Jim Lehrer Commencement Speech
Harvard 2006
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Author and Journalist
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Cambridge, Mass.
As delivered, and published online by The Harvard University Gazette
Thank you, thank you. As the single freshest graduate of Harvard University - remember I was the last one to get in ... in fact, I'm so fresh, I still have my robe on ... and that makes me the most recent new member of the Harvard Alumni Association.
I would like to say to Larry Summers that on behalf of everybody in this room and everybody associated with our school, we accept your challenge and we will make it happen, sir.
I don't know about you all, you're probably used to this, but I was really impressed with the rundown on the financial condition. But that aside, on behalf of the nine of us who received honorary degrees today, we as a group would like to pledge, the new group of the Class of 2006, we would as a group like to pledge $127 billion.
Go way beyond Allston, way beyond Allston.
This is truly a great day for me personally. In fact, in the words of my 3-year-old granddaughter who is here, Olivia, this is what she would call a hoot and holler day for me.
In the morning I am awarded an honorary degree, and now, as the Commencement speaker, I have the opportunity to cause second thoughts for everybody who had anything to do with what happened this morning. And I thought I would make those folks particularly nervous by beginning with a bus call.
You heard several references this morning to the fact that I have a bus background. And that bus background includes: in the 1950s, I worked as a ticket agent in a Continental Trailways bus depot in a place called Victoria in south Texas. And one of my duties was to do this into a microphone:
"May I have your attention, please. This is your last call for Continental Trailways 8:10 p.m., Silversides air conditioned Thruliner to Houston now leaving from lane one for Inez, Edna, Ganado, Louise, El Campo, Pierce, Wharton, Hungerford, Kendleton, Beazley, Rosenberg, Richmond, Sugarland, Stafford, Missouri City, and Houston. All aboard. Don't forget your baggage, please."
Now you may be asking, "What in the world does that have to do with anything that's happening here today?" First of all, I try very hard to include a bus call in every speech I make for good luck. The second thing: it does serve a real purpose this afternoon ... kind of.
Fifty years ago almost to this very day, I received my undergraduate degree in college. The commencement speaker was a man who wore the gaudiest red tie I had ever seen in my life. And he wore it because he said he wanted us, the Class of 1956, to remember him.
He said, " Nobody in their right mind, particularly those graduating, listens to commencement speeches. So you won't remember anything I say. You won't remember my name, or even what I look like, but maybe you will remember this awful red tie."
Well, I've just proven him correct. I remembered the tie. He was also right: I did not remember his name and I did not remember what he looked like, but he was wrong about one very important thing. I did remember what he said, more or less.
I paraphrase from vague memory: "Since you will not remember a word I say, I have chosen to say very little. Good luck in your life from this day forward. Try to be kind to one and to all, and to yourself. Thanks for the honorary degree and have a great afternoon."
He gave us a little nod and then he returned to his seat. As you can imagine, to great and thunderous and thankful applause. And so, "Since you will not remember a word I say, I have cho - No, no, no. No such luck. No thankful applause right now, but in keeping with the man's basic principles of commencement addresses, I promise not to keep you long, and here comes the purpose, and think of the bus call as my equivalent to his red tie. Something to remember me by.
Journalism is my line of work and is at the heart of why I am standing here today. But the kind of broadcast journalism we do on the NewsHour is the ultimate, ultimate collaborative enterprise. As I suggested at a Shorenstein Center/Kennedy School event here a few weeks ago, getting pretty faces like mine on and off the air takes villages of talented professionals.
Thus, whatever honors come to me, including those of today, I accept them always for them as well as me.
Also honored in my case are some guidelines that I also shared with that earlier Harvard audience. They are my personal ones that we use at the NewsHour in our practice of journalism. I wrote them down several years ago at the behest of a seminar being held at the Aspen Institute.
# Do nothing I cannot defend
# Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me
# Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story
# Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am
# Assume the same about all people on whom I report
# Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise
# Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label everything
# Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously
# And finally, finally I am not in the entertainment business
I have come with only one major commencement-like point to make, you'll be delighted to hear. And let me put it simply and directly. I believe we should consider adopting some form of national service. No, not a return to the military draft, something entirely different, and completely new for us. National service in its fullest meaning.
My reasons have to do mostly with what I see as an urgent need to address the growing state of disconnection we have in our country today. But it is based also on my personal experiences which flow directly from something else I did on my graduation day 50 years ago, besides listen to a man in a red tie speak.
I went with my parents from the commencement ceremony to a building on campus and I raised my right hand and was sworn in as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. I spent the next three years as an infantry officer, mostly in the Far East.
It was between the Korean and Vietnam wars. I saw no combat, fired no rounds in anger, had none fired at me, had no roadside bombs kill fellow Marines of mine. I was spared events that might have triggered losing control, to going over the top of civilized behavior into angry barbarism, as has been charged against a group of Marines these days in Iraq.
My Marine service was a life-changing experience for me. A positive one that had I not had, I most likely would not be standing here today. Because I would not be a person deemed worthy for such honor.
I went into the military because I had to. Join on your own or be drafted was the choice. I chose the Marines for personal, not heroic or, as you can clearly see, physique reasons.
My Dad had been a Marine and so had my brother, and so I would be a Marine. That required service changed me and the life I have led ever since.
My travels up till then had been restricted pretty much to central Kansas, eastern Oklahoma, and south Texas. My mode of transport was mostly on Trailways buses. But as a Marine I took my first plane ride, to Washington, D.C., and then on eventually to California and to Japan and to Okinawa and to Taiwan and to the Philippines and to essentially the world.
My friends and acquaintances up till then had been mostly people who looked, talked, and thought like me. But now I was eating, drinking, sleeping, sweating, and running up and down hills with, and listening to and depending on people who had little in common with me.
Some spoke and looked different. Most were larger and stronger than me, a few smaller. Some were smarter, others dumber, some were rich, others poorer. Some were wonderful people, others were less so. Some wouldn't hurt a fly, others sometimes deserved to be hurt by flies.
In that diverse company I learned to be responsible for others, I learned to depend on others, and to understand what being depended on by others really meant.
I learned that there was more to the world than me, and my kind. There was more to my life than me, me, me, and me...
I learned there was joy and satisfaction to be had by looking past the mirror. By serving common interests rather than only those of self.
I am grateful my country forced me to serve my country. Not for my country's sake, but for my own. My three years of service connected me to the rest of the world, the world outside myself, and the connection has been permanent.
The experience also left me with a firm conviction that beyond the benefits to individuals, connecting and connections are essential for our democratic society to work.
And speaking now as a journalist whose job it's been to pay attention to such things, I have never seen us more disconnected from each other than we are right now.
We are splintering off into segments, interest groups, lobbies, target audiences, blogs, boxes.
Our racial, cultural, and religious differences, always our great strength, have become an instrument in our great disconnection. Our growing economic differences, as Larry put it brilliantly, are feeding this. Our politics at the moment actually seem to be encouraging it, and our otherwise terrific explosion in new media outlets for information and debate are helping facilitate it.
I believe what we need is a new hard real-world dose of shared experience. We had one after 9/11, and it drifted away. We had one after Katrina, and it went away. We have yet to even have one on Iraq.
A show of hands please in this room.
How many of you know someone personally who has served or is now serving in Iraq?
How many of you know a person or a relative of a person who has been killed or wounded in Iraq?
Raise your hand if our being at war in Iraq has had any direct effect on your life at all.
What's left, I believe, for us all, the issues of the war in Iraq aside, how do we connect ourselves and then stay connected to the other Americans who do serve in the military and elsewhere in our name, on our behalf, without having to sustain a tremendous man-made or natural disaster.
I would submit one way is service itself. Service in all of its many forms. Service that can mean the Peace Corps, a teacher corps, a conservation corps, a police corps, a hospital aid corps, a tutor corps, a Big Brother/Big Sister corps, a coping corps, a pick up the trash corps as well as the Marine Corps.
I do not have a specific 10- or 12-point proposal to put on the table. I am a journalist, not a proposalist.
But I do have some framing questions for the discussion. In order to be fair, should it be mandatory, no exemptions, no permanent deferments, everyone eventually serves?
Should it apply across the board, men, women, all physical and intellectual sizes and abilities included? What should be the age parameters? Should there be a way to involve not just the young? Should it be constructed around choices, each individual choosing the form of service, military or specific civilian, he or she wishes?
Should it be developed in partnership with private and corporate resources as well as governmental? Should it be tied to a G.I. Bill type program? Service earns education, home and other benefits. In addition to the benefits of connection, and of the soul.
I know some will argue that such a program would cost too much. I would only ask, compared to what?
Others would argue that it, for it to really work politically, it must be voluntary. I don't do politics, so I'll leave the politics of national service to someone else.
But voluntary service is what we have now. The result, to my observation, at least, it may be cheaper, but it's also causing a serious heightening of our differences and our disconnections. And definitely not just as it involves the military.
My guess is that all of you in this room - alums, students, parents, whatever - have an interest in volunteer public service and that you have no doubt already done some of it and will always continue to do so.
Am I right about that? Yes. Absolutely. No question about it.
But volunteer service, voluntary service - the kinds that you perform and the kinds that I perform - is not an equal opportunity operation. Non-military volunteerism is pretty well confined to the well-educated and the well-off.
The majority of Americans are simply not in a financial position to delay careers, to take no-pay internships, to take off a year or two, or even a few weeks or even a long weekend to do good, to help people rebuild their homes in New Orleans or Indonesia. Do tutoring of low-income kids in Los Angeles or Des Moines, find food and shelter for the devastated of Darfur or Biloxi.
So we have a rather stark division among us. The most fortunate volunteer for the non-military, the less fortunate volunteer for the military. And those in between, the vast majority of Americans, do neither because they can't afford to.
I know for a fact I would not have voluntarily gone into the Marine Corps 50 year ago. I would have gone directly from my commencement ceremony to a job ... to my job that I already had as a newspaper reporter, which is what I did three years later after my service.
Trust me, I was a much better reporter then because of how I spent those intervening three years. And a much better person, and even Commencement speaker now, 50 years later.
The bottom line for me on this is simply this: whatever the ultimate conclusion, I believe passionately that we would all benefit from a full and frank discussion of our mutual responsibilities to serve. Of the joys and satisfactions that come from such service. From lifting ourselves away from our own needs just for a while to pay attention to those of others, and of trying to find a way that involves every one of us.
I am well aware of the collateral debates that would most likely spring from this one. One has to do with going to war. National service, with a military option, would complicate decisions of presidents and congresses about using force.
Parents and spouses and children of the potential combatants would have to be in the loop along with the volunteer experts, the pundits, the politicians and the generals.
Some would argue that's a good thing because it would force more public explanations and justifications and thus harder thinking before rushing off to invade or to bomb.
Others would say that's terrible because the result could be a hand-wringing public referendum on every military use decision our country makes. And back and forth, and back and forth, and so the debate would go.
And I say, let that debate and all others on national service begin. And as they say in other venues, thus ends the rendering of the message.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
But let me add very quickly: I am not urging any of you - students, alums, faculty members, members of the administration, parents - to run off and join the Marines.
And I say that because one of the first major commencement addresses I made to a college graduating class, my theme then was risk: take risks in your personal lives, in your professional lives, and I went on and on about the joys and satisfactions to be had from a risk-filled life.
A few weeks later the phone rings at our house in Washington after midnight.
A young male voice on the phone says, "Mr. Lehrer? You changed my life."
"Mmmm." I was trying to wake up.
He said, "I was in that graduating class. I heard what you said in your commencement address about taking risks."
"Mmm."
"I was in the class. I had already taken a job on Wall Street. But when you said that about taking risks, I changed my mind and I decided to do what I wanted to do in the first place anyhow. And as soon as the ceremony was over I told my mom and dad, 'No Wall Street.' I was going into the business of making sunglasses frames with clear plastic tubes where you could change the color with little BB-like things. You want red, white and blue one day ... you want pink the next ... you want whatever."
And he said, "I've done it, Mr. Lehrer. I'm going to be on the CBS morning news tomorrow demonstrating my frames. I figured you'd want to know. Thank you, sir, for changing my life."
Now I was really awake and I was thinking, "Oh my. What had I wrought?" Of course, mostly I was thinking that his parents probably had a hit out on me, on my head.
So ...
In the unlikely event one of you all does decide to join the Marines today, pick up and go and run and go and do it. Fine. Semper Fi. But please, just don't tell me about it.
For the record, I do now know about my own commencement speaker 50 years ago.
I went to my university's Web site the other day. He was a popular novelist, screenwriter and playwright at the time.
So what this means for you, 50 years from now, if you want to know about the Commencement speaker, you can go to www.harvard.edu and find out who he was at the time, in addition, of course, to remembering that he began by calling a Continental Trailways bus to Houston.
And now, as the man said, "Good luck in your life. From this day forward, try to be kind to one and to all, and to yourself. Thanks for the honorary degree. And have a great afternoon."
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