President Obama to Visit Dallas
HARLOW: The president right now heading back to the White House after ending his trip to Spain early, but the country he returns to is hurting and it is different than the one he left. On Tuesday he will confront that as he travels to Dallas to speak at a memorial service there. So what can he say to help heal a battered nation? Let's bring in CNN senior political analyst David Gergen and CNN law enforcement analyst Cedric Alexander. Thank you both for being here. And David, let me begin with you. I mean, as an adviser to four former presidents, if you were sitting on Air Force One with President Obama tonight, perhaps he's drafting some of the remarks that he'll make on Tuesday, what does he say?</s>DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, Poppy, President Obama hardly needs advice from staff at a moment like this, speaking to a grieving nation. Just remember how well he did in Charleston not so very long ago. But I would that -- to his speech writing staff that if they haven't already that they familiarize themselves deeply with three speeches given by Americans that were so healing in the past. First by Bobby Kennedy the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, speaking to a political crowd in Indianapolis, mesmerizing short speech, speaking from the heart, no notes. The second, Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster, and when he drew us together so well. And remember the last picture we had of them as they went to the spacecraft. Brave astronauts. And the third is Bill Clinton, when President Clinton went to Oklahoma City after the bombing there. That was a turning point for his presidency because it was a healing speech. So I think the role the president plays here is unifier-in-chief, healer-in-chief.</s>HARLOW: Unifier-in-chief. Cedric Alexander, to you, you were assigned to the president's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and I want your reaction to something that we heard from Newt Gingrich this week, the former speaker of the House. He said, normal white Americans don't understand being black in America. He said it's more dangerous to be black in America. As you look at this from those comments, from a policing perspective, and in your role on the task force, how should that inform this country as we move forward?</s>CEDRIC ALEXANDER, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, he's exactly right, and certainly there are a number of African-Americans across this country that feel that way. If we certainly look back at the history and still look at many of the challenges that we have in this country today. But we got to move forward. And in regards to the president's reaction when he gets to Dallas, he's going to do what he's always done. He's going to be presidential, he's going to be kind, he's going to be caring, he's going to try to bring people together, and he's going to be loving of this country and the people who live in it. And he's going to be great support to law enforcement. But us as a whole, all of us as a nation, we're at a very critical place in our -- in our country. And for us to move forward, we all got to do this collectively, and certainly there is a lot of pain and a lot of hurt to go around, but we still got to survive as a nation, we still got enemies abroad to fight, and we can only do that if we stand collectively, and this is a real critical time that we move forward and try to do everything we can to do that.</s>HARLOW: David Gergen, to you, Dan Balz of the "Washington Post" wrote a column that really struck a lot of us this week. And he talked about the Kerner Commission report coming out under LBJ and what it informed this nation of when it comes to race relations then and looking at it now. And he quoted it saying, "Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate but unequal." That from the Kerner report. And then he went on to ask, "What would a similar commission say about the country today, nearly half a century later? Perhaps only to add that the country is only divided red and blue." David Gergen, your thoughts?</s>DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think the Kerner report was very important, but it did -- Martin Luther King was assassinated about a month later and there were over 100 riots that broke out across the country after his assassination. So we look back upon that troubled time. Hard to heal, the country hard to move forward. I do think it takes a sustained effort because this is not exactly 1967, '68 again, in part because the rioting frankly has not been as big, but the gulfs are big. They're very big. Because we thought we'd be much farther along than we are in race relations and the fairness of the criminal justice system. And it's heartbreaking that we have so much still to do. But I do think that we have to understand that '67-'68, there were division within the Democratic Party but we were not as divided politically as we are today, so we now have racial tensions playing and mixing in to the political tensions in the country. We're heading into a campaign which sounds -- you know, really, the level of discourse has already descended to the depths. There is already serious name-calling going on. And I think that's the fear that we are -- if we don't pull ourselves together and draw upon Dallas to seek unity and take some steps, we could really be in much worse shape six or eight months from now than we are today.</s>HARLOW: The political divide adding onto it.</s>GERGEN: Yes. Absolutely.</s>HARLOW: David Gergen, thank you very much. Cedric Alexander, thank you as well.</s>GERGEN: Thank you.</s>ALEXANDER: Thank you. Thank you for having me.</s>HARLOW: Coming up next, we're going to talk about the Black Lives Matter movement obviously known and discussed and debated in this country. Where does it go from here? We'll talk more about that with our panel of experts about how they've done so far and what is affecting real change. We're live in the CNN NEWSROOM.