Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (102 page)

I doubt if the Republican party could do so, simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not so desperate for victory.

I do not want to see the Republican party win that way. While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.

As members of the minority party, we do not have the primary authority to formulate the policy of our government. But we do have the responsibility of rendering constructive criticism, of clarifying issues, of allaying fears by acting as responsible citizens.

As a woman, I wonder how the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters feel about the way in which members of their families have been politically mangled in Senate debate—and I use the word “debate” advisedly.

As a United States senator, I am not proud of the way in which the Senate has been made a publicity platform for irresponsible sensationalism. I am not proud of the reckless abandon in which unproved charges have been hurled from this side of the aisle. I am not proud of the obviously staged, undignified countercharges, which have been attempted in retaliation from the other side of the aisle.

I do not like the way the Senate has been made a rendezvous for vilification, for selfish political gain at the sacrifice of individual reputations and national unity. I am not proud of the way we smear outsiders from the floor of the Senate and hide behind the cloak of congressional immunity and still place ourselves beyond criticism on the floor of the Senate.

As an American, I am shocked at the way Republicans and Democrats
alike are playing directly into the Communist design of “confuse, divide, and conquer.” As an American, I do not want a Democratic administration whitewash or cover-up any more than I want a Republican smear or witch-hunt.

As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist. I condemn a Democrat Fascist just as much as I condemn a Republican Communist. They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves….

Son of a liberal senator from Tennessee, Al Gore graduated from Harvard and served in Vietnam, returned to become a reporter and editorial writer for the
Nashville Tennessean
, served in the House and Senate from that state, and was chosen to be Bill Clinton’s running mate in 1992 and 1996.

In his vice-presidency, his speeches—delivered with a strong voice and in a slow, clear cadence—tended to be programmatic and to point with pride at administration accomplishments, which vice-presidential rhetoric traditionally does. However, in debate, the experienced legislator knows how to score points, savaging his opponent while maintaining his Boy Scout look: the televised debate with H. Ross Perot diminished that skilled TV performer and established Gore as a powerful advocate for Clinton’s causes.

He has shown a willingness to use the most emotional personal experiences to rivet a national TV audience. In his first acceptance speech, Gore went into detail about the injury to his young son; in his second acceptance in 1996 his late sister Nancy’s death from cancer was the setting for his condemnation of tobacco use. Democrats were moved; Republicans thought he exploited personal tragedy; an objective speech analyst would have to say his long “stories” were effective, if overdone.

They did run counter to his reputation for wooden delivery. Gore tends to stand stiffly and orate as if he were explaining to a three-year-old. The comedian Mark Russell called Gore’s 1996 debate with GOP vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp “a huddle between a quarterback and the goalpost.” However plodding and syrupy his delivery, Gore was well prepared and resolutely “on message,” and was seen to have won the debate.

At the Harvard commencement on June 9, 1994, Gore made the most profound speech of his vice-presidency, examining the loss of trust in government that has afflicted his generation. The young man who left in 1969 returned with a different, and less disillusioned, view of the world.

***

A HARVARD COMMENCEMENT
is a special occasion. How could anyone not have been thrilled by this morning’s assembly—twenty-five thousand people packed into Harvard Yard to celebrate one of the great occasions of life. I loved it all. And I have especially enjoyed my twenty-fifth reunion….

I remember the twenty-fifth reunion class when they came in 1969 walking around the Yard with their children. That was the class of 1944. They were part of the generation President Clinton commemorated this week in Normandy, the group that went from Harvard to boot camp and basic training and from there were transfused into the weary divisions battling across Europe. Only eleven members of the class were present at graduation; all the rest had by then already left to enlist. Some did not come back to their reunion. Their names are carved in stone in Memorial Church just behind me. Many did come back and some of them are here again today for their fiftieth reunion. We salute you.

Back in 1969 our graduating class was in no mood to salute or to celebrate your sacrifice or your achievement. But we understood then and understand now ever more clearly that without any question, because of your service, the world changed in 1944. Indeed, our world a half-century later is still shaped by the events of that tumultuous and triumphant year.

I want to describe today the reasons why I believe the world also changed in important and enduring ways because of the events of 1969, a year of contradiction and contrasts, of glory and bitterness.

In July 1969 one quarter of the population of the world watched on live television while Neil Armstrong brought his space module
Eagle
down to the Sea of Tranquillity, slowly climbed down a ladder and pressed his left boot into the untrod surface of the moon.

But 1969 was also the year Charles Manson and his followers made the innocent words “Helter Skelter” symbols of a bloodbath. It was the year of music in the rain at Woodstock and the year of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

While we went to class and heard lectures and wrote papers and listened to music and talked and played sports and fell in love, the war in Vietnam was blasting that small country apart physically and ripping
America apart emotionally. A dark mood of uncertainty from that tragic conflict clouded every single day we were here.

The year 1969 began with the inauguration of Richard Nixon, a ceremony that seemed to confirm for many of us the finality of a change in our national mood and ratify the results of a downward spiral that had begun with the assassination of President Kennedy five years, two months, and two days earlier….

After all, the war raged on for five more years and the downward spiral in our national mood reached a new low when the Watergate scandal led to the growing belief that our government was telling lies to our people.

The resignation of President Nixon, his subsequent pardon, the oil shocks, 21 percent interest rates, hostages held seemingly interminably and then swapped in return for weapons provided to terrorists who called us “the Great Satan,” a quadrupling of our national debt in only a dozen years, a growing gap between rich and poor, and steadily declining real incomes—all of these continued an avalanche of negative self-images which have profoundly changed the way Americans view their government.

A recent analysis of public opinion polling data covering the years since my class came to Harvard demonstrates the cumulative change in our national mood. When my class entered as freshmen in the fall of 1965, the percentage of people who believed that government generally tries to do the right thing was over 60 percent. Today it is only 10 percent. The percentage believing that government favors the rich and the powerful was then 29 percent. Today it is 80 percent. And it is important to note that these trends hold true for Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals.

In fact, this may be an apocryphal story, but someone actually claimed the other day the situation has gotten so bad that when they conducted a new poll and asked people about their current level of cynicism, 18 percent said they were more cynical than five years ago, 9 percent thought they were less cynical, and 72 percent suspected the question was some kind of government ploy, and refused to answer.

Democracy stands or falls on a mutual trust—government’s trust of the people and the people’s trust of the governments they elect. And yet at the same time democratic culture and politics have always existed in a strange blend of credulity and skepticism. Indeed, a certain degree of enduring skepticism about human nature lies at the foundation of our representative democracy. James Madison argued successfully in the
Federalist Papers
that the United States Constitution should create a protective balance of power among the factions that were bound to rise in any society.

Democracy did not mean unity in the body politic. People do have reasonable differences. Human ignorance, pride, and selfishness would always be with us, prompting inevitable divisions and conflicting ambitions.

Yet, freedom and order could be protected with safeguards ensuring that no one branch of government and no one group or faction would be able to dictate to all the rest. We were the first large republic to build a nation on the revolutionary premise that the people are sovereign and that the freedom to dispute, debate, disagree, and quarrel with each other created a fervent love of country that could hold us together against the world. It is still a revolutionary premise. And it is still built on a skeptical view of human nature that refuses to believe in perfection in intellect, logic, knowledge, or morals in any human being.

And so the ceaseless American yearning for the ideal life has always stumbled uneasily over a persistent American skepticism about the parties and leaders who claim to have the wisdom and ability to guide us to our destiny. We revere our institutions, and at the same time we watch our leaders as though we were hawks circling overhead, eager to dive with claws extended onto any flaw or failure that we see.

Even our most beloved president, George Washington, wrote in his last letter to Thomas Jefferson, on July 6, 1796: “I had no conception… that every act of my administration would be tortured… in such exaggerated form and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter or even a common pickpocket.”…

The last time public cynicism sank to its present depth may have been exactly one hundred years ago, when Mark Twain said, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” That was a time when Americans felt the earth moving under their feet. Debt and depression forced farmers off the land and into cities that they found cold and strange and into factories where human beings became scarcely more than the extensions of machines. Cynicism was soon abroad in the land.

We are now in the midst of another historic and unsettling economic transformation. Now the information revolution is leading to a loss of jobs in many factories, as computers and automation replace human labor.

After World War II, 35 percent of America’s employment was on the factory floor. Today fewer than 17 percent of our labor force works in manufacturing. Just as most of those who lost their jobs on the farm a hundred years ago eventually found new work in factories, so today new jobs are opening up in new occupations created by the information revolution—but this time the transition is taking place more swiftly and the economic adjustment is, for many, more difficult and disorienting.

In this respect we are actually doing better than most other nations.

Every industrial society in the world is having enormous difficulty in creating a sufficient number of new jobs—even when their economies heat up. So, not surprisingly, public cynicism about leadership has soared in almost every industrial country in the world.

History is a precarious source of lessons. Nevertheless, I am reminded that similar serious economic problems prevailed in Athens in the fourth century
B.C.
, when the philosophical school we now know as Cynicism was born. The Cynics were fed up with their society and its social conventions and wanted everybody to know it. The root of the word” cynic” is the same as the Greek word for “dog,” and some scholars say the Cynics got their name because they barked at society. Sounds almost like some of our talk-radio shows….

Cynicism is deadly. It bites everything it can reach—like a dog with a foot caught in a trap. And then it devours itself. It drains us of the will to improve; it diminishes our public spirit; it saps our inventiveness; it withers our souls. Cynics often see themselves as merely being world-weary. There is no new thing under the sun, the cynics say. They have not only seen everything, they have seen
through
everything. They claim that their weariness is wisdom. But it is usually merely posturing. Their weariness seems to be most effective when they consider the aspirations of those beneath them, who have neither power nor influence nor wealth. For these unfortunates, nothing can be done, the cynics declare.

Hope for society as a whole is considered an affront to rationality; the notion that the individual has a responsibility for the community is considered a dangerous radicalism. And those who toil in quiet places and for little reward to lift up the fallen, to comfort the afflicted, and to protect the weak are regarded as fools.

Ultimately, however, the life of a cynic is lonely and self-destructive. It is our human nature to make connections with other human beings. The gift of sympathy for one another is one of the most powerful sentiments we ever feel. If we do not have it, we are not human. Indeed it is so powerful that the cynic who denies it goes to war with himself….