Great American Commencement Speech
Wattenberg, Ben J.
Ben J. Wattenberg Great American Commencement Speech •• (The college commencement address, like the obituary, is a curiously neglected art form that could be of great service to the Republic....
...Maybe we will witness the slow, almost invisible, erosion of rights, freedoms, and liberties that we have struggled to gain over centuries...
...So what...
...Would it really matter to us if the freedom of Europeans and Israelis, and Japanese and others, were eroded...
...In the course of setting up a freedom coalition, we managed to get allied with some nations that were certainly not bastions of human liberty...
...18 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...
...And the premium is not only the number of dollars in the defense budget, although that is very important...
...Then perhaps I think it willbe useful to ask what has changed—and what hasn't changed—and what we might all do next...
...Ask the Israelis...
...There are no Ralph Naders in the Soviet Union...
...Too much that is speculative...
...As in So what if Communists in Portugal, having lost an election, are taking over the non-Communist press and all the political parties...
...Moreover, we believed then that the United States had played, and wasplaying, a major role in the pursuit of human liberty both in America and abroad...
...Is the price of the insurance premium relatively higher than it was twenty years ago...
...We must have both—we can have a decent, humane America, and we can pay the premium for human freedom...
...It was a generation that heard one President say, "We will pay any price, bear any burden...
...A lot has happened since John Kennedy's voice snapped out over the snow of Washington in January 1961...
...If such opportunity was not available to all, well, we were working on that—the Supreme Court was on our side and the Greensboro sit-in, the Birmingham bus boycott, Selma, and freedom rides were on their way...
...But in the real world, when the answer is "maybe," and the possible outcome is catastrophe, people have to act as if the answer is "yes...
...Those are not easy questions: There were too many "maybes" and "possiblys" in that list of answers...
...Maybe...
...Yes...
...Because the roots of this debate go back to the 1950s, I thought I might begin this morning by briefly describing how my graduating class looked at its world, back in 1955...
...They even sent their children to college...
...The Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, Assassinations, Riots, War in Vietnam, Turbulence on Campus, Withdrawal from Vietnam, Watergate, Attica, Impeachment Proceedings, an Oil Embargo, Inflation, Recession, and Collapse in Vietnam...
...And in our view the good16 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 ness and badness was not measured by loyalty to any specific economic system...
...That tradition deserves to be, first, understood, and second, protected...
...It seems like twenty years ago—in fact it was twenty years ago—that I was sitting in the middle, and not in front of this commencement tent...
...It led to a flawed policy, as all human policies are flawed...
...let's take care of pollution and population...
...The is the principle endorsed by the heads of families concerned with their health and the well-being of their loved ones, it is the principle endorsed by an automobile owner concerned about a possible car wreck...
...It dealt with the origins and development of Western Civilization...
...Yet, somehow, Western Civilization had limped ahead on a road that seemed to lead toward further expansion of liberty...
...These societies, and their grim desolation of the human spirit, have since been described, as never before, in the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...To gain a sense of the new view, consider for a moment some of the more recent catch-phrases: "America Is Not the World's Policeman...
...The 1950s were simpler days...
...Now, a great debate is forming in Washington and around the nation about what America's new role in the world ought to be...
...And we noted, almost as a bonus, that in Athens, in Shakespearean England, and in the modern world, creative explosions have gone hand in hand with societies that honor liberty, to the benefit of us all...
...Is power still—as it has always been—the bottom line of international relationships...
...We also managed to ignore much of what is today called the Third World...
...and then heard another President, a Texan, deliver a speech that ended with the words "we shall overcome...
...It was a generation that put people on the moon, a feat that will be remembered when Watergate, Vietnam, and recession are distant memories...
...There is an impulse, a powerful and The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 17 surely decent impulse, to say: let's solve our problems at home first, let's get people back to work, let's take care of our cities, our minorities, our elderly...
...Let us welcome, in the nicest and best sense of the phrase, a real greening of America...
...Of course one of the reasons we weren't shocked was that President Kennedy, unlike some politicians that followed him, had a habit of finishing sentences...
...That, after all, is the principle behind the industry we call "insurance...
...Around the world we made common cause with a network of allies who avowed their concern with freedom...
...It is not a question of either-or...
...Come Home America" (the refrain of George McGovern's 1972 acceptance speech...
...Thus, the debate is joined...
...Probably...
...What happens if Americans stop paying the premium...
...But many human situations are governed by the principle of We Don't Know What Happens Next...
...They buy insurance, they pay the premium...
...As in So what if the Khmer Rouge has sent 3 million souls, includingwomen and children, the elderly and the infirm, on a forced march through the wilderness of rural Cambodia...
...Are other free nations threatened by the strength of our adversaries...
...Maybe...
...The principle is: we don't know what happens next—so let's buy an insurance policy and pay the insurance premium...
...And the resolution of this great debate may well determine the way you in the Class of 1975 will live the next fifty or sixty years of your lives...
...From our readings we came to see that the heart and soul of our long Western tradition had something to do with the growth of human freedom...
...So, then, the question is this: Must America continue to buy insurance—insurance in the form of power, and insurance in the form of national will—in order to assure the survival of liberty...
...There was always plenty of doubt and ambiguity in the hearts of most cold warriors...
...It would be simpler if I could stand here and say that "falling dominoes in Southeast Asia have undermined America's credibility as a world power...
...Of course, it wasn't that plain and good...
...The cost, actually, is relatively less, six percent of the gross national product versus about eight percent a generation ago...
...With that simple, and maybe simpleminded background, you might be able to understand why most of my classmates were not shocked when, half a dozen years after our graduation, John F. Kennedy delivered the rallying cry of the Cold War...
...President Kennedy, it has been recalled, said that America "would pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, and oppose any foe...
...We saw that the road of human liberty had not been an easy one or a steady one: progress stopped, tyrants conquered, civilizations rose and fell...
...Maybe all of Europe, dispirited and afraid, will come to resemble Finland, technically free, but actually a pet in a cage...
...I hope, and I expect, that your class will do it better than mine did...
...That particular sentence, in its entirety, went like this: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe—in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty...
...And on both sides, honorable and intelligent people searching desperately for a new global policy, a policy that will shape the lives of young Americans in years to come, a policy that says no more Vietnams but at the same time honors human freedom, a policy that can answer the question: So what...
...The resolution of the great debate, then, does not really depend upon any of us allegedly smart thinkers down in Washington...
...And consider finally that haunting recent question—"So What...
...It is a view that is more appealing and familiar to the Class of 1975 than to the Class of 1955...
...On the other, a haunting question, after a decade of despair—So what...
...At Hobart, one of the required courses involved a sequence of thirty credit hours of classes stretching over four semesters...
...Ben J. Wattenberg Great American Commencement Speech •• (The college commencement address, like the obituary, is a curiously neglected art form that could be of great service to the Republic...
...As in So what if the Pentagon is correct and the Soviet Union is really becoming the most powerful nation in the world...
...It did not really involve capitalism or communism or socialism...
...Maybe nothirg happens when a totalitarian power becomes the strongest military force on earth...
...No, the measure of goodness and badness concerned freedom and the lack of it...
...Are these unfree nations bent on expansion...
...Maybe, if the Class of 1975 does not respond, does not resolve to pay the premium, does not make the difficult decisions, maybe twenty years from now a commencement speaker at Hobart will be talking to another graduating class that has learned about a new phase in the story of Western Civilization—a phase of history that notes a ,greening of America, notes an America that has failed to pay the premium, and features America's role as the last, big, green, fallen domino...
...There were, after all, powerful dictatorships that had done away with freedom of speech, freedom of personal mobility, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, freedom to form political opposition...
...A full generation has passed since my own graduation from Hobart, and in the meantime the world has changed, in ways that have shaken all of our lives...
...And by those lights, the policy was seen to be working rather well...
...Our views were subsequently shorthanded into a simple formulation: We were the good guys...
...It would be simpler if I could stand here and say "If the Soviet Union becomes the most powerful military nation in the history of the world, the traditions of human liberty will be eroded all over the world...
...On one hand, a quest to preserve and extend human liberty...
...I wish I knew the answer...
...Were we ever sure of these answers, even a generation ago...
...Are we sure of any of these answers...
...Maybe...
...And maybe something...
...but I don't know for sure that that is so either...
...I don't underestimate the decency of that impulse...
...At home, we had created a remarkable society where tens of millions of immigrants had been able to stand tall and look any man in the eye—as equals...
...A tough question...
...In fact, we can't have either unless we have both...
...Our studies taught us that the essence of modern Western Civilization involved more than just the comforts of suburbia...
...These nations—many of them partners of ours in the traditions of Western Civilization—felt their liberty threatened by forces seen to be hostile to the very notions of human liberty...
...It is a world-view that shapes the terms of the great debate now beginning in America...
...Too much that is very tentative...
...Political power in this nation in the years to come will rest with the Class of 1975, and with your brothers and sisters...
...With these events and conditions, there was born a new sort of American view of the world and our role in it...
...Is freedom still threatened around the world...
...In the course of making these decisions I hope your class will remember that this last generation brought forth not only Vietnam and Watergate, but also: the greatest worldwide economic boom in all history, across all continents for all races...
...The answer, I think, is Probably...
...Properly concocted, it has a rhetorical structure that admits far more than pious platitudes, and we invite you to consider its promise by reflecting on the following example...
...and an agriculturaltechnology that has fed billions of people —not well enough, but better than ever before...
...Are there still powerful nations that deny their citizens elementary rights of migration, expression, opposition...
...And there were bad guys around...
...The Arrogance of Power...
...Will we keep paying the premiums...
...The decision is yours, not mine...
...Maybe nothing...
...A free American fortress in a totalitarian world is both an unlikely and unpleasant future...
...Unfortunately—Probably...
...The colleges had a strange custom then: it was called the required course...
...And the answer to that question, it seems to me, brings us to another question, a question asked at the beginning of this talk: What has changed in the world situation from 1955 to 1975...
...Wattenberg, Hobart College '55, delivered this address at his alma mater and its sister college, William Smith, on June 1, 1975...
...And that I would suggest is the hinge of the great debate: What is the pature of the premium—and will we pay it...
...Are they potentially expansionist if the United States is weak...
...Above all, for all the problems, for all the mistakes, for all the miscalculations, it was a generation that has preserved, for the time being, the fragile tradition of human liberty in the Western world...
...For the demographics of this country are obvious...
...A defense budget of $75 billion in a nation that believes in its purposes, will provide more defense than a $150 billion budget in a nation that says "So what...
...American soldiers have died in faraway jungles, students have revolted, the price of gasoline has skyrocketed, and a President has resigned...
...Woodward and Bernstein file stories from Washington, not Peking...
...I question only the equation...
...We Must Reorder Priorities...
...but I don't know for sure that that is so...
...It was a generation that saw the first Catholic in the White House and the first black mayors of white cities...
...But at the root of it all was an effort to preserve a fragile Western tradition of freedom...
...a medical technology that has cured and prevented some of the world's crippling and fatal diseases...
...Potentially, Probably...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
