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 Buttafuoco? … Get word to the control room… . turn the cameras back on! We can’t let that stand.”

In short, David Gergen is a man of sincerely moderate and diplomatic politics in both style and substance. He is a very sharp man with a very dull ideology. He is also a man drawn to power. But he is more of a gunsmith than a gunman, preferring to fashion, hone, and package other people’s power than wield it himself. Still, in Washington media circles that’s a kind of power in itself.

All of this comes out in his new book, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton. There are two clues right off that this is no conventional tell-all. First, he says so. Gergen admirably doesn’t believe in writing tell-alls about the people he worked for. The second, and closely related, clue is that this book is vastly less interesting than a tell-all would be. Because Gergen won’t say anything bad about anyone without saying something at least equally good —the second chapter on Nixon is entitled “The Bright Side”—there’s almost no edge to Eyewitness to Power. Gergen criticizes Hillary Clinton’s stab at a co-presidency and semi-socialized medicine, only to turn and sprint back in the other direction like a basketball player running suicides during practice. “Over the eighteen months I worked with Hillary,” writes Gergen, “I gained great respect for her as a champion of social causes.” Libel lawyers won’t make a dime off Gergen; the nastiest one-sided barb I could find was that he holds John Dean in “minimal high regard.”

Eyewitness to Power is at times quite well-written, but his lessons for leadership often boil down to the sort of stuff handed out at corporate seminars on good management skills. Indeed, some sentences seem to be lifted straight from the “Successories” posters you can buy from those in-flight airline catalogs. It may be more forgivable, because Gergen is trying to lead by example—after all, he informs us, “Leadership Starts from Within”—but it makes it no less annoying. Of course, there’s plenty of good advice; get enough sleep (something Clinton did not do in his first year), listen to your opponents, don’t lie, etc.

And all of this is fine in the sense that there’s certainly ample room in the political culture for polite people to write polite books. But politeness has its problems when translated into policy. More than anything else, Mr. Gergen is a high priest of the inside-the-beltway faith. It was for this reason that Bill Clinton hired him just nineteen weeks into the administration. “When Bill Clinton is in trouble, he looks for a quick fix,” writes Gergen. “I know I was one of them.” While it was spun—by Gergen himself at the time—that the appointment of a life-long Republican was an attempt at bipartisanship, the reality was that the young administration desperately needed an adviser who could explain how Washington works.

A hallmark of Gergen’s beltway religion is a rejection of eschatology of any kind; for Gergen-types it’s inconceivable to think of existing arrangements coming to an end or even to imagine why you would want them to. Therefore it is always ill-advised to criticize an opponent too harshly or call for the elimination of any major program or approach. The only way someone in power can be 100 percent wrong is in hindsight.

“Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue,” George Orwell wrote in 1946. He was referring to Western intellectuals and journalists who had consistently reversed their predictions of who would win or lose the war after every Allied or Nazi victory. But the principle is just as true today. Witness all of the pundits who insisted welfare dependency or crime could never go down or who believe strong standing in the polls today means strong standing forever.

Gergen recounts how he fought Tony Dolan, the speechwriter who pushed for Reagan to say the words “evil empire” in a speech to evangelical Christians in 1983. Gergen feared it might “upset” U.S. diplomacy. After all, like most members of the political class, Gergen believed that the Soviet Union was a permanent fixture of the global landscape, so why be so rude to a country that wasn’t going anywhere? “I hate to admit it, but it’s true: history has shown that Tony Dolan was right and I was wrong,” Gergen writes.

This is the great irony of Eyewitness to Power. Gergen’s “elemental” lessons of leadership favor boldness and rhetorical clarity in the executive. But in his own politics and as a contemporary commentator Gergen consistently favors incrementalism and difference-splitting. It is only in retrospect that Gergen can see anything as clear-cut at all, and even then only when the vast Washington consensus confirms, or prompts, his conclusion. Without that confirmation, all bets must be hedged and all judgments on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand.

There is a name, by the way, for this sort of politics. In an earlier era, we called it “me-too” Republicanism. Since then it has evolved into what some people call the “Third Way,” “triangulation,” or simply Clintonism. Its essential insight is that government should borrow ideas from all quarters because, even if the government must surrender a bit of technical power— by accommodating the market, for example—it gains in moral and political authority and esteem. Gergen doesn’t talk much about the upcoming election—who wants to offend a potential winner at this stage? But in a sense both candidates represent different strains of this approach. Al Gore’s rhetoric is strictly leftist, but no one believes him because he is a profound and remorseless liar and because his record is steadfastly centrist. George W. Bush is in fact the more recognizable Third Wayer. “Compassionate Conservatism” was never so much the Republican alternative to Clintonism as the Republican version of it. In the recent presidential debates, much of the disagreement boiled down to which candidate could provide prescription drugs faster, not whether they should or shouldn’t be provided at all. In this sense we all worship at Gergen’s altar now.