David Gergen
David Gergen
David Richmond Gergenis an American political commentator and former presidential advisor who served during the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. He is currently a Senior Political Analyst for CNN and a Professor of Public Service and Co-Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. Gergen is also the former Editor-at-Large of U.S. News and World Report and a contributor to CNN.com and Parade Magazine. He has twice been a member...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Show Host
Date of Birth9 May 1942
CountryUnited States of America
This story's going to have legs if somebody gets indicted. I think the president has to lance the boil directly?. It starts with facing reality, accepting your share of responsibility without blinking.
A man never benefits from going to a psychiatrist if the only reason he's there is because of his wife. You have to want to change from within.
There's a tendency after you win your second term to think you're invulnerable. You're not just king of the mountain, you've mastered the mountain. That can often lead to mistakes of excessive pride.
There's an old saying that you can't open a new circus until the old circus leaves town. It was just inevitable that this is going to continue to hang over their heads because the investigation continues. The Libby-Rove-Cheney story continues to have legs, and it's going to continue to for some time. And the war still goes on.
This is the first administration that I can remember, including Nixon's, that said we need to think about a law that would put journalists who print national security things up in front of grand juries and put them in jail if they don't reveal their sources.
Think of that, the split-screen sense. That's the problem this presidency has ... it's being split down the middle.
Larry is a friend and I believe in the vision of renewal that he set forth for the university. He recognized that it was almost impossible to move things forward.
I was in the Nixon White House during Watergate, and we pretended that we were all about business as usual. And we had a president who was talking to the portraits. It was not business as usual, but you have to say it.
He didn't call for a lot of new things on the domestic front. He had a lot of rhetoric, but the proposals were quite modest. And on the foreign policy front, he didn't break a lot of new ground.
If Karl Rove were indicted, that would be like George W. Bush losing his right arm at a time when he needs every limb he's got to climb out of the hole he's in and to rebuild his presidency.
I'm told by some people close to him that this will not be a Kerry-bashing speech. But he's not going to simply rally around Bush. Indeed it's going to be the story of an immigrant coming to this country and finding a country that's embraced him and a party that's embraced him.
If people stay that long, group-think can set in, and that's dangerous for a president.
I don't think there's any other president in the modern era that has seen this kind of stability.
How in heaven's name can a nation with a $1 trillion surplus threaten so much scientific research so vital to its future?