David Gergen Quotations

Yes, it absolutely suggests that. It sounds to me... as if they had a negotiation between the agency and the NSC over what they were going to say, that the CIA objected strenuously to the idea of asserting it on the basis of U.S. intelligence, and when the NSC came back and said, let's blame it on them, let's attribute it to the British, the CIA, well, on that basis, on part of our negotiation, we withdraw our formal objection. And Condi Rice is saying, he didn't object, therefore, we didn't take it out.

We've seen the hubris. And now we're seeing the scandals.

When he hung up on Nancy Reagan, that's when he crossed his final threshold.

On 9/11, we were attacked by an enemy?. But there's no foreign enemy here. There's nobody to blame.

What you're seeing in the East Wing is normal turnover, and what you're seeing in the West Wing is abnormal. It's an aberration to have a team stay as long as this one has.

He (Rove) is the president's right arm, as we all know. And the president's in a deep hole and it's very hard to climb out of a hole without your right arm.

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.

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.

I think the president has raised the stakes for himself. He has raised the stakes for his presidency, so that if there are more explosions in the next few months ... his approval ratings will suffer some more.

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 think he still has time to recover politically, and I think it's likely he will. He's good at this. You'll see a better Bush during the next few days, in charge and compassionate. But if he doesn't, there's going to be a serious political price to pay.

I think he has to calibrate it very carefully. The White House says it is going to be a very optimistic speech. But I think people are not feeling very optimistic at the moment.

I still think this president would be served by having someone fresh come in. It would be a matter of making room at the table.

That would give you protection against Democratic attacks and restore bipartisan spirit.

You can agree or disagree with Ronald Reagan's policies, his conservatism. I was less conservative than he was, but if you add it all up, I believe he ranked as the best leader we've had in the White House since Franklin Roosevelt, and that's saying a lot.

You can agree or disagree with Ronald Reagan's policies, his conservatism.

Win or lose, he realized that it was going to be very difficult to govern and that the better part of valor was to step aside.

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.

One cannot underestimate how widely admired Tom Daschle is in Washington for his integrity.

It’s easy to confuse motion with progress.

Ronald Reagan is clearly to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio.

Morality in government begins with officials using words as honestly as possible to describe the truth.

There's a normal tendency in the campaign, during a crisis, for the country to rally around the White House. That may help Al Gore in this campaign, but on the other hand, George W. Bush handled himself so well the other night on foreign policy that I think it fortified him just before this crisis broke.

I don't have any problem with a reporter or a news person who says the President is uninformed on this issue or that issue. I don't think any of us would challenge that. I do have a problem with the singular focus on this, as if that's the only standard by which we ought to judge a president. What we learned in the last administration was how little having an encyclopedic grasp of all the facts has to do with governing.

Ronald Reagan rebuilt the American presidency; it was in trouble when he came into office as an institution, and he did through his communications and through his own inspiration, and his principles. I think he did lift our spirits about, and convince us that once again that the future of the best, our best days were always ahead of us.

If you've got some news that you don't want to get noticed, put it out Friday afternoon 4:00 pm.

There is a cannibalism that's loose in our society in which public figures such as the Clintons could try to come into this town and do something good for this country and then they get hammered away even though they're trying to do the right thing.

We are making politics a spectator sport in which our only duty is to vote somebody into office and then retire to the grandstands.

I think there's some generational difference between some of the older members of the press and this younger president [Bill Clinton]. I think the older members are not quite on the same wave length, and in general. I think it's been very devastating to the president.

Leadership is about calling people to do things beyond themselves.

It's very, very hard to speak truth to power when the truth is unpleasant. I think it's one of the toughest things especially a young person has to do and the only way you can do it is if you're willing to walk out the door if he doesn't take your advice. Or if you're willing to walk out the door if he goes over the line.

At the heart of leadership is the leader's relationship with followers. People will entrust their hopes and dreams to another person only if they think the other is a reliable vessel.

Politics is like watching football. Yes, you can see it directly on your screen, but I think a lot of people want to have some understanding of what's happening, why the play is unfolding the way it is, and I think that's where it can help them, not to render judgments but to help people make their own judgments in a more informed way.

The proudest moment for [a teacher of leaders] is seeing not what students learn but what they do.

Leadership is a journey. Each one of us has to take our own path, and get there our own way.

A leader's role is to raise people's aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there.

We know that second terms have historically been marred by hubris and by scandal.

There has been this legitimate concern that he has been isolated. It is a smart move on his part to do this. Presidents in the past have frequently called in the old guard. He gets the benefit of hearing different views and is seen as getting out the bubble.

Why a White House that was so adept in most of the first term has misjudged two or three big calls in its second term it's puzzling.

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Don't just listen to the lawyers. You know in your heart it's time to get this behind you, avoid the nightmare of more proceedings up on the Hill.

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.

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.

It's as if he's trying to have it both ways.

It was a sluggish response, almost a White House in slow motion. Americans expect not only to see their president on the scene, but a firm hand on the tiller. That wasn't there. There was nobody in charge.

For a two-term president after the November elections in the middle of your second term, things start going downhill and you really do start quacking like a duck.

It's clear they are bringing in someone to do better marketing. Whether they are bringing in someone to bring more complete information to the public is very much an open question.

It's devastating that the president would ask no questions. If he sat there mum in a full briefing ... that will only confirm the suspicions of a lot of opponents.

Incumbents in both parties are dancing perilously close to the edge right now: Gas prices are out of control, we are bogged down in Iraq and now politicians seem to be doing more talking than acting. We may be heading toward an election in which the attitude is to throw the bums out, and if that happens, Republicans will pay the bigger prices because they are in control.

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?

You can second-guess this all you want ... but there's no question that the four days that elapsed that we had this mini-storm that blew up was embarrassing for the vice president and embarrassing for the president.

You can slice and dice this thing any way you want, but I still think it's politically damaging for the administration.