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Commencement Day Articles
Duck Story · The Day Itself · Honoris Causa · Let There Be Awe
"Gone Outta Here" · Learning On Line · Commencement Confetti · The Return of the Obstinate

Tom Brokaw, anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, addressed seniors and their parents and guests in Tercentenary Theatre on Wednesday, Class Day. He spoke of the wise use of the information superhighway, observing that "This is the first time in history that kids are teaching their parents to drive." He identified the main problem of our time as "racial hostility, envy, and oppression." He gave a good old-fashioned commencement address, full of exhortations, reminding his listeners at the end that the world did not begin when they were born.

Yours can be the age of tolerance and understanding-of gender as well as ethnic differences.

Tom Brokaw reported that he had been "described in the Crimson as 'a quasi-intellectual.' That's something that staff members of The Harvard Crimson would know something about."

Young men, these young women who sit among you are in a passage of historic proportions. You should share their excitement and encourage their determination. You should come to know their world. Moreover, you must know that fathering a child is a daily and lifetime commitment.

Young women, you must also remember that life is about proportion and chosing balance. A balance, if you so choose, between a professional and a personal life. You must remember that motherhood is not incidental to a life of fulfillment.

How will your time be marked?

Fifty years ago this spring, in 1946, another generation of young Americans, many from this institution, celebrated another special spring in their lives-their first spring of peace in five years. Together with their allies they had won the war against Hitler and Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. They had done no less than save civilization. They were born, most of them, in the Roaring Twenties and came of age in the Great Depression, when all in the land was bleak and without much hope. They left their homes, many of them in small villages or farms in rural America, for the first time, and went thousands of miles away to fight, often hand to hand, in primitive conditions, the two mightiest war machines that had ever been assembled. And they won. They saved us. We are their legacy.

Under the parasol, Caitlin Anderson '96 of Pforzheimer House and Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

They came home, and 50 years ago this spring they began to build the America that we know today. They went to college in historic proportions. They married and had families. They built great industries and small businesses. They gave us great universities and great highway systems. They gave us civil-rights laws, and they took us to the moon. They discovered new cures and gave us great songs. They rebuilt their enemies, and they kept the peace. They didn't whine and they didn't whimper. Some of them are here today. Others of them are your grandparents, class of '96.

I am, quite simply, in awe of them.

Fifty years from now, let another Class Day speaker stand here and say, of your generation, "They saved their world. I am in awe of them."

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