| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Coverage of America 250's Our American Story, presented by C-SPAN. | |
| Former presidential advisor David Gergen, who served under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, also passed away in 2025 at the age of 83. | ||
| In 2022, Gergen authored a book titled Hearts Touched with Fire, in which he analyzed traits of leadership among former leaders. | ||
| That same year, Gergen spoke to C-SPAN about his most recent work, first answering a question about his time in the Nixon White House. | ||
| It was a little scary, actually. | ||
| There was a time when the Nixon White House seemed to be a well-run operation. | ||
| I did a first-class job attracting some really talented people in the government. | ||
| I think it was the best group of Republicans who had been attracted. | ||
| You had Moynihan. | ||
| Yeah, Moynihan. | ||
| Pat Moynihan was a major, major figure like that. | ||
| But the greenspans of the world, there are various people who ran programs. | ||
| There was future secretaries of state. | ||
| There were future secretaries of the Defense Department. | ||
| Rumsfeld was there. | ||
| But Jim Baker was there. | ||
| He started out as chief of staff, moved over to the Treasury Department, went from the Treasury Department to run the State Department. | ||
| This was over two terms. | ||
| So it was a really good. | ||
| But then, you know, Watergate hit, and that was just a cataclysmic event. | ||
| I was in the position of, by this time, I was running the speechwriting and research team, which is a pretty big team. | ||
| And I knew Bob Woodward from college. | ||
| And Woodward used to call me when they had a hot story at the Post. | ||
| He would call me and say, I need to read you the first two or three paragraphs of this and see if it's accurate. | ||
| I'm not going to change it just because you don't like the way it's written, but I do need to know if the facts were right. | ||
| So we had a sort of relationship, and Nixon blessed the relationship. | ||
| He knew I was talking to Woodward. | ||
| But for a year and a half or so, we talked a lot, and it helped behind the scenes, it helped to take some of the bumps out of the process, but not all. | ||
| It was a. | ||
| Richard Nixon was the stuff of Shakespeare. | ||
| I mean, this was a man who was one of the most talented I've seen in Washington in the last 30, 40 years. | ||
| He was certainly easily the best strategist along with Henry Kissinger. | ||
| The two of them together, you know, they really plotted out. | ||
| At that point, both China and Russia were locked at the hip in opposition to the United States. | ||
| And Kissinger and Nixon understood that if you can simply, if you can split them apart, you can have a divide and conquer strategy. | ||
| And that's why Kissinger went to Beijing. | ||
| That's why Nixon had, you know, fell in love with the Chinese and that sort of thing. | ||
| And those were big, important changes in American foreign policy. | ||
| I don't know, Richard Haas is here, could talk about this much more eloquently than I can. | ||
| But in any event, had that been all there was to Richard Nixon, this bright side that I saw periodically, he would have been one of our better presidents. | ||
| His problem was what happens to so many leaders when victory goes to their heads too easily and they decide, you know, I think I can go for the moon. | ||
| And in Nixon's case, he not only thought he could conquer everything, but he could do it surreptitiously and he could do it in violation of the law. | ||
| I mean, he was a forerunner of Donald Trump in that respect. | ||
| So Nixon had this dark side. | ||
| He had a bright side and he had a dark side. | ||
| And the clash in that White House was which one is going to prevail. | ||
| And it was a close call all the way along. | ||
| But Ray Price, who had been my mentor at that point, called me in and he said, you've got to understand the fight in here is between the people who want to go for Broke and break into the Brookings Institution and do all these crazy things versus about four or five of the rest of us who are trying to stop him. | ||
| And we were trying to do it very quietly. | ||
| And we failed. | ||
| I mean, Nixon. | ||
| Nixon, we did not truly understand it, but he had demons inside him that he never really learned to conquer. | ||
| And they eventually brought him down. | ||
| He was asked by David Frost, the British journalist, in a TV interview to explain Watergate. | ||
| Nixon said, I gave my enemies a sword, and then they ran me through, which is exactly what happened. | ||
| And they twisted it with relish. | ||
| Very much. | ||
| They twisted it with relish. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| But Richard Nixon was a complex person we don't understand, but I think gives us warning about what can happen if you've got the wrong kind of person there in the White House. | ||
| And that's why what's coming is so damn important. | ||
| It's really important to the future of the country. | ||
| Let me ask you, using your Harvard and your experience with participating and observing, there is a crucial distinction between Nixon and the 45th president, which is, he's like Voldemort. | ||
| I just try not to say the name. | ||
| Which really irritates him. | ||
| So I don't do it a lot. | ||
| In the end, Nixon had a sense of shame. | ||
| Yes, he did, actually. | ||
| He believed in the institutions enough that it wouldn't have occurred to him when Goldwater and John Rhodes and Hugh Scott come down, I think on the 5th or 6th of August, and say, you haven't got the votes to survive in the Senate, he didn't say, all right, let's get the proud boys together. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And Mr. Capital. | ||
| And equally so, what's often forgotten, but you know so well, was the beginnings of the Nixon administration when there was actually a legitimate controversy about whether, in fact, Nixon had won the election and there were a lot of voters in Chicago, for example, in the graveyards of Chicago, you know, brought forth a lot of voters. | ||
| And it made a big difference. | ||
| And Nixon was urged to challenge in courts the case against him because people around him said, you will win this case. | ||
| And Nixon said, we can't do that. | ||
| We can't do that to the country. | ||
| And it was called on his good side. | ||
| It was a good side. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And the other, I'm going to offer a thesis and then you assess the validity. | ||
| And you were a witness and a participant in so much of this. | ||
| I have a theory that one way to understand America from 1933 to 2017 is that it was a figurative debate between FDR and Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| That we debated the relative role of the state in the marketplace, the relative projection of force against commonly agreed upon foes and rivals. | ||
| And Truman and LBJ are over here as part of that conversation. | ||
| President Reagan and George W. Bush are over here. | ||
| But Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Bush 41, Clinton are all kind of in the middle of the field, so to speak. | ||
| And that conversation in many ways ended in 2017. | ||
| And part of the Biden project, I think, is to restore that conversation. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| I agree with it up to a point. | ||
| I do think that there was an alliance or an alignment of people who in public life who did believe in working with each other and working across lines. | ||
| Senator Jack Danforth, a Republican, is here in this group today. | ||
| And he worked as so many of the best leaders of these earlier years. | ||
| He worked really to bring a bipartisan set of solutions. | ||
| But I think it had partly to do with sort of the intellectual conversation, but it also had to do with the fact that we had a rise of the World War II generation after the war. | ||
| And for like in the late 40s and then through the 50s and into the 60s, there was a lot of bipartisanship that came through at that time. | ||
| And it was partly influenced by the fact that the members of the World War II generation were so tied into the military and into sacrifice for the country. | ||
| That made a big, big difference in the conversation. | ||
| Starting with Jack Kennedy and going through George Bush Sr., those were our World War II presidents. | ||
| There were seven of them. | ||
| Every single one of those seven presidents wore a military uniform. | ||
| Six of them were in the war. | ||
| And Jimmy Carter was in the Naval Academy when the war ended, and he went on to serve honorably. | ||
| Those years in the military were bonding experiences that helped people understand there's a set of values that guide this country and we're in this together. | ||
| We all came, as the saying goes, we all came in different ships, but now we're in the same boat together. | ||
| And I think the World War II generation ethic of service, of sacrifice, has sort of passed from the stage. | ||
| And we're into a different era now. | ||
| It's just people are trying to pulverize each other. | ||
| We haven't seen this since the 19th century. | ||
| And it's been a big, big change. | ||
| And I think the challenge now is, can we revive some of the, and Richard Hollis talked about this earlier today, can we revive some of those civic commitments and civic feelings and said a sense of civic principle? | ||
| Can we make those kind of steps and reunite the country with a different kind of generation? | ||
| I believe that instead of the military, what we have right now, what we ought to be building, is a national service program, a serious national service program. | ||
| If we could do that, I can just assure you that for a lot of young people will get out there and spend a year, whether in the forests and the woods, as they did with the old Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, or they're working as first responders to the storms and the fires and everything else. | ||
| Or they're working in hospitals. | ||
| There are a lot of things our young people could be doing. | ||
| They give us a year back. | ||
| We take a year off their tuition debt. | ||
| And we set them up with some other things to help them get started in life. | ||
| But they become the foundation for moving forward and reuniting the country. | ||
| I think we desperately need that. | ||
| And we've got people. | ||
| John and I both have been watching Wes Moore. | ||
| We can talk more about him. | ||
| He's the new governor of Maryland. | ||
| But he's very much into national service and a really heck of an interesting and aspiring individual. | ||
| But along with that is Gavin Newsome, governor of California on the other side of the country. | ||
| Wes Moore is in Maryland. | ||
| Here's Gavin Newsom in California. | ||
| And the two officers are talking to each other about how to build this national service program because they're both champions. | ||
| And I think something similar to that could make a huge difference. | ||
| There's a great, and David's written about this wonderfully. | ||
| If you look at the people who were on PT 109. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It was a plumber from Brooklyn, an agricultural worker from California, a couple of Irish Catholics from Boston, and this scion of an immigrant dynasty. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And our mutual friend whom we just lost, Charlie Peters, used to tell the story about there was an old JFK war friend named O'Malley that Kennedy always loved. | ||
| And he was not, how to put it, he was not Jackie Kennedy's idea of a dinner guest. | ||
| I think it's a fair way to put it. | ||
| And so Mrs. Kennedy would say, I just don't see what Jack sees in O'Malley. | ||
| Well, what he saw in O'Malley was that they had fought the Japanese together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they'd served together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that that's exactly right. | ||
| Gerald Ford. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was he like? | ||
| Sweet guy. | ||
| Sweet guy. | ||
| Gerald Ford was one of the only presidents that I've known in the last X years who didn't really particularly want to be president. | ||
| They never thought he would be. | ||
| That is a very small category. | ||
| It's a very small, about that big. | ||
| It's like French military victories in the 20th century. | ||
| But in any event, Jerry Ford came into the White House and I got recruited back into the White House staff to be there. | ||
| And frankly, it was a very difficult situation because Ford always gave these speeches that were so simplistic that it was hard to build a build support for them. | ||
| But he tended to use a lot of one-syllable words. | ||
| And it just didn't make it very, very interesting. | ||
| But that's the foundation for this point. | ||
| So Ford goes through the period. | ||
| He's seen as not very smart, but a nice guy. | ||
| You know, a guy trying hard. | ||
| And he commanded a lot of respect. | ||
| It's just people, he wasn't ready to be president. | ||
| But there was Ford because he was sort of just sort of going slowly through on the path. | ||
| And then he left office. | ||
| Well, two or three months after he left office, I got a call from his office one day and they said, the president's got a speech to give in the future. | ||
| He would really like to have you read the speech and give him your feedback. | ||
| And I said, oh, fine, okay. | ||
| Send it to me. | ||
| They said, okay, we'll get it to you overnight. | ||
| Call us tomorrow afternoon. | ||
| So he got me the thing and I got the speech. | ||
| It was a beautifully written speech. | ||
| Gorgeous speech. | ||
| A lot of two or three syllable words, really interesting arguments. | ||
| A lot of like, boy, compound sentences. | ||
| You're good. | ||
| And so, and he said, I could hear he was puffing on his pipe sort of behind the scenes there as he was listening to me and he was sort of laughing at me. | ||
| And he said to me, after he heard all this and said, no, because I told him, Mr. President, I don't know, it's a beautiful speech, but I'm not sure why you're calling me. | ||
| Do you want me to rewrite it for you and put it in your name, you know, ready to write it as you would have written it? | ||
| And he said, no, and he said, no. | ||
| And he said, the point is, David, this is the first time I've had enough free time on my schedule to write my own speech. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And it was like, oh, God. | ||
| We let that guy go for a year and a half without challenging his speeches. | ||
| And he was sitting here capable of giving really eloquent speech. | ||
| He wasn't Lincoln, but he was darn good. | ||
| And it was just, in some ways, I came away admiring that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| And I have a lot of, I think in the rearview mirror of history, Jerry Ford's going to be well remembered. | ||
| Because he was one of the last people who upheld principles and ethics and sacrifice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Go back to this. | ||
| The seven presidents all wore military uniforms. | ||
| Since that time, we've had five presidents. | ||
| Not one has worn a military uniform. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Two. | |
| Five. | ||
| One has been in the Guard, and you have to give him credit for this with George W. | ||
| But it's not exactly heavy duty lifting to defend the great state of Texas from the state of Oklahoma. | ||
| Well, not if you ask Texans. | ||
| They're very wary, those folks. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So there's the four-year Carter period, and then you came back in with President Reagan. | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| And it was in part, Jim Baker had been a mentor of mine for a long time, and he was partly responsible for rounding up a group of people to be on staff. | ||
| And I think Reagan understood better than anybody else how important it is to be organized before you get there. | ||
| And what had happened to two or three other presidents just before that was the president would get elected and he would bring with him the people who had been with him when he was back home in the state, but he wouldn't bring any new people. | ||
| And it was a very closed little circle, and it didn't work as a way of governing. | ||
| And so that was an issue. | ||
| And Reagan understood that. | ||
| Baker convinced him of that. | ||
| And a lot of time went into preparing the White House staff. | ||
| And Baker really did that. | ||
| We had two groups of people. | ||
| We had the California people who were on his team. | ||
| They basically were in charge of setting up a lot of the ideas. | ||
| And because we didn't feel it was the conservative wing of the Denver Republican Party got elected. | ||
| And we felt you can't walk away from that. | ||
| You've got to make sure you honor that. | ||
| So we set it up so that the California people were the guardians of the faith. | ||
| But the Washington people knew how to get things done. | ||
| And were very, very good at that. | ||
| Baker and company, Baker was the best single chief of staff, I think, in American history. | ||
| And if you took any list of top 10 people who have come into government over time, not only would he be on it, but three or four would be out of the group that Reagan inaugurated. | ||
| Now, look, I'm not as conservative as Reagan was. | ||
| I'm pro-choice, for example, and have been all my life. | ||
| But I did think that he, you know, when you get your president and get your leader, you're not going to get 100% of what you want. | ||
| And you've got to decide. | ||
| And I think Reagan will go down with FDR as two of the strongest. | ||
| FDR is clearly more important, significant president. | ||
| But I think Reagan, if you look at the years since, Reagan stacks up pretty well. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| He looks like Cicero. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Better hair. | ||
| But so, and one thing to remember about Jim Baker is how a man managed to get past Nancy Reagan, having run two campaigns against Ronnie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he ran the Ford campaign in 76 when Reagan challenged him and the Bush campaign in 1980. | ||
| And I've always had a slight theory that one of the reasons Mrs. Reagan said yes is that Baker looked like her idea of a chief of staff. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He went to Princeton. | ||
| Well, you know, you can't have everything. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| We call that the Vanderbilt of New Jersey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Friday on C-SPAN's Ceasefire. | |
| At a time when finding common ground matters most in Washington, former House Speaker, Republican California Congressman Kevin McCarthy and former Independent West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin come together to preview the year ahead in politics, including the upcoming midterm elections and the political and legislative battles ahead in Washington. | ||
| They join host Dasha Burns. | ||
| Bridging the Divide in American Politics. | ||
| Watch Ceasefire Friday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| This year, C-SPAN brought millions of Americans closer to the work of their government and to the heart of our democracy. | ||
| As you consider a year-end gift, your tax-deductible support truly matters. | ||
| C-SPAN is a non-profit with no government funding. | ||
| Our independence is sustained by citizens like you who believe in open government. | ||
| We're there for major legislation, executive decisions, and pivotal Supreme Court cases so every American can witness their democracy in action. | ||
| Your support keeps this unfiltered, independent access strong. | ||
| Please give today at c-span.org/slash donate. | ||
| Conservative writer and commentator Norman Pothoretz passed away on December 16th. |