University of Delaware Commencement
Newark, Delaware
May 29, 2004
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. This is a high honor and a great privilege and, obviously, you didn’t look at my grade point average.
I graduated, my sister and I attended the University of Delaware, I graduated, she graduated honors. But I did make it in four years which pleased my father a great deal.
Monica, the combination of that incredible voice and this magnificent day and the celebratory atmosphere, there is only one thing that could ruin this day and that’s a commencement speech.
But I will try my best. I understand, I understand that it is my turn to be forgotten. I can’t tell you who the hell spoke at my graduation either and you won’t know yours. Unless I get in real trouble, then you’ll remember.
Mr. President, distinguished faculty members of the board, alumni, the very distinguished alumni that marched in with us today, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, all of those of you who are happy today that you’re getting a pay-raise because no more tuition, I say congratulations to you all. You have reason to be proud. This is a truly great university and that is not hyperbole. This is truly a great university.
When I am asked, as I told the alumni earlier this morning, by many of you, “My child has been accepted this place and that place, what would you recommend Senator?”, I always say, “Pick a university that you can get into now and you are quite sure in ten years you wouldn’t be able to get in.” I picked such a university.
Let me begin by saying how proud I am to be here as a speaker and how honored I am to have been asked but, most importantly, what means the most to me in this opportunity today is this: I came to University of Delaware to play football, among other things, this has allowed me only the second opportunity to get into the end zone in my entire career and I want to thank you very, very much for that. It means a great deal to me. I wish I could have gotten here more often and sooner, with a ball in my hands, but here I am.
Graduating speeches are difficult. Your parents want me to say something significant to justify the tuition and to honor the moment. The faculty has heard five thousand of these speeches and they’re going “Oh God, no, not another one.” You are wondering “Let’s get the hell out of here and let’s party” and you want to get going and so it’s a dilemma.
It’s a dilemma it really is; I truly believe the single most difficult speech to give. And I’m inclined to give the speech that Bob Hope gave the year, after I graduated from the University of Delaware, at Georgetown University. He stood up and addressed the faculty and the families, etc., looked out at the assembled graduating class and said, “Don’t go,” and sat down. I am inclined to do that. Andy Hall, where are you? Stand up. Don’t go. Don’t go. And the rest of your teammates, don’t go. I’d like you to stay for a very selfish reason.
I’ll be serious with you for just a moment. Each graduating class, to state the obvious, is very different, and there are defining moments and stark images that mark each of you personally and each of you generationally. It’s the same for all of us as we graduated, whether it was in 1932 or 1965 or 2004. Each generation is defined by the images in the world in which it graduates.
For me and my fellow graduates, the indelible images that were etched into our minds forever are ones that those who graduated in ‘65 can remember and when I graduated in ‘68 from law school. But although they did not determine the world we graduated into, did not determine what we would become, it became our destiny to try to shape that world.
And just as those of you who are graduating today graduate into a world that is very different than ours, there were defining moments in your career here at the university, both personally, nationally, and internationally. And those moments will tell the story of your generation based upon how you respond to them.
Let me explain what I mean by that. How you react to the world under which you are graduating is going to define your generation for all time. And your generation, like mine and my father and mother’s, is a generation that graduates into a world where what happens beyond our shore will impact upon your daily lives more than anything that will happen within our shores.
The fact of the matter is that you are required to become informed participants in the debate about what role our country should play in the world, regardless of whether you have any political interest in anything. For how we define our role in the world this next decade, is literally going to determine what your life is going to be like. Regardless of whether or not you become involved, informed participants, you will be greatly affected by what happens abroad.
For my generation, it was Vietnam, and how the wise men of our day, written about and read by you, ‘the best and the brightest’, as they were determined to be called, about how the best and the brightest of my generation extended a doctrine of George Kennan’s called ‘containment.’ Of containing communism, extending it from a doctrine that applied to Europe to a doctrine that applied to South East Asia, and affected every aspect of my generation.
For your generation, it is about terror and weapons of mass destruction, and how today’s wise men, the neo-conservative intellectuals, have concluded that military force and unilateralism is the tool to defeat terror. In my view, the wise men of both my generation and your generation learned some of the wrong lessons from their past.
The fact of the matter is, unilateralism is no more applicable to fighting terror, in my view, than the doctrine of containment was in fighting communism was in South East Asia. Both were born out of wrongly-applied lessons and both were the product of some little intellectual arrogance. But that’s for you to decide, not me. That is my view.
I graduated from here in ‘65, and then from law school into an uncertain world of 1968. Two months earlier, one of my heroes, Martin Luther King, was assassinated and two days earlier, two days before my graduation, a second hero, Robert Kennedy, had been gunned down in a kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The Vietnam War was raging in its bloodiest and most of us, who sat where you are sitting today, fully expected to be part of that conflict.
We wondered, as I know you wonder for different if not equally compelling reasons, if we would have a chance to fulfill our hopes and our aspirations. I know that you are very much like, believe it or not, we were in that graduating class of ‘68; anxious about the future, dismayed by uncertainty, wanting to do well and wanting to do good, and not quite sure about your chances of doing either.
In my generation, the images were stark. William Calley and the My Lai massacre, Bull Connor and his dogs in Birmingham. And there was another image from my generation that comes to mind and that is, there was a photograph of a young girl named Kim Park, running up a road in Vietnam, her hands outstretched, her clothes burned from her body and her skin burning so hot from napalm, that when water was poured on her, her skin literally began to boil. I’ve had the occasion to come to know Kim personally. She is a warm and charming woman, and remarkably unburdened by her experience. She has a family now and she puts the horror and the war behind her.
But looking back, thinking of those images and the nature of the times in which I graduated, I am more than a little surprised that our optimism was able to be sustained. We were no doubt naive, but I’m not the least bit embarrassed by that. I thought then, and I believe now that it was a great time to graduate into a promising world, although beset with real difficulties.
I felt, on that graduation day, a sense of purpose. The same purpose I brought with me to my first class here at the University of Delaware, and strengthened by my experience here in those formative years. It grew from the lessons taught by my parents, generous and gentle people, quick to offer help and very slow to judge but possessed by one absolutely raw intolerance: an instinctive outrage at the abuse of power and the arrogance that flows from it. That injustice inflicted upon the powerless at the hands of the powerful. That intolerance for the abuse of power, any kind of power, and the closely related values of personal integrity, of respect for individual autonomy, of responsibility to family, community, and, yes, country, was the foundation I brought with me to the University of Delaware and those are the values that I wanted to express as I entered my legal career seven years later in 1968.
For you, your generation, in many ways, began on September the 11th, 2001. I remember speaking to a thousand of you or so in the hall behind me, several days after the towers came down. The images of your generation are those planes, slicing into the Trade Towers, and the towers, incredibly, incredibly, almost beyond belief, crumbling to the ground. The images of courageous and tireless New York firefighters climbing into, not out of, those burning buildings. A president, rising to the moment, standing on the rubble of those crumbled towers, with a bullhorn in his hands, and saying to those who did this that they will hear from us and hear from us soon. The image of a tall Saudi, most Americans had never heard of, sitting with a laptop in a cave in Afghanistan, commanding a ragtag army of religious zealots.
And, last year, the bombardment of Baghdad when the war in Iraq began. The statue of Saddam being dragged off its pedestal and, most recently, the unfortunate images of extraordinary abuse of power in Abu Ghraib prison. Violence inflicted, not on us by others, but by us on others. Not withstanding the fact that our enemies have done much worse, it was nevertheless shameful for this proud, courageous, and brave nation.
We’ve all seen those images and they are no more a reflection of your generation than the images of Kim running down that crown top road in Vietnam, aflame with napalm, were a reflection of mine. They do not speak to who you are, what you believe to be just and fair, and what you know to be morally right. So don’t let those images stand as a symbol of how the world sees us. Let us let your generation be defined by this day, by the degree you hold. Let it be defined by this great institution of learning. Let it be about a generation that thrives on discovery, exploration, invention, and tolerance. A generation that wants to know everything there is to know, see everything there is to see, build everything there is to build, because you are resourceful, committed, curious, and courageous.
Because you believe in your capacity to do more and to do it better than any generation has. I am so tired, the last five years, of hearing about how your generation has not been challenged. About hearing that your generation is not up to what the greatest generation, the World War II generation, did. About how your generation did not have to face what we had to face. Your generation is wiser, more decent, and better prepared to deal with the world, than any that went before it.
And I mean that. Don’t let them categorize you. Don’t let us be defined by the images that I mentioned. They’re not you, they’re not America, and they’re not what this country can be.
But let’s not kid ourselves, it is a graphic and hideous reminder of the potential for abuse of power at its most base and horrific power. Reminding us that even, even in a country as great and honorable as ours, horrific things can happen. An absolute, stark reminder that the majesty of the law that encapsulates our values must always, always, always be the guide of this great nation.
But the images of Kim, the young girl, just as it was an image that in some measure changed America’s view of the war in my generation, similarly, make something positive out of the grim images that the world is judging us by now. The images from Abu Ghraib prison may, in some measure, be the turning point for your generation; your cry for reason and sanity in the war against terror. How we handle the situation now is no less important than how we handled the situation in 1968.
You are receiving your degrees in a time of extraordinary confusion and emerging self-doubt in American history. A time when the world is beginning to wonder who we are and who we stand for. We sent 135,000 American troops to Iraq as liberators, and I voted to do that, and now we are seen as occupiers. We were told that we didn’t need a large force and now there is talk of reinstating the draft, a prospect that neither you nor your parents want to face.
And not long ago, America was respected; we were the envy of the world. But your world is vastly different than even it was a short few years ago when you entered college and it is, without a doubt, far more complex than when I received a degree.
For now, we are the world’s only super-power, and during your generation we are learning how to wear that jacket. It is not an easy cloak to wear.
I know, and this is the one thing I ask you to take on faith, that neither optimism nor pessimism enables you to predict your future. But I also know, and I believe this as absolutely as anything else, that only a confident, optimistic attitude enables you to take a hand in shaping your future.
We didn’t understand that simple notion when I graduated any better than I suspect some of you do and we were sobered by what we could see ahead. For your generation and mine, foreign policy has intervened in our lives unlike the generation that preceded you or the one that preceded me. Foreign policy is a call for every American to look out the window, rather than in the mirror, as we have been doing for the last decade and a half. You see the world for what it is and what it’s become. What you see when you look out that window may be a terribly failed policy but a very real and ongoing war on terror does exist and is real.
Just as the Kennedy’s administration ‘best and the brightest’ made the decisions that escalated our involvement in Vietnam, so today the neo-conservative intellectuals, bright, patriotic, honorable men and women, the best and the brightest of this administration, made decisions to not take certain actions once we got to Iraq.
My point is this, my generation ultimately demanded that our best and brightest in our generation take a long, hard look at the validity of the policies that were handed to us. That we had to distinguish between the real threat of communism, between the Soviet threat in Europe and the false threat in Vietnam. We had to examine whether or not what we were told was true, that this monolithic communism was gobbling up the world and if the dominoes fell in South East Asia, surely, surely, we would be at risk. That was the policy arrived at by honorable, bright, and decent, patriotic women and men. But a policy that warranted examination.
So, too, must you ask, the best and the brightest among you, to distinguish between the threat of rogue states like Iraq and international terror and the use of weapons of mass destruction. The irony is, that a man of my generation foretold the dynamics that are being played out in your generation.
I urge you to look out the window. I urge you to learn as much as you can about the situation in the world and what America’s strategic responsibilities are. You will have to determine the real threats of terrorism from the false threats, just as we had to distinguish the real threats from communism from the false threats.
Let me tell you what I see with Iraq. We had to go into Iraq, not because Saddam was part of Al Qaeda, there was no evidence of that, not because he possessed nuclear weapons or because he posed an imminent threat to the United States, there was no evidence of that. The legitimate reason for going into Iraq, was he violated every single commitment he made and warranted being taken down. And the international community and us had a right to respond.
But the fact is, that we are in Iraq, and I voted for us to go there. But, first, principles have to be understood. We cannot want freedom for the Iraqi people more than they do, just as we could not want democracy for Vietnam more than they wanted it.
In Iraq, 65% of the Iraqi people want freedom and a government different than that exists in Iran and different than they had. But after being brutalized for three decades, they’ve learned to keep their heads down. We have to give them the security they need to raise their heads again. To be able to send their kid to the store, to be able to go to school, to be able to go to a mosque and know they’re safe.
It is clear that the new government that we are about to endorse is going to need the continued presence of foreign troops. It seems clear that just as the photograph of Kim made it hard for the Vietnamese to trust us, the photographs of Abu Ghraib have made it hard for modern Iraqis to be seen as cooperating with us.
So in my view, we must change the face of the occupation. We have three choices. We can stay the course with no change, keep the American forces in occupation and send a new ambassador, an eminently qualified diplomat named Negroponte, and hope for the best. Or, as some have suggested, and I disagree, we can declare the mission impossible and we can leave.
Or, we can change the course, engage the major powers in the world and their Arab neighbors in the solution. Now, cynics will tell you its too late to do that, but the fact is, the future is as dangerous for our European friends, for their Arab neighbors, and for Russia, and the ‘permanent five,’ if we fail in Iraq as it is for us. They have every reason to see peace succeed; they have every need for this not to fail.
Iraq needs to be secured in order for there to be free elections in December of 2005 and, right now, American forces, alone, lack the legitimacy that is needed to be able to cooperate with this new Iraqi government. So here’s, in my view, and I believe the President is likely to move in this direction, what we must do.
We must convene the major powers in the world in a summit and lead that summit of major powers to agree upon four important points. One, that the goal are free elections in 2005 and the means would be to move up the timetable for the elections in Iraq, to authorize a NATO-lead multinational force, to appoint a NATO high commissioner to be the referee between and among the warring factions, to speed up the training of Iraqi police and armed forces by accelerating European and American trained Arab leaders to train Iraqis, and, last but not least, we need to free, as the President is now doing, the bulk of the 8,000 prisoners being held at Abu Ghraib prison, and tear it to the ground.
And after we salt the ground on which they stood with a new edifice of a school or a hospital or a university, we have to hold those accountable who are responsible for the policy. Some people say that this would be too stark a departure, and, tantamount to us admitting to our mistakes, that it would be too costly politically.
But I would say to them, the war in Iraq and getting it right is bigger than either John Kerry or George Bush and I believe the President understands this. We live in Delaware. We know better than anyone else, when those giant transport planes, those C-5's fly from the Middle East at night, they’re carrying the dead, the dead American soldiers, who gave every measure of themselves for this nation. It’s about that last journey home, to the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base, about 45 minutes here.
It’s about those brave Americans, doing everything in their power to get it right, and we owe them no less than to get it right, for them, in Iraq.
Ladies and gentleman, in conclusion, I have to state, as difficult as things seem, I am optimistic, I am optimistic that we will get this right and that your generation will start the 21st century that will not allow for a repeat of the 20th century. That’s why two stanzas from a poem of my favorite Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, whose poem, “The Cure of Troy,” I think should become the anthem of our nation and this generation. He wrote, and I quote, “History says don’t hope on this side of the grave, but then, once in a lifetime, the long, ford, tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme, so hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge, believe that future shore is reachable form here, believe in miracles and cures and healing-wells, as I believe in you.” Thank you.
