Raw Footage of President Bill Clinton's Dartmouth College Commencement Address in Hanover (New Hampshire)

William Jefferson Clinton when Dartmouth conferred an honorary degree upon Dwight D Eisenhower in 1953 President Dickey stated that the eminence of the presidency precludes the bestowal of greater honor. And of course he was right but this should not deter us Mr. President. From proffering words of encouragement and gentle praise to help bear you forward in your important work. Although the responsibilities of your office are great you have discharged them with any nobility of purpose. That is the mark of a liberal education throughout. Throughout your career of public service you have remained undaunted

by even the most intransigent of challenges confident that reason knowledge and the better angels of our natures will truly equip our nation to confront the future and keenly aware that you are a leader not only of a nation but also of a people you have exhibited an admirable and enduring commitment to the role of education in the development of America's human capital. Mr. President it gives Dartmouth College great pleasure to salute your achievements and to recognize your place in American history by awarding you its honorary degree Doctor of Laws. Thank you very much.

President Friedmann acting president right. Governor Merrell thank you for your warm welcome to my distinguished fellow honorees. I was thinking when they were all introduced to all the others who won this distinction of your honorary degrees that if my blessid mother were still alive she would be saying I see Bill they accomplished something you're just a politician. I am honored to be in their company and I thank them all for the contribution I have made to the richness that is American life to the board of trustees and especially to the parents and families and members of the class of 1995. Let me begin on a very personal note.

I always love coming to New Hampshire. I am delighted to be back at Dartmouth but I am especially grateful to be here saying my good friend President Jim Freedman looking so very well and back with this struggle. I also want to thank at Dartmouth for something else for contributing to my administration. The secretary of labor Bob Rice who came with me today. I understand that I have caused something of an inconvenience here. And that we are now breaking tradition here at Memorial Field having left like a lawn. But I did a little historical inquiry and determined that

when President Eisenhower came here in 1953 Baker lawn replaced the Bema as the site of commencement. I am reliably informed however that the next time a president shows up you will not have to move to the parking lot at the West Lebanon shopping center. You know when President Eisenhower came here he said this is what a college is supposed to look like and I have to tell you even in the rain it looks very very good to me. I want to thank you too for honoring the class of 1945. They did not have a proper commencement because they left right away to finish

the work of World War II. One of the greatest privileges of my presidency has been to express over the last year the profound gratitude of the American people for the generation that one World War Two a year ago this past Tuesday I stood on the glass of Normandy to say to the brave people who want a foothold for freedom there we are the children of your sacrifice. I say again to the class of 1940. The class of 1995 the generation of your grandchildren and all of us in between are the children of your sacrifice and we thank you. To those of you in this class the 50 years that have

elapsed since they sat where you sit today have been a very eventful time for this old world. It is seen the ultimate victory of freedom and democracy in the Cold War. The dominance of market economics and the development of a truly global economy. A revolution in information telecommunications and technology which has changed the way we live and work and opened up vast new possibilities for good and for evil. The challenge of your time will be to face these new realities and to make some sense out of them in a way that is consistent with our historic values and the things that will make your own lives richer. The challenge of your time in short will be to redeem the promise of this great country.

Now there are unparalleled opportunities for those of you with a wonderful education in this global economy and this information age and you don't have to worry about things that your parents used to worry about all the time. I am very proud of the fact that in the last two years for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no Russian missiles pointed at the people of the United States of America. And I might add there are no American missiles pointed at the people of Russia. From the Middle East to Northern Ireland from South Africa to Haiti where as the citation said my friend Bill Gray did such great work to

restore democracy. We see ancient conflicts giving way to peace and freedom and democracy and a genuine spirit of reconciliation. Hundreds of millions of people now breathe the air of freedom. Less than a decade ago found that a distant dream. Every country in Latin America but one is now a democracy. I am proud that our nation could support these developments. But as all of you know this new world is not free of difficulty for the forces of opportunity contained within them. Seeds of destruction. The heavy hand of communism and dictatorships have given way to bloody conflicts rooted in primitive religious ethnic and racial hatreds from Europe to Africa. The mobility of money and people and the advance of technology have strengthened the hand

of organized crime and drug traffickers from Latin America to Asia to the former Soviet Union. And we have all been reminded recently that none of us and this open free flowing world of ours are immune from the forces of organized evil and terrorism. The possibilities are more rapid economic development pose new threats to the global environment rapid changes in the world economy have brought vast new opportunities. But I have also brought uncertainty stagnant incomes and indeed rampant insecurities even in the wealthiest countries in the world. And we have seen it in ours here at home though we have made progress on our deficit and expanding our trade and taking serious action against crime and trying to increase the ability of our country to educate our people and to welcome those from around the world

and so many of you have come to find your educational opportunity here. We know that for the first time since this generation left in World War II Americans are worried that their children will not have a better life than they enjoy half of all of our people are working harder for less than they were making 15 years ago because the global economy punishes people who don't have the skills to learn to compete and to win in a world that is changing daily and hourly in our nation. For the first time since World War 2 we have watched over the last decade and more. The great American middle class which is the core of our idea of America began to split apart along the fault line of education and of course we all know that our social fabric today in this country is being run

apart by what is happening to our children more and more of them are subject to violence and abuse. Higher and higher percentage of them are born into poverty more and more of them are having children while they are still children. Even though the overall crime rate in this country has gone down. Random violence among children is still increasing. More and more children are spending more of their lives with one parent families sometimes trapped on welfare but more often far more often being raised by utterly exhausted parents who are working two or more jobs to give their children a chance just a chance at a good life because in the 1980s we were unable to resolve these problems because inequality and insecurity increased

because the realities of today and tomorrow were not addressed. The American people have continued to lose faith in the ability of their government and sometimes even more importantly in the ability of our society to solve these problems. And perhaps the most important difficulty we face is the increasing cynicism of our own people today in Washington we're having a great debate about what to do about all this. And that's a very good thing. On the one side we have people who say that most of these problems are personal and cultural and if all of us would just straighten up and fly right we wouldn't have these problems anymore. And of course at a certain level that is self-evidently true. None of you would have a diploma today if you had done the right thing to earn it. And nothing can be done for anyone to get out of a tight in life unless

people are willing to do for them selves. But that ignores the other side of the debate which is that there are plain economic and social factors that are not even common to the United States putting pressure on people and taking away their hopes and threatening their dreams. We have a great debate about what the most important thing for our government to do is on the one side or those who say that the government can't really do anything to solve our problems anyway so the most important thing is to balance the budget as quickly as possible without regard to the consequences. On the other hand there are those who say we have a budget deficit and we ought to do something about it. But we have an education deficit as well. And when we have so many poor children we need to invest in people to make sure they can live up to their God given potential and that that is also important. Today I want to say to you is what I want to say to you is

wherever you come down and all these great debates the most important thing is that you should be a part of the debate because your life will be far more affected by what happens in the next two years than my life. I have been given the opportunity of the American dream. I was the first person in my family ever to graduate from college when I was a young boy growing up in Arkansas. One of our honorees president Overholser his father was a Presbyterian minister in my hometown. You raised one daughter to be the president of Duke the other daughter to be the editor of The Des Moines Register. We came out of a place that at the end of World War II had an income barely over half the national average but we were fortunate enough to live through a time when opportunity was expanding. And when we were trying to come to grips with our racial and other problems in this country

and what I wish to say to you is that you are going into the time of greatest human possibility in all history but you must address the fact that all of our forces of opportunity have seeds of destruction. You must make sense and clarity out of complex problems. And I think you must do it with a much greater sense of optimism and hope than we are seeing in most debate today. There is nothing wrong with this country that cannot be solved by what is right with it. And you should never forget that. We have a lot of things to do here in America. We have to grow our middle class again and

shrink our underclass and give our children something to say yes to. We have to strengthen our families and our communities and make the idea of work more real the people for whom it is become unattainable. We have to preserve our environment and enhance our security at home and abroad. And I would argue that we must maintain the leadership of the United States and the world is a force for peace and freedom to all those who want to draw. We want to turn away who want to abolish our foreign assistance programs. Let me remind you look at the history of the 20th century. Every time America turned away from the world we wound up with a war that we had to clean up and win at far greater cost than if we had simply stayed involved in a responsible manner. But our most important mission today I would argue is to help people make the most of their

own lives. You can come down in many places on all these debates in Washington and around the country but it is self-evident that unless people in this country wherever they come from whatever their race or economic standing or region can make the most of their own lives whatever it is that is in there the magic inside all of us we will not fulfill our common destiny. And today more than ever before. It really does all begin with education. What we know and what we can learn. The class of 1945 saw the greatest explosion of economic opportunity in all human history after World War II. In no small measure because everyone who participated was given the opportunity to get a higher education through the GI Bill.

And I am absolutely convinced that that was one of the two or three reasons that the United States of America developed the finest largest broadest deepest system of higher learning in the entire world. And it is still the best system in the entire world because of what happened then. When President Eisenhower faced the dilemma of the Soviets beating the United States into space and the fact that we had let a lot of our educational opportunities go downhill. He lost a great education initiative giving loans to people all across the country and giving them good opportunities to pay them back and they called them the National Defense Education Act the idea was that even in the late 50s education was a part of our national security. I tell you that that is more important today than it was in 1945

and more important today than it was in the late 50s. Man my age between 45 and 55 grew up believing that when we reached this age we'd have the security of knowing we could send our children to college we'd have a decent retirement. We'd be living in our own homes if illness came we'd be able to take care of it. We took these things for granted if we worked hard obeyed the law and paid our taxes in the last 10 years. Earnings of men between the ages of 45 and 55 have gone down 14 percent because in the global economy if you live in a wealthy country and you don't have an education you are in trouble. We cannot walk away from our obligation to invest in the education of every American at every age.

And to those who think there is no public role in that. I say just remember all of those who need those student loans who need those Pell grants all the universities who benefit from the research investments. There is a role for our nation in the national education agenda of our future and we should maintain it. But let me make one other point as well. Education is about more than making money and mastering technology even in the 21st century. It's about making connections and mastering the complexities of the world. It's about seeing the world as it is and advancing the cause of human dignity. Money without purpose leads to an empty life.

Technology without compassion and wisdom and a devotion to truth can lead to nightmares. The sarin gas in the Japanese subway was a miracle of technology. The bomb that blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was a miracle of technology. We have got to use our knowledge to become wiser about the things which we do not understand and find ways to use our knowledge to bring us together in ways that reinforce our common humanity. I want to thank Governor Merrill for his support here in New Hampshire for our national service program Americorp because I think it exemplifies that kind of objective. I want to.

And I want to thank Dartmouth for participating in it. The idea behind national service is to make a connection between ideas and the real world the need out there beyond the ivory towers of academia to make a connection between earning an education and advancing the quality of life for others who might not have a connection or be wanting to be respected for who you are and what you believe and not demeaning or demonizing those who are different. I want to say a special word of thanks to the medical school for the partnership and Health Education Project of the Cooper Institute which go which says medical students and elementary schools up here in New Hampshire and in Vermont helped to promote health and prevent disease among young people. That also is a purpose of education building connections giving to others helping to bind us together.

Society is not a collection of people pursuing their individual economic material self-interest. It is a collection of people who believe that by working together they can raise better children have stronger families have more meaningful lives and have something to pass on to the generation that comes behind. That also is the purpose of education and we need it more than ever today. And so my fellow Americans and those of you who will live and work here you must decide what is this new world going to be like. You can probably do fine regardless. You have a world class education at a wonderful institution. You have the luxury of deciding well you devote your lives and your compassion and your conviction to saying

that everybody ought to have the opportunity that you had Will you believe that there is a common good and it's worth investing a little of what you learn as a result of your education. And will you believe that education is about more than economics that it's also about civilization and character. You must decide what you work for more equality and more opportunity. Will the information superhighway be travel by all even poor kids in distant rural areas will they be connected to the rest of the world or will the information superhighway simply give access on the Internet to paranoids who tell you how to make bombs. Well education lead you to lives of service and genuine citizenship or a politics of hollow reactionary rhetoric where

in the name of reducing government we abandon the public interest to the private forces of short term gain. Just a few days ago at Harvard president Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic said that our conscience must catch up with our reason our all is lost. I say to you today we are having a great debate in the nation's capital and we ought to have it. It can be a good and healthy thing but some things must be beyond debate. We are all in this together. A country at a crossroads has a chance always to redeem its promise.

America is the longest lasting democracy and human history because at every crossroads we have redeemed that promise and you must do it again. Today we got a real chance to make a real life together folks. Yes there's more ethnic and racial diversity in this country than in any other large country. Yes there's more income differential and that's getting worse and it's troubling. But this is still for my money. The country that's the best bet to keep alive hope and decency and opportunity for all different kinds of people well into the next century. I've had the privilege of representing you all over the world. And I think all the time every day about what it's going to be like in 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years when you come back here for that

remarkable reunion that they're celebrating today and I am telling you if you will simply use what you have been given in your lives from God and the people who have helped you along the way to rebuild this country and to bring it back together and not to let us be divided by all these forces to lift up these forces of opportunity and to stamp out the seeds of destruction you still are at the moment of greatest possibility and all human history. Your late president John Kameny who came to this country after fleeing Hungary told the last commencement. He presided over in 1981 the following The most dangerous voice you'll ever hear is the evil voice of prejudice that divides black from white man from woman Jew from Gentile

listen to the voice that says man can live in harmony. Use your very considerable talents to make the world better. Then he ended the speech with as I understand the words with which he ended every commencement. Women and man of Dartmouth all mankind is your brother and you are your brother's keeper. Do not let people divide you want from another. Do not let people make you cynical and do not think for a minute that you can have a good full life if you don't care about what happens to the other people who share this nation and this planet with you. Good luck and God bless you. Mr. President if you would step forward for one moment please

Mr. President on behalf of this college and this year's graduating class. I wonder present you with a book by a member of the Dartmouth class of 18 96. Robert Frost. It is one of a limited edition of Robert Frost 1923 volume of poetry entitled New Hampshire for which he received the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. The book's title page describes its contents as a poem with notes and grace notes. We hope Mr. President that this book will be for you a grace note to this day. Supplementing the bestowal of our honorary degree and expressing our gratitude for your presence at this very special ceremony. It is now my privilege to recognize those members of the faculty and administration

who are retiring this year after a long and devoted service to Dartmouth from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Norman a Dungey is Professor of Classics. Willis doany professor of philosophy