David Gergen Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton. Simon & Schuster, 382 pages, $26
Since full disclosure is all the rage these days, I should disclose fully. I first met David Gergen almost a decade ago when I was a research assistant to Ben Wattenberg. Gergen and Wattenberg were collaborating on a PBS documentary about America’s political parties. Ben, famous for being one of the first and last neoconservative Democrats, fretted over a party he felt had drifted too far to the left. Gergen, with whom I ended up working closely (mostly doing creative photocopying and fetching), subtly bemoaned a Republican party that had moved too far to the right. Ben lionized Al From, head of the then little-known Democratic Leadership Council. Gergen favored then-senators Warren Rudman and William Cohen (now Clinton’s Secretary of Defense) and the HUD secretary Jack Kemp.
I next met Gergen in July of 1998, in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky affair. We were both guests on “Larry King Live.” Right before our segment ended, I responded to the argument that because Clinton is a “good” president on technical issues he should get a free pass on how he had conducted himself during the Lewinsky affair: “You can’t say ‘Well, Bill Clinton is like a good mechanic, and therefore we should leave him alone.’ That’s like saying ‘Joey Buttafuoco is a good mechanic, we should leave him alone.’” My bit of rhetorical flourish horrified Gergen. He said, “Joey