Prepared Remarks of Bob Schieffer
Chief Washington Correspondent and
Moderator of Face the Nation
CBS News
University of Mississippi Commencement Saturday, May 9, 2009
Chancellor
Khayat, trustees, dedicated faculty, proud parents, even prouder
grandparents, surprised brothers and sisters who never thought your
siblings were smart enough to get through college and to that dogged
group of graduates who never thought this day would ever come, I begin
by heeding the advice of Helen Thomas, the legendary White House
correspondent for UPI who was the first reporter I met when I came to
Washington in 1969.
The year was 1975, Gerald Ford had come to the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon and by then, like Helen, I had become a White House correspondent and one day, Henry Kissinger, who was the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor was brought in to brief us.
The press secretary told us that Dr. Kissinger had a very busy schedule and could only stay for 20 minutes. Kissinger, ever the ham, said that, “Being a college professor, my lectures are timed for 40 minutes; I’m not sure I can do it in 20 minutes,” to which Helen, sitting on the front row, responded:
“Then start at the end!”
So I start at the end:
Class of 2009, congratulations! This is your day. You earned it. You deserve it and no one can ever take away the recognition that you have rightly been given today.
A graduation speech is an easy speech to make because the truth is no one ever remembers what the graduation speaker says. I can’t even remember WHO spoke at my graduation let alone what was said.
There is a reason. Graduation is not about what someone says; it is about what you have done. You won’t remember today’s words but you will always remember this day, and that is exactly as it should be.
I often say that graduation is my favorite holiday. It is the one holiday where we recognize achievement – what someone has accomplished and it means so many different things to all who take part.
Graduation is one of life’s cross roads but unlike many cross roads it is clearly marked.
You knew it was coming, you knew what you needed to do to get here, you came to understand there were no shortcuts – well, maybe a Cliff Note or two – and once arrived you knew exactly where you were.
And so there was a great feeling of accomplishment for you – and for your parents.
For the parents, there is another feeling as well. As the father of two college graduates, I can tell you exactly how I felt when they walked across that stage and received their diplomas.
I felt like I had just received a substantial pay raise.
So parents, I know how you feel and I because I am older than most of you, including some of the grandparents, I offer only this advice.
You have made a substantial investment in these young people and I know you believe it was worth it, but it is equally important to stay on good terms with them because they are – after all – the ones who will choose the nursing home.
My parents grew up in the shadow of a great state university very much like this one, the University of Texas in Austin. But for them, that campus might well have been a thousand miles away because they were children of the Depression and had no money to go there. Even though tuition was virtually nothing, my father was needed daily on the family farm. College and time away from the farm was not an option. The only money my Mother’s family had came from what her 13-year-old brother brought home from his job at the drugstore so there was no money for college, just barely enough for food.
After coming though those hard times, the driving force in their lives became seeing to it that their children had what they could never have – what you graduates have gotten here – a college education. My father did not live to see it, but when I became the first on either side of the family to graduate from college, it was the proudest moment in my mother’s life.
We lost her many years ago, but somehow I hope she knows that when my brother’s son graduated from college last year, it meant that not only had her three children graduated from college, but her three grandchildren as well. And I think she knows somehow that we understand we could not have done it without the sacrefices she made, and more importantly the example she set and the values she taught – and I should add, the values she enforced.
You ask why graduation is my favorite time. That is why.
I have never held much to the theory of the self made man. We all got help from someone and many of those who helped you may be here with you today. There is no better day than this day, no better time than right now, to say thanks.
Thank you, parents.
It was the sacrifice of my parents that enabled me to go to college but I had one advantage that many of my contemporaries did not: I was white. You see, when I graduated from high school, no black person had ever attended a school that I attended. When I graduated from my college, TCU, no black athlete had ever played in the Southwest Conference, then one of the most powerful athletic conferences in the country.
It was not until I was a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force that I ever shook hands with an African-American – it wasn’t that I tried to avoid that; in the segregated city where I grew up, there was hardly an opportunity. They lived on one side of town, we lived on another – which is why coming here, to speak to you today is so meaningful to me.
In 1962, I returned to my hometown of Fort Worth after three years in the Air Force. I had hoped to work at my hometown newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
There was no opening there, but I was told a job would open up soon and while I waited, I took a job in the news department of the small radio where I had worked during college and was promptly sent – along with a suitcase-size tape recorder – to cover what would turn out to be my first big story, the enrollment of James Meredith at this university.
For us, the story had a local angle: a former Army general named Edwin Walker of Dallas – ironically the general who had commanded the federal troops that enforced intergration of Little Rock schools, and who now claimed he was “on the right side” – was urging people to form a white citizen’s militia and converge on Oxford to stand with the governor of Mississippi and prevent one black man from enrolling in a tax-supported state institution.
Bring your flag, your tent, your skillet, he railed on radio stations across the South.
I drove all night from Fort Worth to Oxford in one of the station’s panel trucks, which had the station’s call letters KXOL emblazoned on the side along with our slogan, “the station that pioneered and developed on-the-scene news coverage in the great Southwest.”
As I drove into the area near the campus, I was not greeted with all that much enthusiasm. An angry mob was already gathering outside the campus, and when some of them saw that truck with all its radio antennas and signs and realized I was from out-of-state, they began pelting it with rocks and beer bottles, and there seemed an endless supply of bottles.
So as the Marines would say, I advanced to the rear, parked on a quiet street some distance away and lugged that suitcase-size tape recorder on the campus.
I was just two weeks out of the Air Force, where in three years I had never heard a shot fired in anger, yet as darkness fell that night I experienced one of the most terrifying nights I would ever endure, including future days when I finally got that job at the Star-Telegram and was sent to Vietnam.
That night as the mob took control of the campus, as Meredith was being heavily guarded in one of the dorms, 166 federal marshals who had been brought in to restore order were injured or wounded, one of them shot through the neck, 40 U.S. soldiers who finally did restore order were injured, 200 people were arrested and two people were killed, one of them a reporter and one of them a maintenance man who had been in one of the dorms making repairs and wandered into the area around the Lyceum to see what all the commotion was about.
I was one of the lucky ones. I got roughed up, but not really hurt. But that tape recorder was smashed.
The next morning, this beautiful campus looked like a World War II battlefield. The smell of endless rounds of tear gas still hung over the campus, windows had been shattered by rocks, cars burned, fires from torches that had been hurled as weapons had left burnt patches in the grass, but under heavy guard, Meredith was enrolled. As the marshals walked him to the Lyceum, I walked up to him and tried to ask a question but he looked straight ahead and did not answer.
But the incongruity of the moment and the madness of what had happened the night before was somehow summed up for me by how clean and neat he looked, as if he were going to church. In contrast was the wire service reporter trying to question him. He was wearing a porkpie straw hat and a seersucker sport coat, but somehow in the night, he had lost his shirt, and his bare chest showed between the lapels of what was left of that coat. It was not the biggest story I would cover for long – the next year I was in Dallas covering the assassination of the young president who had sent the federal troops here to ensure Meredith’s enrollment and there would be more.
As it turned out, I did not return to the campus until last year when I came to cover the first of the presidential debates. It was – as you will remember – a beautiful fall day and so a colleague and I decided to walk over that afternoon from our hotel downtown.
As I came onto the campus, I went to the place in front of the Lyceum – a band was playing, students were laughing and enjoying the day – and then I went to the auditorium where the debates would be held that night and I saw white kids and African-American kids working together to make sure everything was in order. During the afternoon I ran into the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, and I said, “Governor, how’s it going?” and he said, “It’s going to be perfect,” and it was in every way – a debate between two good men, one a true American hero, the other an African-American, the first African American to win the nomination of a major political party in this country.
And I thought that night back to that evening in 1962 and it made me understand that we still have a long way to go, but in less than my lifetime, we have come a very long way and it made me proud to be an American.
So I thank you for that.
What happened here became a turning point in the American civil rights movement, but the important part is not what happened that night when the madness prevailed, but what happened in the days and years that came after, the years when good people came together and said what happened then was not right and we will not allow that night to be the night for which this campus shall be remembered. And so it wasn’t. Nor will it ever be.
Two years after that night on this campus, Lyndon Johnson, a Texan who like me grew up in the segregated South, convinced the Congress of the United States to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Hubert Humphrey would later call it “the single most effective foreign policy imitative of the second half of the 20th century,” not because it had anything to do with American foreign policy, but because it told the world who we were and what we believed in and that our ingenious system of government which was based on simple fairness and equal treatment for everyone worked.
And so the great wrong that had been more than 200 years in the making began to be righted, the circle began to close.
In the end, good does prevail over wrong. American values – equality, freedom and fairness – do prevail, but only if good people are there to nourish them.
America came through those days, not a weaker nation but a stronger nation and a better nation because the core of our strength is not our weapons – it is our values.
America leads best, America is strongest when we lead by example, when we practice what we preach.
As you leave here today, I envy not just your youth, but the adventure that awaits you. When I think of the wonders that happened during my own lifetime, who can know what awaits you? Yes, these are dangerous and complicated times, but your generation is far better equipped to handle them than mine because the store of knowledge increases with every generation.
You are well-prepared to meet the challenges of your time. So do not be afraid to reach for greatness but remember that true greatness comes not from the battles we win, but the battles we choose to fight.
Remember too, the lessons that were learned in those years and what you accomplished here. Yes the circle began to close and one of the great wrongs began to be corrected, but the circle never closes completely. No lesson learned, however hard, is learned forever. The historian Will Durant once said that “Civilization is not imperishable. It must be relearned by every generation.”
So that is your responsibility to pass on to your children, the values that your parents and my parents passed on to their children. The passing on of those values will always be each generation’s most important unfinished business.
For what Durant said in another time remains true today: “Barbarism, like the jungle, does not die out but only retreats behind the barriers that civilization has thrown up against it and waits there always to reclaim that to which civilization has temporarily laid claim.”
Thank you. The world needs you. May God bless you.