Hail Fellow Well Met
David Gergen was the right kind of fellow.
Born in 1942 in Durham, North Carolina, his father chaired the mathematics department at Duke University, and served as director of a research office affiliated with the U.S. Army.
As an undergraduate at Yale University, Gergen was regarded as a “likeable, well-informed guy,” according to a fellow member of Manuscript, his senior society. He served as managing editor of the Yale Daily News, producing articles and commentary that were “intended to make the system’s manifest good even better.”
In 1967, he earned a law degree from Harvard and married. Rather than practice law, Gergen accepted an officer’s commission in the U.S. Navy and served in Japan during the Vietnam War.
In his mid-century classic The Power Elite, sociologist and New Left intellectual C. Wright Mills observed that elite universities were the finishing schools for budding technocrats, instilling in young men a common set of norms and behaviors that could sustain them through long careers in private industry, government, and politics. The wrong school could mean a life of uphill climbs toward uncertain rewards. But the right school could pave the way to opportunity and prestigious billets — for the right kind of fellow.
Only a few years into his naval career and not yet 30 years old, Gergen was ready for the next rung on the ladder of success. A fellow from the Yale Daily whose father was friendly with Richard Nixon helped arrange an interview with the president’s speechwriter. Though he had voted for Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election, Gergen was hired. Within a few years, he was director of presidential speechwriting.
Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, Gergen continued to excel in roles that focused on political communications. His work for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan helped generate a steady hum of speeches, snippets, and memos. He showed a knack for distilling political problems into quotable nuggets for broadcast on television. “Gergen really understood sound bite,” said a fellow in the Reagan White House. Legend has it the rhetorical question posed by Reagan in a 1980 television debate with President Jimmy Carter – “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” – was Gergen’s idea.
“He’s the best conceptualizer, in terms of communications strategy, that we have,” said a fellow who served as Reagan’s White House chief of staff.
In fact, Gergen was one of the best that anyone had. After leaving the Reagan White House, he worked briefly as managing editor of U.S. News and World Report and became a sought-after pundit at CNN, NPR, and PBS.
“Gergen loves panels,” said the late Mark Shields, a center-left colleague at the PBS NewsHour. “He loves seminars.”
His warm voice and social grace brightened gatherings held by luminaries on both sides of the aisle. He counted Dick Cheney, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton as friends and fellow attendees at weekend retreats for the elite and well-connected.
“He had such a genial nature that there’d always be a lightbulb going off in the White House and someone saying, ‘Why don’t we bring Gergen in?’” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley.
Bill Clinton did just that in 1993. With his communications team struggling to adjust to the white-hot Beltway spotlight, Clinton tapped the aristocratically adept Gergen for the senior most role of his career in government—Counselor to the President. Gergen instilled professionalism into Clinton’s operation. He proved a careful minister of the status quo, gently coaxing the president to adopt certain centrist policy positions, including on free trade.
But being a fellow in a Democratic administration surprised and angered many insiders. They called Gergen a cynic for choosing position and power over loyalty to the Republican cause, though he contended public service was a privilege no matter who occupied the White House. “The guy is very idealist,” insisted Gergen’s older brother.
Once, while serving President Clinton, Gergen contacted The American Spectator hoping to preview journalist David Brock’s “Troopergate” expose of Clinton’s peccadilloes while serving as Arkansas Governor. Editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. responded by offering Gergen (whom the Spectator derisively called “Mr. Potato Head”) information about how to subscribe to the magazine.
By the mid-1990s, the system Gergen had spent his career managing and safeguarding was fading. Fellowship was giving way to partisanship. Populism was on the rise. Gergen lasted only a year in the Clinton White House before returning to punditry.
From his bully pulpit Gergen lamented the falling standards in media coverage of elected officials, and the country’s diminishing trust in political institutions. A media landscape once dominated by Gergen’s beloved television was fragmenting across the internet and social media. Not surprisingly, the patrician Gergen thought Trump a bully, “mean, nasty and disrespectful of anyone in his way.”
In the final years of his life, Gergen taught part-time at Duke and Harvard, lecturing on Big Think courses titled “Contemporary Issues in American Elections” and “Leadership for a Livable City.” He wrote books on what he had witnessed from the edge of presidential power, and he joined many panels and seminars. Most importantly, he gave back to those clubby institutions that had provided admission to the highest levels of media and government for him over more than four decades.
Today, the old establishment has given way to a more striving, strident, and hyper-competitive meritocracy, one that produces elites with even more sterling credentials, but perhaps less influence across society. In this more democratic age, in a country of increasing diversity, a leader needs to do more than specialize in the aesthetics of politics and message-craft.
Like a character from The Great Gatsby, Gergen was the right kind of fellow in the right place at the right time in American life. A politico who never chanced his reputation by running for office. A professor who never wrote or defended a doctoral dissertation. A Harvard-trained lawyer who never practiced law. A longtime Republican operative who never officially joined the Republican party. He didn’t do those things because he didn’t need to do them. Gergen was loyal to the manners and etiquette – indeed, the ideals – of the institutions that sustained him.
John J. Waters is author of the postwar novel River City One. Follow him at @JohnJWaters1 on X.
