It is an honor to participate in this exercise which has so much actual and symbolic importance to our country.
I stand before you today as a refugee from a very exclusive college on the Potomac known as the United States Senate.
There we have studied such profound subjects as the higher mathematics of the California primaries, the abnormal psychology of certain Latin American expectorators, and the organic chemistry of the great American electorate. There are two difficulties, however, with this Senate School – in the first place, you can never tell the teachers from the students; and secondly, although there are many would-be students clamoring to get in, no present student ever wants to graduate.
But I wonder how many of the class of 1958, at this or any other similar institution will want to enter our postgraduate college or the political profession at other levels.
In the midst of all of the pleas, plans, and pressures that urge a career upon this year's graduates, few, I dare say, if any, will be urging upon you a career in the field of politics. Some will point out the advantages of civil service positions. Others will talk in high terms of public service, or statesmanship, or community leadership. But few, if any, will urge you to become politicians.
Mothers may still want their favorite sons – or daughters – to grow up to be President, but, according to a famous Gallup poll of some years ago, some 73% do not want them to become politicians in the process.
Successful politicians, according to Walter Lippmann, are "insecure and intimidated men," who "advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate" the views and votes of the people who elect them. It was considered a great joke years ago when the humorist Artemus Ward declared: "I am not a politician, and my other habits are good also."
In more recent times, the President of the United States, when asked at a news conference early in his first term how he liked "the game of politics," replied with a frown that his questioner was using a derogatory phrase. Being President, he said, is a "very fascinating experience … but the word 'politics' … I have no great liking for that."
Politics, in short, has become one of our most neglected, our most abused and our most ignored professions. It ranks low on the occupational list of a large share of the population; and its chief practitioners are rarely well or favorably known.
Unfortunately, this disdain for the political profession is not only shared but intensified in our academic institutions. For both teachers and students find it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature. In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion; in the latter, compromises and major ties and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is good, or, more importantly, what is possible.
No education is considered necessary for political success, except how to find your way around a smoke-filled room.
But this hostile attitude has not always prevailed – and I would ask those of you who look with disdain and disfavor upon the possibilities of a political career to remember that our nation's first great politicians were traditionally our ablest, most respected, most talented leaders, men who moved from one field to another with amazing versatility and vitality. A contemporary described Thomas Jefferson as "a gentleman of 32, who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin."
John Quincy Adams, after being summarily dismissed from the Senate for a notable display of independence, could become Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and then become a great Secretary of State. (Those were the happy days when Harvard professors had no difficulty getting Senate confirmation.) Daniel Webster could throw thunderbolts at Haynes on the Senate Floor and then stroll a few steps down the corridor and dominate the Supreme Court as the foremost lawyer of his time.
This link between American scholarship and the American politician has remained but has never regained its former strength. A little more than one hundred years ago, in the Presidential campaign of 1856, the Republicans sent three brilliant orators around the campaign circuit: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (In those times, apparently, the "eggheads" were all Republicans.)
I would urge therefore that each of you, regardless of your chosen occupation, consider entering the field of politics at some stage in your career.
I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil – or a hammer. The question is whether you are to be a hammer – whether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.
It is not enough to lend your talents to merely discussing the issues and deploring their solutions. Most scholars, I know, would prefer to confine their attentions to the mysteries of pure scholarship or the delights of abstract discourse. But "Would you have counted him a friend of Ancient Greece," as George William Curtis asked a century ago during the Kansas-Nebraska Controversy, "who quietly discussed the theory of patriotism on that Greek summer day through whose hopeless and immortal hours Leonidas and his three hundred stood at Thermopylae for liberty?" No, the duty of the scholar – particularly in a republic such as ours – is to contribute his objective views and his sense of liberty to the affairs of his state and nation.
This is a great institution of learning, Smith College. Its establishment and continued functioning, like that of all great colleges and universities, has required considerable effort and expenditure. I cannot believe that all of this was undertaken merely to give the school's graduates an economic advantage in the life struggle. "A university," said Professor Woodrow Wilson, "should be an organ of memory for the state for the transmission of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation, as well as a man of his time." And Prince Bismarck was even more specific – one-third of the students of German universities, he once stated, broke down from overwork; another third broke down from dissipation; and the other third ruled Germany. (I leave it to each of you to decide in which category you will fall.)
I am assuming, of course, that you are taking something with you upon graduation, that you do not look upon this university as Dean Swift regarded Oxford. Oxford, he said, was truly a great seat of learning; for all freshmen who entered were required to bring some learning with them in order to meet the standards of admission – but no senior, when he left the university, ever took any learning away; and thus it steadily accumulated.
We do not need political scholars, whose education has been so specialized as to exclude them from participation in current events – men like Lord John Russell, of whom Queen Victoria once remarked that he would be a better man if he knew a third subject – but he was interested in nothing but the Constitution of 1688 and himself. No, what we need are men and women who can ride easily over broad fields of knowledge and recognize the mutual dependence of the two worlds of politics and scholarship.
I do not say that our political and public life should be turned over to college-trained experts who ignore public opinion. Nor would I give Smith a seat in the Congress as William and Mary was once represented in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Nor would I adopt from the Belgian Constitution of 1893 the provision giving three votes instead of one to college graduates (at least not until more Democrats go to college). But I do ask you to accept the obligation and opportunity of participation in the public solution of the great problems of our time.
The hard, tough question for the next decade is whether a free society – with its freedom of choice and breadth of opportunity, with its range of alternatives, with its dependence on a chain reaction of public opinion which is frequently neither informed nor interested but merely prejudiced; the question is whether this kind of society can meet the single minded advance of the communists. Winston Churchill once said that democracy was the worst form of government ever devised except for all the other systems that have been tried. It is certainly the most difficult.
Can a system which includes so many checks on action, checks which we believe necessary to insure individual liberty – can such a system be hard and quick enough in these troubled days to survive. Can a democracy based upon a belief in the good judgment of a majority of the citizens endure when the questions to be decided in many cases are of such magnitude and complexity that they challenge the understanding of those at the very seat of power.
During this last week in the Senate we have seen some of the difficulties inherent in setting upon a new course of action. We have seen how the prejudices of the past block present action to meet future dangers. Two proposals, both endorsed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, were presented to the Senate during the consideration of the Mutual Security bill. First, to amend the Battle Act which was enacted in 1951 to deal with entirely different conditions in the world, by placing strict limitations on any governmental actions to assist economically any of the peoples behind the Iron Curtain who might be striving to lessen dependence on the Soviet Union.
It is quite true that there is no country today where such action immediately might be desirable – but who can predict – in view of the outbreaks of the past three years – in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia – what the next decade will bring. Yet the Senate by a single vote rejected our proposal, even though our recent experiences in South America should have shown us how troublesome would be the weakening of ties in one's own backyard.
Our own arsenal of weapons for use behind the Iron Curtain is very nearly empty – the old slogans of liberation have proven hollow, the diplomatic approaches to a Russian troop withdrawal have failed, little new can be done for refugees, or by way of propaganda, or through further UN Resolutions.
We can no longer count on freedom to come to Eastern Europe by means of a dramatic or violent revolt. Our best hope is rather in more nations following the example of Poland, Finland and Yugoslavia in moving gradually and cautiously away from total Soviet political domination and seeking greater economic independence as well. We are not going to help them revolt or send arms – We made that clear in 1956. Neither are we helping by lumping all Eastern European nations together under one red label, regardless of the differences in their aspirations or operation. We can help by offering a concrete alternative – by being prepared to take advantage of the first opening – by having ready alternative forms of economic aid to lessen their dependence upon the U.S.S.R. or China. Unfortunately, we cannot do more – certainly we dare not do less. But the Senate rejected this amendment by a single vote thus dooming any opportunity for versatility for at least another year in this the area of greatest Soviet vulnerability.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee also proposed an amendment to the Securities Act suggested on a bi-partisan basis (by Senator Cooper of Kentucky, our former Ambassador of India and myself,) which pledged our support to the success of – the second five year plan on which India's hopes for a free viable economy are based.
There are few issues of more significance in this country and the free world. If India's second five year plan fail and the present government and form of government should fall, if the Indian people should feel that they can only conquer their economic problems by following the same road that China is following and, if the rest of Asia should support that decision, which they surely would, then the balance of power in the world would be so altered, that the free world might never recover. It is true that after a bitter debate in the Senate by a small majority of a few votes with little public or executive interest – this amendment was adopted but no one can predict it will survive in the House of Representatives.
I stress these two examples because they are the most recent indications of the difficulties inherent in a democratic society as it attempts to match the unified purpose and mobilization of a totalitarian society. And this issue is also of substantive importance for unless the free world can successfully mobilize its resources to assist these under-developed countries to solve their overwhelming economic problems then all of our military stock piles will be useless.
Though the population explosion within those countries would seem to make the task of raising individual standards impossible, – India to go from four hundred million to seven hundred million people in 30 years. Nevertheless, I believe the job can be done in India and other countries if its elements are recognized and, most important, if the leaders in those countries and ours recognize the job to be done.
If the population of those countries increases on the average of two per cent a year, it will require a capital investment of at least six per cent a year of their gross national product to maintain existing standards. If they can double that investment rate twelve per cent and India's is now eleven per cent but is falling, then they can not only absorb the additional people but they can realize these people's greater expectations. But to do this job will require greater emphasis on long range capital loans and investment and development by not only the United States by the whole free world and a shift in aid from the military to the economic.
The question is whether those who are supposed to act with understanding can make their voices heard over the voices of inertia and prejudice which using the opportunities for delay inherent in a democratic system – block action – so that America's policy too often resembles the exhortation from King Lear "I shall do such things, what they are yet I know not but they shall be the wonders of the earth."
In short, we need your vitality, your informed judgment and your idealism for you can be the bearings on which the ponderous structure of a free society moves and acts. The question for our time, in short, is – can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure. Can we carry through in an age where – as never before – our very survival is at stake – where we and the Russians have the power to destroy one-quarter of the earth's population – a feat not accomplished since Cain slew Abel? Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only new breakthroughs in weapons of destruction – but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the inside of the earth and the inside of men's minds?
In the words of Woodrow Wilson: "We must neither run with the crowd nor deride it – but seek sober counsel for it – and for ourselves."
Source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files, Box 901, Folder: "Smith College commencement address, Northampton, Massachusetts, 8 June 1958." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.