Presidential Advisor David Gergen: Democracy in Peril and New Leadership (#96)

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers.

Speaker 1 Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers.

Speaker 1 And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Toman.

Speaker 2 Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Toman.
Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be with David Gergen.
There's no one like him.

Speaker 2 He's not only been a White House advisor to four presidents, he's been an advisor to both Republican and Democratic presidents. I'm excited to get a behind-the-scenes look at U.S.

Speaker 2 presidents and learn about leadership from their struggles, successes, and failures.

Speaker 2 David believes that the success of the United States and other countries will depend heavily upon the success of a new generation in power.

Speaker 2 To that end, he has studied and taught leadership and and founded the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Speaker 2 He's also just written a new book, Hearts Touched with Fire, How Great Leaders Are Made. Welcome, David, and thanks so much for our conversation today.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Lynn. I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 2 Me too. You worked as a White House advisor to four presidents, seeing them on almost a daily basis, so you got to know them in a way that almost no one else has.

Speaker 2 I especially liked your insights on their temperaments and styles of leadership. Let's start by talking briefly about a few of those presidents.
Can you tell us first about President Reagan?

Speaker 3 Well, President Reagan was an unusual figure, especially for those of us who spend a chunk of our lives in the academy.

Speaker 3 It seemed improbable that Ronald Reagan, the Class B movie actor, could have become a significant president.

Speaker 3 But I think he has been in terms of his impact on the late 20th century, his impact on our politics, and by the way, on how to govern.

Speaker 3 We often talk about political figures whether they're comfortable in their own skin or not. Do they go through life being comfortable? Reagan was serene in his own skin.

Speaker 3 Unlike Richard Nixon, for example, whose very existence depended upon his power, how much power he had, and he was more interested in power than he was in doing good deeds.

Speaker 3 Reagan didn't need the presidency to feel or believe he'd had a fulfilling life. My final conversation with him before he went into seclusion, in effect, was a few weeks before he went into seclusion.

Speaker 3 And I thought we would spend that weekend with a group of us. I thought we'd spend that weekend reminiscing about his presidency.

Speaker 3 Instead, he spent the whole time talking about Hollywood and his stories from Hollywood. And the presidency seemed to be sort of, well, yeah, I was also president, but look at over here.

Speaker 3 Look at these people I knew and worked with and Jane Wyman and all the rest. In political science, you talk about a lot of data and evidence of a proposition, but the data is especially important.

Speaker 3 Reagan wasn't into data. He was into how do you mobilize people emotionally?

Speaker 3 You have one or two well-chosen facts to make your case, but most of it is about motivating you and stirring you up and making you feel you have the country as a real responsibility or you have a real responsibility to your society.

Speaker 3 And depending on, if he's a conservative, he stresses individual freedom and a small government.

Speaker 3 Going back to the question of temperament and versus this IQ or quality of his mind, it was very, very interesting. My dad was a professor of mathematics.

Speaker 3 He was chair of the mathematics department at Duke for a quarter century. So I grew up believing that the best leader was the smartest person in the group.

Speaker 3 If you just went and found a person whose brain power was the highest, you get the best results from leadership. Reagan convinced me that's not true.

Speaker 3 He brought to mind a famous incident or a moment when Franklin Roosevelt, who was newly inaugurated, went to see Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who'd been a member of the Supreme Court and an iconic figure.

Speaker 3 But he went to celebrate Holmes' 92nd, 93rd birthday. And as FDR left, Holmes turned to an associate and said, that's mine, but of course, that's temperament.
That was the secret to FDR's success.

Speaker 3 And simply was the secret of Ronald Reagan's success.

Speaker 3 Temperament, his equanimity, if you would, his sort of joy of living, I think really did sustain him as a leader in ways that you rarely, you rarely see.

Speaker 2 I love that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, a second-class intellect and a first-class temperament. It's wonderful.

Speaker 3 It teaches you, you don't have to have the mind that got you into Columbia University.

Speaker 3 You don't have to have a take on life that people who are going to community colleges, people who are doing other kinds of things in life can still have a real impact as a leader in a community or indeed in a country.

Speaker 3 Martin Luther King kept stressing that it's not all your credentials, it's sort of what you're soul.

Speaker 2 President Reagan had a fairly narrow base. About a third of the country were supporters of his conservative perspective.

Speaker 2 And yet he broadened his appeal more broadly, both among Democrats and among Democratic members of government and Congress, as well as among the country. How did he successfully do that?

Speaker 3 Well, I think he radiated RO.

Speaker 3 You didn't have to be a conservative to appreciate Reagan's warmth and his seeming caring. Conservatives are different from liberals.
Liberals tend to be conservative first.

Speaker 3 They tend to not identify very much with groups like Blacks, Hispanics, or whatever. They tend to think more in terms of individuals.
And on the individual level, conservatives are quite caring.

Speaker 3 At the group level, the conservatives can sometimes be uncaring because they have a rigidity about thinking about people as a group. And it's just the opposite with the liberals.
They love the group.

Speaker 3 They're not very good with the individuals frequently. I found that in White Houses, I've observed that on the liberal side, they'll throw you under the bus pretty quickly if they need to.

Speaker 3 They don't relate to you as individuals. They relate to you as, are you part of a group that matters to us? Reagan just brought something different to the table.

Speaker 3 And I want to stress part of his success as a political leader and part of the reason he is regarded even now as being one of our more significant presidents.

Speaker 3 he was quite willing quite eager to work across the aisle to get big things done i always felt that regan's rhetoric was pretty far right but his actual governance was more center right it wasn't that far out but i think he kept his base with him and his rhetoric helped on that front but if you actually look at what he did the big things he got done, tax reform and social security reform, were both done with working closely with Democrats, including Tip O'Neill, who was the Speaker of the House.

Speaker 3 In those days, we had Reagan, one of the most conservative presidents we've had in the 20th century, in the White House.

Speaker 3 And we have Tip O'Neill in the House of Representatives, one of the most liberal speakers of the House in history. And yet they worked well together.

Speaker 3 They developed bonds of, they had originally, the two of them had sort of an informal pact, that up until five o'clock in the day, you could take real swipes with the other guy.

Speaker 3 you could go out and bang him pretty hard. Politics ain't beanbag, as they say.
But after five o'clock, you put down your differences.

Speaker 3 You could raise a glass if you were Irish and tell old Irish yarns and have and laugh and scratch have a good time. They got along pretty well together.

Speaker 3 So when Tip turned 65 or 70, I can't remember which, Reagan decided to have a big birthday party for him at the way house, so luncheon.

Speaker 3 And the merry mud, Reagan got up and to give a toast at the end of the lunch. And he had written out this little doggerl, as he liked to do.

Speaker 3 Reagan said, Tip, if I had a ticket to heaven and you didn't have one too, too, well, I'd give my ticket back and go to hell with you.

Speaker 3 He had a great sense of humor. And by the way, humor is a factor that people overlook as important to leadership.
Lincoln understood and some others have understood.

Speaker 3 He basically said, if I don't laugh, I cry. I try to avoid that.
But Reagan was like that. He loved the humor, and we often played pranks on each other that made everybody laugh.

Speaker 2 I love in your first book where you you talk about President Reagan and how he invited everyone to the table. He respected everyone, including liberal Democrats with views very different from his own.

Speaker 2 And he sucked out the bitterness and essentially developed relationships, good relationships across the spectrum. Are there lessons for today from how President Reagan led?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think there are lessons, especially from his generation, what I would call the World War II generation.

Speaker 3 I think that was a highly successful group of people in the governance process. And Reagan was obviously a very important part of that.

Speaker 3 And we had seven presidents, starting with John Kennedy through George H.W. Bush, whom we call the World War II presidents.
That's because they all came through.

Speaker 3 Every single one wore a military uniform during the war or just after. Six of them served during the war itself.

Speaker 3 One, Jimmy Carter, was still in the Naval Academy as a student when the war ended, and he went on to serve honorably as in the military.

Speaker 3 And because they had fought under the same flag, because they had put their lives on the line for the country, they had a special feeling of patriotism and a special pride in the country.

Speaker 3 And they saw us as a can,

Speaker 3 because we overcame both the Depression and the war itself, they thought of themselves as being part of a can-do country. we can do anything.
It was Kennedy calling for a moonshot.

Speaker 3 And next to within 10 years, we're going to have a man on the moon. And we had a man on the moon within seven or eight years.
It was faster than anybody thought.

Speaker 3 And Reagan was part of that group of people who saw their role as properly one of having being an opposition, but not being an angry opposition.

Speaker 3 Often trying to work across the office, seeing if you can find common ground and moving ahead. Don't get stalled.
Don't let the poison seep into the system.

Speaker 3 With Reagan, but also with these other six presidents, we had a period of time when that World War II generation was basically running the country. And they weren't perfect.

Speaker 3 I don't want to mislead this. They gave us Vietnam and they gave us Watergate.
So there was much about what they left behind. And they were too slow, frankly, on advancing women and people of color.

Speaker 3 And we've made a lot of progress since then on some of those fronts.

Speaker 3 But if you look at the overall contributions of the World War II generation, they left behind in America that was the strongest society country since ancient Rome in terms of our political and economic power, in terms of our military power, in terms of our cultural influence.

Speaker 3 America was right there on the top, and there was this sense that we could do anything we put our mind to.

Speaker 3 Reagan firmly believed that America was capable of doing almost anything it wanted if it was united and if it was committed to a project. And I think there was a lot of truth to that.

Speaker 3 And what we've seen since, of course, is an erosion in all of those models of how to get things done. And as a result, we're losing faith in the democracy itself.
We're losing faith in each other.

Speaker 3 And I think we're on a very dangerous path on that regard in terms of our democracy is more vulnerable than it looks.

Speaker 2 Can you tell us about President Clinton and what we can learn from his leadership?

Speaker 3 I worked for Bill Clinton for a year, a year and a half when he first came into the presidency. And he floundered in the beginning.
He had a hard time finding his footing.

Speaker 3 I had known him a long time and he thought I knew my way around Washington or how to deal with the press corps and that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 So six months into his presidency, he asked me if I'd come in, taking into account that I had worked for three Republican presidents. And I was pretty much a free spirit.

Speaker 3 And I'm more of a centrist than on either one of the extremes. But Bill Clinton, when I got there, when he was in trouble, he was sort of in a ditch.

Speaker 3 What I found was that he had lost his self-confidence. It's a big leap.
from a place like Arkansas, landbound state, to go from there to the presidency. It's asking a lot of a person.

Speaker 3 Jimmy Carter ran into into the same problem, making a leap from Georgia and was a peanut farmer into the White House. That's hard to do.
So Clinton had been knocked around a little bit.

Speaker 3 But our approach, my approach and that of others was to not try to remake him. I don't think you can recast people very well, especially people who are in their 60s or 50s or 60s.

Speaker 3 They are who they are, who they are. You can't come up with a new persona.
What you can do is to restore their self-confidence. That's what we tried to work on with Clinton.

Speaker 3 And what what I found was he was a very apt student. He snapped to very quickly as he, we created this sort of safety zone around him.

Speaker 3 And he gradually got out from under all the criticism that was coming his way and worked his way out. And he worked his way out of the ditch.

Speaker 3 And one of the things I think is important about a president is he kept growing, he kept learning. Some people reach an apogee and their leadership and then they sort of flatline.

Speaker 3 And the world is changing so quickly. If you're not curious about how the world is evolving, you just don't get it.

Speaker 3 And Clinton, when i first met him he was reading a book on the japanese quality circles and at that time you know everybody was scared the japanese were 10 feet tall we're going to come to another japan too often we exaggerate the threats to the country in order to get people stirred up but clinton was i think he was the smartest man i've met in the presidency when he literally quite literally you could go into a conversation in the oval office and be three or four people talking to him and he was an active participant in the conversation and would listen carefully But while you were talking, he would be filling out a New York Times crossword puzzle.

Speaker 3 Now, I found that daunting, that somebody could be filling out a New York Times crossword puzzle. He'd look up in the middle of something and say, who is that character in the second act of Aida?

Speaker 3 So I found it daunting.

Speaker 3 Ultimately, I found it insulting

Speaker 3 that our words meant so little that he could focus somewhere else. But nonetheless, he was right.
And I think he did roll with the Times.

Speaker 3 He obviously had not really come fully to grips with his own personal weaknesses, temptations, and that sort of thing. And that I think he paid a price.

Speaker 3 He's paid a price with historians because he was seen as sort of taking advantage of women or preying upon women or harassing them. That was not my experience with him.

Speaker 3 My experience with him was he was completely seductive. He was seductive with men and women, but it was all consensual, as far as I could tell.
Certainly, it was, and with everybody I knew around him.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 but that's just who he was. And he had a huge, sharp mind to remember people.

Speaker 3 He was such an extrovert that he could remember people extremely well he met my mom during the carter years i think it was or during the no i'm sorry it was late a little later than that but he met her and had a couple of conversations with her and then i brought her in two years later i brought her into the white house to say hello to him he remembered her nickname he remembered the conversation he'd had with her a couple years earlier and she was florida i mean she was completely captivated she was completely seduced and my mom was like 75 years old but she fell in love with bill

Speaker 2 That is wonderful. How do you see President Obama's leadership and what lessons can we learn from his leadership?

Speaker 3 Clearly, he's going to be an historic figure as the first Black president. And I think that he has stayed pretty close to his true north in his days in government and his days out of government.

Speaker 3 I think he remains a moral leader in many significant ways. He didn't have huge accomplishments that you could say, well, he passed this bill or he passed that bill.

Speaker 3 He came a long way on health care, obviously. But I think he left a mark and he opened the door for a lot of other people who have been coming through.
We have a lot more people of color.

Speaker 3 We have a lot more women coming through the doors and who want to be in the arena. And I think that's partly the ties that he built in the Black community.

Speaker 3 Those ties lived on and they were a major asset for Joe Biden when he ran for president. Biden wouldn't have won had it not been for the strong support he got from the black community.

Speaker 3 And I think that was partly a legacy from Barack Obama.

Speaker 2 How do you now see President Biden and the Biden White House?

Speaker 3 Biden, as a human being, one of the most attractive figures we've had in the White House.

Speaker 3 I think the crucibles that he went through, the loss of his wife and daughter, automobile accident when he was young, and then the loss of his son, Hunter, we've all learned a lot about that.

Speaker 3 I think that he has demonstrated an empathy and a concern for people who are in trouble that that is very admirable. And he comes from a deep place.

Speaker 3 But I think he's also discovered is that empathy and a very positive personality of the kind he had is not enough to necessarily be a big president. The presidency is a tougher place than that.

Speaker 3 And I think that he's had the word of mouth on it that you find in Washington about a lot of people who know him.

Speaker 3 very well is he was a very strong man, but he goes through life almost as a senator still.

Speaker 3 The people he surrounded himself with are almost involved to staff people from his senate days or his congressional days. They go back.

Speaker 3 And that group of people, while they're fine individuals, they're having a hard time finding out what their strategy is, their own footing. He doesn't have two or three big, big goals.

Speaker 3 He has like 20 goals. And it's very hard to govern.
And it's very hard to get big things like done when you've got so many different objectives you're following.

Speaker 3 Usually, I found MTM Baker did a lot to teach me about this.

Speaker 3 If a CEO has like two or three big goals, what you want to do is focus on those and almost solely until you get them solved and then you move on to something else.

Speaker 3 But don't get intermixed with every day something new. The spotlight moves on and we'll wait and see how it all turns out.
But we were starting to see a pattern.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of talk for a few days and then the searchlight moves on. There's a famous book by Walter Libman written back in the 1920s about journalism and about the way the national discourse.

Speaker 3 And he compared it to a searchlight and that the searchlight moves slowly across the landscape, but it keeps moving.

Speaker 3 And you're going to be in the spotlight for a while and you got to get your big things done then because that searchlight's going to keep moving on. It's going to leave you behind.

Speaker 3 And part of governing well, part of leading well is understanding the context in which you find yourself and building on that.

Speaker 2 What do you think so far have been President Biden's biggest successes and biggest failures?

Speaker 3 I think his biggest successes have come recently reuniting the Western nations. He spent a lot of time reuniting them.

Speaker 3 And I think that he gave real strength to the Marshall Planet and going into Ukraine.

Speaker 3 I think the Afghanistan part of the was botched, but the Ukrainian part of it, and we still, as we speak here, are still working our way through it.

Speaker 3 I think reuniting the Western nations was the big asset. What he's had trouble doing is reuniting the American people.
And that has been a failure so far.

Speaker 2 What do you think think caused his failure on Afghanistan? That was almost, at least to me, unimaginable, the way that exit worked out.

Speaker 3 I thought it was the turning point of his presidency. I mean, because it was so clearly a moral issue as well as a logistical issue in terms of getting people out.

Speaker 3 But I think that was the, if not the low point, it's one of the low points of his presidency.

Speaker 3 Frankly, I don't know what happened, the thinking that went into it was so badly, I don't think there was a strategy. and there was certainly no sense of the tactical plan to get there.

Speaker 3 There was a failure on many fronts. And I agree with you.
I don't see there's any way you can get around it. If our military prides itself on no man left behind, no person left behind.

Speaker 3 And we left thousands upon thousands of people who put their lives at the line for America, many of the native Afghanis, where the Taliban is marauding again and going after women in a variety of ways, going after young school children.

Speaker 3 It's a gigantic mess. And we bear significant responsibility.
The searchlight moved across Afghanistan and we all got excited and wanted to see something doubt about Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 And then the searchlight moved on and now it's on Ukraine and Afghanistan is in darkness again and we're not taking it as seriously as we should.

Speaker 3 Our continuing responsibility to protect the interpreters and others who worked so hard to protect Americans for so long, we still need to get them out of there.

Speaker 3 But yet there's not this national sense of urgency because we're into Ukraine. And that's what I mean on the searchlight question and on the question of governance in general.

Speaker 3 If you're going to get it done, you need to stick around long enough and be wrestling with it long enough to wrestle it to the ground.

Speaker 3 You can't just sort of get up and say, well, that was interesting and go on to the next event.

Speaker 2 You've worked in the White House for four presidents and you've also advised several additional presidents. Which of our recent presidents do you think were our greatest leaders and why?

Speaker 3 Well, I think if you go all the way back to World War II, I think there's no question that Franklin Roosevelt rose above the PAC.

Speaker 3 I think he was our most successful president of the 20th century, the most important president of the 20th century.

Speaker 3 There were some others, I believe, and I'm not as conservative as he was, I believe that Reagan was the best president, the best leader as president.

Speaker 3 Or let's not say best puts too much emphasis on the quality of what he was stood for. I think he was the most effective president.
we've had as a leader.

Speaker 3 Linda Johnson is getting more credit than he used to get because we're focusing more on civil rights and the social issues. And the focus is off his Vietnam policies, which obviously didn't work.

Speaker 3 It's hard for me to say that any one of the recent presidents we've had is the equal of a Franklin Roosevelt or a Teddy Roosevelt or any of the people about Rushmore.

Speaker 2 What skills and temperament are important early in a career and which ones are important as one climbs the ladder?

Speaker 3 That's a good question. One climbs a slippery pole.
What becomes increasingly important as you grow up the ladder is you move beyond the skills of being able to run a good team.

Speaker 3 I think increasingly as you go up the ladder, it's important whether you work well with others outside your team, whether there's collaboration.

Speaker 3 The great men theory, how change is made has taken a beating here in recent years. We haven't seen many great men.
What we see occasionally is great groups. who come together.

Speaker 3 We saw that in the Second World War, various projects that were involved there, but we've seen it since.

Speaker 3 I think that the capacity to collaborate constructively with others has become very, very important to contemporary leadership.

Speaker 3 But another skill and quality that I think has become extremely important is that of persuasion. How does one persuade others to do hard things? Not easy.
And too often now, of course,

Speaker 3 political figures, especially on the right, are resorting to disinformation as a way to persuade.

Speaker 3 But I think the true leaders, the ones who are going to go down in history, are the ones who see that the presidency is ultimately a moral institution.

Speaker 3 And the big questions that come there are moral questions, the place of women in society, the place of blacks in society, and opening the doors to people to have more opportunity.

Speaker 3 Unless you're into that stream, I think you have a really, really hard time governing.

Speaker 2 How do you think leadership is changing?

Speaker 3 Well, as I say, leadership is changing and the skills that one needs have evolved.

Speaker 3 I would include another skill beyond those we've talked about, and that is uses and understanding of the social media, uses and understanding of the internet age.

Speaker 3 One of the problems I think the current generation has, the baby boom population, as it gets increasingly older, it's losing touch with younger people, how they communicate, how they work together, what values they hold.

Speaker 3 There's such a gap now between people who are running the country and people who are knocking on the door and would like to run the country over time that I think we don't translate easily.

Speaker 3 Joe Biden is a figure who in many, many ways has the values and their good values, but of someone who's older and it doesn't connect with the younger population.

Speaker 3 And what we need, in my judgment, one of the most important things we need is it's time to pass the baton from the generation running the country to younger generations who are knocking on the door.

Speaker 3 I think the people who are now running the country, the baby boomers, there are many fine baby boomers. There are many fine people who are Generation X.

Speaker 3 That was the group that came just after the baby boom with people born between 1965 and 1980 and they're knocking on the door now to the generation x and they deserve their time at bat but i think it's becoming hugely clear that as much as the baby boom generation has some wonderful individuals in it as a group they seem incapable of getting the big things done getting the leadership to follow through on their on their goals as leader and so there's an emptiness kind of question of a lot of people sort of have lost faith in our institutions, lost faith in our leaders.

Speaker 3 And we have to win that back. And from my way of thinking, there's a lot of talent in the younger generations.
They have shown that they can lead when they're young.

Speaker 3 You can look anywhere from overseas to Greta Thunberg in Sweden or Malala in Pakistan, or look at the woman Ardern who's running New Zealand now. So one hand, we have people overseas.

Speaker 3 On the other hand, we have a lot of veterans who are coming back now from Iraq and Afghanistan, whom I think make terrific political leaders. They're hardened up.

Speaker 3 They remind me so much of the World War II generation. So I'm spending a fair amount of my professional time trying to help that group, the returning veterans.

Speaker 3 But we also have another stream of people whom I admire greatly. And that is the people of color, especially women of color.

Speaker 3 I think Black women have taken to moral high ground and they deserve to be listened to. And yeah, it was young Black women who came up with the Me Too movement.

Speaker 3 It was young Black women who came up with Black Lives Matter, young AOC of a different background.

Speaker 3 And Lynn, I firmly believe that the people who are coming out provide something that's extraordinarily important, and that is we need fresh blood, we need fresh energy, we need fresh vision, we need people who are not so bogged down by the arguments of the past.

Speaker 3 We need to stop looking backwards in that sense and looking forward. How are we going to get things actually productively done? How are we going to get the environment under better control?

Speaker 3 It's astonishing. We've kicked this can down the road again and again and again, and now we're up against it.

Speaker 3 There's an urgency now about change and people coming into a position where they have responsibility for the future.

Speaker 2 David, how do you see the state of democracy in America?

Speaker 3 Threatened beyond anything we've seen in my lifetime. I think this goes far beyond where we were in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement of the 1960s and early 70s.

Speaker 3 I think that there's an anger. People who were once seen as rivals now see each other as enemies.
They now think of politics as a zero-sum game. If you win something, I lose something.

Speaker 3 And what politics usually has in the past, when successfully practiced in a democracy, is a win-win. And we've lost so much of that capacity.

Speaker 3 And it's really hard to think of, there was a time when I was growing up, this is before you came along. that we had a sense of heroes in our country.

Speaker 3 And some of them were in political leadership, but some were in sports and some were the Jackie Robinsons of that day. And heroes have now become celebrities.

Speaker 3 We're interested because of the Kardashians or who are they, but they're not our heroes. The question becomes, where are the Zelenskies in our America? We don't seem to have any at the moment.

Speaker 3 I think there are going to be out there. I think that there are some individuals that are coming along.

Speaker 3 And one of the reasons I'm so much in favor of the millennials and the Jam Z going forward is they have been knocked around. They had had hard times in life.

Speaker 3 They've had a lot of adversity in their lives. They've seen country knocked down.
but that toughened them up. Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her son, John Quincy, when he was a teenager.

Speaker 3 It was a famous letter, in which she made the argument that adversity brings opportunity, opportunity for people to grow. And people, and from national adversity, so often come statesmen.

Speaker 3 It's important to remember that.

Speaker 3 My friend Warren Bennis, who was a leadership guru, dear man, he used to ask me the question, how is it that when we were a country of 3 million people back in the early days of the Republic and we produced six world-class leaders in that small population?

Speaker 3 You know, there was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, all six of them world-class leaders.

Speaker 3 And then Warren Bennett would say, today we have 330 million Americans, and we have a hard time finding one world-class leader in the group.

Speaker 3 Something happened there that we need to address. And I think Abigail was right.
In this adversity, we could see some of the real leaders re-emerge there or emerge. And I'm encouraged about that.

Speaker 3 I confess that I'm a short-term pessimist. I think the next few years are going to be extremely rough.
Next five or six years maybe become ungovernable, but I'm increasingly a long-term optimist.

Speaker 3 I do think there are glimmers of hope that are out there now that were not there a few years ago. And I see them coming through my classrooms.

Speaker 3 I teach at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and I've just seen the quality of students coming through has gone just straight up. It's good.
It's really impressive.

Speaker 3 And you teach Columbia, so you know this. And you see a lot of the nonprofit world, the Cheryl Dorsey's of the world.

Speaker 2 We certainly need great leaders.

Speaker 2 David, before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't already touched upon?

Speaker 3 I think you gave me an opportunity to write the end to say what I really want.

Speaker 2 Okay, so what are the three takeaways?

Speaker 3 First takeaway is we're on an unsustainable path. Continue down down this path very long without paying a huge, irreversible price.

Speaker 3 I've analogized it to somebody on a car riding along the side of a cliff, three o'clock in the morning. It's raining like hell and the headlights don't work.

Speaker 3 You can ride along that cliff for a while, but eventually you're going to go.

Speaker 3 I think right now we ought to be paying attention about what a perilous state we find our democracy in. The next thing I would argue, the second takeaway is that help can be on the way.

Speaker 3 There are people out there who are younger now, who are dedicated to rebuilding the democracy. I think would thrive if given more responsibility.

Speaker 3 We have seen young people can make a difference already. So the second big takeaway is much of our future could rest upon the quality, the capacity of the new generations to take the reins.

Speaker 3 The passing of the torch has become important.

Speaker 3 The third takeaway that I would suggest, we need to do a much better job of preparing the younger generations for leadership.

Speaker 3 We have a small group of people who are doing things in the nonprofit world, but we need to be able to expand that.

Speaker 3 And it's one of the reasons I think one of the most important changes we can make is to be serious about national service, to have a robust program of national service in which every person between the ages of 18 and 24 is strongly encouraged, not drafted, but encouraged to volunteer.

Speaker 3 to work in their communities, to work in their hometowns, or more importantly, I think the opportunity to say, if you're living in rural America, you have an opportunity to go work for a year or two in urban America and see what it is like and why all the gunfire and what is happening there.

Speaker 3 But in turn, people in urban America ought to go out and be in rural America there, or they ought to be in the forest. There was a precedent for this back with Franklin Roosevelt again.

Speaker 3 But just shortly in the second or third month of his presidency in 1933, I think it was March, April of 33, that he called for the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Speaker 3 And by that summer, we had 250,000 young men in the forests and parks around the country refurbishing those parks. And to this day, you can go into parks and find what the CCC did way back when.

Speaker 3 It was the most popular program in the New Deal. It brought a lot of young people into the system.
So you had, it was democratizing just as a world war itself was democratizing.

Speaker 3 When you have a Salton Stahl from Massachusetts saluting a Polish kid from Brooklyn, you know, you're moving in the right direction. And the CCC was that.

Speaker 3 And I think we could have another CCC already. There are the makings of it on the environment for first responders.
You know, we have some nonprofit groups that are doing that.

Speaker 3 I think this is largely built around the nonprofit community.

Speaker 3 But I believe there are opportunities out there in working with the younger generation that we will surprise ourselves with how good they can be.

Speaker 2 David, thank you. Thank you for our conversation today.

Speaker 2 Thank you for your service in government, for your teaching of leadership, and for your two two books on leadership, both of which I really enjoyed.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much, Lynn. It's good to be with you, and I appreciate the effort you're making here and the work you're doing.

Speaker 2 And I look forward to seeing you next week in Washington.

Speaker 3 Good. That'll be terrific.

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