Sharing Bad Habits with the Boss

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

A week or so before a little-known Texan named George Bush announced his candidacy for the presidency in 1979, political adviser David Keene telephoned a Washington speechwriter with a desperate plea for help. "We need an announcement statement," Keene explained to Vic Gold. "So what's the problem?" Gold asked. "The problem," answered Keene, "is that David Gergen has been working on it for months."

The conversation helps explain why many Republicans were chortling last week at Clinton's decision to bring on David Richmond Gergen as his top spokesman, with the title of Counsellor to the President. While Gergen, 51, is regarded in Republican circles as an expert communicator and strategist, he is also known to be disorganized, undisciplined and often tardy -- characteristics he shares with his new boss. "If they are looking for a good analyst," said a Reagan White House veteran, "they have found one. But this is not someone who can make the trains run on time."

Nobody disputes Gergen's talents as a politician. Close associates say he is % "constantly pulse taking" -- measuring the attitudes of his co-workers, his allies and the country. Gergen's fans say this habit helps explain his ability to move easily in a wide circle of public figures, policymakers and journalists. His detractors say it has led him to switch alliances with alarming expedience.

A native of Durham, North Carolina, Gergen attended Yale University and Harvard Law School, and was a Democrat until his late 20s. He went to work as a speechwriter in Richard Nixon's White House in 1971, served as communications director to Gerald Ford and was what several Bush loyalists described as a "fair-weather friend" in 1980. As assistant to chief of staff James Baker in the Reagan White House, Gergen emerged as a skilled wordsmith and political strategist, helping design the 100-day plan for winning Reagan's revolutionary tax cuts. Gergen aggressively courted reporters and earned a reputation as a world-class leaker, but nonetheless lost a contest with deputy press secretary Larry Speakes to be Reagan's top spokesman. Distrusted by the harder-line Reaganauts, Gergen left the White House in 1983.

Though he became familiar as an even-toned commentator on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, he has spent most of his time since as an editor at U.S. News & World Report. Gergen was a weak editor who often showed up late for meetings and preferred long, drawn-out sessions, sometimes late at night, at which he sought to forge impossible consensus on story ideas. His casual management style led in part to his replacement in 1988, when he became editor-at-large.

Gergen befriended the Clintons nearly a decade ago at "Renaissance Weekend," an annual New Year's retreat on Hilton Head Island in which an eclectic group of influential people swap stories of personal growth along with their business cards. Both policy wonks, the two men never heard a debate they didn't want to join, and tend to forget that the clock is running. "Just like the White House has 'Clinton Standard Time,' " said a U.S. News staff member last week, "we have Gergen time."

Hired to reposition Clinton as a centrist, Gergen has his work cut out. But his influence is likely to expand quickly in the coming weeks, if only because Gergen is the sole White House official with previous West Wing experience. How long his devotion to Clinton will last is another question.