Bob Schieffer - Commencement Remarks

May 2, 2009

Distinguished guests, members of the faculty and administration, proud parents and grandparents, surprised brothers and sisters who never dreamed your older siblings were as smart as they claimed to be and of course, most of all to that dogged group that thought this day would never come-the class of 2009 … Congratulations!

The psalmist sang of "days made in heaven" and surely graduation is one of those. For sure, I know one thing, it has always been my favorite holiday-it is my favorite because it holds special and sometimes very different meaning for all who attend: parents and grandparents, graduates and faculty and even one who is honored to be asked to speak.

As the proud parent of two college graduates, I once sat where your parents sit today and I can tell you exactly how I felt that day. I felt I had been given a substantial pay raise. It is a good feeling all round isn't it?

Since I am a few miles down the road ahead of you let me offer just one bit of advice to the parents here.

You have made a substantial investment in your sons and daughters-now try to stay on good terms with them: Because, and remember this always, they are the ones who choose the nursing home.

While I am truly honored to be here, I have a confession. A graduation speech is not hard to make because there is really no pressure on the speaker and the reason is no one ever remembers anything ever said by a graduation speaker.

I have been to many graduations and I can't remember anything anyone said at any of them, I can't even remember who spoke at my graduation. There is a reason for that. Graduation is not about what someone says, it is about what you have done and that is as it should be. You won't remember what is said here, but you will always remember this day.

Graduation Day is one of life's crossroads. But unlike so many other crossroads in life, it is clearly marked. You knew it was coming, you had a plan to get here, you knew there were no short cuts, and now you have come where you set out to go.

For nearly all of your life you have been a student. For the last four years a student at this University. From this day forward, you will be a graduate of Maryville University. That has a very nice ring doesn't it?

So enjoy today, celebrate it with your friends and family, you have earned it, you deserve it and nobody can ever take it away from you.

Which brings us to the next part? Now what? I wouldn't be honest if I told you that it's going to be easy to find a job and I don't have to tell you that the country is going through some very difficult times. But I would tell you two things. I doubt that a job will come looking for many of you. I doubt many of you will hear a knock on your dorm door and open it to hear a voice that says, "Hi! I'm a job and I'm here just for you."

No, but there is a job out there somewhere. You just have to find it. That first job may not be just the one you want, and it may not be in the place where you wish to spend the rest of your life. But it's always easier to get a job when you have one. So you probably ought to take the first one while you look for the next one.

What I do urge you to do is find something you like to do, and then learn to do it well.

There is great pressure on young people to be successful-make a lot of money. I know a lot of people with a lot of money-some of them not as much as they used to have-and some are happy and some aren't. But the people who seem happiest to me are those who have found something they liked to do. If they became good at it, the success part took care of itself.

Strive for excellence not success and understand there is a difference. The technology is moving so rapidly. There may be a job out there for you that hasn't even been invented yet. When my children were young they used to ask me, "Dad, when you were a little boy did you want to be a TV reporter?" and I would have to explain, they didn't have TV when I was a little boy.

But from the eighth grade, when I saw my byline set in type on a story in our junior high school paper and it just looked so fine sitting there on top of that story, I always wanted to be a reporter. And I feel lucky that I got to do what I had wanted to do as a child and not everyone is lucky enough to be able to do that. So I am grateful I had that chance.

I am also grateful that I had parents who were determined that their children would have a better life than theirs. They had been children of the depression, they lived in the shadow of the tower of the University of Texas in Austin but that campus might well have been a thousand miles away because they had no money to go there.

Sending their children to college became the driving force in their lives. My father did not live to see it, but when I became the first person 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 last year when my brother's son graduated from college, it meant not only that all three of her children had graduated from college, but all of her grandchildren as well.
 
I hope she knows as well, that all of her children understand that we could not have managed to do it without the sacrifices she made, the example she set and the standards and expectations she not only set but enforced.

She expected nothing but that we try as hard as we could to do our best. The other part was she accepted no less. 

At our house, there was a three day limit on being sick. After that, it was "get up from there, you're well, it's time to go to school."

I remember once during his college days when my brother was telling her she wasn't giving him enough credit for doing the right thing.

"You never had to come to the University of Texas and get me out of jail like some people's parents had to do," he said.

"Well, I didn't send you down there to go to jail," she said. "I sent you down there to go to school."

When she died, an obituary writer at our hometown paper in Fort Worth called and said, "You and your brother and sister all had successful careers in very different fields.  Why do you think all of you were successful?"

I answered without hesitation, "We were afraid not to be."      

I told you at the beginning of this talk that graduation is my favorite occasion. Now you know a little more about why it means so much to me because when I come to graduation I cannot help but think of my parents and what they did for me.

I've never held to the self made man or woman theory. We all got help from somebody and many of those who helped you may be here today and there is no better time to think of them than right now, and if they are here to say thank you.

Because-and I say this as a parent-until you sit where they sit, you can never know how proud of you they are.    

I have had a wonderful life. I have been a reporter now for 52 years, and I can't think of anything else I could have done that would have been more fulfilling and interesting to me and that could have been more fun. I still get up every day, anxious to know what the news is, and I can't wait to get to work, which has never seemed like work.

But that is me. The important thing for each of you is to make sure that what you do is your choice. It is your life, you deserve the chance to do with it as you wish. And don't be afraid to reach, to take a chance.

The sun in my sky is moving toward the horizon, so I must be careful about such choices. If I make a mistake, there's not all that much time to make a correction.  But the sun in your sky is still high. If you make a mistake there's plenty of time to correct it.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "Do something every day that scares you." I'm not sure any of us could do that every day, but don't be afraid to take a chance. We only make this trip once. As the playwright Thornton Wilder said, "Realize life as you live it."

What you do not want to do is to reach my age and regret that you didn't try something you really wanted to do, something you may have come to believe you could have done, had you just had the courage to take the chance.

John Kennedy once said few men would trade their time on earth for the time of another and I would not trade mine. But I am envious of the adventure that await you, the wonders you are about to behold. And I know you will see wonders because I think back to the world that I have been privileged to see and all that has happened in just my life time.

How, while I was still a child, my parents met and defeated the greatest evil that civilized humankind has ever known, Nazism, and had they not been successful, the world would surely have been plunged into a new Dark Age. They understood that and many of them risked their lives willingly so that their children could live in freedom as they had.

There were also so many remarkable good things.

I think about how in my lifetime, man for the first time left the earth and sadly how we developed the means and the weapons that for the first time gave us the ability to destroy the planet.

I remember that it was in my lifetime that America underwent not one, but two great social revolutions: the civil rights movement and the women's movement.

When I graduated from high school no black person had ever attended any school that I had attended, when I graduated from college, no black athlete had ever played in the Southwest Conference, the then powerful athletic conference that my school, TCU, was a part of.

When I entered the United States Air Force in 1959, no one would have argued that a black man or a woman of any color had an equal chance with a white male in the work place.   

Yet in less than my lifetime, a society that once sanctioned and legalized segregation came to outlaw it and women were finally allowed to take their rightful place in our society.

I remember how as a young reporter just out of the Air Force where in three years I had never heard a shot fired in anger, I was sent to Oxford, Mississippi, to cover what would be my first big story: the enrollment of James Meredith at Ole Miss and how that night 144 people were wounded or injured and two people died in riots as people tried to keep one back man from attending a tax supported institution.

And then, I remember going back to that very campus last year, to cover the first presidential debate and seeing black kids and white kids working together to make sure that debate in which one of the candidates was an African American went off just perfectly, and it did.

And I remember thinking we may have a long way to go, but we have come a very long way - in less than my lifetime - and it made me proud to be an American.

As I reflect on my own life I remember what one of my favorite historians Will Grant once said-that Rome wasn't built in a day, neither did it fall in a week.

The fall of Rome occurred over three hundred years, longer than any democracy including ours had survived. That is the part we must never forget and that is the part that we must make sure our children understand. How do we do that?

By remembering where the true strength of our nation's lies: not in our weapons but in our values, the values that my parents taught me and that your parents passed on to you. By remembering the courage and the optimism and the determination of those who came before them, those who were willing to cross an ocean to find a better life for their children, and cross a continent in covered wagons with no other knowledge except that on the other side of those mountains was the chance - the chance for a better world than they had known. All of that is a part of us.

We are not descended from fearful people as Edward R. Murrow once said. And we should not forget it.
Hubert Humphrey famously remarked that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the most effective foreign policy achievement of the last half of the 20th Century, not because it had anything to do with foreign policy, but because it told the world what kind of people we were, how we treated one another, and how we were willing to correct wrongs, not matter how long in place or how difficult. And, that it works.

During the Cold War we built the greatest arsenal of weapons the world has ever known, and that arsenal kept the Soviet Union at bay, but it was not the weapons that won the war.

The war was won when the people East of the Iron curtain looked across and saw that the people on the other side had a better way of life and that it was a life their form of government was incapable of giving them. They didn't want guns and rockets and tanks, they wanted washing machines and televisions and good schools, and when they saw that, and there are no secrets in the television age, the walls came down and Communism collapsed.

Our greatest security comes when people understand who we are and that our system works. When we mistakenly take short cuts and in haste or panic adopt the methods of others, we do not enhance our security, we weaken it. We must always practice what we preach.  

Our message to the world must be disregarding the law, obeying only the laws that are convenient - those are things that others must do. That is not America. That is not what we do. We don't need to.

So you leave this campus today to enter a world more complicated than the America of my college days, and the challenges are more complex but you are better equipped to meet them because the store of knowledge increases with every generation.
It will be your task now to meet the challenges of your time, but it will be your duty as well to pass on to your children what you have learned. For as the imminently quotable Will Durant reminds us, civilization is not imperishable, it must be relearned by every generation-the transmission of civilization, educating the next generation, will always be our most important unfinished business.

It is a message we disregard at our peril, for as Durant has said, "barbarism like the jungle does not die 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."

Do your best and set your expectations high and remember always, true greatness comes not from the battles we win, but the battles we choose to fight.

I thank you. The world needs you. May God bless you.  

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