Former four-time presidential adviser and longtime political commentator David Gergen died on Thursday from complications caused by Lew body dementia. Image courtesy of UPI
Former presidential adviser and political commentator David Gergen died at age 83 from complications caused by Lewy body dementia on Thursday.
His son, Christopher Gergen, confirmed his father died Thursday at his residence in a retirement home in Lexington, Mass., The New York Times reported.
Gergen was a speechwriter and communications strategist for Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
While working with Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign versus former President Jimmy Carter, Gergen suggested Reagan ask voters the rhetorical question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
“Rhetorical questions have great power,” Gergen said years later, as reported by The New York Times.
“It’s one of those things that you sometimes strike gold,” Gergen continued. “When you’re out there panhandling in the river, occasionally, you get a gold nugget.”
He also was a political analyst for CNN and the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Gergen was a “political scholar who served four presidents of both parties, an adoring father and dedicated husband, a senior statesman in every sense of the word, and a tireless educator,” a CNN spokesperson said.
“But above all else, David was a relentlessly kind and warm person,” the unnamed spokesperson said. “Our staff, contributors and audiences are better informed because of his towering influence.”
Gergen’s cause of death, Lewy body dementia, is the second most common type of Alzheimer’s disease and is caused when protein deposits called Lewy bodies form within nerve cells in the brain, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The protein deposits interfere with thinking, memory and movement and can cause dementia or Parkinson’s disease dementia.
