sident Advisor Dies

David Gergen, a former trusted adviser to four U.S. presidents, celebrated political commentator and mentor to generations of future public servants, died last Thursday in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was 83 when he died.

Gergen puts a rare brand of both democrat and republic. He served in the White House under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, holding titles from speechwriter to communications director to presidential counselor. Across his long and multifaceted career, he was equally at home behind a lectern at Harvard or on live television, where his deep understanding of politics and leadership made him a sought-after voice for decades.

He is born in Durham, North Carolina, in 1942 to a mathematician father and a journalist mother, Gergen would graduate from Yale in 1963 and earn a law degree from Harvard. He later served in the Navy for more than three years before landing his first White House job under Nixon in 1971.

Gergen went on to shape the messaging of Reagan’s 1980 campaign, crafting the famous debate line: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” He was later credited with softening the rhetoric of the Reagan administration’s more hardline voices. Years later, Gergen brought the same steadying influence to the Clinton Administration. In a statement posted on Facebook, Clinton wrote: “I counted on him for forthright advising and honest feedback, and he never failed to deliver.”

His career expanded beyond politics into journalism and education. Gergen edited U.S. News & World Report, served as a senior political analyst for CNN and was a familiar face on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. But perhaps his most enduring legacy was in the classroom.

In 1999, he joined the faculty at Kennedy School, where he founded the Center for Public Leadership. There, he mentored hundreds of students, many of whom called him a career-defining influence. Among them was Michael Horn, a Lexington resident and faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“He wasn’t just my boss, but my mentor and then lifelong friend. I learned so much from him and through the amazing people that he interacted regularly with—from the arc of U.S. history and its impact on politics to lessons on leadership to how ideas become movements and how to work with and speak to the media,” Horn told LexObserver.

And this is a bit about David Gergen.