64 Quotes by David Gergen

Trust remains the coin of the realm in politics. A President who is trusted, by the people, by the congress, by the press, by foreign countries, is a President who can get a lot of good things done.

Yes, it absolutely suggests that. It sounds to me... as if they had a negotiation between the agency and the NSC over what they were going to say, that the CIA objected strenuously to the idea of asserting it on the basis of U.S. intelligence, and when the NSC came back and said, let's blame it on them, let's attribute it to the British, the CIA, well, on that basis, on part of our negotiation, we withdraw our formal objection. And Condi Rice is saying, he didn't object, therefore, we didn't take it out.

We've seen the hubris. And now we're seeing the scandals.

When he hung up on Nancy Reagan, that's when he crossed his final threshold.

On 9/11, we were attacked by an enemy?. But there's no foreign enemy here. There's nobody to blame.

What you're seeing in the East Wing is normal turnover, and what you're seeing in the West Wing is abnormal. It's an aberration to have a team stay as long as this one has.

He (Rove) is the president's right arm, as we all know. And the president's in a deep hole and it's very hard to climb out of a hole without your right arm.

He didn't call for a lot of new things on the domestic front. He had a lot of rhetoric, but the proposals were quite modest. And on the foreign policy front, he didn't break a lot of new ground.

I was in the Nixon White House during Watergate, and we pretended that we were all about business as usual. And we had a president who was talking to the portraits. It was not business as usual, but you have to say it.