David Gergen
David Gergen
David Richmond Gergenis an American political commentator and former presidential advisor who served during the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. He is currently a Senior Political Analyst for CNN and a Professor of Public Service and Co-Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. Gergen is also the former Editor-at-Large of U.S. News and World Report and a contributor to CNN.com and Parade Magazine. He has twice been a member...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Show Host
Date of Birth9 May 1942
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
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.
On 9/11, we were attacked by an enemy?. But there's no foreign enemy here. There's nobody to blame.
When he hung up on Nancy Reagan, that's when he crossed his final threshold.
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.
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.
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.
We've seen the hubris. And now we're seeing the scandals.
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.
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.