Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I think Winston Churchill said the only reason people give a standing ovation is they desperately seek an excuse to shift their underwear. (Laughter.) So certainly before I’ve opened my mouth, that’s true. (Laughter.)
Anyway, President Salovey and faculty members, parents, siblings who came here under thefalse impression there would be free food (laughter); Handsome Dan, wherever you are,probably at some fire hydrant somewhere (laughter); members of the 2019 NCAA championmen’s ice hockey team (cheers and applause); distinguished guests and graduates,graduates of the Class of 2019, I really am privileged to be able to be here and share thecelebration of this day with you, especially 48 years after standing up right here as a veryintimidated senior wondering what I was going to say.
You are graduating today as the most diverse class in Yale’s long history. Or as they call it inthe NBA, Donald Sterling’s worst nightmare. (Laughter and applause.)
Nia and Josh: Thank you for such a generous introduction. What Josh didn’t mention is that heinterned for me at the State Department last summer. (Cheers and applause.) Well, hold on aminute now. (Laughter.) I learned that he’s not afraid to talk truth to power, or semi-truth. (Laughter.) On his last day he walked up to me at the State Department and he was brutallyhonest. He said, “Mr. Secretary, JE sucks.” (Laughter and cheers.)
No, actually, on the last day at the State Department, he asked if I would come here today anddeliver a message his classmates really needed to hear. So here it goes: Jarred Phillips, you stillowe Josh money from that road trip last fall. (Laughter and applause.)
I have to tell you, it is really fun for me to be back here on the Old Campus. I’m accompaniedby a classmate of mine. We were on the soccer team together. We had a lot of fun. He served asambassador to Italy recently, David Thorne. And my daughter Vanessa graduated in the Classof 1999, so I know what a proud moment this is for your parents. But my friends, the test willbe if they still feel this way next May if you live at home. (Laughter.)
Now, I’m really happy you made it back from Myrtle Beach. (Cheers and applause.) As if youhadn’t already logged enough keg time at “Woads”. (Cheers.) Just remember, just remember: 4.0 is a really good GPA, but it’s a lousy blood-alcohol level. (Laughter.)
I love the hats. We didn’t have the hats when I was here. I love the hats. They are outrageous.They’re spectacular. This may well be the only event that Pharrell could crash and gounnoticed. (Laughter and applause.)
I’ve been looking around. I’ve seen a couple of Red Sox, a few Red Sox hats out there. (Cheers.)I’ve also seen a few of those dreaded interlocking N’s and Y’s. (Cheers.) But that’s okay: I saiddiversity is important. (Laughter.) It’s also an easy way for me to tell who roots for theYankees and who’s graduating with distinction. (Laughter and cheers.)
So here’s the deal, here’s the deal: I went online and I learned in the Yale Daily comments thatI wasn’t everyone’s first choice to be up here. (Laughter.)
When Yale announced that I’d be speaking, someone actually wrote, “I hope they give outFive-Hour Energy to help everyone stay awake.” (Laughter.) Well don’t worry folks: I promisenot to be one minute over four hours. (Laughter.)
Someone else wrote I haven’t “screwed up badly as Secretary of State ... yet.” (Laughter.)Well, all I can say is, stay tuned. (Laughter.)
But my favorite comment was this: “I’m really proud that a Yalie is Secretary of State.” Ishould have stopped reading right there because he or she went on to write, “but he is buttugly.” (Laughter.) So there go my dreams of being on “Yale’s 50 most beautiful” list. (Cheersand applause.)
It really is a privilege for me to share this celebration with you, though I’m forewarned that noone remembers who delivers their graduation speech. All I really remember about our speakerin 1966 is that he was eloquent, insightful, really good looking. (Laughter.) Anyway, onething I promise you, one thing I promise you: I will stay away from the tired cliches ofcommencement, things like “be yourself,” “do what makes you happy,” “don’t use the laundryroom in Saybrook”. (Cheers and applause.) That’s about all I’ll say about that. (Laughter.)
So right after we graduated, Time Magazine came out with its famous “Man of the Year” issue.But for 1966, Timedidn’t pick one man or one woman. They picked our entire generation.
And Time expressed a lot of high hopes for us. It not only predicted that we’d cure thecommon cold, but that we’d cure cancer, too. It predicted that we’d build smog-free cities andthat we’d end poverty and war once and for all. I know what you’re thinking – we reallycrushed it. (Laughter.)
So fair question: Did my generation get lost? Well, that’s actually a conversation for anothertime. But let me put one theory to rest: It’s not true that everyone in my generationexperimented with drugs. Although between Flomax, Lipitor and Viagra, now we do. (Laughterand applause.)
Now, I did have some pretty creative classmates back then. One of my good friends, very closefriends in JE – (cheers) – I’m going to set it right for you guys right now. (Laughter.) One of mygood friends in JE had at least two hair-brained ideas. The first was a little start-up built on thenotion that if people had a choice, they’d pay a little more to mail a package and have it arrivethe very next day. Crazy, right? Today that start-up is called FedEx. And by the way, it wascreated in JE, which therefore means JE rules. (Cheers and applause.)
Now, his other nutty idea was to restart something called the Yale Flying Club. And admittedly,this was more of a scheme to get us out of class and off the campus. So I basically spent mysenior year majoring in flying, practicing take-offs and landings out at Tweed Airport.Responsible? No. But I wouldn’t have missed it.
And one of the best lessons I learned here is that Mark Twain was absolutely right: Never letschool get in the way of an education.
Now, I didn’t know it at the time, but Yale also taught me to finish what you start. And that’sone thing that clearly separates us from Harvard. (Laughter.) After all, a lot of those guys don’teven graduate. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Matt Damon – what the hell have they everamounted to? (Laughter.)
For all I ever learned at Yale, I have to tell you truthfully the best piece of advice I ever got wasactually one word from my 89-year-old mother. I’ll never forget sitting by her bedside andtelling her I had decided to run for President. And she squeezed my hand and she said: “Integrity, John. Integrity. Just remember always, integrity.” And maybe that tells you a lotabout what she thought about politics.
But you should know: In a complicated world full of complicated decisions and close calls thatcould go either way, what keeps you awake at night isn’t so much whether or not you got thedecision right or wrong. It’s whether you made your decision for the right reasons: Integrity.
And the single best piece of advice I ever received about diplomacy didn’t come from myinternational relations class, but it came from my father, who served in the Foreign Service. Hetold me that diplomacy was really about being able to see the world through the eyes ofsomeone else, to understand their aspirations and assumptions.
And perhaps that’s just another word for empathy. But whatever it is, I will tell you sittinghere on one of the most gorgeous afternoons in New Haven as you graduate: Listening makes adifference, not just in foreign ministries but on the streets and in the souks and on the socialmedia network the world over.
So Class of 2019, as corny as it may sound, remember that your parents aren’t just here todayas spectators. They’re also here as teachers – and even if counter-intuitive, it’s not a badidea to stay enrolled in their course as long as you can.
Now for my part, I am grateful to Yale because I did learn a lot here in all of the ways that agreat university can teach. But there is one phrase from one class above all that for somereason was indelibly stamped into my consciousness. Perhaps it’s because I spent almost 30years in the United States Senate seeing it applied again and again.
One morning in the Law School Auditorium, my Professor, John Morton Blum, said simply: “Allpolitics is a reaction to felt needs.” What I thought he meant is that things only get done inpublic life when the people who want something demand nothing less and the people who makeit happen decide tht they can do nothing less.
Those “felt needs” have driven every movement and decision that I’ve witnessed in politicssince – from South Africa a couple of decades ago to the Arab Spring a few years ago to ourown communities, where same-sex couples refuse to be told by their government who they canlove.
In 1963, I remember walking out of Dwight Hall one evening after an activist named AllardLowenstein gave the impassioned and eloquent plea that I had ever heard. He compelled usto feel the need to engage in the struggle for civil rights right here in our own country.
And that’s why, just steps from here, right over there on High Street, we lined up buses thatdrove students from Yale and elsewhere south to be part of the Mississippi Voter RegistrationDrive and help break the back of Jim Crow. Ultimately we forced Washington to ensure throughthe law that our values were not mere words. We saw Congress respond to this “felt need” andpass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and life in America did change.
Not only did landmark civil rights advances grow out of the sit-ins and marches, but we sawthe EPA and the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act and allof it come out of Earth Day in 1970. We saw women refusing to take a back-seat, forceinstitutions to respond, producing Title IX and a Yale University that quickly transformedfrom a male bastion of 1966. Citizens, including veterans of the war, spoke up and brought ourtroops home from Vietnam.
The fact is that what leaps out at me now is the contrast between those heady days and today.Right or wrong, and like it or not – and certainly some people certainly didn’t like it – back theninstitutions were hard pressed to avoid addressing the felt needs of our country.
Indeed, none of what I’ve talked about happened overnight. The pace of change was differentfrom today. The same fall that my class walked in as freshmen, Nelson Mandela walked intoprison. It wasn’t until 30 years later, when my daughter walked through these gates for thefirst time, that Mandela was his country’s president.
When I was a senior, the debate over the growing war in Vietnam was becoming allconsuming. But it took another seven years before combat ended for our country, and morethan 25,000 lives. And it wasn’t until the year 2019 that we finally made peace and normalizedrelations. Now, amazingly, we have more Vietnamese studying in America – including some inyour class – than from almost any other country in the world.
What’s notable is this daring journey of progress played out over years, decades, and evengenerations. But today, the felt needs are growing at a faster pace than ever before, piling upon top of each other, while the response in legislatures or foreign capitals seems nonexistentor frozen.
It’s not that the needs aren’t felt. It’s that people around the world seem to have grown used toseeing systems or institutions failing to respond. And the result is an obvious deepeningfrustration if not exasperation with institutional governance.
The problem is today’s institutions are simply not keeping up or even catching up to the feltneeds of our time. Right before our eyes, difficult decisions are deferred or avoided altogether.Some people even give up before they try because they just don’t believe that they can make adifference. And the sum total of all of this inaction is stealing the future from all of us.
Just a few examples, from little to big: a train between Washington and New York that can go150 miles-per-hour – but, lacking modern infrastructure, goes that fast for only 18 miles of thetrip; an outdated American energy grid which can’t sell energy from one end of the country tothe other; climate change growing more urgent by the day, with 97 percent of scientists tellingus for years of the imperative to act. The solution is staring us in the face: Make energypolicy choices that will allow America to lead a $6 trillion market. Yet still we remain gridlocked;immigration reform urgently needed to unleash the power – the full power of millions who livehere and make our laws in doing so both sensible and fair.
And on the world stage, you will not escape it – even more urgency. We see huge, growingpopulations of young people in places that offer little education, little economic or politicalopportunity. In countries from North Africa to East Asia, you are older than half theirpopulation. Forty percent of their population is younger than Yale’s next incoming class.
If we can’t galvanize action to recognize their felt needs – if we don’t do more to coordinatean attack on extreme poverty, provide education, opportunity, and jobs, we inviteinstability. And I promise you, radical extremism is all too ready to fill the vacuum leftbehind.
What should be clear to everyone – and it’s perhaps what makes our current predicament,frankly, so frustrating – is that none of our problems are without solutions. None of them. Butneither will they solve themselves. So for all of us, it’s really a question of willpower, notcapacity. It’s a matter of refusing to fall prey to the cynicism and apathy that have alwaysbeen the mortal enemies of progress. And it requires keeping faith with the ability ofinstitutions – of America – to do big things when the moment demands it. Remember whatNelson Mandela said when confronted by pessimism in the long march to freedom: “It alwaysseems impossible until it is done.”
One thing I know for sure – these and other felt needs will never be addressed if you, we fallvictim to the slow suffocation of conventional wisdom.
On Tuesday I sat in the State Department with some young Foreign Service officers at theState Department, and one of them said something to me that I’ve been thinking about,frankly, all week. He wasn’t much older than any of you. He said: “We’ve gone from an erawhere power lived in hierarchies to an era where power lives in networks – and now we’rewrestling with the fact that those hierarchies are unsettled by the new power.”
Every one of you and your parents have mobile devices here today. They represent a lot morethan your ability to put a picture on Fbook or Ins. They are one of the powerful newinstruments of change that makes hierarchies uncomfortable because you can communicatewith everybody, anywhere, all the time – and that’s how you beat conventional wisdom.
That’s what makes me certain that felt needs are not just problems. They are opportunities.And I am convinced if you are willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, which youshould be after this education, you can avoid the dangerous byproducts of indifference,hopelessness, and my least favorite: cynicism.
It is indifference that says our problems are so great, let’s not even try. We have to rejectthat. It’s hopelessness that says that our best days are behind us. I couldn’t disagree more.
It’s cynicism that says we’re powerless to effect real change, and that the era of Americanleadership is over. I don’t believe that for a second, and neither does President Obama. Werefuse to limit our vision of the possibilities for our country, and so should you. Together wehave to all refuse to accept the downsizing of America’s role in a very complicated world.
I happen to love T.S. Eliot’s "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” one of my favorite poems. And Irespectfully challenge you to never wind up fretfully musing as Prufrock did: “Do I daredisturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute willreverse.” Class of 2019: Your job is to disturb the universe.
You have to reject the notion that the problems are too big and too complicated so don’t wadein. You don’t have the luxury of just checking out. And it doesn’t matter what profession youwind up in, what community you live in, where you are, what you’re doing, you do not havethat luxury.
One of the greatest rewards of being Secretary of State is getting to see with my own eyes howmuch good news there actually is in the world – how many good people there are out thereevery single day courageously fighting back. The truth is that everywhere I go I see or hearabout an extraordinary number of individual acts of courage and bravery, all of which defythe odds – all by people who simply refuse to give up, and who start with a lot lessopportunity than you do.
You can see this in the lonely human rights activist who struggles against tyranny and againsta dictator until they are defeated. You see it in the democracy activist who goes to jail tryingto ensure an election is free and transparent. You see it in the civil rights lawyer who suffersscorn and isolation for standing against bigotry, racism, and intolerance.
I am literally in awe of the courage that ordinary, anonymous people demonstrate in themost difficult circumstances imaginable – in a dank African jail, a North Korean gulag, aprison in Syria or Central Asia, facing the cruelest persecution and lonely isolation.
Many of these people just quietly disappear. They lose their lives. They never become aninternational cause or a global hero. Courage is not a strong enough word for what they doevery day, and all of us need to think about that.
What all these people have in common – and what I hope they have in common with you – isthat they refuse to be complacent and indifferent to what is going on around them or towhat should be going on around them.
And that’s the most important lesson I hope you will take with you when you leave Yale. Thefact is that for those of you who have loans are not the only burden you graduate with today.You have had the privilege of a Yale education. No matter where you come from, no matterwhere you’re going next, the four years that you’ve spent here are an introduction toresponsibility. And your education requires something more of you than serving yourself. It callson you to give back, in whatever way you can. It requires you to serve the world around youand, yes, to make a difference. That is what has always set America apart: our generosity, ourhumanity, our idealism.
Last year I walked through the devastation of the typhoon that hit the Philippines. The U.S.military and USAID and regular volunteers got there before countries that lived a lot closer. Wewent there without being asked and without asking for anything in return. And today Americansare helping to bring that community back to life.
In Nigeria, when Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of girls, the government didn’t turn to otherpowerful countries for help – and by the way, they’re not offering.
As Josh and Nia mentioned, it was my privilege to stand here 48 years ago at Class Day.Before coming here, I did re-read that speech. A lot of it was about Vietnam, but one linejumped out at me. In 1966 I suggested, “an excess of isolation had led to an excess ofinterventionism.” Today we hear a different tune from some in Congress and even on somecampuses and we face the opposite concern. We cannot allow a hangover from the excessiveinterventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism in this decade.
I can tell you for certain, most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worryingabout America’s presence – they worry about what would happen in our absence.
Without arrogance, without chauvinism, never forget that what makes America different fromother nations is not a common bloodline or a common religion or a common ideology or acommon heritage – what makes us different is that we are united by an uncommon idea: thatwe’re all created equal and all endowed with unalienable rights. America is not just a countrylike other countries. America is an idea and we – all of us, you – get to fill it out over time.
Tomorrow, when President Salovey grants you those diplomas, listen to what he says. He won’tsay what is said at most schools – that your degree admits you to all its “rights and privileges.”At Yale, we say your degree admits you to all its “rights and responsibilities.” It means we needto renew that responsibility over and over again every day. It’s not a one-time decision.Participation is the best antidote to pessimism and ultimately cynicism.
So I ask you today on a celebratory afternoon as you think about the future: Remember whathappened when the Founding Fathers had finished their hard work at the ConstitutionalConvention in Philadelphia and Ben Franklin, tired, end of day, walked down at night, down thesteps of the hall. A woman called to him. She said, “Tell us Dr. Franklin: What do we have, amonarchy or a republic?” And he answered: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Class of 2019: We know what you have – a world-class education – if you will use it.
Congratulations to you, good luck, and God bless. (Cheers and applause.)
