Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Presidential Adviser David Gergen

I recently interviewed David Gergen on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today was an advisor to four U.S. presidents serving presidents of both parties. David Gergen was White House Director of Speech Writing under Richard Nixon, White House Communications Director, and the Ford and Reagan administrations and counselor to the president under Bill Clinton. David is the gold standard for political analysis. As a senior political analyst for CNN, is a New York Times bestselling author, and is the author of the new book, Hearts Touch with Fire: How Great Leaders are Made. David, thank you for joining us.

David: It's terrific to be here with you.

Adam: You grew up in Durham, North Carolina with three older brothers and a dad who was the chair of the math department at Duke. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What were the best lessons and key experiences that shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

David: Good, good questions. Again, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I did grow up in a university family, to a Duke family. We lived in Durham, but I also grew up in the segregated South. We lived on a dirt road in Durham and I went to all White schools throughout my time there in high school. I didn't integrate until I went to college so I never had that experience. I grew up and I thought I'd be an athlete. I played a lot of football, a lot of baseball, and I had a pretty good arm on the baseball thing. But sometime before I went to high school, I grew about six inches in one year versus several months. And I totally lost control in baseball as a baseball pitcher. When I went ahead to call for tryouts for the baseball team in high school, I showed up for the first trial, it was raining, we had it inside of the gym. And I threw it pretty well for about three or four pitches, and then I let loose with the pitch that went through a window on the second floor of this building. And the baseball days were over. 

Adam: Sounds like Mitch Williams.

David: So, I became a sportswriter for the local paper. And I really got into journalism there and I covered sports for a few years, including college sports, and it's a very hot area for that. And then I became a local news reporter. I wrote a lot of obituaries. And I wound up doing these things, really interesting things when Khrushchev came to Washington to see Eisenhower in the late ‘50s. The Durham Morning Herald sent me as a correspondent, you can believe that it was a wonderful experience. So, I learned a lot. I was working with older people, mostly older guys. And they taught me to go out a lot. They gave me a hard time. We drank a lot of beer together. We broke a lot of rules. But they came out of Chapel Hill and have a great journalism department at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. So, all that went really well. But, I must tell you, the most important experience I had came not from having been thinking ahead to the state or doing especially the national politics, which I was interested in. But we had a situation that I became quite involved within civil rights. And that was a dangerous time in the South. Now, Terry Sanford was elected governor of our state. He was a very progressive young guy who was our John Kennedy. And I went to work for him as a college intern and wound up working for something called the North Carolina Good Neighbor Council, which was something Terry set up to try to bring peace to between Blacks and Whites. And he formed something called the Good Neighbor Councils. And I went and became the top aide to the guy who was running it, a fella named David Coltrane. And I remember so well, David Coltrane had grown up as a farmer in North Carolina. He was a part of segregated North Carolina and he was a segregationist and went to work in the state but he converted over to becoming an activist for civil rights. And I drove him all across the state. I got involved for three and a half years with him. Great experience. I love the man. He was terrific for me and I really learned that you can make a difference in life outside going to Washington, going to the White House. A lot of the most important things that go on in our country go on at the community level. And young leaders who are, we desperately need more young leaders these days. Look at what's going on. Just see what the jobs are that you might work for the state or for local government, or you might work for a nonprofit. But there are a lot of things at that level. And that had a very formative experience on me, I became very service-oriented. It became, sort of, a heart-to-heart in the center of what I thought about in life. And what I am doing now.

Adam: I love that. And I want to ask you about your first experience working in the White House. You did your undergrad at Yale, you went to Harvard Law School, you served in the Navy for three and a half years. And then you take your first full-time job working in the White House on the speech writing team, the year was 1971. The President was Richard Nixon in 1972. Watergate became the biggest story in America in 1973. You became White House Director of Speech Writing in 1974. Richard Nixon resigns the presidency. Whatever experiences any of us have had early on in our careers, is it very hard to compare to that.

David: Well, it was eye-opening. One part of that that came with the job as industry training was that I was asked to sit in on cabinet meetings and take notes because, you know, for potential speeches. So, I was in there, sitting there, right on the back row, in the Cabinet Room. And you do that often enough, and you, sort of, grow up. You learn to think like big guys think. You learn how they make decisions and how they screw up. And also, I learned that with Richard Nixon in particular, character matters so much in the quality of our presidents, more than what you know about policy is a question about a person's character. It's really, really important that well, let's take Richard Nixon, I worked for him over time and got to be really reasonably close to him. But he was, when we started out, when I first met Richard Nixon, he was still a respected politician. And he was the best strategist I've ever met in terms of the long-term interests of the country, how to deal with China, how to deal with Russia, and Henry Kissinger, all of that was right there. And I learned an enormous amount. But, what I learned is, they let me come into the inner circle, they invited me into the inner circle, to spend more time with him. There was something deeply troubling inside Richard Nixon. There were furies at work inside him that he had never learned to control. And they brought him down. He self-destructed the office and had it not been for that, he would have been a reasonably good president. But he had to go, which was really necessary. Thank God for Jerry Ford being a narrative to succeed him because Ford became a good bridge back to sanity, back to, sort of, more normalcy. But had Nixon been able to control those inner turmoils, he would have been a far better president. So these jobs sound very, very glamorous at first, in places like the White House, but in truth, you got a lot, you mostly have a lot of people there who don't quite know what they're doing. They're trying to do the best they can. Most people are honest. But it's so easy to slip over the side. It's so easy for arrogance to take hold. And for people to go out. There's so many people who get into public life, especially these days, who think that because they're on top, they're exempt and rules don't apply to them. That they can get away with damn near anything. And it turns out, you can't. And it was, again, another big learning experience.

Adam: David, you touched on a number of different themes, which I'd love to dive in more deeply over the course of this conversation, ethics as it pertains to leadership. What it takes to lead effectively. But something I want to ask you about before we talk about any of that is, you mentioned that at a very early age, you were able to become a part of Richard Nixon's inner circle. And over the course of your career, over the course of your life, you've been incredibly effective at cultivating relationships with U.S. presidents of both parties with four different U.S. presidents, with leaders in business, with leaders inside and outside of government. And to that end, number one, how and number two, what advice do you have for anyone listening on how to build trust? And how to build winning and successful relationships with all kinds of people?

David: Sure. Well, I think, Adam, and when I've tried to reflect in the book, you've drawn upon the work of Joseph Campbell. He wrote a lot of stuff about the hero's journey in life. How all of us, if you want to be a good, really good leader, I think, you have to realize that leadership starts from within you. And it's very, very important in the early stages of your development, your personal development, to begin to gain a sure standing of who you really are, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, where your temptations are, just how you are constructed. And what are your values? What is your true north? What values are you going to guide yourself by, no matter how up or down the good the fortunes are of your team or your president? And then, I think, it's really, similarly important not only to have self-understanding but to have self-mastery. To be able to put down those temptations, to be able to be guided by your inner values. And to be steady about that. You build more trust when people feel they can not only rely upon your word, but they can rely upon your behavior, and how you're going to represent yourself. I can just tell you that there are a lot of people who come in, again, inside an organization like the White House, but even a lot lesser organizations. And it just goes through their head. And they become quite disoriented and very, very elitist, and very arrogant. And you got to get off that. What's critical to leaders today, especially, is learning how to be more empathic, and learning how to work with others. There's an old proverb in Africa, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”. And I really believe that it's become more and more important to have constructive collaboration at the heart of how you behave with groups. Then you are the star. What we need is, you need a team of stars who work together to build a good organization. But, I think, first, you have to develop yourself. Then you have to learn how to help others, how to better provide them advice, or counsel, or support, or comfort, whatever it may be. When I went into work for Bill Clinton, it was very much, can you help me get out of a ditch? We had been old friends and I went to work on it. Listen, I learned back with Reagan, the best thing you do, if you're an underling, is to let your boss try to play to the best elements of your boss. Trying to bring out the best in them. And that will remind them who they are and why they got there. So, when Clinton was in trouble, I went in and said, “We need what we did with Reagan”. We had to let Clinton be Clinton. But we had to help him gradually get out of the ditch by finding his self-confidence. He lost his self-confidence early on. He came out of Arkansas, he got Al knocked out of him when he got to Washington. Hillary was under constant attack. And they were in a very defensive position, very vulnerable, suffering in many ways. But as he recovered his self-confidence, when he remembered who he was, and got back to his own values, and let Clinton be Clinton, he was a much better president. He climbed out of the ditch. And he was a good president in the years that followed. My judgment.

Adam: You hit on so many themes that are essential, not only to developing trust as an advisor but to developing as a leader, which is the theme of your work, the theme of your book. Before you can effectively lead others you need to be able to lead your own life.

David: Exactly right. That's precisely well-stated.

Adam: Thank you. You need to understand yourself. I love how you phrased it. You need to develop a sense of self-understanding. But beyond that, a sense of self-mastery and empathy. It's essential to great leadership. Great leaders are great collaborators. Great leaders understand that decisions aren't made alone. They're made with the support of others and the support of great advisors around them.

David: Yep, well-stated. And I find those two photographs that bring it to light very well, Adam. One is when you think of John Kennedy. One of the iconic pictures of Kennedy as he's in the Oval Office all alone is he's standing up at a desk but he sort of slumped over as if the weight of the world is on him and him alone. As if he is the only. As if he is the answer to all our prayers. That was the 1960s. Now, you come into the 21st century. The photograph that best captured Barack Obama is when he's down in the Situation Room, going after Osama and he was closing in on him. He's linked up to admirals and so-forth overseas. He goes minute to minute, and he's surrounded by six or seven advisors. He's not down there alone. He's down there with his team. And that team worked constructively together. That's what you want to, again, pull together.

Adam: You're referencing so many great leaders of our day. So many great leaders in U.S. history. But our country is so polarized right now. We have one side of the country that's all the way over here and we have another side of the country that's all the way over there. We have another part of the country that's somewhere in the middle. And taking political perspectives aside, it all sort of fundamentally comes down to how do we communicate with each other? How do we talk to each other? How do we build successful relationships with each other? And I want to ask you and your experience, you've been able to develop successful relationships with all kinds of people, with all kinds of ideologies, people at all kinds of levels of government and all kinds of levels of business. What are the keys to developing successful relationships? What are the keys to communicating effectively, particularly with people who might not necessarily see the world and see things the same way that you do?

David: I think that some of the most successful advisors to leaders and become advisors who become leaders themselves over time is a person who can put himself into the shoes of the person they're working with. How did that person you're thinking about become your boss? What does your boss need in order to succeed? Not just today. You don't want to just have one eye on making sure you succeed in the short term. But you have to have your other eye on that horizon. What's coming? How do we prepare? We have been remarkably unsuccessful for seeing the pandemic, for seeing the recessions, we're seeing the kind of wildfires, we're having the flooding, we're having all these kinds of cognitive problems that are cropping up on us. We're foreseeable. They were predicted. I have a friend here at the Harvard Business School to go talk to the board about a book on predictable surprises. And that's what we've been going through. A series of surprises that were predictable. And we didn't see it. The really good leaders are the ones who can see things coming. That happens, I think, to people who are, I think, favored, and trying to figure out who can see farther ahead. Churchill made the argument that a person who can see farther back can see farther ahead. If you read history, if you read biography, if you begin to understand human nature as it is, not as you wish it to be, then you have a jumpstart over others. And over time, Adam, if you're in the field long enough, or in the arena long enough, you begin to see patterns. You've seen how something like this unfolded two or three times. And you begin to realize where the pitfalls are and what needs to be done. You can get to the answers more quickly. And we have also right now, if I may say so, this is a country that once had heroes. And now we have celebrities. We have a lot of celebrities and sports. We have a lot of celebrities. Entertainment celebrities are fine. Where are our resilience? These were the people like Zelensky, who so bravely stood up in Ukraine and remains at the moment we're talking. And we're a vital hope for peace in that part of the world. We simply don't have, right now, a lot of people we can look up to who helped us, sort of, who helped to guide us through a period like this. And help us keep together so that we maintain a societal true north. We don't fly apart and be at each other's throats. I have one final point. And the central point of what I've tried to make in the book is we are at a point in our lives, as a country, where things could go either way. We could get a lot healthier as a country socially, or we could continue down the path we're on now, which I think is a path to doomsday if we just stay on it. I think what's needed more than anything else is fresh thinking, fresh blood. We need fresh blood in Washington. We need fresh ideas. We need fresh idealism. We need that coming from the millennial generation, coming from Gen Z, with social media. We're at a time and place where people who are 15, 18, 20 years old have a big impact quickly. Greta Thunberg is the most obvious example in Sweden. This is one young girl who is 15 years old, and can inspire a nation and inspire a continent on climate change. Where you think of Malala in Pakistan. I got to know Malala. She was hunted down by the Taliban. They shot her in the head twice. It was a miracle she lived through it. But she's an enormously important figure and being. I need people in her part of the world. When you think about the Parkland kids in our United States down in Florida. And David Hogg and others, who responded to the shootings in their high school, and went on and pushed on gun control, and really made some progress on Black Lives Matter. And another case, young women in their 30s, who are Black and developed an organization without lead. They didn't try to go for leader, they just tried to go from bottom-up leadership as best they could. So, there are a lot of people who are young, whom, I think, can make an enormous impact. And I have my book as a cry for help. When you're young, you can make a big, big difference. And you can learn in over 50 years if you persevere, you can actually make big changes. You can't get big, fat changes in three, four or five years. It's too hard. It's too complicated. But over time, if you persevere, perseverance is one of the most important aspects, important strengths that a young leader must-have today. But, I'm just telling you to love the young. The younger generations represent very much of our best hope for the future.

Adam: And your new book, Hearts Touch with Fire, tackles the question, how are great new leaders made? And I want to ask you, what can anyone do to become a better leader?

David: Sure. Well, first of all, we know that great leaders are not born. There are people born with strengths in the area. But if you want to be a great leader you've really got to work at it. You got to throw yourself into it, just as in any field down there. These books about the 10,000-hour rule, that if you really want to be from good to great, as Jim Collins would put it, you're gonna be good to great. So, as a leader or an accomplished person, you have spent a lot of time with it. And the argument that has been made, which, I think, has a lot of strength behind it, is that as many as 10,000 hours. We look at the Beatles. They weren't great until they went to Germany. And they've been a band and they played the nightclubs there. And they had about 1000 appearances before they came back to the UK. And, at that point, they were terrific. They were well-formed. And similarly, if you look at Mozart, people think well, he was not a child prodigy. Actually, his father did a lot of the early work with him and helped him to write a lot of the music. But, by the time Mozart was just 19 or 20, he had the 1000 hours. He had done it a lot, just as the Beatles had done it a lot. You have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing to try extra hard. Bill Bradley was a basketball player who might depress in a play, played before a lot of your listeners probably were born at an event, he was a great athlete. And he came back and played for the New York Knicks after he was a Rhodes Scholar. But he used to tie up and put weights in his shoes. So, when he learned how to jump he could go up higher. And then in order to be able to become a great shot with a basketball or control the basketball, he put cardboard under his eyes under his glasses, so that he could not see the floor and he could not see the basketball he was dribbling. And he had to learn how to dribble and evade people and get to the basket, not by watching but by doing. You need those kinds of efforts, those kinds of experiences, to acquire the skills for leadership. But you also have to have it, as I say, go back to this. I can't tell you how important it is to dig in. And don't think you can just, sort of, brush up on things and brush by things and it's all about being a hotshot. If you really want to be a true leader, a great leader, you need to have more depth, you need to be a serious person about knowledge and acquiring. Relating to John F. Kennedy, he would have made a terrible mistake and helped blow up the world heading in the Cuban Missile Crisis had he not been reading the history. The historian Barbara Tuchman persuaded him when he was president how important it was that we went to the First World War. The First World War broke out through miscalculations. And when the Cuban Missile Crisis came up, he said I don't want the guns of August of the First World War to become the guns of October, the Second World War. And he handled the war, the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with great care. Realizing he never wanted to put Khrushchev in a corner. Don't ever back him into a corner because that's when he's gonna lash out. I have some fear we're doing that with Ukrainian leadership. That we're maybe backing him into a corner where he will have a hard time extracting himself and are more likely to go to nuclear explosives, which would just be awful to the world. We might not have a world after that. So, I do think that there's a lot of learning to be done. But open learning. One of the things you discover in journalism was, with great intensity, that you're always going to school because you're always having to learn new things and write about new things. You need to be a great leader and you need to be curious. You need to be really, really interested in how the world works, how people work. This is not something you can do mechanically, it's something you acquire. It's about the fingertip feel for the dynamics in a room. And how do you bring people around with Bill Clinton, for example, when he first went? And what do you think went into the room? They didn't know anybody. How about a fundraiser? Let's do some gathering. I would be with him. And I'd watch him. He didn't know anybody. So he spent an hour or more shaking hands with people, learning who they were and learning what they believed. And then, when they asked him to speak, and he got up, he could remember what he had been told. And he could speak. He could use the voices of the people he talked to, to talk to the crowd. When you give a speech as a leader, you're not there to talk about what you think you're there to, or what you are concerned about. You're there to talk about what they're concerned about, what your audience is concerned about, in order to bring them along and to help them.

Adam: So much great advice in understanding your audience. I love the example you gave with Bill Clinton. Actually, Joe Lockhart was on the podcast and he shared a story about an interaction he had with Bill Clinton. When Michael Jordan was waiting in the line for Bill Clinton, he just won the championship and Bill Clinton was a huge sports fan but not a big NBA fan, more of a college basketball fan. The NBA is not big in Arkansas. College basketball is big in Arkansas. And Joe Lockhart is a big NBA fan. And what Joe was sharing was that Bill Clinton was picking Joe's brain about basketball, just grilling him. He really wanted to learn as much about the NBA as possible. And it was his inquisitiveness, this desire to learn, desire to grow, which defined Bill Clinton. And it opened Joe Lockhart’s eyes more broadly. The best leaders are lifelong learners. The best leaders are dedicated to learning, dedicated to growing. You brought up Bill Bradley. I hope that listeners know who Bill Bradley is. I've had a number of Hall of Fame basketball players on the podcast but I have not had Bill Bradley on. But something you brought up about Bill Bradley, which I thought was really interesting in terms of how he trained to become such a great basketball player. Shohei Otani, who's as good a baseball player as there's ever been, on the cover of Time magazine, has been revolutionizing baseball. This offseason, he was training with Jo Adell, one of the up-and-coming stars of the Angels. And Jo Adell was talking about how he and Shohei were training and one of the things that they were doing was hitting with a ball much smaller than a Major League baseball.

David: Hmm. Oh, that's really interesting. That's very interesting because it'd be a situation where you get into a swing and you see the ball earlier and bigger than it is, it's easier to connect to it. But, by using a smaller ball like that, it strikes me as a really, really interesting way to develop your skill. Because you're seeing your eye connecting with the ball. It must be so important. As I said, a long time ago, I gave up on being a baseball player. So, I'm no longer an expert, so to speak. But I do like the game and I enjoy basketball a lot. And I thought Bill Bradley was very special.

Adam: David, your baseball career sounds about as successful as my baseball career. I was the captain of probably the worst baseball team in the history of high school baseball. That's about where things ended. 

David: I get that. 

Adam: David, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

David: Good question. I want to have a conversation. You're in L.A. and I went to see Warren Christopher when he had retired as Secretary of State. As you know, he grew up in the Los Angeles area. He's a USC alum. 

Adam: Oh, really interesting. 

David: Brilliant. Well, I said to him, “Mr. Secretary”, this was after he'd been Secretary of State. I said, “Mr. Secretary, what advice would you give to the young people coming up about how to get involved and, you know, how much time to spend on and so forth?”. He said, “Well, first of all, David, a lot depends on where you want to go in life. Generally, if you want to be a big lawyer of your law firm, you want to be managing partner of your law firm, then you probably ‘ought to go in and give the law firm about 150% of your time. You really need to jump in with both feet”. He said, “But if you want to practice law, but you also want to get into public life, then what I recommend is that you spend about 100% of your time on your law. And you spend the other 50% of your time in public service. And work your way up, pay your dues, get involved in things with kids, and so forth. Spend time at the level where you can make a difference”. And that's what Warren Christopher did. He first got very involved with L.A. politics and locally did a lot of things on police, that sort of thing. And then he worked his way up to Sacramento. And then eventually when Christopher went to Washington, D.C., he went to the Justice Department. He was a worker over at the Pentagon for a while and then gradually worked up and eventually became Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, a wonderful human being and a very persevering Secretary of State. And I just worked for him for a while. I came away very impressed. And, frankly, more thoughtful because of Warren Christopher. And, I think, that would be one big message I'd have. Yeah, you want to be where you can get your hands dirty. Then, let me just say something about weighing in the U.S. Navy, in my experience, Adam, which was very helpful for me. So, I go to a couple of Ivy League schools or colleges and I go for law school. And then I go into the U.S. Navy. I've just graduated with honors at law school. Within 36 hours of reporting to the Navy, I have toothbrushes and I'm cleaning latrines with toothbrushes that they want to use to start slow, and get used to what it's like to be an enlisted guy. And when you can do that, you can become a good officer who becomes a better officer. And that was really important. Did I enjoy being down here in those damn latrines? No, I didn't at all. But it was a good experience for me and I needed to do that. We need to be tougher on ourselves to be able to ask more of ourselves. Now we're going to read a story about Mother Teresa. Shortly before she died, a couple of journalists were talking to her and they were very curious about why she chose to live with the poor. To live in the poorest neighborhoods and be in a devastating place. The place with the worst public health records and that sort of thing. Why did she choose to live like that? And she said, “Because I wanted a tough life to get out of this mess”. We as Americans need to toughen up. We need to stop cutting ourselves short. We have big things and need to be accomplished. We want to save this country. And I think the next generation is the answer.

Adam:  David, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

David: Thank you. I was honored to be here. 

Adam: Honor was mine.


Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.

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