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Gergen describes himself as a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. The next several years are likely to be rough in America, he believes, but the long-term outlook holds much greater promise. Our prospects for success, he argues, now rest heavily upon preparing rising generations for lives of service and leadership.



As a White House adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, Gergen gathered invaluable lessons on leadership that he has shared for more than two decades with students at the Harvard Kennedy School. But he has long hoped to write a book that would spread those lessons more widely. In the past few yeas, that dream has taken on greater urgency, with growing threats to democracy at home and abroad.



Who would have believed,” Gergen writes, “that for the first time since the Civil War, we would begin tearing ourselves apart? Who would have imagined that our democracy — and long-standing democratic traditions across the world — might be on the brink of collapse? But here we are. It feels as if we are driving on the side of a cliff in the middle of the night with our lights out. We all know it, but we cant seem to stop it.”