David Gergen died on July 10, 2025 at the age of 83.  Neighbors of ours in Cambridge for 20 years, his wonderful wife, Anne is a good friend of my wife and a lunch and yoga partner.  I only knew David from a distance, but was impressed by the quiet calm and presence he exuded from his tall, Southern frame.

After a distinguished career in politics providing counsel to four U.S. Presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton), Gergen applied his wisdom, experience, and knowledge to teaching, primarily at Harvard’s Kennedy School (HKS) but also via television as a CNN commetator and analyst.  He was a much loved teacher and mentor and established the Center for Public Leadership at HKS. The huge impact of this work was evident in the outpouring of respect and affection we saw at his memorial service last month.

“Hearts Touched with Fire” is the kind of book that I would have avoided at all costs during my working life.  Over the nearly 40 years I spent at the Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospitals, I managed to randomly walk into a variety of leadership roles and firmly believed that one was either born with leadership skills or was not.  I didn’t believe that leadership could be taught.  Sadly, I now know I was wrong, and how I wish that Gergen’s book had been there for me when I began my leadership career.

Drawing on his unique breadth and depth of experience and using plain English and concrete examples, Gergen acknowledges the innate qualities of an effective leader—character, courage, integrity, honesty—but he also provides useful guidance on how one born with those traits can leverage them with attention to developing specific skills and awareness.  Not naive, but certainly not cyncial, he uses the lives of John Lewis, FDR and Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Lincoln, Reagan, and others to illustrate how to lead.  At times reading like Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path, he offers “eight tips”, “four basics of public speaking” and other lists, but rather than coming off as cliches, he weaves them into useful practices for the up and coming leader.

And make no mistake about to whom this book is directed.  It’s the new generation, the Millenials and Gen Zers who he feels need to replace the aging and often ineffective current leadership.  This book was written after trump’s first term but well before he returned to the White House, and its cautious optimism often felt out of place given the disaster we are currently living through.   Gergen’s death has deprived us of one of those wise senior eminences who might have provided valuable guidance as the 2024 election spun towards disaster.

While we will miss him going forward, his book is a valuable legacy. I intend to give it to my daughters and their husbands.