David Gergen, Adviser To 4 U.S. Presidents, Dies At 83

David Gergen, a political commentator who served under four U.S. presidents, died Thursday. He was 83.

Gergen died in a retirement community in Lexington, Massachusetts, The New York Times reported Friday. His son, Christopher, told the Times the cause of death was Lewy body dementia.

Gergen’s daughter, Katherine Gergen Barnett, announced his diagnosis in December in The Boston Globe.

“Watching the wrecking ball of Lewy body dementia careen into the fortress of my father’s mind has been devastating,” she wrote.

Gergen served under President Richard Nixon as a speechwriting director, and under Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Regan as the White House communications director. Gergen then served as an official counselor to President Bill Clinton.

His speechwriting prowess shone during the 1980 presidential election. More from The New York Times:

It was Mr. Gergen who devised a line in the 1980 presidential election that helped secure victory for the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, over Jimmy Carter, the incumbent Democrat. In that era of high inflation, onerous interest rates and a national psyche wounded by Iran’s holding of 52 Americans hostage, Mr. Carter was already on the ropes. The clincher came in a televised debate a week before the election when Mr. Reagan asked viewers a Gergen-suggested question that hit political pay dirt: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

For many Americans, the answer was no.

“Rhetorical questions have great power,” Mr. Gergen said years later.

Gergen eventually became a commentator on shows including “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and as a political analyst on CNN.

In her December story in The Boston Globe, Barnett said her father spoke about the “period of fear” Americans are living in.

“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 told his daughter.

“We must hold onto the inspirational moments of our history and use them to light our path forward,” he added. “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.”