Presidential adviser and political commentator David Gergen has died at the age of 83.
Gergen served alongside four presidents: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. He then spent some time as a magazine editor before going from political insider to TV commentator.
Gergen died at a retirement community in Lexington, Massachusetts, on Thursday from Lewy body dementia, his son Christopher said, according to The New York Times.
Gergen wrote speeches, briefed reporters, and created communication strategies. He also helped set the agenda for the four presidents he served, with Clinton being the only Democrat among them.
He began his political career in the Nixon White House and served as communications director on two occasions, first to Gerald Ford and then to Ronald Reagan.
The adviser was given credit for easing the harsh rightwing rhetoric that Reagan’s more hardline staffers wanted to use.
Clinton brought him back into the White House after a number of political mistakes had set his administration on the wrong course.
He lasted roughly a year in the Clinton administration, where some viewed him as an intruder and in a time when many Republicans saw him as a deserter.
Following his departure from government, he was lauded by the presidents he had served, and he remained mostly unmarred by the issues that had befallen them.
He told The Washington Post in 1981 that he had been slow to understand Nixon’s guilt in the Watergate scandal. “I was young, and I was too naïve. It hardened me up a lot.”
Decades later, in a 2021 column for CNN, he wrote President Donald Trump was “a bully — mean, nasty and disrespectful of anyone in his way.”
Speaking to The Boston Globe in 2020, he said, “Centrism doesn’t mean splitting the difference.”
“It’s about seeking solutions, and you bring people along. I’m happily in that role,” he added at the time.
A tall man, 6-feet-5, Gergen became popular with many reporters at the White House, leaking information often enough to be dubbed “the sieve,” The Times noted.
But some journalists weren’t so charmed. Mike Kelly, who died in 2003 during the Iraq War, was one of them.
“To be Gergenized 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,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1993.
Gergen told Kelly that he had often been “selling for the sake of selling.”
Spinning “had nothing to do with ideas,” said Gergen.
“It had nothing to do with anything that was real,” he added. “Eventually, it became selling the sizzle without the steak. There was nothing connected to it. It was all cellophane. It was all packaging.”
Between his tours in the White House, Gergen dabbled in journalism, becoming the managing editor of Public Opinion magazine in 1978. The magazine was published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He also served as the editor and columnist at U.S. News & World Report in the mid-1980s. He frequently appeared on television and taught at Duke University and Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Born on May 9, 1942 in Durham, North Carolina, his father was the chair of the mathematics department at Duke. Graduating from Yale with a degree in American studies in 1963, Gergen was an intern in the office of North Carolina’s Democratic Governor, Terry Sanford, for three summers.
After earning a law degree from Harvard, he joined the Navy in 1967, serving as an officer on a ship in Japan. He married a Brit, Anne Wilson, whom he met on a blind date that same year.
Gergen is survived by his wife, his son and daughter, two brothers, and five grandchildren.
