Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, February 4, 1958

CONSIDERING A CAREER IN THE FIELD OF POLITICS

It is with a deep sense of honor and satisfaction that I have welcomed this opportunity to be here this evening and to receive the honor so generously bestowed upon me. This degree means to me something more than a scrap of paper, another in a long collection of degrees customarily heaped upon public figures or a document suitable for framing or for impressing visitors. I recognize the fact that honorary degrees are not always seriously regarded. Even more than fifty years ago, Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley had this to say to his friend Hennessy in discussing the honorary degrees recently awarded by a famous American college:

"What's a degree, says ye? A degree is a certyficate fr'm a ladin' university entitlin' ye to wear a mother Hubbard in spite iv th' police. It makes ye a doctor iv something; I don’t mind tellin’ ye, Hinnissy, that if I was a law which I'm not, I'd have to be pretty sick befure I'd call in manny iv th' doctors iv laws I know; an' as f'r American lithrachoor, it don't need a doctor so much as a coroner. But annyhow degrees is good things because they levils all ranks. Ivry public man is entitled ex-officio to all th' degrees there are. An' no public or private man escapes. Ye haven't got wan, ye say? Ye will though. Some day ye'll see a polisman fr'm th' University iv Chicago at th' dure an' ye'll hide undher th' bed. An he'll say: 'Ye'd betther come along quiet. I'm servin' a degree on ye fr'm Prisidint Harper.' Some iv th' thriftier universities is makin' a degree th' alternytive iv a fine. Five dollars or a dochtor iv laws."

The degree with which I am honored today means much more than this, however, because of the high qualities which have made this institution and thus these degrees possible. For this is the oldest Benedictine college on the North American continent. The devotion of the followers of Saint Benedict, and the ancient Benedictine monasteries, has been one of the most inspiring chapters in the story of the church; and their successors in communities, priories, and colleges all over the world have unfailingly demonstrated these same qualities of great courage and whole-hearted dedication. These are qualities without which all that we hold dear would surely wither and perish – and qualities which I know those of you who have been fortunate enough to study on this campus will be reluctant to leave behind.

But, if I may address myself to those students as they look forward to the day of their graduation, what concerns us most is not what you will leave behind but what you take with you, what you will do with it, what contribution you can make. I am assuming, of course, that you are taking something with you upon graduation that you do not look upon this university as Dean Swift regarded Oxford. Oxford, he said, was truly a great seat of learning; for all freshmen who entered were required to bring some learning with them in order to meet the standards of admission – but no senior, when he left the university, ever took any learning away; and thus it steadily accumulated.

What will you take with you? To what areas will you make a contribution? I realize that all the emphasis today is on science and national defense, on developing more scientists, better soldiers and more terrible weapons. I would not try to de-emphasize the critical state of our defenses and scientific development as contrasted with Soviet achievements. But I would insist with equal fervor that arms and science alone will not save us.

Possession of the world’s greatest arsenal of super-weapons, of the most destructive missiles and anti-missile missiles, of the greatest minds in science and engineering – this is not enough to assure this nation’s role as leader of a free, peaceful, and prosperous world. We need voters and politicians capable of making the hard unpopular decisions our times require – leaders who can help end the domestic problems of inflation or recession, race relations, education, the decay of our cities, agriculture, and health – leaders who can carry on and improve the American way of life in this hour of its greatest challenge. In our concern over the education of more scientists and engineers for the future America, we dare not neglect its politicians.

I realize that most Americans are not concerned about the education of politicians. No education, except how to find your way around a smoke-filled room, is considered necessary for political success. Those of you who are graduating this spring are urged to follow any number of other careers – by public officials, editorials, businessmen visiting your campus, newspaper advertisements – and your local draft board.

But in the midst of all of these pleas, plans and pressures, few, I dare say, if any, will be urging upon you a career in the field of politics. Some will point out the advantages of civil service positions. Others will talk in high terms of public service, or statesmanship, or community leadership. But few, if any, will urge you to become politicians.

Mothers may still want their favorite sons to grow up to be President, but, according to a famous Gallup poll of some years ago, they do not want them to become politicians in the process. They may be statesmen, they may be leaders of their community, they may be distinguished law-makers – but they must never be politicians. Successful politicians, according to Walter Lippmann, are "insecure and intimidated men," who advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate" the views and votes of the people who elect them. It was considered a great joke years ago when the humorist Artemus Ward declared: "I am not a politician, and my other habits are good also." And, in more recent times, even the President of the United States, when asked at a news conference early in his first term how he liked "the game of politics", replied with a frown that his questioner was using a derogatory phrase. Being President, he said, is a "very fascinating experience … but the word 'politics' … I have no great liking for that."

Politics, in short, has become one of our most neglected, our most abused and our most ignored professions. It ranks low on the occupational list of a large share of the population; and its chief practitioners are rarely well or favorably known. "Don’t teach my boy poetry," a mother recently wrote the headmaster of Eton; "don’t teach my boy poetry, he’s going to stand for Parliament." The worlds of politics and scholarship have indeed drifted apart.

Unfortunately, this disdain for the political profession is not only shared but intensified in our academic institutions. For both teachers and students find it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature. In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion; in the latter, compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good.

And even when they realize the difference, most intellectuals consider their chief function to be that of the critic – and politicians are sensitive to critics (possibly because we have so many of them). "Many intellectuals," Sidney Hook has said, "would rather 'die' than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right."

Of course, the intellectual’s attitude is partly defensive – for he has been regarded with so much suspicion and hostility by political figures and their constituents that a recent survey of American intellectuals by a national magazine elicited from one of our foremost literary figures the guarded response, "I ain’t no intellectual."

But this mutual suspicion was not always the case – and I would ask those of you who look with disdain and disfavor upon the possibilities of a political career to remember that our nation’s first great politicians were traditionally our ablest, most respected, most talented leaders, men who moved from one field to another with amazing versatility and vitality. A contemporary described Thomas Jefferson as "A gentleman of 32, who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin."

Daniel Webster could throw thunderbolts at Hayne on the Senate Floor and then stroll a few steps down the corridor and dominate the Supreme Court as the foremost lawyer of his time. John Quincy Adams, after being summarily dismissed from the Senate for a notable display of independence, could become Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and then become a great Secretary of State. (Those were the happy days when Harvard professors had no difficulty getting Senate confirmation.)

This versatility also existed on the frontier. Missouri’s first Senator, Thomas Hart Benton, the man whose tavern brawl with Jackson in Tennessee caused him to flee the state, was described with these words in his obituary: "With a readiness that was often surprising, he could quote from a Roman Law or a Greek philosopher, from Virgil’s Georgics, The Arabian Nights, Herodotus, or Sancho Panza; from the Sacred Carpets, the German reformers or Adam Smith; from Fénelon or Hudibras, from the financial reports of Mecca or the doings of the Council of Trent, from the debates on the adoption of the Constitution or intrigues of the kitchen cabinet or from some forgotten speech of a deceased Member of Congress."

This link between American scholarship and the American politician remained for more than a century. A little more than one hundred years ago, in the Presidential campaign of 1856, the Republicans sent three brilliant orators around the campaign circuit: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (In those times, apparently, the "egg-heads" were all Republicans.)

I would urge therefore that each of you, regardless of your chosen occupation, consider entering the field of politics at some stage in your career. All kinds of professions have been represented in our political leaders. A Member of Congress from the Michigan Territory in 1823 was the eloquent and hard-working Father Gabriel Richard, a Salpician priest from Detroit. Certainly both sexes have been well-represented, including many a housewife concerned about public affairs.

It is not necessary that you be famous, that you effect radical changes in the government, or that you are acclaimed by the public for your efforts. It is not even necessary that you be successful. I ask only that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil – or a hammer. The formal phases of the "anvil" stage are now completed for many of you, though hopefully you will continue to absorb still more in the years ahead. The question now is whether you are to be a hammer – whether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.

It is not enough to lend your talents to merely discussing the issues and deploring their solutions. Most scholars, I know, would prefer to confine their attentions to the mysteries of pure scholarship or the delights of abstract discourse. But "Would you have counted him a friend of Ancient Greece," as George William Curtis asked a century ago during the Kansas-Nebraska Controversy, "who quietly discussed the theory of patriotism on that Greek summer day through whose hopeless and immortal hours Leonidas and his three hundred stood at Thermopylae for liberty? Was John Milton to conjugate Greek verbs in his library, or talk of the liberty of the ancient Shunamites, when the liberty of Englishmen was imperiled?" No, the duty of the scholar – particularly in a republic such as ours – is to contribute his objective views and his sense of liberty to the affairs of his state and nation.

This is a great institution, Saint Vincent College. Its establishment and continued functioning, like that of all great colleges and universities, has required considerable effort and expenditure. I cannot believe that all of this was undertaken merely to give the school’s graduates an economic advantage in the life struggle. "A university," said Professor Woodrow Wilson, "should be an organ of memory for the state for the transmission of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation, as well as a man of his time." And Prince Bismarck was even more specific – one third of the students of German universities, he once stated, broke down from overwork; and another third broke down from dissipation: and the other third ruled Germany. (I leave it to each of you to decide which category you fall in.)

But if you are to be among the rulers of our land, from precinct captain to President, if you are willing to enter the abused and neglected profession of politics, then let me tell you – as one who is familiar with the political world – that we stand in serious need of the fruits of your education. We do not need political scholars whose education has been so specialized as to exclude them from participation in current events – men like Lord John Russell, of whom Queen Victoria once remarked that he would be a better man if he knew a third subject – but he was interested in nothing but the Constitution of 1688 and himself. No, what we need are men who can ride easily over broad fields of knowledge and recognize the mutual dependence of our two worlds.

I do not say that our political and public life should be turned over to college-trained experts who ignore public opinion. Nor would I adopt from the Belgian Constitution of 1893 the provision giving three votes instead of one to college graduates (at lease not until more Democrats go to college). Nor would I give to Saint Vincent College a seat in the Congress as William and Mary was once represented in the Virginia House of Burgesses.

But I do urge the application of your talents to the public solution of the great problems of our time – increasing farm foreclosures in the midst of national prosperity – record small business failures at a time of record profits – pockets of chronic unemployment and low wages amidst the wonders of automation – monopoly, mental illness, race relations, taxation, international trade, and, above all, the knotty complex problems of war and peace, of untangling the strife-ridden, hate-ridden Middle East, of preventing man’s destruction of man by nuclear war or, even more awful to contemplate, by disabling through mutations generations yet unborn.

No public leader need apologize for a religious education such as you have received – for religion is at the essence of our present world struggle. The Communist rulers do not fear the phraseology of religion, or the ceremonies and churches and denominational organizations. On the contrary, they leave no stone unturned in seeking to turn these aspects of religion to their own advantage and to use the trappings of religion in order to cement the obedience of their people. What they fear is the profound consequences of a religion that is lived and not merely acknowledged. They fear especially man’s response to spiritual and ethical stimuli, not merely material. A society which seeks to make the worship of the State the ultimate objective of life cannot permit a higher loyalty, a faith in God, a belief in a religion that elevates the individual, acknowledges his true value and teaches him devotion and responsibility to something beyond the here and the now. The Communists fear Christianity more as a way of life than as a weapon. There is room in a totalitarian system for churches – but there is no room for God. The claim of the State must be total, and no other loyalty, and no other philosophy of life can be tolerated; and our nation needs leaders who can penetrate that weakness by their own lives and philosophy.

No, you do not lack problems or opportunities – you do not lack the ability or the energy; nor, I have tried to say, do you lack the responsibility to act, no matter what you have heard about the profession of politics.

We want from you graduates not the sneers of the cynics or the despair of the faint-hearted. We ask you for enlightenment, vision, illumination.

In his book, "One Man’s America", Alistair Cooke tells the story which well illustrates this point. On the 19th of May, 1780, as he describes it, in Hartford, Connecticut the skies at noon turned from blue to gray and by midafternoon had blackened over so densely that, in that religious age, men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came. The Connecticut House of Representatives was in session. And as some men fell down in the darkened chamber and others clamored for immediate adjournment, the Speaker of the House, one Colonel Davenport, came to his feet. And he silenced the din with these words: "The Day of Judgment is either approaching – or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish, therefore, that candles may be brought."

Students and faculty of Saint Vincent College, we who are here today concerned with the dark and difficult task ahead ask once again of you that candles may be brought to illuminate our way.

Source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files, Box 899, "Upon receipt of honorary degree from Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, 4 February 1958." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.