adership matters, it has throughout American history, and it matters today as we still grapple with the lingering effects of the pandemic, seemingly intractable political disputes, and voices that deny the integrity of American elections.

Today's guest pins his hope on the men and women in the arena, the public leaders who, in following their North Star, could lead the country to a brighter future.

He's David Gergen, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with "The Providence Journal."

- This week, we're joined by David Gergen, advisor to presidents, CNN commentator, developer of young leaders, and author most recently of "Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made."

David, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Jim and Wayne, it's good to see you, and it's good to be engaged again with public television.

- Well, we can't think of someone with a better resume for writing a book about public leadership and really offering some advice to public leaders of all stripes about that undertaking.

What drew you to public service and public life in the first place?

- I started out thinking I was gonna be a baseball player, frankly.

I was a pretty decent pitcher.

I managed to throw the ball over the plate a fair number of times 'cause I was fairly tall.

But then, between like the 9th grade and the 10th grade, I grew six inches in 12 months and totally lost my control.

And I tried out for the baseball team, my high school baseball team that fall.

And the first tryout was in the gym because it was raining outdoors.

So they put us in a gym, and I started throwing the ball.

I got two or three pitches that were okay, but then I threw one, and it just a total wild pitch and it went through a window.

The pitch went through a window.

It wasn't just a window, it was a window in the second floor.

(all laughing) So I decided then and there I was not cut out to be a baseball player, but I could write sports pieces for the local newspaper, the "Durham Morning Herald" and "Durham Sun."

And I wound up being a sports writer and eventually covered obituaries for Durham.

And after that, you know, covered state politics as well as local politics.

And that was very, very engaging and that got me very, very involved in the national scene and my fascination with it.

When I went off to college at 17, I was going up to the northeast for college, and I remember Khrushchev was coming to visit President Eisenhower in Washington.

And my newspaper, of all things, asked me to cover Khrushchev's visit.

So I got credentials and I got on the bus, the press bus, and one thing to another, it was fabulous, I loved it.

And you can imagine how exciting that was.

So that also drew me into public life.

And more and more, but especially through civil rights, I became deeply engaged in the civil rights of our time.

- Well, you know, major league baseball's loss, I think, is the country's gain.

You've served four presidents in your career, three Republicans, one Democrat.

Is such a career with bipartisan credibility like that even possible today?

- Well, I wouldn't glorify it too much.

I first got in with Watergate.

Well, then I got out with Whitewater.

(all laughing) So I think that it is, it's very hard to do these days, just to go switch parties like that.

And it wasn't easy for me.

I can show you the scars on my back if you'd like.

But the truth is, now, if you work with the other side and if just cooperate with them, it's often seen as a betrayal by your own party.

So we just had Liz Cheney up here at the Kennedy School, where I'm talking to you from, and, you know, she spoke here.

And they were very moving, but what I was delighted about was that a lot of students turned out and cheered her.

She got a standing innovation at the end of her talk, which indicated to me that at least there's still room in some quarters for bipartisanship and sort of working across the aisle.

But we've got a long way to go to get back to where we were.

You know, the three of us can all remember different days when we had different times, when it was honorable to work with people on the other side.

And that's how progress was made.

And that was true most of our history.

But in this latest benighted period, you know, it's been less true.

- So, David, you've spent more than five decades in public service.

Why is public service so essential?

- Well, public service is essential.

I'm glad you raised the question, Wayne, because we belittle, some part of the service is belittled.

But in fact, you know, what holds the country together usually, or the glue that's helped to hold the country together has been in the many occasions when we all had common purpose, especially in wars.

And we were all on the same side, or mostly on the same side.

And those were times of serious public sacrifice.

But people did that and it made a major difference in the quality of life in the country.

And the war had a lot, it was very binding for us.

You know, it was very helpful to the health of our democracy that Saltonstall, from this great state of Massachusetts, would learn how to, you know, salute a Polish kid from Brooklyn.

That was very democratizing for us.

And, you know, we've lost that sense.

We now have elites and we have the people who feel that they're being left behind.

And we have to get back.

The same thing we learned to do in the battlefield is what we have to learn how to do in our public life, and that is leave no one behind.

- So you used the term common purpose.

Do we as Americans today have common purpose?

- Well, if we do, it's sure as hell not apparent.

I think, at some fundamental level, we're still mostly patriotic.

You know, we did come together on 9/11 for a few days.

It didn't last long, but I remember that whole scene with George W. Bush up in New York you know, and the people who were working in the World Trade Center ruins yelled out, "We can't hear you."

And and Bush responded, Yes, but we can hear you.

And the whole world can hear you and we know what you've done and are doing for this country."

There was a time when, you know, they marched in sympathy in Canada, all across Canada on 9/11.

There were, you know, countries in Europe, Western Europe, all marched in unison with the United States in support of the United States.

But those were sort of twinkling in time because, soon thereafter, we went back to business as usual.

And business as usual has become much harsher in these days.

So I do think it's very hard to restore a common purpose.

I must tell you, I don't think it's out of the question.

I happen to be someone who's a short-term pessimist, but a long-term optimist.

And if I might explain just for a minute, look, we're going through a very rough period right now.

And from everything I can tell from our friends in the financial world and the economic world, it's gonna get rougher in the next few weeks and next six months.

It's gonna be a tough ride for a lot of people.

And a number of people in this country are gonna get really badly hurt by a wicked recession.

Some people tell me it's gonna be worse than '08, '09.

So that's coming, but I think if you look beyond that, if you look over the horizon, you can spot young people coming out now whom I think have still have an idealism.

If anything, they've embraced it heavily.

They've begun startups, you know, non-profit startups all over the place.

We have people in their 20s and 30s now who are making a significant difference in the quality of our life.

If you look at what happened in Florida after that shooting down at the Parkland, and the Parkland kids, as we call them, David Hogg and others, you know, just within a matter of days formed an organization to appeal on gun control.

And, lo and behold, we got the major first major gun control legislation passed in a long time, you know, I hear on their watch and in part because of them.

Or you look at what's happened overseas, you know, to Malala, who was in Pakistan, or Thunberg, Greta Thunberg from Sweden, and these were young people in their 15, 16, 17, 18 years olds who were moving their nations.

You know, one of them got a Nobel Prize, youngest Nobel Prize in history.

And so they stirred our hearts, I think in the same way Zelenskyy in Ukraine is stirring people's hearts and I think giving common purpose, in many ways, to Western nations overall.

So, you know, there are, I don't think we should give up yet.

I think, if anything, we need to double down on service.

And I'm very biased on this, but I strongly believe that if we encouraged every young person in the country between 18 and 24 to spend a year after high school, or during the college or after college, to spend a year giving back, you know, working in a local hospital or working in a school room, you know, working on climate change and first responders, there's so many things that could be done that would improve the quality of life in our country, and at the same time, give us a whole new generation of people, of servant leaders, people who really believe in how important it is that we learn to live with each other and that we do try to live up to our ideals and they're not just empty platitudes.

So I see evidence that that's happening.

It may not, whether it's gonna follow through or not, whether it's gonna get to where we need to be or not.

The the truth is, we have hundreds, even thousands of young people now who are engaged.

We need hundreds of thousands.

I happen to be for something called National Service, and that is the 18 to 24 year old deal.

And I think we can get that passed.

It's gonna make a major difference.

I would suggest to you follow the path.

Watch now and in the next few weeks.

I don't know when this will be broadcast, but watch what happens in Maryland, you know, a state not far away, and in some ways, similar to Rhode Island.

And Maryland is about to elect its first Black governor, first Black governor in the United States for a long time, since, you know, we've only had, you know, we had one here in Massachusetts with Deval Patrick, of course.

But nonetheless, there's a fellow named Wes Moore, M-O-O-R-E, who is gonna be elected in Maryland.

He's ahead by 32 points at this point.

And he is going to bring a platform based on service, encouraging people to get into service.

And I think he could become a model and Maryland could become a model of how to have states, you know, more joined.

And, you know, if you've got a governor who wins by 30 points, you've got the makings of a real coalition.

- Yeah, and you know, David, you mentioned your roots in journalism, and I know at one point in your career you were also the editor of "U.S. News & World Report."

One of the things that strikes me repeatedly is that so much of cable news in particular, and you've spent a lot of time on CNN and I think a lot of people know you from your time on CNN, so much of CNN's coverage and other cable networks' coverage focuses on the horse race in American politics and spends so little time talking about the kinds of things that you just talked about, like national service, like some of the things that might actually stitch us back together as a country.

Why are those platforms so misaligned with the kinds of things that a lot of people think the country needs to be able to keep us together?

- Well, there's a chase for profits, as you well know.

You're talking about the cable folks who are all, you know, for profit.

And here, you know, you're on public television and we see you as a non-profit organization.

I happen to think there's a lot of of value in having a non-profit organization because we can focus on the deeper news, as you say, the news beneath the news, which is really the important part, right?

So I wanna be respectful, after all, I do have contract with CNN and it's a privilege to have and I admire much of what they do.

I think they covered the Ukrainian war beautifully.

But there are times when I worry that, you know, there was a time five years ago or seven years ago I was really concerned, as I think Jeff Zucker was, that we were giving too much time to Donald Trump because, you know, if you put Trump on the air, you'd get a crowd of 2 or 3 million people come out to watch you.

And if you put Jeb Bush out there, you know, you could hold his rally in a library.

So all the incentives were to put Trump on a lot.

And I think that wound up being sort of one-sided, and, you know, there's an enabling quality to that that we all have to sort of take responsibility for.

I happen to think CNN has a record of the fairest of the three major, and the most balanced of the three major broadcasting areas or channels.

In the current environment, you know, I think the danger is we pay too much time, give too much time and exposure to extremists on both sides.

You know, we're very, very tough, of course, on Trump and his minions.

But that's because I think he holds the most responsible job in the world and if they're gonna lie to us and parade around or all sorts of antics that are, you know, I think discouraging, of course, so many indistasteful, that's gonna get a lot of coverage.

And sometimes I wish, I mean, sometimes I think the border that we need, we need to find a way, and newspapers in particular need to find a way to get back to a time when the news was on the front page and the opinions were on the opinion page.

And I think those lines have been blurred so badly it's really, really hard to figure out what's hard news and factual news versus what's opinion and how much is it being slanted because of that blending.

And I think it's pretty substantial.

And, you know, that to me is sort of, it it may not be a disinformation, but it is a misinformation.

Maybe it's unintentional, but there is a misinterpretation of a lot of what's going on.

- Well, so let's turn to "Hearts Touched With Fire," which is a really remarkable read and heartfelt advice, I think, for public leaders who are emerging and who are at various different points in their careers.

One of the central arguments it seems to me, though, in the book is that leadership matters, and especially in a democracy, leadership matters.

Could you explain that for our audience?

- Sure, and it is absolutely true, that leadership does matter, and it's absolutely true that leadership can make a difference if it's well practiced and if it's wisely practiced.

But, you know, I think since time immemorial, going back over 2,500 years you will find, since the beginnings of your Western civilization, a cry for leadership and a cry for somebody to bring order from periods when, you know, there's a lot of strife and there's civil wars going on and there are frequent conflicts over territory and water and other aspects.

And history, human history is littered, littered with stories of conflicts and wars, and families, you know, had no protection.

And so a lot of people started turning to government to begin protecting them.

You know, you look at anyone, Edmund Burke, if you go back and look at, you know, what that argument was all about, It was that you have, that life in the jungle short and brutish and you need to move beyond that.

And then leadership is intended to help you form a civilization or a nation or a society which is well anchored in a set of values, that has some sense of moral purpose, that's respectful of others, that, increasingly, we want leaders who are empathic, we want leaders who are adaptable in that they have the kind of qualities that they can move with the times.

You know, the kind of leadership we had in the 19th century doesn't fit the 21st century.

And we used to have a theory of leadership that a leader was a, quote, great man.

It was called the great man theory of leadership and that there was one individual that essentially was gonna come in riding in a white horse and save everybody.

And that's captured, you know, photographically in my mind, in one of the most famous pictures of John F. Kennedy when he was president.

And he's in the Oval Office all alone at dusk.

He's sort of hunched over at what it looks like a a globe.

And it's still clear that the weight of the world is upon him and the country is looking to him as a singular feature of the person who was gonna rally the country and get us out of the ditch.

And he was able to rally the country at times.

When he said, "We're gonna put a man on the moon and we're gonna do it within a decade," and we all got stirred up 'cause nobody ever thought you could do that before and that we didn't have the science or the engineering to support that.

You know, we were pretty much removed from it, but Kennedy said we're gonna get to the moon, and by God, they got thousands upon thousands of people who are Americans.

I think there were around 300,000 Americans who worked on the moon shot.

And it was true.

And the skeptics were right in one sense.

You know, we didn't get there in 10 years.

We got there in seven years.

We got there in seven years, and it stirred the imagination of the country.

So there are times when a great man works, but more recently, I think what captures the way leadership is practiced is when Obama was president and the United States had Osama bin Laden in their gun sights and the picture came out of the Situation Room afterwards.

There's Obama watching avidly as our helicopters go in.

But then, there around him, is the Secretary of of State, the Secretary of Defense, the head of the Joint Chiefs, you know, the head of CIA, you know, there were seven or eight people in the picture.

That's because, today, increasingly, leadership is about teams.

You know, as the old saying there's no letter I in the word team.

It's a different concept.

I just had General McChrystal come teach my class, and it was wonderfully interesting, about the way business and war has been conducted over the century.

It keeps changing and evolving.

So, you know, when we went into Iraq, we had a hugely big advantage over the terrorists in Iraq.

But yep, they had a hit and run situation where they they could come in, hit you at night, and get away.

It was really hard to catch them, very hard to catch them.

We had to change our whole way of structuring our counter-terrorism effort.

It took several years to get it done, but we eventually got Zarqawi, we got bin Laden and these other people.

And we've largely won, but it took 7, 8, 9 years of a different kind of leadership.

And so we have to be alert to the idea you can't just have one way of doing things.

You've gotta have it adaptive to the environment in which a leader finds herself or himself.

But once you do that, then, you know, I think that an awful lot does rest, the success of a society rests largely upon the quality of its leader.

- So, David, one of the eternal questions is are leaders born or can they be made?

What's your take on that?

- Yes, I know it's an old chestnut.

The truth of the matter is, I think some people are born with greater proclivities and with greater capacity for leadership.

But I must tell you that you can't lead with just what you're born with.

You've gotta develop yourself over a long period of time.

And I think the real answer is is that leaders are self-made.

It's the process that leadership is a journey.

It's all about, you know, first trying to understand the world in which we live, to have self-awareness, but also to have self-mastery.

I worked for Nixon and I can just tell you that he was a really smart guy, the best strategist I've ever met.

But he had these terrible demons inside of him that he had never learned to control.

And you know, if you've started leadership, you start from within and it has everything, self-awareness and self-mastery.

After that, it's about learning a lot of skills, you know, whether learning how to manage your boss, learning how to lead up and learning how to lead sideways to groups outside, learning how to lead down, all that, learning how to communicate, how to motivate, how to deal with crises.

There are less and lots of skills you have to learn.

But I do think that, at the end of the day, the leaders who are, they're the best are ones who've had a lot of experience at it, who have failed.

I frankly don't trust someone as president unless they failed somewhere along the way 'cause I like to see how they respond, how they respond with honesty and integrity, you know, or do they try to blow it off?

That matters a lot when you see, so you have these moments with leaders periodically where you can see just a flash, you get, okay, sometimes Donald Trump walks on the stage and you can just listen to him for the first couple of minutes and that's all you hear need to hear 'cause he is who he is who he is.

And that's been true of other people.

- We've got about 45 seconds left here, David.

You know, when you look at the future, I know that you said you're still a long-term optimist, but what can we all as citizens do to help ensure that that future is positive, that it is optimistic, and that we do preserve American democracy?

- I think it's very, very important that we who are older begin to pass the torch much more frequently and much earlier than we're doing now, to give responsibility to the young generations that are coming.

And then to step back, to stop clinging to the curtains in the Oval Office, to step back and allow other people to govern the country while you provide to presidents and to other leaders your wisdom, your background.

You can do a lot to help people.

We need to do as much as we can to prepare the next generations.

The X generation, the Millennials, the Z generation, those are our future.

The young men and women that they're often our kids or our grandkids, we have to prepare them for lives of service and of leadership.

And I guarantee you they can get us out of this.

- And that is what "Hearts Touched with Fire" does.

David Gergen, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you both very much, Jim, and thank you, Wayne.

- Thank you, that is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne and I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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