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{shortcode-097912bcb5705790fe60eafaa545d1c65c60540e}uring his three decades in Washington, David Gergen could be tough to pin down.
Gergen was a Nixon speechwriter and Reagan communications director who was recruited to set a wayward Clinton administration back on track. He was a CNN, PBS, and NPR household name who also edited a magazine for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. And he was a Navy veteran who cut his teeth working on progressive civil rights initiatives for Democratic North Carolina governor J. Terry Sanford.
But when he arrived at the Harvard Kennedy School in 1999, Gergen seemed weary of playing political chameleon.
“There was a time in my life when I spent 150 percent of my working hours in Washington, in the life in Washington, the politics, the arena,” Gergen told The Crimson when he joined the HKS faculty. “In recent years I’ve had a growing interest in teaching.”
And for the next 20 years, colleagues and students said Gergen built a new legacy at the Kennedy School as a tireless champion of young leaders and an intergenerational presence.
“People say time is your most precious asset,” said Mark Zuckerman, who worked for Gergen as a research assistant. “And he just poured years and years of his life into young people and hearing what they had to say and sharing advice when they asked, and trying to do everything he could to support the next generation — and the generation after that.”
“Part of David’s magic was that he would take an individual young student as seriously as he would take a president of the United States,” former HKS Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf said.
His HKS colleague Cornell William Brooks called Gergen’s career “wonderfully odd” and said he was “sui generis.”
“You have an elder statesman with a somewhat patrician manner, who supports grassroots leaders, young leaders and veterans, and people across the political spectrum, who has a serious commitment to public service, who also supports civil rights,” Brooks said.
Gergen, 83, died on Saturday of Lewy body dementia at a retirement community in Lexington, Massachusetts. He is survived by his brothers Kenneth and John, his wife Anne, a son Christopher, a daughter Katherine Gergen Barnett, and five grandchildren.
Spin and Idealism
Gergen was born in Durham, North Carolina, in May 1942 to a mathematician father on the faculty at Duke University and a mother who spent her early years as a journalist and poet.
Gergen’s brother, Kenneth, said he carried their “genetic legacy” — both able to deduce patterns like a mathematician and able to write and communicate.
After high school, Gergen left the South for Yale University, where he majored in American Studies and was managing editor of the Yale Daily News.
Joseph S. Alpert, who was Gergen’s roommate at Yale, said Gergen was “already dedicated” to a journalism career and would often return to their dorm at 3 a.m. after a late night at the newspaper.
But Alpert said he and Gergen still made time to join a college debate team, gallivant to the nearby Smith College, and talk politics — Alpert was a centrist Democrat, but Gergen was “even more centrist,” he recalled.
“I always told people that I thought at least half of my Yale education were the discussions that went on after midnight,” Alpert said.
Gergen spent three summers working on civil rights for Sanford in North Carolina before turning to law school at Harvard. After graduating in 1967, he served a three-year stint as a naval officer in Japan.
In 1971, he moved to Washington to take a job in President Richard Nixon’s administration, serving as chief speechwriter before and during the Watergate crisis. Gergen emerged relatively unscathed from the scandal, and would return to work in the Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Clinton administrations.
Along the way, Gergen developed a reputation as a “spinmeister” — a political messenger able to gloss the truth and sell it.
He was good at it, too: Gergen is often cited as the source of then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s one-liner “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” — a zinger that all but sealed his victory over incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Though he spoke on behalf of politicians on both sides of the aisle, Gergen maintained his own consistent views, describing himself to The Crimson in 1999 as “very hawkish on foreign policy while being very committed to social change at home.”
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Between stints in the White House, Gergen returned to his journalism roots. He edited the U.S. News & World Report, appeared regularly on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour alongside liberal counterpart Mark Shields, and became a household name for his political analysis on CNN.
He was close with White House journalists even when he was batting for the other team — in fact, his reliability as a source earned him the nickname of “the sieve” among the Washington press corps.
But even if his job occasionally required him to be a salesman, his brother Kenneth said Gergen remained “highly idealistic.”
“That never wavered,” Kenneth said. “I think he was terribly disappointed in the Nixon years when reality broke through. And I don’t think he ever lost those ideals, even when he was trying to make a president credible.”
In fact, Gergen’s time in Washington left him staunchly committed to maintaining decency in politics, his Harvard colleague Hannah Riley Bowles said.
“This question of: ‘How do leaders maintain their moral center amidst the storm of activity and crisis and political jabs?’ That was of central concern,” Bowles said.
‘Our Closer’
Gergen may have traded Washington for Cambridge in 1999, but his Beltway charm and connections remained useful.
Upon joining the HKS faculty, he was recruited by HKS professor Ronald A. Heifetz and then-dean Joseph S. Nye to help establish the Center for Public Leadership and secure critical funding from the Wexner family.
“He was our closer,” Heifetz said. “His charm, his grace, his wisdom and his distinguished public service history enabled us to hold on to our winning game in establishing the center. He got us a save, in baseball language.”
Gergen directed the center for almost two decades and expanded its footprint exponentially — from just a handful of fellows to more than 100 each year.
Bowles, who succeeded Gergen as CPL director, said he “put the Center for Public Leadership on the map and filled it with students.”
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Gergen was especially devoted to attracting diverse future leaders to HKS, Bowles and others said. To do so, he fundraised tirelessly, his colleagues said, working to expand pipelines of access to the school for veterans and those in need of financial aid.
Brooks, a fellow CPL professor, said Gergen was “way more than just a glittering resume” and “raised funds to bring a kind of diversity that is under-noted and under-discussed in the country right now.”
“When you walk around the Kennedy School, there are buildings and people that are there as a consequence of David Gergen. The buildings are nice, but the people are even better,” Brooks said.
Gergen was also known for co-teaching a popular class during election years — “Contemporary Issues in American Elections” — with Elaine C. Kamarck.
“What he brought to the classroom was a very realistic view of the political world,” Kamarck said. “You have to go to history to find that. And David, of course, had lived so much history that he was really valuable in the classroom.”
Rye M. Barcott, a student and Gergen acolyte, said Gergen seminars were “almost like a master in narrative storytelling in and of themselves.” Barcott and Gergen co-founded a nonprofit and super PAC, With Honor, to elect military veterans to Congress.
Gergen brought the same wealth of knowledge to TV hits. Another one of his research assistants, Michael B. Horn, said Gergen could pull from “a reservoir of stories” and historical context to help make sense of the present moment — whether for a class of students or a national audience on CNN.
“He didn’t get swept up in moments, if that makes sense. He really had the long arc of history,” Horn said. “He was not a hot head. He was obviously a staple on cable news, but he was sort of the sober minded one on cable news, who would take the long view.”
‘The Ultimate Extrovert’
The openness that made Gergen adaptable in Washington also shaped his relationships outside of the classroom, friends and family said.
They said he was much the same person in public as in private — gregarious, warm, with a keen sense of humor.
“David's the ultimate extrovert,” Jeremy Haber, another research assistant, said. “We did a retirement party for him a couple years ago and I told him that he did none of us any favors because our first boss was going to be our best boss.”
Gergen’s extroversion also meant that he was almost always late — losing track of time in conversations with taxi drivers, his barber, his nurse, and people who approached him at the train station or the airport.
“He was so in the present with the individual,” Horn added. “It was his way of reclaiming his time.”
Gergen remained the same way even after his retirement and dementia diagnosis, Horn said. When Gergen made an appearance at a Girl Scouts celebration for Horn’s daughters last May, he was once again drawn into the fray, talking to people, mingling, and asking questions.
“You could see his wife being like, ‘we got to get you home,’” Horn recalled. “He was just drawn to energy from people.”
Gergen’s wife was Anne E. Gergen, his partner of 58 years.
“The best part of knowing David is to get to be friends with Anne. And both Anne and David will tell you that,” Haber said. “She has tremendous strength, and they were a very good pair.”
“It was fun to watch them together,” Elmendorf added. “Anne, like David, was just as happy to sit down with a person in the cafeteria she didn't know as she was to go to state dinners at the White House.”
There was one exception to Gergen’s geniality, his brother Kenneth said. He was “tremendously competitive” in games of volleyball, kickball, and tennis during family vacations.
“Winning was absolutely essential,” Kenneth Gergen recalled. “He really liked to win.”
Did David Gergen emerge victorious?
“Sometimes, not always,” his brother said.
—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.
