Hillary Rodham Clinton's Graduation Address from Wellesley College

Hillary Rodham Clinton's Graduation Address from Wellesley College

Hillary Diane Rodham, future wife of President William Jefferson Clinton (elected in 1992 and 1996) and first lady, was born on October 26, 1946, in Chicago, Illinois. Her interest in social issues began at an early age, and intensified in 1965 when she entered Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In 1969 she was asked to give the commencement address for her graduating class. Her speech, given on May 31, 1969, was quite different from the traditional mild commencement address normally heard at college graduations. In her typically assertive and free-thinking manner, traits that would distinguish her as a future first lady, Hillary Rodham exhorted her graduating class to help make the world a better place. She also criticized one of the previous speakers, Senator Edward Brooke, for being out of touch with modern issues.

Her speech gained national attention, and several commentators accurately stated that Hillary Rodham appeared to be a woman with a bright and promising future. Relevant excerpts are set forth below:

I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.

What does it mean to hear that 13.3% of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective. The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade; years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program; so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap.

Many of the issues that I've mentioned; those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multimedia age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us.

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive; now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see; but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere. But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance:

Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity, a man like Paul Santmire.

Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said, “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.” What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then Respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word “consequence” of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she is afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

There are two people I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing I would like to read.

“My entrance into the world of so-called “social problems”

Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.

The hollow men of anger and bitterness

The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation

All must be left to a bygone age.

And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle

For all those myths and oddments

Which oddly we have acquired

And for which we would become unburdened

To create a newer world

To translate the future into the present

We have no need of false revolutions

In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds

And hang our lives up on narrow pegs.

It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.

And once those limits are understood

To understand that limitations no longer exist.

Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free

Not to save the world in a glorious crusade

Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain

But to practice with all the skill of our being

The art of making possible.

Hilary Clinton ran against Republican Rick Lazio for a seat in the US Senate in 2001, winning fifty-five to forty-three percent. She represented the state of New York in her new role until 2009. She was the first former first lady to run for public office and serve as a national official. Clinton helped New York rebuild after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, voted for the Patriot Act, and supported military action in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. However, she voted against George W. Bush's tax cuts and further Iraq intervention in 2007. She also supported the US government's financial bailouts in 2008. Clinton then ran for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2008, having the chance to become the first female US president, but conceded to Barack Obama when he won the majority of the delegate vote. She replaced Condoleezza Rice as US secretary of state in 2009, supporting women's rights and human rights. She advocated for military intervention in Libya during the Arab Spring and helped broker an agreement for international negotiations with Iran for halting its nuclear program. She traveled extensively, visiting 112 countries while secretary of state.

Clinton came under fire in 2012 for “systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies” in the State Department after an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three employees. An investigation of the security issues that preceded the attack took place, but when Clinton was called to testify, she became ill and could not attend. She suffered a stomach virus, concussion from fainting, and blood clot that led to her hospitalization. However, she returned to duty and testified on January 23, 2013, wearing large, black-rimmed glasses meant to help patients recover from a concussion, claiming that “I take responsibility, and nobody is more committed to getting this right.” Clinton left her post in 2013, passing the job to John Kerry. She was repeatedly criticized by Republicans in 2014 for the Benghazi incident, and there were rumors that she suffered a brain injury from her fall in 2012 that were denied by former president Bill Clinton. Hilary Clinton is considering the opportunity to run for president again in 2016 and is regarded as the favored candidate for the Democratic nomination, but she had not stated her intention to run as of October 2014. Her memoirs, titled Hard Choices, were published in 2014.