国防部长罗伯特·m·盖茨（Robert M. Gates）记录了毕业典礼上的讲话
谢谢你，尼科尔总统。各位老师、各位家长、各位嘉宾：奥康纳大法官，大法官，很高兴见到你。1991年，奥康纳法官主持了我作为中央情报局局长的宣誓就职仪式，最近，正如尼科尔总统所提到的，我们去年在贝克-汉密尔顿委员会任职——尽管我在该委员会的任期突然中断了。说到这一点，就我担任国防部长的时机而言，这让我想起了很久以前乔治亚州参议员理查德·罗素（Richard Russell）讲过的一个故事，他说自己看到过一头公牛冲向火车头。他说：“你知道，这是我见过的最勇敢的公牛，但我对它的判断力不敢说太多。”凯尔索博士和科尔曼部长，你们今天得到的认可是当之无愧的。
2007届的毕业生们：祝贺你们！我非常荣幸能成为你们的毕业演讲嘉宾。作为德州农工大学校长，我主持了39场毕业典礼，但今天是我第一次发表毕业典礼演讲。我感谢你们所有人给予我这个特别的特权，让它在我的母校举行。致父母：你一定会为你孩子的成就感到骄傲。供两个孩子上完大学，我知道你也会松一口气，你可能已经在计划如何花掉你新获得的可支配收入了。算了吧。相信我。如果你认为你已经给你的儿子或女儿写了最后一张支票，做梦吧。国家爸爸妈妈银行仍在营业。我想我应该给你一些关于如何成功的建议。我可以引用亿万富翁j·保罗·盖蒂（J. Paul Getty）的话，他为如何致富提供了建议。他说：“起得早，干得晚，找到石油。”或者，阿尔弗雷德·希区柯克（Alfred Hitchcock）说过，“获胜真的没什么大不了的。前提是你恰好有一双敏锐的眼睛，一个敏捷的头脑，没有任何顾忌。”好吧，除了这些信息，我今天唯一的成功建议来自两位伟大的女性。首先是歌剧明星贝弗利·希尔斯，她说：“任何值得去的地方都没有捷径。”第二，来自凯瑟琳·赫本，她写道：“生活就是要活下去。如果你要养活自己，你就必须找到一些有趣的方法。而你不能通过坐在那里思考自己来做到这一点。”
在德州农工大学的39场毕业典礼上，我学到了演讲简洁的重要性。萧伯纳曾经告诉一位演讲者他只有15分钟的时间。演讲者问：“我怎么可能在15分钟内告诉他们我所知道的一切？”肖回答说：“我建议你说得慢一点。”我将说得很快，因为，套用林肯总统的话，我相信你们不会注意到，也不会长久记住我在这里所说的话。1961年，17岁的我来到威廉玛丽学院，打算成为一名医生。我的第一年是纯医学预科：生物、化学、微积分等等。我很快就从医学预科转到了历史。我曾经说过：“天知道我当中情局局长而不是医生救了多少人的命。”当我反思我在这里的经历时，我对许多事情感到感激：
- 感谢威廉玛丽大学，这是一所一流的学校，像我这样的人，即使是一个州外的学生，也能上得起。顺便说一下，家长们，请注意：当时州外的学费是每学期361美元。
- 感谢优秀的教职员工的个人关怀和关注——这体现了这所大学对本科教育的承诺，一直延续到今天；
- 感谢大威廉斯堡社区的人们，他们向一个远离家乡的17岁男孩敞开心扉，敞开家门；和
- 再感谢一件事。大一的时候，我的微积分得了“D”。当父亲从堪萨斯州打来电话，问我怎么可能有这样的事情时，我不得不承认，“爸爸，‘D’是一份礼物。”所以，我也很感激那个数学教授。
What William & 玛丽 gave me, above all else, was a calling to serve—a sense of duty to community and country that this college has sought to instill in each generation of students for more than 300 years. It is a calling rooted in the history and traditions of this institution.
Many a night, late, I’d walk down Duke of Gloucester Street from the Wren Building to the Capitol. On those walks, in the dark, I felt the spirit of the patriots who created a free and independent country, who helped birth it right here in Williamsburg. It was on those walks that I made my commitment to public service.
I also was encouraged to make that commitment by the then-president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, who said to we young Americans in the early 1960s, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”
We are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine this country could have gotten off to a more challenging start. It began as a business venture of a group of London merchants with a royal patent. The journalist Richard Brookhiser recently compared it to Congress today granting Wal-Mart and GE a charter to colonize Mars.
Brookhiser wrote, “Its leaders were always fighting. Leaders who were incompetent or unpopular—sometimes the most competent were the least popular—were deposed on the spot,” He continues, “The typical 17th Century account of Jamestown argues that everything would have gone well if everyone besides the author had not done wrong.” Sounds like today’s memoirs by former government officials.
Jamestown saw the New World’s first representative assembly—the institutional expression of the concept that people should have a say in how they were governed, and having that say brought with it certain obligations: a duty to participate, a duty to contribute, a duty to serve the greater good.
It is these four-hundred-year-old obligations that I want to address for the next few minutes. When talking about American democracy, we hear a great deal about freedoms, and rights, and, more recently, about the entitlements of citizenship. We hear a good deal less about the duties and responsibilities of being an American.
Young Americans are as decent, generous, and compassionate as we’ve ever seen in this country—an impression reinforced by my four and a half years of experience as President of Texas A&M, by the response of college students across America—and especially here at William & 玛丽—to the tragedy at Virginia Tech, and even more powerfully reinforced by almost six months as Secretary of Defense.
That is what makes it puzzling that so many young people who are public-minded when it comes to their campus and community tend to be uninterested in— if not distrustful of—our political processes. Nor is there much enthusiasm for participating in government, either as a candidate or for a career.
While volunteering for a good cause is important, it is not enough. This country will only survive and progress as a democracy if its citizens—young and old alike—take an active role in its political life as well.
Seventy percent of eligible voters in this country cast a ballot in the election of 1964. The voting age was then 21. During the year I graduated, 1965, the first major American combat units arrived in Vietnam, and with them, many 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds. In recognition of that disparity, years later the voting age would be lowered to 18 by constitutional amendment.
Sad to say, that precious franchise, purchased and preserved by the blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans your age and younger from 1776 to today, has not been adequately appreciated or exercised by your generation.
In 2004, with our nation embroiled in two difficult and controversial wars, the voting percentage was only 42 percent for those aged 18 to 24.
Ed Muskie, former senator and Secretary of State, once said that “you have the God given right to kick the government around.” And it starts with voting, and becoming involved in campaigns. If you think that too many politicians are feckless and corrupt, then go out and help elect different ones. Or go out and run yourself. But you must participate, or else the decisions that affect your life and the future of our country will be made for you—and without you.
So vote. And volunteer. But also consider doing something else: dedicating at least part of your life in service to our country.
I entered public life more than 40 years ago, and no one is more familiar with the hassles, frustrations and sacrifices of public service than I am. Government is, by design of the Founding Fathers, slow, unwieldy and almost comically inefficient. Will Rogers used to say: “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”
These frustrations are inherent in a system of checks and balances, of divisions and limitations of power. Our Founding Fathers did not have efficiency as their primary goal. They designed a system intended to sustain and protect liberty for the ages. Getting things done in government is not easy, but it’s not supposed to be.
I last spoke at William & 玛丽 on Charter Day in 1998. Since then our country has gone through September 11 with subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We learned once again that the fundamental nature of man has not changed, that evil people and forces will always be with us, and must be dealt with through courage and strength.
Serving the nation has taken on a whole new meaning and required a whole new level of risk and sacrifice—with hundreds of thousands of young Americans in uniform who have stepped forward to put their lives on the line for their country. These past few months I’ve met many of those men and women—in places like Fallujah and Tallil in Iraq and Bagram and Forward Operating Base Tillman in Afghanistan—and at Walter Reed as well. Seeing what they do every day, and the spirit and good humor with which they do it, is an inspiration. The dangers they face, and the dangers our country faces, make it all the more important that this kind of service be honored, supported, and encouraged.
The ranks of these patriots include the graduates of William & 玛丽’s ROTC program, and the cadets in this Class of 2007, who I’d like to address directly. You could have chosen a different path—something easier, or safer, or better compensated—but you chose to serve. You have my deepest admiration and respect—as Secretary of Defense, but mostly as a fellow American.
You are part of a tradition of voluntary military service dating back to George Washington’s Continental Army. That tradition today includes General David McKiernan, William & 玛丽 Class of 1972, who led the initial ground force in Iraq and now commands all Army troops in Europe. It also is a tradition not without profound loss and heartache.
Some of you may know the story of Ryan McGlothlin, William & 玛丽 Class of 2001: a high school valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa here, and Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. After being turned down by the Army for medical reasons, he persisted and joined the Marines and was deployed to Iraq in 2005. He was killed leading a platoon of riflemen near the Syrian border.
Ryan’s story attracted media attention because of his academic credentials and family connections. That someone like him would consider the military surprised some people. When Ryan first told his parents about joining the Marines, they asked if there was some other way to contribute. He replied that the privileged of this country bore an equal responsibility to rise to its defense.
It is precisely during these trying times that America needs its best and brightest young people, from all walks of life, to step forward and commit to public service. Because while the obligations of citizenship in any democracy are considerable, they are even more profound, and more demanding, as citizens of a nation with America’s global challenges and responsibilities—and America’s values and aspirations.
During the war of the American Revolution, Abigail Adams wrote the following to her son, John Quincy Adams: “These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. . . . Great necessities call out great virtues.”
You graduate in a time of “great necessities.” Therein lies your challenge and your opportunity.
A final thought. As a nation, we have, over more than two centuries, made our share of mistakes. From time to time, we have strayed from our values; and, on occasion, we have become arrogant in our dealings with others. But we have always corrected our course. And that is why today, as throughout our history, this country remains the world’s most powerful force for good—the ultimate protector of what Vaclav Havel once called “civilization’s thin veneer.” A nation Abraham Lincoln described as mankind’s “last, best hope.”
If, in the 21st century, America is to be a force for good in the world—for freedom, the rule of law, and the inherent value of each and every person; if America is to continue to be a beacon for all who are oppressed; if America is to exercise global leadership consistent with our better angels, then the most able and idealistic of your generation must step forward and accept the burden and the duty of public service. I promise you that you will also find joy and satisfaction and fulfillment.
I earlier quoted a letter from Abigail Adams to her son, John Quincy. I will close with a quote from a letter John Adams sent to one of their other sons, Thomas Boylston Adams. And he wrote: “Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or another. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.”
Will the wise and the honest among you come help us serve the American people?
恭喜你，祝你好运。
