Commencement speech of Jim Lehrer
Author and Journalist
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Cambridge, Mass.

As delivered

A show of hands please in this room.

How many of you know someone personally who has served or is now serving in Iraq?

How many of you know a person or a relative of a person who has been killed or wounded in Iraq?

Raise your hand if our being at war in Iraq has had any direct effect on your life at all.

What's left, I believe, for us all, the issues of the war in Iraq aside, how do we connect ourselves and then stay connected to the other Americans who do serve in the military and elsewhere in our name, on our behalf, without having to sustain a tremendous man-made or natural disaster.

I would submit one way is service itself. Service in all of its many forms. Service that can mean the Peace Corps, a teacher corps, a conservation corps, a police corps, a hospital aid corps, a tutor corps, a Big Brother/Big Sister corps, a coping corps, a pick up the trash corps as well as the Marine Corps.

I do not have a specific 10- or 12-point proposal to put on the table. I am a journalist, not a proposalist.

But I do have some framing questions for the discussion. In order to be fair, should it be mandatory, no exemptions, no permanent deferments, everyone eventually serves?

Should it apply across the board, men, women, all physical and intellectual sizes and abilities included? What should be the age parameters? Should there be a way to involve not just the young? Should it be constructed around choices, each individual choosing the form of service, military or specific civilian, he or she wishes?

Should it be developed in partnership with private and corporate resources as well as governmental? Should it be tied to a G.I. Bill type program? Service earns education, home and other benefits. In addition to the benefits of connection, and of the soul.

I know some will argue that such a program would cost too much. I would only ask, compared to what?

Others would argue that it, for it to really work politically, it must be voluntary. I don't do politics, so I'll leave the politics of national service to someone else.

But voluntary service is what we have now. The result, to my observation, at least, it may be cheaper, but it's also causing a serious heightening of our differences and our disconnections. And definitely not just as it involves the military.

My guess is that all of you in this room - alums, students, parents, whatever - have an interest in volunteer public service and that you have no doubt already done some of it and will always continue to do so.

Am I right about that? Yes. Absolutely. No question about it.

But volunteer service, voluntary service - the kinds that you perform and the kinds that I perform - is not an equal opportunity operation. Non-military volunteerism is pretty well confined to the well-educated and the well-off.

The majority of Americans are simply not in a financial position to delay careers, to take no-pay internships, to take off a year or two, or even a few weeks or even a long weekend to do good, to help people rebuild their homes in New Orleans or Indonesia. Do tutoring of low-income kids in Los Angeles or Des Moines, find food and shelter for the devastated of Darfur or Biloxi.

So we have a rather stark division among us. The most fortunate volunteer for the non-military, the less fortunate volunteer for the military. And those in between, the vast majority of Americans, do neither because they can't afford to.

I know for a fact I would not have voluntarily gone into the Marine Corps 50 year ago. I would have gone directly from my commencement ceremony to a job ... to my job that I already had as a newspaper reporter, which is what I did three years later after my service.

Trust me, I was a much better reporter then because of how I spent those intervening three years. And a much better person, and even Commencement speaker now, 50 years later.

The bottom line for me on this is simply this: whatever the ultimate conclusion, I believe passionately that we would all benefit from a full and frank discussion of our mutual responsibilities to serve. Of the joys and satisfactions that come from such service. From lifting ourselves away from our own needs just for a while to pay attention to those of others, and of trying to find a way that involves every one of us.

I am well aware of the collateral debates that would most likely spring from this one. One has to do with going to war. National service, with a military option, would complicate decisions of presidents and congresses about using force.

Parents and spouses and children of the potential combatants would have to be in the loop along with the volunteer experts, the pundits, the politicians and the generals.

Some would argue that's a good thing because it would force more public explanations and justifications and thus harder thinking before rushing off to invade or to bomb.

Others would say that's terrible because the result could be a hand-wringing public referendum on every military use decision our country makes. And back and forth, and back and forth, and so the debate would go.

And I say, let that debate and all others on national service begin. And as they say in other venues, thus ends the rendering of the message.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

But let me add very quickly: I am not urging any of you - students, alums, faculty members, members of the administration, parents - to run off and join the Marines.

And I say that because one of the first major commencement addresses I made to a college graduating class, my theme then was risk: take risks in your personal lives, in your professional lives, and I went on and on about the joys and satisfactions to be had from a risk-filled life.

A few weeks later the phone rings at our house in Washington after midnight.

A young male voice on the phone says, "Mr. Lehrer? You changed my life."

"Mmmm." I was trying to wake up.

He said, "I was in that graduating class. I heard what you said in your commencement address about taking risks."

"Mmm."

"I was in the class. I had already taken a job on Wall Street. But when you said that about taking risks, I changed my mind and I decided to do what I wanted to do in the first place anyhow. And as soon as the ceremony was over I told my mom and dad, 'No Wall Street.' I was going into the business of making sunglasses frames with clear plastic tubes where you could change the color with little BB-like things. You want red, white and blue one day ... you want pink the next ... you want whatever."

And he said, "I've done it, Mr. Lehrer. I'm going to be on the CBS morning news tomorrow demonstrating my frames. I figured you'd want to know. Thank you, sir, for changing my life."

Now I was really awake and I was thinking, "Oh my. What had I wrought?" Of course, mostly I was thinking that his parents probably had a hit out on me, on my head.

So ...

In the unlikely event one of you all does decide to join the Marines today, pick up and go and run and go and do it. Fine. Semper Fi. But please, just don't tell me about it.

For the record, I do now know about my own commencement speaker 50 years ago.

I went to my university's Web site the other day. He was a popular novelist, screenwriter and playwright at the time.

So what this means for you, 50 years from now, if you want to know about the Commencement speaker, you can go to www.harvard.edu and find out who he was at the time, in addition, of course, to remembering that he began by calling a Continental Trailways bus to Houston.

And now, as the man said, "Good luck in your life. From this day forward, try to be kind to one and to all, and to yourself. Thanks for the honorary degree. And have a great afternoon."