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David Gergen is in. Again.
In fact, as the impeachment trial of President Trump unfolds in the US Senate and in political echo chambers from Boston to Los Angeles, from Harvard to Stanford, Gergen is somewhat a man of the moment. Once again, he’s a ubiquitous presence on CNN, dissecting yet another troubled presidency, drawing on his experience in serving under four White House occupants dating to the turbulent Nixon years.
He has been an eyewitness to history. Gergen was there in 1974 when Nixon’s helicopter on the South Lawn carried the just-resigned president from the disgrace of Watergate, and was back in the White House with Bill Clinton before he was impeached and then survived a Senate vote to remove him from office in 1998.
It’s the precise moment that Donald Trump now encounters.
That may explain the standing-room-only crowd the other day inside Gergen’s classroom, where some 60 students — dressed in blue jeans and down vests, sporting colorful scarves and some speckles of gray hair — jockey for space to learn about the art and adventure of public leadership.
“Leadership is very difficult to teach,’’ Gergen tells them. “But leadership can be learned.’’
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Few have mastered that art more skillfully than David Gergen.
He possesses an all-world resume: presidential adviser, magazine editor, a ubiquitous television pundit, and college professor now poised to take his class on an academic journey about courage and moral purpose, judgment, and public persuasion.
He’s no flamethrower. In fact, he is an unapologetic centrist.
And, as far as the odious conduct of the 45th US president is concerned, he’s reached a decidedly centrist verdict.
“My own conclusion is that (Trump) definitely did something terribly wrong — in violation of our constitutional norms,’’ Gergen tells me after his class in his office lined with books and world-class Oval Office political memorabilia. “There’s no question that there ought to be a censure or something. I think removal is a much harder step to take.’’
The country is sharply divided. There’s an election coming up. Gergen’s prescription? Let the voters decide.
“If the senators are not going to convict him — and they’re not — I think it would be very helpful if they signed something that said they want to make it clear that after listening to all the evidence — much of which is new to us — that we ought to make it very clear that what he did was inappropriate and a mistake of judgment,’’ Gergen said.
“But we don’t think it rises to the level of ousting him. That, to me, would at least prevent him from having exoneration rallies around the country to proclaim how he’s been found innocent and this has been a fake from the start. I did not think it was a fake. I thought it was quite serious.’’
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And Gergen, 77, knows serious when he sees it. Why? Because he has seen it before.
He recalls his days in the Nixon White House, where, he said, the Watergate cover-up worked more seamlessly inside the West Wing than outside of it.
He was commissioned to write white papers on ancillary issues surrounding his boss’s conduct, when the West Wing was suddenly electrified in July 1973 by the news that Nixon had secretly installed a taping system in the White House.
“What was really striking to me was that those of us who had gone to these elite universities and came out of a middle-class educated families, we were in a celebratory mood,’’ Gergen said. “We thought: ‘Finally. We can just show that he didn’t do it. He’s exonerated! We’ve got the tapes right here! This will prove it.’
“We had champagne. And then we had the guys who came from the other sides of the tracks and went to the state schools and had more hard-scrabble lives. They all got drunk. They said, ‘It’s over! Don’t you understand, you fool! He did this! Haven’t you understood that right from the start?’ ’’
Gergen said what the country is witnessing now is one of the two or three biggest cover-ups within the executive branch across the last half century. The difference — and the situation remains decidedly fluid — is that Trump’s defense has yet to unravel.
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That could change with new allegations from John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security adviser, whose new book alleges that Trump wanted to withhold military aid from Ukraine until it committed to helping with investigations into Democratic rival Joe Biden — a charge the president and his lawyers are denying.
“It’s hard for people to imagine four more years like this,’’ Gergen told me. “I can see him getting re-elected. I just can’t imagine what he’s going to be like during four more years. I worry that this is going to embolden him. That he’s going to think: ‘I can do any damn thing that I want.’ ’’
To avoid that, the nation is now in a searching mode, Gergen said.
Democratic voters, he said, are wrestling with these nettlesome questions: Who can beat Trump? Who is worthy of the power that comes with the seat behind the Oval Office desk?
“I think the Democrats running, almost to a person, they’re decent people,’’ Gergen said. “The question is: Do you see someone who can clearly beat him? Biden is the one who emerges most likely. You can understand why Trump wants to go after him. It’s obvious.
“I think it’s easier to see people who would make good vice presidents than it is to see people who would make good presidents. I think Amy Klobuchar is probably a long shot to become the nominee but she clearly would be on the short list (for vice president). It can’t be two white guys. It’s going to have to be a woman and or a person of color.’’
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Rarely, Gergen said, has the nation been so divided, so polarized. His answer? A meeting of the minds. Compromise. Something called centrism.
“Centrism doesn’t mean splitting the difference,’’ he said. “It’s about seeking solutions and you bring people along. I’m happily in that role. Working for Bill Clinton helped liberate me so I could have my own voice. I could say what I thought as opposed to worrying whether there are five senators from this party or that party who are going to be very angry and I have to toe the line.’’
As his class adjourned the other afternoon, students huddled around him. They smiled and took selfies with the man in the middle. A teacher so in demand that they’re moving his class to a bigger room.
“I consider myself a radical moderate,’’ Gergen said later.
There he is, comfortably and unapologetically in the middle of things. The center. It’s been his ticket to witness history — and to teach it.
Thomas Farragher is a Globe columnist. He can reached at thomas.farragher@globe.com.
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