Thank you very much. This is a great honor and I'm glad to be here. All through my years at Wellesley I heard about the Dimple. Here it is! It's quite beautiful, but here it is. It is wonderful to be with you and to celebrate with you. I love coming to Massachusetts because in the very nice conferring of the degree, talking about my love of Congress is true and Massachusetts always brought us some of the most interesting members of Congress.

My personal favorite, of course, was Tip O'Neill, who we all miss terribly. And one of the many reasons that I am so grateful to him is that he told me a joke. He told a joke--actually right before he died--my husband and I were at a do-good event with him, and I never remember jokes. I'm terrible. I hear it; it goes out of my mind. I think, "Shoot. It's a clean joke I can tell." This is my one joke therefore. This is the only joke that I remember, and you are supposed to tell a joke at this point, so I am deeply grateful to Tip for this joke which is one that starts the way that so many do a great when a great and good man dies and goes to heaven and arrives and the Pearly Gates and he sees St. Peter, and St. Peter says to him, "You have been a good child of Holy Mother Church. You get a wish." "Great. I want to meet the Blessed Mother." Peter says, "Easy, done." And in he goes and he meets Mary, and he says to her, "There is a question I have been dying to ask you. Over all those centuries and all that art, in all those stained glass windows and all those sculptures, and all those paintings, any time you're holding the Baby Jesus you look sad. Why?" She says, "I wanted a girl."

I promise you, you will never be able to look at a Madonna and child again without cracking up. I have seen a great many of them because my mother, after she left Congress and retired for a few years and discovered that was really hard work, took a new job at age 81 in a new country as the United States ambassador to the Vatican, which was a wonderful thing except she found herself representing Bill Clinton to the Pope. Toughest job in the diplomatic service and if anybody could do it, my mother could. She is out of a long line of very feisty women, just like the women here today in the Classes of '31 and '36. How fabulous. And I loved the Class of '46 banner: Older and bolder. Yes!

Massachusetts women have particularly that heritage. I have a book out called Founding Mothers, which is about the women who influenced the founding fathers. And, of course, the feistiest of that group is probably Abigail Adams, whom you know from her wonderful advice to the men meeting in Philadelphia, to remember the ladies which, of course, they didn't do. But that was just the tip of the iceberg of her advice. And she had plenty of opportunity to write to John because he was away all the time. And one of the things that I had not really noticed or thought about until I started doing the research, was of course these women were left alone for years at a time not only forced to raise the children, take care of the old people, but to support the family because no one was paying those men in Philadelphia to think great thoughts--and, oh by the way, the British were coming.

At one point John wrote to Abigail and said, "If it gets really dangerous, take our children and fly to the woods." Thank you, John. You know, hope you're having a nice dinner in Philadelphia.

But one of her great causes was women's education. As early as 1776 Abigail wrote to John, "If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women. There was a huge flowering of women's academies after the revolution, partly for that reason-so mothers could raise republican, virtuous citizens.

It was in that spirit as higher education institutions for woman were finally established that Wheaton College came into being in 1835. Very, very early. And so I was thrilled to get the invitation to come here to this wonderful institution and to celebrate you, the Class of 2006, but also of course to be honored, to be with my fellow honorees, but I always wanted to celebrate three of your alums who are friends of mine--"Wheaties," as they were known.

Patricia King, who is here with us, who is your former Chairman of the Board of Trustees, came here in the fall of 1959 without the advantage of something like Posse and probably thought you had landed on Mars. It was bad enough for me a year later going to Wellesley in the middle of the Kennedy/Nixon campaign. My parents drove me up there and then they drove off campus in the pouring rain and my mother turned to my father and she burst into tears, and she said, "We have left our baby at a Yankee, Protestant, Republican school!"

Any time I tease my mother about it she says, "It's true. It was just true." But at least I had grown up in the world of Washington politics and had some sense of different kinds of people. Pat was in a different position, but what she found here was the caring of a small college and the excellence of a liberal arts education. So she went from managing, to flourishing, to shining, to triumphing. And she became the president of the student body, and she has been shining ever since as a distinguished lawyer and law professor, champion of civil rights, preeminent bioethicist, and author and on and on and on her accomplishments go in so, so many areas. I see her most often now as a fellow trustee of the Kaiser Family Foundation, where she brings her great intelligence and good sense.

Pat's classmate and my dear friend, Leslie Stahl, you know from her public career, 60 Minutes, and her coverage of the White House for CBS News and her pioneer work as the first woman anchor of the Sunday morning show Face The Nation. And she was always scooping everyone while wearing spiked heels and still being the best friend and mother and daughter that any of us knew.

And the third Wheaton grad that I want to honor today is a woman that, in fact, I'm rushing out of here to go back to honor her in Washington because she's retiring after 25 as headmistress of Stone Ridge, the school that I attended. Her name is Anne Dyer. She was the Class of '59, and she is a Sacred Heart nun.

Now, I could see you sort of imagining yourselves becoming Patricia King or becoming Leslie Stahl. You're probably not imagining yourselves becoming Anne Dyer, but she has had an incredible influence in the lives of decades of girls. The Sacred Heart nuns influenced me more than anybody other than my own family because in the 1950s they believed--radically--that girls should be taken seriously and they taught us that we could be anything we wanted to be except priests and they were bitter about that. They have become more bitter over the years. But Anne has given direction and inspiration to generations of girls who have gone on to higher education and into the world with a solid intellectual basis filled with moral values.

All three of these women I cite not just because they are my friends and I admire them, but because they have lived lives in various ways of service. And I know that you have been encouraged to serve your community here, but I would like to echo Doctor Rostow by saying that it would be especially useful for you to consider, now that you have this wonderful education, a life of public service, particularly public service in elective office.

I know that that is not a popular thought or that these are not popular people. And some of it's their own fault. Right now they're misbehaving badly. Some of it is their fault because they tend to run against the institutions they serve in rather than admire them and respect them. Some of it is your fault, our fault as citizens, because to be good leaders you have to be good citizens and allow people to take leadership, not punish them the minute that they do something that you think is not in your immediate self-interest. Some of it is certainly our fault in the press for always jumping on public servants and politicians and denigrating them as "professional politicians" as if that is some epithet of disgrace. But I would like to argue the other case because I think to denigrate the professional is to denigrate the profession. After all, we demand professional doctors, and we respect the practice of medicine. We expect professional bridge builders, and we respect the art of engineering. So to say that only amateurs, nonprofessionals, should be governing us is to show a basic disrespect for government.

And I know that that sentiment is popular, but I think it's dangerous because nothing binds us together as a nation. We have no nationhood except our government. We have no common ethnicity, race, history, religion--even language, despite what the Senate's up to right now. If you look at what's happening in the rest of the world today, you understand the miracle of this nation. You see a world completely torn apart by racial, ethnic, religious strife. But by and large, we who are the most multi-cultural, diverse nation on earth have been able to put it aside, with the horrible exception of the Civil War.

And it's because our nationhood has been defined by our Constitution. It's our shared heritage. And it's on display in our National Archives in a room, the rotunda of the archives, that is the closest thing we have to a national shrine: The Constitution on one side, the Declaration on the other, the Bill of Rights in the middle. It looks for all the world like Our Lady's alter, St. Joseph's alter, and the tabernacle. But it is a respect for the Constitution and the institutions that it created. All three branches of government: the judiciary, the executive, and, yes, the Congress, that is essentially the glue that keeps our country together and a willingness to participate in those institutions.

You know, I'm so glad that Dr. Rostow said this because I'm going to quote here from de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville came, of course you know, 170 years ago and looked around this country and said, How could it possibly be a country? These people have nothing in common. And then he came to the conclusion that it was because, and I'm quoting, "Every one in his sphere takes an active part in the government of society." He goes on, "The cares of politics engross a prominent place in the occupations of a citizen in the United States. Even the women frequently attend public meetings and listen to political harangues as a recreation from their household labors."

Now, of course, women are running those public meetings, I'm happy to say, because they understand that you have to get involved. I love the quotation of a woman state legislator in Connecticut who said, "You either have to stop complaining or you run for office. I couldn't stop complaining."

The influx of women and minorities into our political lives should make you more respectful of them. They are not closed institutions; they are places where people are not locked out, places where you can serve. And, of course, service is what it's all about. And again, as Dr. Rostow said, you will serve--all of you will serve--in a variety of ways. Those of you in the arts can enliven our lives. Those in the sciences, including the social sciences, can improve our lives. Those of you in the humanities can enrich our lives; those in teaching and communication can inform our lives. Those of you who go into the healing professions can improve our lives. All of you will serve, but I would like, as you go forth from this glorious place, for you to keep in mind the particular place of public service in this republic of ours and its part of our heritage.

I will go back to my friend Abigail, who at one point wrote to John, "Posterity, for whom we are making all these sacrifices, will never know what we have suffered."

Prove her wrong. Get into the fray. When your balloon, as Brittany says, goes up there, make part of its journey a time in public service. Thank you very much.

This page is maintained by Commencement. Last updated on 8/21/07.
Questions about this page? Use our query form.

CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST
ON REUNION 2006