Ten years ago, in cap and gown, I stood in this place to
receive an honorary degree - a happening which only compounded an
already heavy burden of guilt. I had always figured the first
degree you gave me was honorary.
That first degree was thirty-five years and a few months
ago.
Now, as far as you students are concerned, that makes it
definite I am not of your generation. There are those with
differing political views who would go even further and place
me as far back as the Ice Age—some even further to the time of
McKinley.
Some here today, however, can bear witness that thirty-
five years are like thirty-five minutes, so clear and fresh is
memory. No matter how much you students may want to believe
this, your imaginations are not quite up to it. you will just
have to wait and find out for yourselves. But you will find
out.
There is a tendency in today's world to put more than years
between us. Somehow, as humans, we have been stratified into a
horizontal society instead of vertical. Layers of humanity are
separated into age groups from preschool to those the social
thinkers refer to as senior citizens. And somehow we are losing
our ability to establish communications between layers. What is
even worse, there is a growing hostility between these layers.
It is an unnatural situation. Humanity is vertically
structured. The teenager will become the young married or
junior executive, and, in turn, the middle-aged and eventually
the senior citizen. Each one of us will take his faults and
virtues, his pluses and minuses, through the years, being at
all times the sum total of all he has experienced.
This separation into horizontal layers makes no sense at all.
What of this talk that no one over thirty understands the youth
of today? If this is true, then what happens when you reach
thirty? Do you suddenly join us and quit understanding those
who have not quite reached the magic age?
Each generation is critical of its predecessor. As the day
nears when classroom and playing field must give way to the
larger arena with its problems of inequality and human
misunderstanding, it is easy to look at those in that arena and
demand to know why the problems remain unsolved. We who
preceded you asked that question of those who preceded us and
another younger generation will ask it of you.
I hope there will be less justification for the question
when it is your turn to answer. What I am trying to say is that
no generation has failed completely, nor will yours succeed
completely.
But don't get me wrong. When the generation of which I am
a part leaves the stage, history will record that seldom has
any generation fought harder or paid a higher price for
freedom.
We have known three wars and now a fourth, a cataclysmic
worldwide depression that toppled governments and reshaped the
map. And, because we could not find the single cure-all for
man's inhumanity to man or the answer to human frailty, we have
downgraded our performance and confused you as well as
ourselves.
It is easy to point to the failures and talk of the mess
of our times, and even to promise we will do better. But for
the record, since we are the generation that exploded the
atomic bomb and brought a permanent terror to the world, we
also harnessed the atom for peaceful purposes. And some of
those peaceful purposes, in medicine and industrial power, have
brought man to the threshold of a fabulous era.
We have defeated polio and tuberculosis and a host of
plague diseases that held even more terror for mankind than the
threat of the bomb. It is a certainty that your generation and
ours will overlap in defeating cancer.
Point an accusing finger and list smog, water pollution,
poverty, civil rights, inequality of opportunity. We still seek
the answers, and, while many of us disagree as to the
solutions, we were the ones who faced up to the problems and
charged ourselves with finding the answers. No one in public
life fails to treat these problems.
This horizontal stratification has led to lateral
communication, and it is highly essential that we restore
vertical dialogue, if not an outright recognition of the
naturalness and rightness of a vertical structuring of society.
How well do young people understand those whose defect is
age thirty-plus? Can you possibly believe your fathers who knew
the savagery of World War II or your grandfathers who came of
age in the muddy trenches of the Great War could possibly have
an affection for war? That we would callously send our sons to
war?
Permit me here to build at least a footbridge between the
age groups of parent and child, remembering that bridges are
open to traffic both ways.
That fellow with the thickening waist and the thinning
hair who is sometimes unreasonable about your allowance or
letting you have the car... his life seems a little dull to you
now as he reports for his daily 9 to it chores, or looks
forward to lowering a golf handicap, or catching a fish no one
wants to eat.
I wish you could have known him a few years back on a
landing craft at Normandy or Tarawa or on a weekend pass in
Peoria. He was quite a guy. Winston Churchill said he was the
only man in the world who could laugh and fight at the same
time. General [George] Marshall called him our secret weapon.
He hated war more than he hated the enemy, but he did what had
to be done.
A few years after the end of World War II, I was in a
little pub in rural England. The motherly soul who was waiting
on trade figured out I was an American (for the life of me, I
don't know how). She began to reminisce. "During the war," she
said, "some of your chaps were stationed just across the road.
They used to come in here and have song-fests. They called me
Mom and my husband Pop. It was Christmas Eve and we were here
all alone when the door burst open and there they were with
presents for us." she paused for a tear or two and then said:
"Big strappin' lads they was from a place called 'Iowa'."
I know those over-thirty fellows probably don't tell it
very well so that you can see them as they were then, but they
all knew what it was like to dream, to say good-bye to a girl
and wonder when, if ever, they would see her again. They missed
a world that let things like that happen, and swore they would
do better when they got back and were running the show.
They came back from war and created an organization to
outlaw war, and we have not known a single minute's peace
since. The dream was a good dream, no effort was spared and we
continue to pour out our treasure to make the dream come true.
Proving again our vertical structures this problem will be
yours as well as ours to solve.
It wasn't that we faltered or lacked in willingness. There
are organizational difficulties that could not have been
foreseen. New and emerging nations with neither power nor
responsibility for controlling world forces have a
disproportionate voice in world councils. A two-thirds majority
can be mustered among a half hundred nations who represent less
than 10 percent of the world's population.
Are the problems of urban ghettoes and poverty the result
of selfishness on our part or indifference to suffering? No
people in all the history of mankind have shared so widely its
material resources.
We taxed ourselves more heavily and extended aid at home
and abroad. And when the problems grew, we planned more and
passed more legislation to add to the scores of programs, until
today, they are listed in government catalogues of hundreds of
pages. We who are called materialist have tried to solve human
problems with material means. We have forgotten man's spiritual
heritage; we have placed security above freedom and confused
the citizen's responsibility to society with society's
responsibility to the individual.
We have to re-study some of our social legislation,
legislation that meant well, but has failed in its goals or has
created greater problems than the ones it was meant to cure.
We have to re-examine our individual goals and aims.
What do we want for ourselves and our children? Is it enough to
have material things? Aren't liberty and morality and integrity
and high principles and a sense of responsibility more
important?
The world's truly great thinkers have not pointed us
toward materialism; they have dealt with the great truths and
with the high questions of right and wrong, of morality and of
integrity.
They have dealt with the question of man, not the
acquisition of things. And when civilizations have disregarded
their findings, when they have turned to the things of the
flesh, they have disappeared.
You are concerned with us and what seems to be hypocrisy
and lack of purpose on our part. And we in turn are concerned
about you, seeing a rising spirit of unrest, aimlessness, and
drifting, a feeling of rebellion without a real cause that
results sometimes in meaningless but violent actions. Now, let
me make it plain. I am aware that all of you are unfairly
suspect because of a very small percentage of dissidents.
Nevertheless, you do seek a purpose and a meaning to life,
and apparently we have failed to give it to you. But, again,
our failure was not one of bad intent.
We are the classic example of giving to you what we never
had—from TV to wheels and dental care to Little League. But I
am afraid we shortchanged you on responsibilities or the right
to earn for yourselves.
All too often, because we had to earn, we wanted to give.
our motives have been laudable, but our judgment has been bad.
"No" was either a dirty word or dropped from our vocabulary.
Some time ago in Newport, California, a row of luxurious
oceanfront homes were threatened by an abnormally high tide and
heavy surf. All through the day and night, volunteers worked,
piling sandbags, in an effort to save these homes. Local TV
stations, aware of the drama, covered the struggle. It was
about 2 A.M. when one newscaster grabbed a young fellow in his
teens, attired only in wet trunks. He had been working all day
and night—one of several hundred of his age group. No, he did
not live in one of the homes they were trying to save, and,
yes, he was cold and tired. The newscaster inevitably got
around to why. The answer was so poignant, such an indictment
of so many of us, it should be on a billboard across the
nation. He said: "Well, I guess it's the first time we've ever
felt like we were needed."
You are needed; we need your courage, your idealism, your
new and untried viewpoint. You know more than we did at your
age; you are brighter, better informed, even healthier. And
because human kind is vertically structured, we can take a
little credit for that. But, you want a purpose, a cause, a
banner to follow, and we owe you that.
A few years ago, a national magazine did a series of
articles by prominent people including a president, a vice-
president, and distinguished statesmen. Each wrote his idea of
what was our national purpose. Somehow, nothing very exciting or
profound resulted from these articles. I have always felt it
was because they tried to invent something we already have and
have had for two hundred years. Our national purpose is to
unleash the full talent and genius of the individual, not to
create mass movements with the citizenry subjecting themselves
to the whims of the state. Here, as nowhere in the world, we
are established to provide the ultimate in individual freedom
consistent with law and order.
Today, we dedicate this library because Wesley and Clinton
Melick have thought not in horizontal lines of just their
associates in time. you want a purpose, something to believe
in? You might try resolving that you will contribute something
to generations unborn—a handhold above your own achievement so
that another generation can climb higher and achieve more.
This library is more than a beautiful and functional
building. It is first and foremost a repository of knowledge
and culture. More facts will be available in this one library
than were available in all the libraries of the world a hundred
years ago.
That shouldn't surprise you.
Man's knowledge has increased at such a rapid rate since
the turn of the century that any book of facts written then
would be obsolete now, both in terms of what we know to be
true and also what we know to be true no longer.
But a library is more than just a place to go for facts. A
library is also a place to go for wisdom. And the purpose of an
educational institution is to teach not only knowledge, but
also wisdom.
Someone once said that people who want to understand
democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle
and more time on buses and subways.
In a way, that may be true.
But to understand democracy is not necessarily to solve
its problems.
And I would venture to say Aristotle, and those others
whom you will find not in the buses and subways, but instead in
this building here, will give you more answers and more clues
to the solutions of our problems than you are likely to find on
the buses and subways.
Maybe the best answer is to be found in both, but do not
let the library go to waste because you are awaiting the
completion of Eureka's first subway.
Now, when I suggest that we turn to books, to the
accumulated knowledge of the past, I am not suggesting that we
turn back the clock or retreat into some dim yesterday that we
remember only with nostalgia, if at all. But we must learn from
yesterday to have a better tomorrow.
We are beset by problems in a complex world; we are
confused by those who tell us only new and untried ways offer
hope. The answers to all the problems of mankind will be found
in this building by those who have the desire to find them and
perception enough to recognize them.
There will be the knowledge of Aristotle, Plato, and
Socrates, and from the vantage point of history, their
mistakes. We can look back and see where pure democracy became
as dictatorial as a sultan and majority rule without protection
for the minority became mob rule.
One of mankind's problems is that we keep repeating the
same errors. For every generation some place, two plus two has
added up to three, or in another place, five—four seems to
elude some of us. This has happened in my generation and I
predict, without smugness, it will happen to yours.
But, these two men here today have given something almost
beyond comprehension.
Do you doubt the answers can be found here? From the
eleventh century, Maimonides, Hebrew philosopher and physician,
will give you the eight steps in helping the needy to help
themselves.
Can you name one problem that would not be solved if we
had simply followed the teachings of the man from Galilee? We
can redirect our nation's course into the paths of freedom and
morality and high principle.
And, in so directing it, we can build better lives for
ourselves and our children and a better nation for those who
come after us, or we can ignore history and go the way of
Greece and Rome.
I think that this is the significance of this library. The
fact that we can use it to rechart our course, not into the
great unknown, but onto paths that are clear and which, if
followed, can show us how to cope with the new problems that
always confront each generation and can lead us, as a people,
on to continued greatness.
There were many who had a hand in this, but they would be
the first to say it happened because of you, Woes and Clint
Melick. On behalf of all of us who knew Eureka and those still
to come, we thank you. Eureka means "We have found a way of
life." you have made the search much easier.
It must be evident to most of you that only a thin wall of
wavering willpower stands between you and an engulfing flood of
nostalgia.