David Gergen, Washington veteran who advised four presidents, dies at 83

David Gergen, an inside-the-Beltway veteran who helped shape the public images of four presidents, mostly Republicans, and who, after a turn as a magazine editor, trod a well-worn path from political insider to television commentator, died Thursday in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was 83.

His death, at a retirement community, was caused by Lewy body dementia, said his son, Christopher. Gergen previously lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It was Gergen who devised a line in the 1980 presidential election that helped secure victory for the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, over Jimmy Carter, the incumbent Democrat. In that era of high inflation, onerous interest rates and a national psyche wounded by Iran’s holding of 52 Americans hostages, Carter was on the ropes. The clincher came in a televised debate a week before the election when Reagan asked viewers a Gergen-suggested question that hit political pay dirt: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

For many Americans, the answer was no.

“Rhetorical questions have great power,” Gergen said years later.

“It’s one of those things that you sometimes strike gold,” he said. “When you’re out there panhandling in the river, occasionally you get a gold nugget.”

Gergen mined as many of those nuggets as he could writing speeches, briefing news reporters, creating communications strategies and helping to set the agenda for four presidents: Republicans Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Reagan, and then a Democrat, Bill Clinton.

With Reagan, for instance, he was widely credited with softening the in-your-face conservative rhetoric that some of the president’s far-right aides wanted in speeches. Clinton hired him in 1993 to help righten a White House weakened after a series of political missteps. Gergen helped, but he lasted barely a year — a poor fit in an administration where some regarded him as an interloper and in a divided capital where Republicans deemed him a turncoat.

Still, when Gergen bade government farewell in the mid-1990s, he was generally praised by the presidents he had served. Significantly, he was untainted by the troubles that undermined each of them — from the multitentacled Watergate scandal that forced Nixon’s resignation to the cloud over Ford for pardoning Nixon, from the arms-for-cash operation known as Iran-Contra that damaged Reagan to the dubious Whitewater real estate investment that hurt Clinton.

With Nixon, Gergen acknowledged that he had been slow to grasp the president’s guilt. “I was young, and I was too naive,” he told The Washington Post in 1981. “It hardened me up a lot.”

Years later, he expressed contempt for President-elect Donald Trump (“a bully — mean, nasty and disrespectful of anyone in his way,” he wrote in a 2021 column for CNN).

“Centrism doesn’t mean splitting the difference,” he told The Boston Globe in 2020. “It’s about seeking solutions, and you bring people along. I’m happily in that role.”

Gergen wore his 6-foot-5 frame comfortably and was graced with an easygoing manner, verbal quickness and a ready laugh that made him popular with many White House reporters. He also leaked information often enough to be labeled “the Sieve” by some of them.

That reputation fed speculation that he was Deep Throat, the shadowy figure who provided the Post with insights into the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. That source, however, was confirmed in 2005 to have been W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 official at the FBI.

Not every journalist was beguiled. Michael Kelly, who was killed in 2003 in the Iraq War, wrote a singularly harsh piece for The New York Times Magazine in 1993. “To be Gergenized,” he said, “is to be spun by the velveteen hum of this soothing man’s soothing voice into a state of such vertigo that the sense of what is real disappears into a blur.”

Gergen acknowledged to Kelly that he had often resorted to “selling for the sake of selling.”

The spin “had nothing to do with ideas,” Gergen said. “It had nothing to do with anything that was real. Eventually, it became selling the sizzle without the steak. There was nothing connected to it. It was all cellophane. It was all packaging.”

His White House tenures intertwined with forays into journalism. In 1978, he became the managing editor of Public Opinion, a magazine published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. In the mid-1980s, he was the editor of U.S. News & World Report, where he was also a columnist. Over the decades he was a frequent commentator on television, including “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS and public affairs programs on CNN. And he taught about politics and public service at Duke University and at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he was the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership.

Gergen was the author of a bestselling book, “Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton” (2000). The book offered lessons for would-be leaders that tended to be little more than bromides, advising them to develop “a capacity to persuade” and “an ability to work within the system.” He revisited the topic in a 2022 book, “Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made.”

David Richmond Gergen was born May 9, 1942, in Durham, North Carolina, the youngest of four sons of Aubigne (Lermond) Gergen and John Jay Gergen, a longtime chair of the mathematics department at Duke University. After schooling in Durham, Gergen went to Yale, where he was managing editor of the student newspaper The Yale Daily News and graduated in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in American studies. For three summers he was an intern working on civil rights issues for North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Terry Sanford.

He received a law degree from Harvard in 1967 and later that year joined the Navy. He served most of the next 3½ years as an officer on a ship based in Japan. By then he had married Anne Wilson, a Briton whom he had met on a blind date earlier in 1967 while she was touring the United States on a 99-day bus ticket.

In addition to his son, Christopher, his wife survives him along with their daughter, Dr. Katherine Gergen Barnett; two brothers, John and Kenneth; and five grandchildren.

After Gergen left the Navy, his contacts helped him land a writing job in the Nixon White House, where he eventually became the chief speechwriter. From Nixon, he said, he learned that points had to be made over and over: “He used to tell me, ‘About the time you are writing a line that you have written it so often that you want to throw up, that is the first time the American people will hear it.’”

What he did not do for the four presidents he served, Gergen said, was lie. “I feel the moment you walk out there and lie to the press, that you’re finished,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in 1981. While not ruling out the possibility of being untruthful in the name of national security, he said, “I think the next day you’d quit.”

“You’re of no value to the president at that point,” he added, “and you’re of no value to anyone else.”