Word: gergens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...David Gergen, 40, the White House communications director, is pondering his future after seven years with three different Presidents. He planned to stay with Reagan for six months, and still is there. Why? "Because," he said, "there is, after many bad years, a chance to make the presidency work again." There is, too, the grandeur and sweep of the office. "It came home to me," recalled Gergen, "on the day we had breakfast at the Versailles economic summit, met with the Pope in Rome at noon and had dinner with the Queen at Windsor...
...Darman, 39, to coordinate the passage of Reagan's economic program. "It was important that everyone in the Administration knew there was a clearing house," explains Darman. Other core participants: Baker's partners in the White House top troika, Michael Deaver, 44, and Meese; Communications Director David Gergen, 40; Kenneth Duberstein, 38, the Administration's gregarious and highly effective lobbyist on Capitol Hill; Budget Director David Stockman, 35; and Craig Fuller, 31, who coordinates the work of the Cabinet...
...want to follow the fine print. Reagan obviously didn't invent the homely example: Remember how Roosevelt shrewdly argued for Lend-Lease to Britain, justifying it as lending a hose to a neighbor to put out a fire? Nor did Reagan invent the bite-size explanation of policy. Gergen, from his speechwriting days for Richard Nixon, remembers Nixon's insistence that press statements be less than 100 words long: "That way, Nixon said, he and not somebody else controlled how much of what he said got used." Gergen thinks of Nixon and Carter as two Presidents who boned...
...Gergen spends much time devising visual backdrops for Reagan appearances. Outlined against the U.S. Capitol dome, Reagan proclaims his support of a balanced-budget constitutional amendment. In St. Louis his backdrop is grinning black children. Last week Reagan tried waging diplomacy by camera. White House spokesmen pointedly referred newsmen to how unsmiling the President was in greeting Israel's Foreign Minister Shamir. If this was meant to signal a new kind of diplomatic rebuff, it didn't overwhelm the Israelis, who went on bombing Beirut...
...Reagan learned that the box office personality more important than the critics. Sharp words have appeared about him in print, but Reagan's only real outburst of White House pique came over TV interviews of the unemployed. Not that Reagan totally ignores the printed press. After all, in Gergen's view, it provides much of the news and many of the ideas that TV picks...