David Halberstam
Life After Williams
Right now the only thing that stands between you actually receiving your diplomas — four years of work invested in this — is the length of my speech. Be aware that at my own graduation 49 years ago, our speaker was Konrad Adenauer, the aged chancellor of West Germany, a man who I always thought was in his nineties, but who was it turned out — I checked him out for this speech — a mere 79 at the time, and whose nickname, appropriately enough was “der Alte,” the old man. Chancellor Adenauer had clearly wanted to come to the United States for a very long time and had a great deal to say and on that very hot day he took full advantage of the occasion, speaking for fully an hour which, with the translation, brought the speech to two hours. I pledge today to be much shorter — I think we can do this in under 17 minutes so you can get your degrees that much more quickly.
For those of you who have not exactly prospered academically let me give you a second bit of good news — you are being addressed by someone who was in the bottom half of his class at Harvard. Or if you want to be didactic about it, the bottom third of his class. So there is life after college. I’m proof of this and so, might I add, was Henry Ford II, the grandson of the founder of the Ford Motor Company who went off to Yale in the late thirties where he proved to be a devoted playboy but, regrettably, an indifferent student. In time, with a critical paper due in an English course, he paid a classmate to write the paper for him, was caught in the act, and was unceremoniously bounced from Yale, without, of course, his degree. Still, the future was not that bleak for him. He managed to get a job after college, with the Ford Motor Company, of course, for he was wise enough not to change his name, and he soon rose to the top, becoming in almost record time the president of the company, and thereby one of the most powerful and richest industrialists in the country. Much later a somewhat rueful Yale, always on the lookout for a new building or two — the Henry Ford School of Business Administration, perhaps — invited him back for an honorary degree. That day Henry Ford stood up, held up his beautifully written speech, looked at the assembled Yale officials, waved the speech in front of them and said, “I didn’t write this one either.”
I wrote this one. A graduation speech is part of your rites of passage: the platitudes of June, Emily Dickinson once called them. As a commencement speaker I’m supposed to do what your parents and most cherished faculty members and other people crucial to your lives have failed to do in the previous 22 years, set you on a course of happiness and prosperity and away from a life of indolence, sloth and failure.
What will happen next in your life, you may wonder? Will there be life after Williams, and will it be as pleasant? Will you ever again root for a football team that goes 26 and 6 over four years? A basketball team that goes 104 and 16? Does that happen in real life? Will you ever again be surrounded by so many people with higher SATs than your own? Will the food in the cafeteria ever be that good again? Will there ever again be so many highly intelligent people — faculty members — paid to listen to what you think, and paid to read what you write, and, if at all possible, to praise it? Or as my friend George Plimpton once said at a commencement — he had come to the part where it was duty to tell the assembled graduates what to do next — “Don’t go,” he said.
There is in all commencement speeches a mandatory part, words of direction from the old to the young, the requisite geezer wisdom, and I think we should get to it right now. In the few minutes that remain to us I would like to talk briefly about the uses of the uncommon degree of personal freedom which is now yours, and which we celebrate today. For your education greatly adds to one of the most elemental American rights — one which we often take for granted, but which does not so readily exist elsewhere — the freedom to make choices in life, a freedom often missing for those less privileged academically and for those who live in nations less favored by history. What will you do with all the freedom that is yours today? Freedom, after all, does not come without burden and without responsibility — for, if we make the wrong choices, we have no one to blame save ourselves. We cannot, as in so many other countries, rant against authoritarian governments which deprived us of our rightful possibilities.
So how do you handle the burden of being responsible for your own destiny? For you are at the threshold of one of the most important choices that most of you will make in your lives, the choice of your careers. We have, after all, in this country an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Notice that wording, for we are not guaranteed happiness, merely the pursuit of it. Notice as well, that the wise people who authored that phrase did not say pursuit of wealth, for the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of wealth are by no means the same thing, nor do they by any stretch of the imagination generate the same inner sense of contentment and personal validity.
This is a critical decision for you. For other than the choice of a lifetime partner, nothing determines happiness so much as choosing the right kind of work. It is a choice about what is good for you, not what is good for others whom you greatly respect — your parents, an admired professor, your friends, a significant other, any or all of whom you suspect may be dazzled by a greater or loftier choice of profession. The choice is not about what makes them happy, but about what makes you happy. Not what seems to show that you are successful by the exterior measurements of the society. Not about what brings you the biggest salary — particularly in the beginning when those things seem so important — and the biggest house, or the greatest respect from Wall Street, but what makes you feel complete and happy and makes you feel, for this is no small thing, like a part of something larger than yourself, a part of a community. In the end this is a choice you must make for yourself, for no one can make it for you.
So the choices for you out there are not simple. It is, for example, possible to be immensely successful in your chosen field, yet in some curious way to fail at life; to succeed at something that you have mastered, but which gives you no psychic pleasure and leaves you at the end of a seemingly successful career feeling curiously empty and oddly without purpose as an individual. Believe me that it is hard enough to keep going every day, even when you’re doing something you love. Or in the words of the noted philosopher, Julius Erving — Dr. J to many of you — "being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days when you don't feel like doing them."
So a few last words of advice: do not be afraid to make some mistakes when you are young. Do not be afraid to try and fail early in your life; we often stumble towards the things we will end up doing best. Do not be afraid to take chances when you are young, to choose the unconventional over the conventional. Often it is the experience in the unconventional which prepares you best for the conventional. Be aware that it’s all right to make mistakes and it is quite permissible to try something and fail; the price of failure when you’re young is much lower than when you're older. All of us are always failing in different ways, both large and small. In order to succeed, you almost surely must first fail.
I suspect that you in the graduating class must look at us gathered here on the stage and see people who look like we have always succeeded, men and women who have led professionally flawless lives. Would that that were true. What you do not see are our own anxieties, not just when we were your age but throughout our careers, when again and again — in our own minds — we seemed to be on the edge of some new failure.
You do not see me at the moment, a few days short of my 22nd birthday when the editor of the paper I worked for — the smallest daily in the state of Mississippi where I had started my career — fired me. I walked in one morning and he told me that it was time for me to go (I was writing too much about race, which was supposed to be an unmentionable subject) and, in fact, he said he would pay me for that last day (not for the whole week or the whole month) but that he wanted me to be gone from the office that day and from the town by the next morning and that he had already hired my successor who was scheduled to show up the next afternoon, and he did not think it was a good idea if we overlapped. Fired as it were from the smallest daily in Mississippi after less than a year — what an auspicious start to a career!
Understand that it is — in different ways, perhaps not all of them quite so dramatic — like that out there every day, even for the most successful of us; we are defeated every day in lots of little ways — that, even when you’ve reach a high career plateau, there are daily defeats and daily humiliations and the key to life is getting on with it. Succeeding is more than anything else picking yourself up on the bad days and deciding that you will not be defeated. If it happens to us all the time in advanced careers, believe me that it will happen to you in your embryonic ones. How you deal with it will determine your level of success and happiness in life — elemental resilience, I believe, is more important in your career than pure brilliance.
So I congratulate you, my classmates. I ask you to choose wisely in the days ahead, to trust your heart in all things and to live joyously. Let me add, because this is a difficult time in America, an additional suggestion — do not live fearfully. Do not live fearfully whether from the threat of terrorists from abroad or from the edicts of those powerful fellow citizens who think that they alone can determine what true patriotism is, and how you should behave as a citizen in difficult times and how narrow the parameters of your thought processes should be. Do not fear to dissent, to be different, to live as independent thinkers in a free society — that's at the core of what they've spent all that time educating you to be here at Williams over the last four years. You are, after all, being addressed today by someone who incurred the anger of two presidents of the United States — before I was even 30 — as a Times correspondent during the Vietnam War: one, President Kennedy, who tried to have me transferred from Saigon and another, Lyndon Johnson, who simply called me a traitor to my country. Recently John McCain wrote the introduction to a new edition of my book “The Best and the Brightest.” The world can turn around. There is life after presidential wrath.
So play to your strengths, trust your heart, and remember that there is a rich life out there awaiting you — if you have good fortune and the strength to find it. And thank you very much for letting me share this day with you.
June 6, 2004