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.
