David Gergen, Adviser To 4 U.S. Presidents, Has Dementia | EUROtoday

David Gergen, a political commentator who’s served within the White House underneath 4 presidents, has been recognized with dementia, his daughter revealed in The Boston Globe.

Gergen, 82, has Lewy physique dementia, his daughter, household drugs physician Katherine Gergen Barnett, wrote, describing the illness as “a combination of Parkinson’s meets Alzheimer’s.”

“Watching the wrecking ball of Lewy body dementia careen into the fortress of my father’s mind has been devastating,” she wrote, saying his physique and thoughts have rapidly declined.

Gergen’s profession highlights embody serving throughout the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. He served as an official counselor to Clinton, because the White House communications director for Ford and Reagan and the speechwriting director for Nixon. He’s spent his previous couple of years as a political analyst at CNN.

In her piece for the Globe, Gergen’s daughter shared a few of her father’s latest ideas, together with ones on the present political local weather.

“We are going through a period of fear. People are terrified. We have been tested, we are being tested now, but we must recognize that politics in our country is like a pendulum,” Gergen informed his daughter, including: “We must hold onto the inspirational moments of our history and use them to light our path forward. … I keep thinking about Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech — and though we still have so far to go as a country, you could not have imagined everything that could have happened from that moment.”

He additionally known as on youthful generations to issue the nation’s wants into their profession plans.

“Many in the next generation are going to the best schools and not giving back what is remotely needed by our country,” he mentioned, in line with his daughter. “We need to continue to ensure that we have people in the next generation out front pulling the wagon — innovators and people in the public sector — delivering on the goods.”

Gergen has printed two books about his perspective on management, together with “Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made” in 2022. In it, he praised the management successes of Presidents John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush, the late Rep. John Lewis, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, human rights advocate Malala Yousafzai and local weather activist Greta Thunberg.