Editor’s note: David Gergen, the centrist political commentator
for PBS’ “News Hour With Jim Lehrer” who is currently on a
country-crossing tour to promote his new book about presidential
leadership, has been called the consummate Washington insider for good
reason.
Mild-mannered, intelligent, serious and bipartisan — almost to a
fault — he has been a Zelig-like presence in the White House for 30
years, serving as a political adviser/consultant/conscience for
presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.
Gergen, who also teaches at Harvard and is editor-at-large/columnist
for
U.S. News & World Report, recently wrote a book about his adventures at the epicenter of big-time American politics.
“Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership — Nixon to
Clinton” has been described as part memoir, part political history and part portrait of White House culture.
Bill Steigerwald, a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review associate editor whose
Magazine Watch column appears every Friday in WorldNetDaily, recently talked to Gergen about his new book and the presidential race.
© 2000, WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
Question: There’s a good chance you’ll be working with whomever wins in November. Do you prefer either of the candidates to the other?
Answer: (Laughing slightly) I think there’s virtually no chance I’ll be working with either of the candidates or the winner after November. I do hope that whoever wins turns out to be an effective and responsible president.
I’m trying not to take sides at this point. It strikes me that each candidate has some strengths and that over the last few weeks, they have been much more obvious. Gore is a man who has considerable capacity and obviously knows the issues and also knows how the game is played.
Q: Is the campaign going as you expected? Are there any major surprises?
A: I think the turn this campaign has taken since Joe Lieberman was selected and the Democrats had their convention is one of the most astonishing changes we’ve seen in politics in a long time.
Q: Is it Lieberman, “The Kiss” or Gore’s loosening-up?
A: The selection of Joe Lieberman was the turning point. It opened voters’ minds up to the possibility of Gore. It prompted millions of people to take a second, more positive look at Gore. Then what they saw at his convention, starting with the smooch seen around the world, was a man who was energized, who seemed to be taking his mask off so that you got a sense of who he was, and who found a message that has resonated even better than I would have expected.
I thought the attempt to rail at the big industries and rally people would backfire — at least I thought the Republicans would be able to use that against him in a skillful way. But the Republican side has been unusually — in fact, stunningly — ineffectual in responding.
Q: Do you expect it to get nasty?
A: Not immediately, but I imagine the Republicans will go more negative now. We’ve already seen evidence of that in the ads they’ve been putting up on the air in the last few weeks.
Q: Will it really matter that much who wins?
A: I think it does matter. It matters philosophically about the direction the country takes. Whoever wins is going to face some bitter divisions in Congress, and it’s going to be very difficult for the winner to wander too far from the mainstream.
But there’s no question that a Gore administration would lean toward more government-oriented solutions to social problems, such as Medicare and education, while a Bush administration would lean toward smaller government and more reliance upon the private sector. While no single choice may move the ocean liner very much, when you get an ocean liner to move 10 degrees over time, you wind up in a very different place.
Q: You’ve been called “the consummate insider.” Are you uncomfortable with that term?
A: It doesn’t really bother me. Since I worked in four White Houses, including Democratic as well as Republican administrations, it would be disingenuous to say that I haven’t been inside.
I think some people see the term “consummate insider” as a term of opprobrium, as a criticism. I don’t see it that way. I think that people can perform quite honorably on the inside as well as be on the periphery or on the outside. At the end of the day, somebody’s got to make the government work. The government, after all, spends about a quarter of our GDP altogether, and it’s important that it works well. I salute those who are civil servants and who spend a lot of their lives inside trying to make it work.
Q: What are your politics?
A: I am passionate about the need for social reform. I lean toward using free-market principles to do that. But I also believe that there are times when you’ve got to be willing to spend the money to get there. So, I consider myself moderately right of center.
For example, I am in favor of school vouchers, and I’m also in favor of charter schools. I think we ought to be trying as many experiments as possible to open up our educational system. But I part company from conservatives who say that’s the answer to education. I think that’s part of the answer to education. The other part is that we have to be willing to invest in these crumbling schools, to put children in good facilities that send a signal to them that we respect the process of education and we respect them, instead of sending them to buildings that look like run-down prisons.
I also think we need to make the teaching profession much more professional. To put more emphasis on the professionalism of teaching, and that’s going to require more training, more money for teacher development. Fifty percent of new teachers leave teaching within five years. That’s too high a dropout rate. If that takes money, so be it. Let’s spend it.
Q: What should the federal government be doing that it is not doing, and what is it doing that it should not be?
A: The federal government ought to be leading a crusade to revolutionize education in this country, because that’s the best single equalizer we have when there is a widening gap in wages and income. Every industrial revolution seems to widen the gap between those who make it and those who are left behind by industrial change. That’s what we’re facing today.
The only way you ensure equal opportunity and live up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence is to try to give people an equal chance at the starting line. I think education is the key to that. So, I would like the federal government to lead a crusade on that.
I also think it’s going to be very important for the federal government to put far more emphasis upon steering the global revolution that’s taking place, not just in economics but in technology and life sciences. That’s where the real cutting edge is. And it’s disappointing that this campaign is so silent on globalization and what we’re going to do about the future of technology and science, and indeed, how we are going to address the growing inequities in the world, with almost half the people in the world living in near-poverty.
There are some things the government ought to be doing. It ought to find ways to get out of other areas, such as housing and urban development. I think the federal government ought to be passing far more money to the states. A lot of the innovation in housing and urban development is coming at the state level.
Q: How is it that you have been able to cross political and even ideological lines at such a high level. What is it that makes you so valuable to a president, so trusted?
A: Beats the hell out of me.
Q: You’ve worked closely with Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
A: Every president, I believe, needs two types of people around him or her. One group who are very energetic, young, eager to reinvent the world. And another group who have more gray hairs, who have seen efforts in the past at reform and who, if experience brings any wisdom, perhaps can bring that to the table.
You need to temper enthusiasm with prudence and experience. I’m one of those people who’s been around forever, who’s seen so much. Bill Clinton, I think, reached out to me in part because he saw me as a veteran of the past. He had lots of people around him already who were young and energetic and very, very talented. But he needed a few more veterans. That’s why I got pulled in. There are going to be people coming now out of the Clinton administration who will be great counselors to come in and advise another president. That’s just the natural turnover in life.
Q: Your book has been described as a “meditation on what it takes to be a political leader.” Of the seven key traits you list — personal integrity, a sense of mission, the ability to persuade, the ability to work with other politicians, a strong start after inauguration, skilled advisers and the ability to inspire — is there a most important one?
A: Yes. We tend to conceive of leadership in the wrong way. That is, we put an enormous amount of emphasis upon the relationship of leader to followers. That relationship is very critical. But what comes first is the relationship of the leader to himself or to herself. If I’ve learned anything, it is that people who are extremely talented can turn out to be surprisingly ineffectual leaders because of flaws in their own personalities.
If brains were the only criterion by which leadership was determined, Nixon and Clinton would have been our best modern presidents. But Nixon had demons he could not control and Clinton had fault lines in his personality that he couldn’t manage. As a result, both fell short of their promise.
Q: Who is the greatest political leader you’ve worked for, and is it the same person as the greatest president you worked for?
A: That’s an interesting question. While many may disagree with his political philosophy and his policies, I believe it is clear that Ronald Reagan is the best leader we’ve had in the White House since Franklin Roosevelt.
We look back with great nostalgia, obviously, upon Jack Kennedy, but his time was really cut so short he didn’t really have a chance to live up to his leadership potential. We look back with great fondness upon Harry Truman, and he did wonderful things, in the foreign policy field in particular. But he didn’t lead the country as such, in the way a leader ordinarily does.
Reagan is underrated today because many of the people who write history don’t agree with his policies. But James McGregor Burns, who is one of the authorities on leadership in the country and who’s written biographies of FDR and other great works, has commented that he thinks Reagan was one of our most successful leaders in the presidency — and Burns totally disagrees with Reagan’s policies.
I’m a big believer that Reagan showed us a lot about leadership. One of the things he showed us was that, like Roosevelt, if you have a second-class mind but a first-class temperament, you can be a very, very successful leader.
To put it in different terms, those that are popular today from Daniel Goleman, a president needs a certain “core competence.” He needs to know his way around the issues, but that’s not what ultimately distinguishes him as a leader. What ultimately distinguishes you is how much “EQ” you have, not IQ. It’s the emotional intelligence. And emotional intelligence, broadly defined, means that a person is well-centered, that he understands himself and has mastered his own character, relates well to others, is empathic, can listen well to others, and can relate well to their needs.
Q: And Reagan fits that?
A: Yes. No one will say that Reagan rang the bells on IQ, but his EQ was as good as we’ve seen.
Q: Did you give any advice to President Clinton that he didn’t take?
A: Plenty!
Q: But now wishes he had?
A: Well, that’s a different matter. I urged him very strongly to disclose certain documents about Whitewater to the Washington Post in 1993 — I wrote that in the book — and he and Hillary refused to do that. George Stephanopolous and I both urged that upon him. I believe to this day that that was a turning point in his presidency.
The refusal to turn over those documents led to the appointment of a special prosecutor and that in turn led to Ken Starr and all that followed. We also disagreed strongly on the health-care proposal. I felt the original proposal that went up from the Clinton administration was bad on policy and bad on politics, but I was in the minority. So be it.
Q: Last year, you wrote a column in
U.S. News & World
Report saying that we may miss Mr. Clinton more than we think. Do you still think that?
A: I believe that. I believe that Bill Clinton, for all of his flaws — and he clearly is a man who had trouble telling the truth and controlling his own personality — presided over a period that will be remembered well by history.
The 1990s will turn out to be one of the brightest decades in the 20th century. Clinton was not the architect of the 1990s. But he was one of the major architects, and for that he’ll get some substantial credit — and he should get credit.
WATCH: Trump speaks at rally in Gastonia, North Carolina
WND Staff