Heritage Award 2003 Acceptance Speech
by The Hon. James W. Symington '45
Given November 11, 2003

Little did I dream when I first set foot on the Albany Road sixty-two years ago - that it could lead to a moment like this. I feel a little like the fellow whose deceased friend of long standing - and some imperfections - was being so generously eulogized he felt the need to approach the casket to be sure they had the right man.

Across the screen of memory glide the names, faces, voices, and careers of countless friends and schoolmates who would be my nominees. For, if like Tennyson's Ulysses, we are part of all we've met, those treasured friends are most certainly a part of me. Wherever they are - in this world or the next - I feel their presence and share with them the moment. In preparing for it I asked Mr. Widmer how long should I speak. "It doesn't really matter", he said, "everybody leaves anyway in about 20 minutes". I then turned to wife and counselor for the past half century, Sylvia, and asked her what I should talk about. 'Well, whatever you do", she said, "Don't try to be witty or intelligent, just be yourself." I trust you're all familiar with the old adage, "Home is where you hang your head". In any case, the mid-academic season does not call for a commencement address. If you haven't commenced what are you doing here? Now, if it were graduation time I would feel perfectly justified in quoting two of my favorite examples: Art Buchwald's parting shot to a senior class, "We've given you a wonderful world. Now don't mess it up", or Bob Hope's concluding remarks: "As I look into your eager, upturned faces, full of desire to arise and go out into the world, I've one piece of advice. 'Don't go'. Droll and ironic as they are, both messages implicitly acknowledge the limits of every departing generation. And that's just as well. How would you feel if there was nothing left to fix? No worry on that score.

So go we did, as will you. But since you are at neither the alpha nor omega of your journey through Deerfield and beyond, I thought I might share a few instructive moments encountered on mine, and close with a Deerfield prescription for America. First a couple of reminiscences that validate Kipling's admonition regarding triumph and disaster to treat those two imposters just the same as - well as - Will Rogers' definition of history itself, "just one darn thing after another."

One evening in the old Wells House I took an active and perhaps leadership role in some disruptive conduct which occasioned the manifest displeasure of the normally unflappable Russ Miller, housemaster, later acting headmaster, and subsequent lifelong friend. Duly chastised, I and my fellow celebrants dispersed. Now in those days the Headmaster kept a second office right in the open corridor of the old school building - which linked classrooms, study hall and library. Passing through, one was inclined to steal a glance at our maximum leader. The morning after the referenced indiscretion, he caught my eye and motioned me to approach. I did so in a state of incipient anxiety. "Jimmy", he said mildly, "have you ever heard of sophomoritis?" "Yes sir, I believe so, yes sir". "And you know what it means more or less?" "Yes sir". "Well", he said, "the interesting thing about you is you're getting it in your Junior year". Oh, sharper than a serpent's tooth - and yet - a highly useful - not unkind, and clearly memorable reproach for one whose prior good fortunes had led him to believe he was on a secure path to universal approval.

Let me say this bit of ancient history is by no means a reflection on today's sophomores whose judgment and maturity, I have it on good authority, are an example to the entire free world. In any case the following year, having turned 17, I stood before a brawny Marine Corps recruiting Sergeant. The date was August 9, 1945 which a check of your history books will reveal as the date of the second atomic explosion - over Nagasaki. There was as yet only scant news of the first which had detonated over Hiroshima on August 5th. So to pass the time I asked the Sergeant if he knew anything about this "new weapon". He looked down on my 129 pound frame with an air of resignation. "Son", he said, "When we saw we were down to you we decided to go with everything we had". So much for the newly minted graduate of New England's finest, festooned with honors and exalted above the fray.

Mr. Boyden would have smiled at the sudden deflation. "Be mobile" he always cautioned - which is to say, adjust rapidly to rapidly changing circumstances. John Suitor, teacher of both English and wisdom, might have added, "and be mindful of Ozimandias, King of Kings, buried up to his chin in the windblown sands of Egypt, and the moral drawn from the sight by the poet Keats. It's in your notebooks, I'm sure - the futility of renown and the certainty of oblivion. That doesn't mean we shouldn't give it our best shot - even if it isn't one heard around the world. Far from it. Our communities, our country and our world now need our best shots as never before. Nor do I have the slightest doubt Deerfield has prepared you to take them. In fact the feeling that overcomes a Deerfield graduate of sixty years past, i.e. me, as he confronts Deerfielders of today, i.e. you, is a mixture of wonder and intimidation. Wonder because an indecipherable future is written on your faces as it must have been on ours six decades ago. Intimidating because from all I've read, heard and seen of your activities, your accomplishments, your perspectives, and the reach of your academic, social and political inquiries, I find you far better attuned to the requirements of a just and mutually rewarding society and world than ever we were. Issues of race, gender and social and economic responsibility which were just aborning in our time, are the daily grist of yours.

And that's progress. But if history has been correctly described as a race between education and disaster, you, better put on your running shoes. Remember the old saw about the fellow who was asked, which did the most harm, ignorance or apathy, and responded, "I don't know, and I don't care" A little remedial knowing and caring is essential if we are not to be overtaken by the consequences of past ignorance of and indifference to forces in the world that can do us great injury, have done so, and appear determined to keep on doing so...unless and until...what? The shape and content of that "what" should occupy your minds, minds I adjudge open enough, and resourceful enough to help America remain "mobile" - in her perspectives, expectations, and initiatives, and always positioned to apply her enduring values to the solution of the evolving challenges we face. How different they are! In magnitude and kind. In 1838 in an address to the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, the then young Abe Lincoln put the following prescient question:

"From where shall we expect the approach of anger? Shall some transatlantic military giant step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Africa and Asia with a Bonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide."

This by that extraordinary man whose fateful duty would one day be to prevent the self-destruction of our country. But sad to say in today's world neither oceans, nor mountain ranges, nor walls, electric fences and checkpoints guarantee the security of any land. Our treasured values and the social construct that protects them are vulnerable to an extent undreamed of in our comfortable past. Technologies of destruction in the hands of hate have proven capable of breaching even fortress America. Clearly, nation states per se, ours included, can no longer contain the ideological, transnational, subversively funded, apocalyptic forces that threaten them and their peoples. Being equally vulnerable, they must at least combine their several insights and resources to identify, understand, and ameliorate if not negate those forces with America taking the lead, America - the one nation which continues to prove that people of different races, ethnicities, religions, and historical backgrounds can live together in peace and mutual respect under one flag and one set of just laws. Our sights must be adjustable, even as our vision remains constant.

The dual challenge of my early days was the containment of Fascism and then Communism. So it was off to Parris Island and then to Russia with guitar and dictionary. Were I so fortunate as to be your contemporary it could be immersion in Islamic, Asian, African and Latin American cultural studies, yes, and "Old Europe" too, coupled with student-inspired exchange programs to meet, sing, learn, share perspectives cheerfully, draw the poisons of mutual ignorance and suspicion - and reduce thereby the pool of willing recruits available to the private legions of hate. There will always be keen competition for your time, insights, talents, energy and the works of your heart and mind. But save a little for Uncle Sam. In whatever walk of life you set out upon reserve a portion of it in whatever way you can to keeping our country sufficiently "mobile" to anticipate, meet and surmount whatever dangers lie ahead from without or within, by widening its circle of trusted and trusting friends, doubting a little of its infallibility as the sage Ben Franklin advised, and, by word and deed, confirming its good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. A tall order, but not too tall for a graduate of today's Deerfield.