2003 Commencement Address
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DAVID
HALBERSTAM
TULANE UNIVERSITY
MAY 17, 2003
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Fellow classmates:
At my own college graduation a mere 48 years
ago, our speaker was Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor
of West Germany. It was his first trip to America.
He had clearly wanted to come here for a very
long time. It was very hot and he was very old--his
nickname was der Alte, the old man--and he had
a lot to say and he spoke very slowly. In fact,
he spoke very slowly in German. In addition his
words had to be translated into English and the
translator obviously enjoyed his moment in the
limelight and translated at what I would call
a languorous pace. So I will be brief--20 minutes,
I hope and with luck there will be no need for
President Cowen to translate into English.
For those of you who have
not exactly prospered academically let me give
you a second bit of good news--you are being
addressed by someone who was in the bottom
half of his class at Harvard. Or, in fact,
if you want to be didactic about it, the bottom
third of his class. So there is life after
college, I'm proof of it. And so, might I add
was Henry Ford II, the grandson of the founder
of the Ford Motor Company, who went off to
Yale in the late Thirties where he proved to
be a devoted playboy but regrettably, an indifferent
student. In time with a critical paper due in
an English course, he paid a classmate to write
the paper for him, was caught in the act, and
was unceremoniously bounced from Yale without
his degree. Still the future was not that bleak
for him, he managed to get a job after college--with
the Ford Motor Company of course. He was wise
enough not to change his name, and he soon rose
to the top, becoming in almost record time, the
President of the company, and thereby, one of
the most powerful and richest industrialists
in the country. Much later, a somewhat rueful
Yale, always on the lookout for a new building
or two--the Henry Ford School of Business Administration,
perhaps--invited him back for an honorary degree.
That day Henry Ford stood up, held up his beautifully
written speech, looked at the assembled Yale
officials, waved the speech in front of them
and said, "And I didn't write this one either."
I wrote this one. A graduation speech is a part
of the rites of passage--the platitudes of June,
Emily Dickinson once called them. As a commencement
speaker I am supposed to do what your parents,
your most cherished faculty members and other
people crucial to your lives have failed to do
in the previous 22 years, set you on a course
of happiness and prosperity and away from a life
of indolence and crime. All in under 20 minutes.
So consider yourself warned.
What an extraordinary moment for you, receiving
your degrees so close to the start of a new century,
and the new millennium--the country as well as
you starting out with a clean slate. I realize
that many of you are a little uneasy about the
immediate future, that it seems a bit more cloudy
than the future as experienced by so many recent
graduating classes--the economy is soft today,
the jobs you might want seem to be frozen, people
are not returning phone calls, the graduate schools
a bit overloaded; meanwhile we are in the midst
of at least one war, an ongoing war with terrorism,
and engaged in a secondary war, in the Middle
East, which may turn out to be more complicated
and draining than some of its architects expected.
But I would ask you today not to be fearful--we
are not a fearful nation, we have never been
one, and the members of our own families who
settled in this country often after the most
difficult and arduous of journeys were most assuredly
not fearful people. Instead I want you to look
forward to the essentially rich future which
lies ahead of you, the blessed future which goes
with the great good fortune of being a college
educated citizen of this bountiful and most dynamic
country.
The truth today, which I suspect you already
know, is that you are among the fortunate of
the world. Let me correct that--the very fortunate
of the world.You have been given a priceless
education at an exciting time in the most open
society in the world at the moment when an entirely
new kind of economy beckons, and as such you
are uniquely advantaged. An education like yours
from a school as distinguished as Tulane sets
you apart not merely from most of your fellow
Americans, but from most of the people on this
planet. You, the young men and women of the dot
com and cell phone and E-mail age, live at a
time when education more than ever before is
an economic advantage, when brains rather than
muscularity drive the economy. America, the country
which most of you are fortunate enough to inhabit,
is not merely a military superpower, and a political
superpower, and an economic superpower, but perhaps
at this moment, most critical of all, it is an
educational superpower. This more than anything
else may be the source of our strength in the
coming century, the one quality which makes our
national strength so renewable, and makes us
so much a beacon to the ambitious of the rest
of the world--America, a special place where
ordinary people can transform themselves by dint
of education and their own innate energy into
extraordinary people. Sometimes in America we
take our good fortune, our chance to ascend to
the good life for granted.Yet I believe what
sets us apart from other societies is the fact
that for all our flaws and failures and myriad
contradictions, we in America, more than any
other society, give ordinary citizens a chance
to reach their fullest potential.
I speak of more than economic advantage of course,
for you have been part of a rare academic community
where the intellectual process is valued not
just for what it can do for you economically,
but as an end in itself. Learning is not just
a tool to bring you a better income; learning
is an ongoing, never ending process designed
to bring you a fuller and richer life, to help
you understand the people around you, the world
around you, the events around you--and to help
you understand among other complex organisms,
yourself.
You are fortunate enough
to live in an affluent, blessed society, not
merely the strongest but the freest society
in the world. In this country as in no other
that I know of, ordinary people have the right
to reinvent themselves to become the person
of their dreams, and not to live as prisoners
of a more stratified, more hierarchical past.
We have the right to choose: to choose if we
so want, any profession, any venue to live
and work in, any name. As much as anything
else this is what separates us from the old
world, the old world across the Atlantic and
the old world across the Pacific, where people
often seemed to be doomed to a fate and a status
determined even before their birth. We have
the words of the great physicist I. I. Rabi
to remind us of that special freedom, of the
privilege which comes with choice. When he
received the Nobel Prize, Rabi was asked by
a journalist what he thought: "I think," he said, "that
if I had lived in the old country I would have
been a tailor."
I do not think the stunning success of this
society took place by happenstance. Both by chance--and
by choice--I have become something of a historian
of the second half of the twentieth century.
I graduated from high school in 1951, and from
college in 1955, and my professional career,
through the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam,
took me through the stormiest years of much of
the last 50 years. And if there is one great
truth which categorizes that period in America
it is that this nation has systematically become
more and more inclusionary in race, gender and
ethnicity--that we have made a constant and increasingly
successful effort to make the playing field as
level as possible, and to open doors once firmly
closed to so many.
As they announced that we were coming into Louis
Armstrong Airport yesterday, an image came from
the computer of my brain of the first time I
met Louis Armstrong--he wasn't always an airport.
For a time he was the most joyous and distinguished
of Americans, probably the American best known
and most loved outside our shores. In 1958, as
a young reporter, I decided to do a magazine
piece on him and traveled with him and his band
from Atlanta to Nashville where he was going
to play. Now of course in those days he could
not stop at the highway roadside for lunch--so
lunch was packed. And when he, this most distinguished
of Americans, needed so to speak, to use the
facilities, the bus driver looked for particularly
thick foliage and the bus stopped. This was how
we treated perhaps our most famous and beloved
citizen. We may be nostalgic about a past that
we can now barely recognize, but we ought to
be aware that the present is infinitely richer
and more productive for almost all of us. This
is for all the difficulties and dangers a wonderful
time to be young and American--never have there
been so many wonderful choices before you, if
you manage to make the right calls.
The truth is, not surprisingly, that this effort
to be inclusionary has made us in all ways a
better, fairer and stronger society. And as for
the economy being weakened by being more inclusionary,
I should mention to you that the year that I
graduated from high school, 1951, the Dow stood
at 250. Yes, that's right, 250.
And now on to the mandatory part of the speech--words
of direction to the young from the old--the requisite
geezer wisdom. In the few minutes that remain
to us I would like to talk briefly about the
uses of the uncommon degree of personal freedom
which we celebrate today. For your education
greatly adds to one of the most elemental American
rights--one which we often take for granted,
but which does not so readily exist elsewhere--the
freedom to make choices in life, a freedom often
missing for those less privileged educationally.
So what do you do with all that freedom? Freedom
after all, does not come without burden and without
responsibility--for if we make the wrong choices,
we have no one to blame save ourselves. We cannot
rant against an authoritarian government which
deprived us of our rightful possibilities.
So how do we handle the
burden of being responsible for our own destinies?
For you are at the threshold of one of the
most important choices that most of you will
make in your lives, the choice of your careers.
We have after all in this country an inalienable
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Notice that wording, for we are not guaranteed
happiness--merely the pursuit of it. Notice,
as well, that the wise people who authored
that phrase did not say "pursuit
of wealth," for the pursuit of happiness
and pursuit of wealth are by no means the same
thing, nor do they by any stretch of the imagination
generate the same inner sense of contentment
and personal validity.
This is a critical decision for you. For other
than the choice of a lifetime partner, nothing
determines happiness so much as choosing the
right kind of work. It is a choice about what
is good for you, not what is good for others
whom you greatly respect--your parents, an admired
professor, your friends, a significant other--whom
you suspect may be dazzled by a greater or loftier
choice of profession. The choice is not about
what makes them happy, but about what makes you
happy. Not what seems to show that you are successful
by the exterior standards of the society. Not
what brings you the biggest salary--particularly
in the beginning when those things seem so important--and
the biggest house, or the greatest respect from
Wall Street, but what makes you feel complete
and happy and makes you feel, for this is no
small thing, like a part of something larger
than yourself, a part of the community.
So the choices for you
out there are not simple. It is, for example,
possible to be immensely successful in your
chosen field, and yet in some curious way to
fail at life, to get to the top and yet fail
to enrich yourself. A few years ago my colleague
Russell Baker, the distinguished New York Times
columnist and humorist, was asked by the Times
in-house magazine to write a piece about a
colleague who had just been promoted to a powerful
new position. Baker went to see his own great
mentor, James Reston, then the Times bureau
chief. He mentioned the colleague's name to
Reston. "Tell me about his life," Baker
asked Reston. "That's not a life--that's
a career," Reston said, and he said it with
great disdain. He meant that the colleague had
at once done everything right, but had somehow
missed the point of what he had done; he had
covered the requisite big stories, had made the
front page the requisite number of times, but
he had in some way failed in the elemental human
involvement so necessary for real pleasure in
his career. He won all the prizes save the real
ones, the friendships and all the fun that are
at the core of what we do.
So how can you tell the difference between a
life and a career, between the authentic and
the inauthentic? How do you seek out a life when
so many others tell you to have a career?
There is no sure plan to it. There is no clear
path for any of us, you cannot simply sit down
upon graduation and chart your career, come up
with some fool-proof mathematical graph, and
have it work out on schedule: such and such a
title and salary by 30, an even bigger title
and salary by 35. It doesn't quite work out that
way. Let me suggest that by now you should know
something about your inner self, what is fun,
what you're good at, and what makes you feel
good about yourself. And I am suggesting as well
that that often has very little to do with the
society's external reward system.
Let me give you an illustration.
I recently went back to the college from which
I graduated and visited the undergraduate newspaper,
and I visited with a few of the graduating
student editors. This was back a few years
ago in that golden era when all kinds of recruiters
were knocking on doors to find bright young
men and women and to pay them too much money
to go to work immediately after college. And
I found that a number of young editors had
already signed up to go to work for a consulting
firm which was going to pay them roughly $85,000
a year, about three times the beginning salary
for reporters. Leaving aside the bizarre question
of why anyone 22 or 23 years old should be
going around consulting and giving advice about
anything to anyone else, I had a sense that
they did not particularly want to consult,
but this was the best offer available, and
seemed to connect them to something from which
I and most of my generation were luckily spared,
the dreaded fast track. And I who had headed
off after my own graduation to the smallest
daily newspaper in the state of Mississippi for
the grand total of $46 a week asked them, "Did
it ever occur to you that the salary you are
being offered reflects the fact that this is
a choice you might not make were it not for the
size of the salary? And that in some way that
you do not yet entirely comprehend, you are being
manipulated." So perhaps there is a rule
or law of some sort here--if you are at too young
an age being offered too heady or large a reward,
perhaps it is not being offered with your best
long term interest in mind.
Let me make a suggestion based on the accumulated
wisdom of my 48 years in the field--it did not
necessarily do those young people a great deal
of good in recent years when the economy seemed
to be so golden to have people rushing in to
compete for them in law or business or consulting,
when success seemed such a guarantee, and so
immediate, just one more easy step, everything
plotted and lined up for you on the day after
graduation. The truth is, mostly in life we stumble
towards success; more often than not we are successful
only after we have failed. If things come up
too easily we rarely appreciate them--the things
we truly appreciate are more often than not,
hard won. It's all right today to be a little
unsure of the future, it's all right to take
a job a little different from the one you expected,
or to have to wait a bit on getting into graduate
school-- you may learn about yourself and what's
good for you in the long run this way.
So try and use your lives wisely, and try and
make choices--even in your professional lives--that
are of the heart. Do not be too readily caught
in the material snare of this society. If you
want to be a botanist, poet, actor, teacher or
nurse, if that is what your heart tells you to
do, do not go to law school or some other graduate
school on the theory that it is a great ticket,
and that it will get you to a higher level in
the society, that you'll make some money for
a while, and then you can go on and do the things
that you really wanted to do in the first place.
It doesn't work that way. You will, I suspect,
find it surprisingly hard to escape the life
you have chosen and go back to the career you
originally intended. For you will almost surely
become a prisoner of a lifestyle that you did
not particularly seek out in the first place:
an ever larger house, a fancier car, a more luxurious
vacation.
Do not be afraid to make some mistakes when
you are young. Do not be afraid to try and fail
early in your life. We often stumble towards
the things we will end up doing best; do not
be afraid to take chances when you are young,
to choose the unconventional over the conventional.
Often it is experience in the unconventional
which prepares you best for the conventional.
Be aware that it's all right to make mistakes,
and it is all right to try at something and fail.
The price of failure when you are young is much
lower than when you are older. I suspect that
you in the audience may look at us upon the stage
and see people who seem like we have always succeeded,
men and women who have led professionally flawless
lives. Would that it were true. What you do not
see is our own anxieties, not just when we were
your age, but throughout our careers, when again
and again--in our own minds--we seemed to be
on the edge of some new failure.
You do not see me, at the moment a few days
short of my 22nd birthday when the editor of
that small daily in Mississippi came to me and
told me it was time for me to leave, that in
fact he would pay me for that last day and that
he wanted me to be gone from the office and from
town by the next morning. He had already hired
my successor who was scheduled to show up the
next afternoon and he did not think it a good
idea if we overlapped. Fired as it were from
the smallest daily in Mississippi after less
than a year. What an auspicious start to a career!
In all things in life,
choose your conscience, and trust your instincts
and lead your lives without regrets. It's simply
easier that way. I mention that because life,
under the best circumstances, even if you're
lucky, as I have been, to choose the right
profession, is very hard. First you have to
choose the right profession--and then you have
to work hard for the rest of your lives to
sustain yourself in this choice which you happen
to love. As the noted philosopher, basketball
player and sports commentator, Julius Erving--Dr.
J--once said, "Being a professional is doing
the things you love to do on the days when you
don't feel like doing them."
So I congratulate you, my classmates. I ask
you to choose wisely in the days ahead, trust
your heart, don't worry if it does seem as if
for the time being you're not on the fast track--after
all sometimes the slow track is the rich track--and
try and live happy and full lives. Thank you
very much for having me here and letting me share
this day of celebration with you. |