Departments
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Week of 11 June 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 35 |
Feature
Article
Kissinger calls on Class of '99 to value substance over sound bites
By Eric McHenry
Henry Kissinger has a friend who believes there's no such thing as an English accent.
"He thinks it's something the English put on to intimidate Americans," Kissinger told the crowd of over 30,000 that filled Nickerson Field for BU's 126th Commencement exercises May 23, "and that if you can only catch an Englishman unaware, like waking him up at four in the morning, he will talk like a normal human being."
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Henry Kissinger |
"We read, for example, that in the Balkans and elsewhere, people should learn from the way various ethnic groups live together in the United States," Kissinger said, "and that with just a little effort we can bring this situation about. But in those areas where there are murderous ethnic conflicts, there are long historical roots. Conquerors have swept across the Balkan regions for hundreds of years. . . . The weak have been killed, the conciliatory have emigrated, and to the remainder, their ethnic identity is one of the cardinal experiences of their lives.
"This, of course, does not justify the crimes that are committed in the name of ethnic identity," he said. "But it does mean that the problem is not so simple that we can present an American plan to two contending parties, as we did at Rambouillet, and be surprised when both of them turn it down."
This narrowness of political perspective, Kissinger said, is reflected in, and reinforced by, the increasingly facile character of American political speech. As access to the Internet, cellular telephones, faxes, and 24-hour news stations accelerates both the pace of political decision making and the delivery of information, substantive discourse gives way to sound bites.
"When I started as a political advisor," said Kissinger, whose first such job was under Eisenhower, "politicians used to ask me what to think. Today, if they ask me anything, it is what to say."
And dependence upon new media, he added, can determine not only the way ideas are presented, but whether or not they are internalized. The quantity of information made available by electronic resources belies the threat they pose to genuine understanding, a threat faced for the first time by the generation that includes the Class of 1999.
"My generation grew up reading books," he said. "Now we have found that learning from books is time-consuming, and one cannot acquire all the available knowledge by reading all the books. And the computer has expanded our range of knowledge in an amazing way, so we have more facts available than any previous generation. On the other hand, we acquire these facts so easily that we know more facts than their meaning. When you read a book, you have to imprint the knowledge in your mind in some way, because it's difficult to keep going back to it. When you learn from a computer, you just have to scan it. You know you can always evoke the same facts again, which has the paradoxical consequence that we have expanded our knowledge while shrinking our perspective."
Kissinger charged the graduating seniors "to find some way by which the time that is freed by the availability of computers leads to a deepening of understanding rather than to enhancement of political demagoguery. "I consider that the overwhelming challenge of our period," he said.
Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923. His family immigrated to the United States when he was 15. After three years in the U.S. Army, he began undergraduate studies at Harvard, from which he would take his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees. Following his work with the Eisenhower administration, he served as an advisor to government agencies under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He was named secretary of state by President Nixon in 1973. That year, he received the Nobel Prize for peace, which honored the cease-fire he brokered with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho.
In 1983, he was appointed by President Reagan to chair the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, a body that included BU President John Silber. Kissinger opened his Commencement address with humorous remarks about his early interactions with Silber.
"He was put on that commission as a Democrat," Kissinger said. "Very soon, however, he achieved an amazing consensus. Both Republicans and Democrats were begging me to find a way to get him off that commission. I say all of this, however, to emphasize that there is nobody I have met whose integrity, courage, and leadership I admire more than John Silber's. And after we got through our stormy period . . . we had a wonderful relationship, and he contributed enormously, I would say decisively, to what the commission achieved, and uniquely to the humane and constructive recommendations that it included. Boston University has experienced what true leadership is."
Such leadership, Kissinger said, particularly at a time when new media allow near-constant scrutiny of public officials, requires both the judgment to separate what is lastingly important from what is merely urgent and the courage to act upon that judgment. It was a theme to which he returned at the very end of his address, when he again set Silber forth as a model for leadership in the future.
"Can we distinguish between little problems and big problems?" he asked. "And can we reduce big problems to small problems? The task of any leader is to take a society from where it is to where it has never been, which is a lonely task, requiring much courage. That is the challenge before us. And this is why John Silber has been such an inspiration to me."