An Interview with David Gergen

David Gergen is a professor of public service and was the co-founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. In addition, he serves as a senior political analyst for CNN and works actively with a rising generation of new leaders. In the past, he has served as a White House adviser to four U.S. presidents of both parties: Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. He wrote about those experiences in his New York Times best-seller, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton.

Mary Jo Meisner/Anthony Mohr: David, thank you so much for this opportunity to not only get your thoughts on President Biden’s first 100 days in office, but also to get your insights into what lies ahead for this President and our country at such an incredibly significant -- and, frankly, troubling -- time in our history and democracy.

There is so much terrain to cover that we thought it would be helpful to divide our conversation into three segments to best utilize our precious time with you, and also to signal our interest in the near future as well as the recent past.

So, let’s focus first on how you view and grade Biden on the first 100 days in office and use that time to look both at some of the key decisions the President has made (and not made) and how you think he ranks in terms of the qualities that you believe are essential for success.

Second, while the first 100 days is a traditional milestone that journalists use to take stock of a new President, the next 100 days -- and beyond -- will be even more crucial markers of Biden’s ability to steer the country over the longer haul of his administration. Let’s talk about what he needs to do and the shoals that lie ahead.

And, finally, we’d love to get your perspective on the party that is out of office right now, where it is going and the gathering storm that is brewing within the GOP. How will it impact this President and how can he or should he navigate their efforts to impede his progress.

To begin, at the time of this interview on May 7, 2021, we are about a week beyond Biden's actual 100 days in office and in keeping with this time-honored tradition in Washington, since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, there's been considerable press analysis and coverage of President Biden’s first three months. But there are few political analysts that have your perspective and platform as both a White House advisor for several presidents and as an acknowledged journalist and expert on public service and civic leadership. So, with that, what is your overall assessment of how President Biden has used these first 100 days?

David Gergen: He's been exceptionally good. Far better than I had originally anticipated. I think he has really surprised progressives in his party who were worried he was going to sell out to Republicans in the name of bipartisanship and, instead, he has made his own way. In many ways, I think his first 100 days will be historic. Only twice in our history have we had a President who went to a podium this early in the first term and proposed such a sweeping set of reforms. I have to go back to 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt took office in the midst of the Great Depression and proposed more than 15 major bills in his first 100 days and also saved the banks -- which was quite important to that time -- and ever since then we've measured Presidents by the 100-day marker with the sort of unwritten assumption that the first 100 days are sort of a harbinger of what's to come. And it's a yardstick on how successful you are likely to be and where your problems are likely to be. I think that Joe Biden has navigated through those waters extremely well.

I might point out, he is the second President to challenge its citizens to build a great society. The first, of course, was Lyndon Johnson in 1965 when he had just won a landslide in 1964 against Barry Goldwater. Notably, he told his staff after winning about 60% of the vote, that even though we have this high number and this incredible degree of support, we only have one year to get big things done, because in the second year of a presidency the attention span transfers over to the midterm elections. People get caught up in that and it's very, very hard to get big things done in the Congress during that period of time, so what you really want is to do things in the first year. That's what Lyndon Johnson did, that's what FDR did and that's what Joe Biden hopes to do. That's what Joe Biden’s plan is -- to have sweeping transformation. If he could, to change course for the ship of state and have us going in a whole different direction before he leaves office.

Meisner/Mohr: David, to that point, you did a terrific interview in the middle of the pandemic with the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last year and you said that you could never recall a time when there were three major crises of such magnitude underway in the United States at the same time as we were experiencing then and, frankly, are still experiencing -- the global pandemic, the impact on the economy and jobs, and the racial justice imperative brought on by the murder of George Floyd.

Gergen: I would add a fourth crisis that Biden inherited and that is climate change. The United States had abandoned its leadership in the world on climate change and walked out of the Paris accords in the last administration. Had we not gotten back into the Paris accords, had we not recommitted to American leadership, the world was careening toward a change in temperatures that was becoming irreversible. The UN intergovernmental group has been proclaiming for some time that we've only got a few years left to get this turned around. After four years of Trump, we were going in the wrong direction. I think Biden has corrected that. So, you look at the four different crises -- he inherited the pandemic, the jobs crisis that came with it, the racial crisis that came with George Floyd and the existential threat on the climate. He's made significant progress on all four already. He's not there yet, but he is starting out well and I think the question is why he is so successful? I think he thought much more boldly than we expected; he understands the need for moving ahead and he appointed a crackerjack staff and cabinet. He's got really strong people around him. They've been around there before and they're not in it for personal glory. There have been no stories that I’ve seen -- leaked stories -- about inner tensions within the staff, backstabbing within the staff. They’ve been remarkably cooperative, collaborative and supportive of each other and I think that has made a big difference. If you look at some previous Presidents, by this time they're all fighting with each other with their backs to the wall so the knives couldn't get you. But in this case, people are supportive of each other and I think it makes a real difference.

The one other difference I’d like to point out and again it's in parallel with Roosevelt. The alignment with Roosevelt is not just about the big policy efforts, it's also about the human being. Franklin Roosevelt was, as we all know, transformed by polio when it struck him down. He'd been one of the most athletic men and quite a dandy in his age bracket, but when he woke up one morning and couldn't walk, it was the turning point in his life. He tried for seven years to walk and never could. He was disabled from the waist down for the rest of his life, and he changed psychologically. We find, if you look at leadership literature, one of the big issues we often focus on are crucible moments in the life of a leader. When an out-of-the-dark blow comes, as it did with FDR, it transformed who he was and created these crucible moments in response to them. First thing you need to do is get through it and stay anchored and that requires resilience. But for some people, the response to the crucible is to find moral purpose in life, to find meaning in life and that's what FDR did. And I would suggest to you that that is what we're seeing in Biden. In his recovery from losing his wife and a small daughter and losing his beloved son Beau. I think that has given him inner character and inner steel that has helped him enormously as President.

Meisner/Mohr: David, one of the pieces that I was reading in preparation for our conversation was that one analyst put it this way -- Biden was not throwing away his shot -- a reference, of course, to the Broadway musical “Hamilton” and to one of its great songs. This analyst’s point is that he's taken this all in, and this is his moment and he's not going to throw away that shot.

Gergen: Absolutely. This is his moment. He waited all his life to do this, he wanted all his life to do this, and he thought, I’m sure, that he was never going to make it. At one point when he was (in the Presidential campaign) in Iowa or New Hampshire, he was at 2% or 3% in the polls. It just wasn't there, and one of the reasons of course, he is so loyal to the Black community was that Black Americans are the voting group who saved him, really made a huge difference politically for him and I think that's the basis for his coalition.

Meisner/Mohr: You referenced the staff behind him right now that have enabled him to hit the ground running. You could almost kind of envision them sitting there over the two months between the election and inauguration just putting everything in place.

Gergen: Well, several of them were there before. Ron Klain, who is now the chief of staff, was the guy that Biden appointed to get us through the Ebola crisis during the Obama administration. He was a guiding figure under Obama and it worked out really well, it was contained then. That was terrific preparation for the much bigger crisis with COVID that they had to face when Biden came in. It was something that was already in his wheelhouse and I think if you look around at the various people who are around Biden now like Steve Ricchetti, there are many who have been around him a long time. Jake Sullivan has been there a short time, but he's a wunderkind. I’ve known Jake since he was in college and he's always been an All Star. You can just go down the ranks -- Antony Blinken is strong and has a lot of international experience -- and you find people who are not only strong, but close with Biden.

Meisner/Mohr: Please talk about the Cabinet choices as well and the crucial decisions Biden made there.

Gergen: When you think about the Cabinet, the critical positions are the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Treasury and the Defense Department. Biden has appointed a very able person in Kamala Harris as Vice President, and I think he's giving her the kind of responsibility that, should events take a bad turn, she's capable of stepping in. I think she's getting a real education and that's great. Beyond that, Antony Blinken has been expected to have this job for a long, long time and I think he's off to a very good start. I would say that Ron Klain has the capacity, over time, to be another Jim Baker. I’ve always thought Jim Baker was the best Chief of Staff in American history. I worked with him and have enormous regard for him, but along comes Klain and I think he has a lot of the same professionalism that Baker brought to the job. The surprise is the Defense Department. Former General Lloyd Austin seems to be off to a good start and we just know less about him so let's wait and see. We had an experience with the Trump administration with a very strong Defense Secretary (General James Mattis), but he kept clashing with the President and he left and wrote a book called Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, which apparently captured the relationship of the past administration. Another superb choice is Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary. The markets have great faith in her. She's been at the Fed, she's been at the White House, she's been at the treasury, she's touched all the bases. I went to Yale with her husband George Akerlof who is a Nobel Prize winner in economics and very, very highly regarded. They have a wonderful marriage and she is just first class. You know we're going to have twists and turns on this economic recovery. Just today, we know the numbers that came in on the jobs front were so dismal compared to what we expected so it's clear we're going to have unexpected events in the next two or three years. I think she's a great person to ride it out. Women have been well represented in these appointments. I’m impressed by the gender diversity, by the racial diversity. It is very healthy for the country.

Meisner/Mohr: Talking about racial diversity, would you comment on how you feel Biden in his first months in office has navigated the issues of race and racial justice? We just had the verdict in the George Floyd murder case and Biden had very intimate conversations with George Floyd’s family and others afterwards. Would you talk about how you think he's doing in that regard?

Gergen: Well, I think he's done a superb job as Consoler in Chief. This goes back to the empathy and the approach that he brings to life because of the crucibles he's been through. I think he relates extremely well with people who have faced hardships because that's what he has faced. You know the empathy is genuine, that this is not some fake show. This is just who he is and his whole tone changes when he begins talking about people who are on the margins. So I think that on a personal level, many people feel they have a friend in the White House, including the Black Community, which makes a big difference. That was not true when FDR was President. Lyndon Johnson won people over through the legislation that was passed in 1964 and 1965. As to Biden, I don't think the verdict is fully in yet on race relations. It's got to go beyond burying people who have been shot and offering inspiration and consolation. The question is, “What are we going to do about police forces in this country?” I think Biden is wise to oppose “defunding” the police, but I also think he is wise to push reimagining the police, and reimagining the relationship. You have to wait and see if they need a national commission to help him figure it out and also help Attorney General Merrick Garland. I should have mentioned Garland as among the premiere Cabinet appointees because I think he is an excellent choice. He doesn't seem to bear any grudges from the past (when his nomination for Supreme Court Justice by President Obama was blocked) which you can imagine could happen after what he went through. But, nonetheless, I think the real question is what is subjectively going to be done.

We've also got the various relief packages and the issues contained in them, whether it is pre-K or community college or other items. What and for whom are those proposals aimed at? Primarily people of color and single mothers with a child at home. People need help and the question is whether the country is going to step up or not. I don't think we know yet. My working assumption is that Biden is going to do well in getting a big chunk of money for infrastructure, but it's going to be a much bigger struggle to get money for these family supports and changing policies, because there are even some Democrats -- not just Senator Joe Manchin (of West Virginia), but other Democrats, who have real questions about the deficits and how big they are going to grow and how we are going to pay for them.

Meisner/Mohr: Well, that does get us squarely into moving from Biden’s first 100 days to the kind of transformative leadership that you can tell he wants to have. Given some of the markers that the President has put down so far, what are some of the things you would advise him to do right now?

Gergen: My advice now would be -- you have put an awful lot out there, in these first 100 days. You have a significant number of proposals out there, so we ought to think now about slowing down on new proposals and about consolidating what we have and selling them to the country and persuading the Congress to pass what we have. If he can get that done, if he just got half of what he's proposed done in the next 100 days, I think that would be a great success. So, I think the idea is don't keep showering the country with more and more proposals that we can't handle. Jimmy Carter did that and it didn't work out very well. It was just too much. I know that in the minds of the progressives that that's a bad idea, that it sounds like a sell out, but Roosevelt himself said you can't govern at the same high decibel level for year after year after year. You need to change the decibel levels from time to time. Adjust, consolidate, make sure it's on strong, sturdy ground and then move ahead.

Meisner/Mohr: Well, that squarely gets to the issue of communications. You were known as a master communicator, as the director of communications for several Presidents. There is such a stark contrast, of course, between Trump and Biden, and the way they communicate. How is Biden doing on that front?

Gergen: We'll see what Mark Zuckerberg will do next to know how that's all going to go down, but it sure has been better for people sleeping better at night. Now we don't have to wake up at four o'clock in the morning to see what the latest tweet is. I just see a lot of behind-the-scenes professionalism in the way Biden’s team communicates, the way they put things out and the way they preserve his energy. I think that's very important. Biden appears to me to be physically fit. He looks like he clearly works out and the early assertions by Republicans that he's a prop -- that it was other people making decisions or that he's just reading a teleprompter -- turned out not to be true. He is a force and I think he is the one that has gotten a lot of things done. But one health issue that happens -- anything like tripping going up the plane ramp -- the press is hawkish about these kind of issues and you know they are going to pounce. So I think his team is really smart to not try to push him, but also push him to keep physically fit. I think you can be President, without having to travel the country incessantly, and maybe COVID actually gives them good reason not to be flying. What we need is his experience, his goodwill, his decency and his caring for the country. I think if you can continue to demonstrate that, then there are going to be a lot of people that just plain like him.

Meisner/Mohr: What about bipartisanship? Have you given up on that?

Gergen: I think what we're seeing is historic among Republicans and just as it’s historic among Democrats, but among Republicans it's historic because it reminds us so much about how fragile our democracy is and what attack we are under right now. I think we are in an increasingly dangerous place. I’ve worked in Republican administrations and I’ve worked in a Democratic administration. I think we need a Center Right Party; I think it's really important for the country. To say we as a country are going to have a Center Right Party and a Center Left Party -- that's the tradition in which a lot of us found ourselves earlier in life, when there was more bipartisanship in Congress and in Washington. As you so well remember, Mary Jo, in Washington those days, the two parties clashed a lot, but they did it sort of within the 40-yard line. Now we've got a lot of extremists on the Republican side and it's happening on the Democratic side, but I must say Democratic Left had been better behaved in that regard than I think Republic Right has been. I think right now, we're seeing the Republican Right is fracturing the Republican Party and is a real threat to the country. You’ve got to ask yourself if the direction we're going to take is that you're only admitted into alliance with Republicans if you accept the Big Lie. You know if we get into the Big Lie territory, that is where Germany was back in the ‘20s and ‘30s. I looked up last night a quote from Joseph Goebbels that was attributed to him; maybe you can use his quote, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people.” Doesn't that sound a lot like what we're going through now with the Big Lie? Hitler used that against the Jews, invented the Big Lie. Goebbels used it regularly and here it is returning to the United States. I find it astonishing and very, very worrisome.

Meisner/Mohr: Now on the issue of the voting restrictions that are being methodically put out there by the Republican Party in 40+ different states right now.

Gergen: Forty-seven states the last I saw, 350 bills. The press can't keep up with all of it. Things have been conducted under camouflage and you can't quite see what's happening. We really don't understand this bill that Governor Ron DeSantis just signed in Florida -- how many votes have they moved with all this? Who can tell? It's really because it’s so decentralized.

Meisner/Mohr: I interviewed former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick right after the election and he reminded me of the pernicious and consistent and just drip-drip-drip quality of these voting restriction issues that have been going on for decades.

Gergen: I think some organizing group is going to have to find its way here. Voter suppression is really, really hard to get people mobilized in the streets over because it's so complex and people don't quite understand it. Black Lives Matter has been enormously successful getting people into the streets when it's George Floyd, but for this kind of issue it’s much harder. Stacey Abrams I think plays an extremely constructive role, but even as we have to give her a lot of credit, it's hard for people to understand exactly what it is she's been doing in Georgia.

Meisner/Mohr: David, you have had such an incredible platform from which to view and participate in our country's history. So, as we leave this conversation, what is your hope for President Biden? I think we just talked about your hope for America -- that we do not go down certain roads -- but what are your words right now?

Gergen: I think Joe Biden inherited the worst set of crises of any President since Franklin Roosevelt and arguably even more serious because there were multiple crises in the Biden period. I think that if he can help us resolve these crises and get us back on a more optimistic, hopeful footing, that would be an enormously successful presidency. He doesn't have to pass all the bills to make progress to get us out of the ditch we've been in. I think if he could succeed there; if, in fact, the Republicans are willing to play ball with him that would help a great deal. I do worry that the prospects for bipartisanship seem to be dwindling and that worries me. The environment that surrounded the (removal from leadership of) Rep. Liz Cheney is very disturbing and I don't know whether we're so emotionally exhausted from the campaign, or what, but I have a feeling we're not coming to grips with these underlying problems and we need to. At some point it's up to the citizens. There's a saying that you get the government you deserve and so there really is going to have to be a call to citizenship. I think that's the reason why this Advanced Leadership Initiative program here at Harvard is so important because it is all about trying to renew civic engagement. I think increasingly we're seeing business step up. You see CEOs like Ken Frazier and others who've been in the limelight as well as the Business Roundtable. I think it's coming around, but we need to really step it up. I think we have a long, long path ahead and the way poison has been injected into the bloodstream of Republicans, I think it's just going to make it very difficult. We can't even get to herd immunity at this point because of the distrust that exists out there, so we have got a long way to go. But I do think Joe Biden -- as a man with an enormous good heart and an enormously decent man -- he's a good match for our time. In my more hopeful days I remember the Bismarck line, “God has been good to fools drunkards and the United States of America.”

Meisner/Mohr: David, thank you so much for your time and your insights and we're so fortunate to have you at Harvard.

About the Authors:

Mary Jo Meisner is a senior business executive specializing in communications, media, government relations, and public policy. Over the course of a 30-year career, Mary Jo has been a journalist, a newspaper and business executive, and was the architect of a groundbreaking civic leadership arm of the Boston Foundation. After spending a year as a 2017 Advanced Leadership Initiative fellow at Harvard University, Mary Jo formed MJM Advisory Services, a bespoke consulting firm that advises senior leaders in the private sector on their social impact initiatives.

Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.