Charter Day Remarks, 2001
February 10, 2001
The year was 1923. Munich, Germany. A disgruntled World War I veteran preaches a gospel of racial hatred and extreme nationalism organizes a few hundred malcontents into a rag-tag army and launches his ominous goose-step toward infamy.
The very same year, 1923, in a small town less than a hundred miles from Munich, a son is born to a middle-class Jewish family. Ignorant of the grim realities looming just a decade in the future, the family celebrated the birth with the hope and joy that always attend the beginning of a new life and a new generation.
Knowing as we do today knowing what lies ahead knowing of the burning synagogues, the starving ghettoes, the packed boxcars winding slowly toward Auschwitz, Birkenau and Treblinka, knowing all this, what odds would we now assign to the survival of that young boy born in Germany in 1923?
What degree of probability, or more accurately, what measure of improbability would we calculate for the chance that he would be able to make his way to the United States, serve in the American Army, and survive the Battle of the Bulge? That he would earn a doctorate at Harvard University? And would become a distinguished professor of foreign affairs, and then brilliantly convert theory to practice as one of the ablest American Secretaries of State in the last century.
Could we have imagined that he would ultimately win the Nobel Peace Prize?
Could we have anticipated this moment, when this singular statesman would join the long line of distinguished chancellors of the College of William and Mary, a group including the first President of the United States, a Chief Justice of the United States, and one of the most brilliant Prime Ministers in the history of Great Britain? Mr. Chancellor, we are honored by your service and we welcome you to William and Mary.
Clearly, the odds against our Chancellor's remarkable life's journey were long, incalculably long. But while it may be useful to ponder briefly such imponderables, it is I think ultimately more rewarding to consider the lessons that we should draw from his life and his work.
I say this because, clearly, Dr. Kissinger's achievements have more to do with character than with chance. And who may we wonder helped shape that character? Our Chancellor, I am sure, owes a great deal to the influence of his father Louis, a schoolmaster, and his mother, Paula, who was fiercely dedicated to the welfare of her children. In the end, I suspect those seeking insight into our Chancellor's remarkable life would be wise to weigh carefully the deep debt he owes to his mother and his father. Whatever the explanation, what we do know is that Dr. Kissinger developed both courage and character, qualities that led him from the depths of Nazi Germany to the heights of the Nobel Peace Prize. And so, his life provides a powerful case study of the value, the rewards, and yes the hazards, of leadership in the modern world.
Our new Chancellor is a complex man. His historic achievements reflect that complexity. When Robert Bolt in his wonderful play, A Man For All Seasons, has Sir Thomas More say "A God made man to serve him wittily in the tangle of his mind," surely he must have had someone very much like Henry Kissinger in mind.
With complexity, inevitably, comes controversy. So certainly it has been in the life of our Chancellor. To my mind, the controversy he inspires owes much to his courage and to the explosive complexity of the world with which he contended and the events he sought to shape. Never has he been afraid to ask uncomfortable questions. Never has he failed to embrace the unconventional when the unconventional promised good for our country's cause.
Some examples:
Do you remember the skepticism that greeted his idea that an era of détente could replace decades of confrontation with the Soviet Union?
Do you recall our surprise when our Chancellor's shuttle diplomacy first gave us hope that war in the Middle East might not have to be a permanent state of affairs? If only the promise of his hopes had ended in triumph rather than tears.
Do you remember our shocked amazement when we learned that the United States dared to open a dialogue with the world's most populous Communist country? Or our doubts when he first suggested that American interests might just might sometimes coincide with those of 1.2 billion Chinese?
Today, the orthodoxy of these ideas is so deeply ingrained that most of us have forgotten how profoundly they once startled us. We no longer remember indeed, younger members of this audience never knew that the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union were such dramatic propositions that they shook half-formed notions once blindly accepted as immutable truths.
Leadership like this inevitably strikes sparks, because it challenges the limits of what seems acceptable and forces us to face uncomfortable truths. But such leadership can and does lift a people, a nation to a better place, and as Dr. Kissinger showed it can advance what remains our most important mission: the search for world peace.
James McGregor Burns, a scholar of exceptional distinction, has a name for such leadership. He calls it transformational. Transformational leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa force us to examine critically what is and they challenge us always to imagine what could be.
This willed act of transformational imagination, both rare and powerful, invites us to envision a future about which we only dreamed and offers hope that our dreams may come true.
But Professor Burns also tells us that there is another and much more common kind of leadership. He calls this leadership transactional. Transactional leaders never challenge those whom they aspire to lead; their stock in trade is the promise of something for nothing. The details of the deal change from age to age but the deal is always a sucker's game fueled by cynicism and certain to end in tears because the promise that sounds too good to be true inevitably is.
Transactional leaders do not really lead. They manipulate. Our political landscape is littered with transactional leaders women and men, Democrats and Republicans, office holders at every level who are skilled at telling us not what we need to know but what we want to hear. And sadly, they never understand that the bubble popularity which is the object of their relentless ambition is important to no one but themselves.
Little wonder then, that a recent survey found that political engagement among first-year college students nationwide is at an all-time low. As a university president, I can testify that students have an infallible ability to detect chicanery, and our politics has given them abundant opportunities to hone that skill. The result, of course, is the dangerous political alienation of so many of the best of our nation's young people.
Even as I hope few of us here today share this sense of alienation, I know that many of you do share my concerns about the state of our civic soul. Over the past year, William and Mary completed the most sweeping survey of its constituents ever undertaken. Through this effort, called William and Mary 2010, we asked you how our College might best prepare its students for lives of leadership in a new world of fantastic complexity and rapid change.
So many of you responded with passion, with wisdom and with powerful new ideas. But you also expressed concern. Listen to the reflections of a member of the Class of 1990:
We seem to have forgotten, she writes, that this great country in which we live is composed of we the people not I the person. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that each person has a responsibility to contribute to the greater good. This is where the College can make a difference. Historically, true leaders have emerged from institutions such as William and Mary. I believe that the essence of leadership should be part of the liberal arts education.
Think of those phrases: The essence of leadership part of the liberal arts education. Do we not all agree that they are important? And yet does not the very scarcity of real leaders, leaders of the transformational kind, does not their scarcity fuel our conviction that an indispensable part of William and Mary's purpose must be the education of great leaders, true leaders?
I promise you that in the decade ahead, our College will not merely continue but redouble its effort to educate graduates who understand the meaning of civic responsibility, who delight in questioning conventional wisdom and who are marked by an unshakable commitment to the public good.
To educate leaders of that kind we must teach our students these three things:
First, there can be no substitute for intellectual rigor. We educate the best, that is the vocation to which this place was called and we make no apology for it. Our obligation, our calling is to teach the lessons of global citizenship to students whose destiny is to be global leaders.
Second, we must teach our students, every one, the life giving glory of hearts attuned to what Wordsworth called the still, sad music of humanity. Although the din of daily life mostly drowns out this haunting melody, the needs of others less lucky than ourselves command our permanent engagement in building a better and more decent world.
Third, we must ask our students to hazard the risks of leadership, to speak with strong and reasoned voices in the great debates that will animate the age of their maturity. So much that is wrong with the way we live now, is attributable to the inexplicable and shameful silence of those best equipped to speak truth to power, to call out the moral cowards who abuse their public trust in the service of private ambition.
We must invite our students to follow the example of our Chancellor. We must teach them to ask uncomfortable questions. And all of us must be willing to show the way. Nearly two hundred years ago, President-elect Thomas Jefferson vividly demonstrated the value of asking challenging questions at critical times.
On a rainy morning March 4, 1801 Jefferson left a modest Washington rooming house and began a short journey to his inauguration, the first to be held in our nation's capital.
Unlike George Washington and John Adams, he carried no sword and wore no badge of office. Dressed in the plain black clothes of an ordinary citizen, Jefferson walked through muddy streets, rather than ride in a splendid coach.
When he reached the Capitol, the president-elect was greeted by his fellow William and Mary alumnus and life-long antagonist, Chief Justice John Marshall. Who, with little to-do, administered the oath of office in the Old Senate Chamber, the only completed portion of the building.
Just as the Capitol, our nation was then unfinished, and Jefferson faced a daunting challenge of leadership. His election had been fractious, so much so that out-going President Adams had left Washington at four o'clock that morning, rather than bless the transfer of power by witnessing the inauguration of his political foe.
To reassure a divided nation, Jefferson spoke graciously to those who had not voted for him. Every difference of opinion, Jefferson famously said, is not a difference of principle. We are all republicans; we are all federalists.
Not entirely satisfied with these comforting words, however, Jefferson went on to ask one of those questions with the power to illumine a moment . . . and to inspire a nation.
Sometimes, Jefferson observed, Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
By his leadership, Thomas Jefferson answered that question affirmatively. But he could answer it only for his time, for his place, for his generation.
The truth is, my friends, each generation must face that question anew. And now it is our turn. Can we be trusted with the government of others?
Here, at William and Mary, I say that answer is yes. We teach now, we always have, we always will, what it means to live a life of service, of honor and of moral and intellectual leadership.
In that pursuit, we remain proudly unfashionable. I believe with the late Judge Learned Hand that: The only America you can love is the one whose citizens have learned self-discipline in the face of truth; the only country which any man has a right to love is one where there is balanced judgment, justice founded on wisdom and a temperate mind.
Is not Judge Hand's powerful definition of patriotism reason enough both to swear anew allegiance to the America envisioned by our founders and to work for its preservation here at the College of William and Mary where the dream of America which became in time the American Dream came first to life?
