Senator Christopher Dodd
Speech at Howard University
School of Business
Washington, DC
November 16, 2006
Thank you . . .
I wanted to come today to share a few thoughts, and then hear from all of you.
As you might have noticed, we had an election last week.
We call it an election – but it really was a referendum.
The message was not just: throw the Republicans out.
In my view, it’s just as much a message to all of us: that it’s time to put partisanship aside, and come together to get this country back on track – to simply do the job that we were sent here to do.
We have been given an opportunity, a moment in time, to come up with better answers. We need to make the most of that opportunity. That’s what I want to talk to you about today.
I had an experience not long ago that I want to share with you.
My five year old daughter, Grace, was getting ready for school one morning, when she looked up at me and said, “I wonder what my day is going to be like.”
It’s not every day that you get that question from a five year old.
A moment later, she looked up again and said these exact words: “I wonder what my life is going to be like.”
She had just turned 5. How do you answer that?
But it’s a question I’ve heard before – because it’s the same question that all parents ask about their children every single day.
The one thing I do know is that the life she leads tomorrow will depend in no small measure on the decisions we will make.
In the brief time we are here on this earth, I believe that every generation has a responsibility to do all we can to get this world right, to make sure that every child can grow up to have as beautiful as passionate and as meaningful a life as anybody can imagine.
In my view, we are not going to get there by being timid or fearful of the future.
We are only going to get there if we approach the future with confidence, optimism, and hope, and also a deep belief that tomorrow will be better.
Through the centuries, much of a world held back by tradition, watched each generation move America forward;
First, to establish a set of moral principles and rules of governance that were revolutionary;
To throw off slavery;
To open our country to millions of immigrants;
To escape the depression;
And then, to build a middle class and a nation of unparalleled opportunity.
It has been anything but a perfect history! Many paid a high price.
But in the first decade of the 21st Century, we seem to have left that great tradition behind.
For six years now, America has succumbed to the politics of small solutions and low expectations.
We don’t try to solve the big problems we face. In many cases, we don’t even talk about them.
As a nation, I believe America once again needs to be unapologetic about being idealistic;
To dream big dreams again;
To try bold solutions again;
We need to face and solve the hard problems we encounter today – guided by the belief, as Shakespeare once wrote, that it is noble “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.”
I want you to know: it is no accident that I chose to speak on this campus today. Howard University is a place born of a commitment to generational responsibility.
It was 140 years ago tomorrow – on November 17th, 1866 -- that 30 members of the First Congregational Society of Washington, DC got together in a small rented room in Judiciary Square to talk about this future.
The Civil War had just ended.
They came together to discuss a dream: that one day, Washington would have its own institution to train the next generation of black preachers.
They believed it was their responsibility to help create opportunity for the first generation free of slavery.
Most of the 30 people gathered that day believed that such a school would only be possible in the distant future.
But one member, Henry Brewster, stood up and asked a very simple question: why not now?
Why not build the school now?
We have a whole generation of young Americans to educate, he said, and we can’t afford to wait.
Henry Brewster issued a challenge to the other 29 members in that room: who among us will stand up and lead?
And then came the response: all of them said they would lead.
That very day, they voted to create a college.
On March 2, 1867, Howard University was officially born.
But in fact, this university was conceived on November 17th, 1866, when one person stood up, and called his generation to greater things.
Henry Brewster knew his audience, and they knew him. He understood the deep well of talent in that room that was just waiting to be called, waiting to be summoned to a higher purpose.
It didn’t just happen because it was a good idea.
It happened because those 30 people took responsibility for creating a world they wanted to see.
If you attended or saw the dedication of the Martin Luther King memorial on Monday, you saw another generation of people whose lives were transformed by the power of a single dream.
The tears shed by grown men -- Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis -- were a powerful reminder that even though Dr. King was gone, his dreams live on.
We all understand the power of that call, because in that generation, America was inspired by Dr. King and John Fitzgerald Kennedy and many others, who constantly asked the question: why not now?
What we learned then is that it’s not only the people whose name appear in the history books that do great things – there are people all around us, in every community, every day, capable of asking and acting upon the question: why not now?
I stood on the East Front of the Capitol on a cold January day in 1961 and heard the famous inaugural address of John Kennedy. I understood that when he talked about a torch being passed, he was talking to me.
I heard that call, and I took it to the rural hills of the Dominican Republic, near the Haitian border, where I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years.
I didn’t speak Spanish (although I do now), and I had no idea what I was doing. But it didn’t matter.
We built a youth club and a library and a maternity hospital and many other projects.
What people in that community saw in me was a 22 year old American who had no background in any of this, but who believed there were limitless possibilities for what people could do if we worked together.
That’s not something I was taught to believe as a Peace Corps volunteer – that’s who I was as an American.
The thought of totally eradicating poverty and curing disease and ending racism may have been exaggerated, but there’s nothing wrong with a generation believing those goals are possible.
When people wonder why I joined the Peace Corps, I have a simple answer: because someone asked me to.
At a difficult moment in our nation’s history, somebody asked me and thousands of others in my generation to stand up and lead – to keep dreaming, keep hoping, to keep working to create a better America and a better world.
I am here on this campus today because I believe we need the same kind of leadership today, willing to call all Americans to be part of something larger than themselves once again.
The world has watched with admiration as each generation, almost without exception, inspired by idealism, took America to better places.
Now, they watch an American leadership that does not challenge us to be better and seems indifferent to the principles that we affirmed before the world.
Travel around America today and there is a sense that something is being lost. Something is missing.
I’m not just referring to jobs or the tragic loss of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, as significant as those losses are.
I’m talking about something else, something deeper.
I’m talking about a sense of who we are as a people, of what we stand for.
As America has struggled to form a more perfect union here at home, we’ve have also strived to stand for the right things in the world.
We didn’t start wars – we ended them.
We didn’t commit torture – we condemned it.
We didn’t turn away from the world – we embraced it.
But there’s a feeling that all that has changed in the past six years.
There’s a sense that “the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”
Those are not my words: they belong to former Secretary of State and Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell.
Here at home, it is the same, unfortunately.
As we face tremendous problems, we have leaders today who just throw up their hands as incomes, opportunity, and graduation rates go down and health costs, tuition costs, and poverty go up.
The last thing we need in America is a government that dreams smaller dreams than our families.
Yet, when we look to our leaders to take a bold stand on these issues that are so important to our lives – we see an American President who takes a bold stand on torture instead.
It is impossible to imagine a John Kennedy or a Bill Clinton – or a Ronald Reagan – signing that shameful torture bill that our President signed into law a month ago.
It was especially shameful that he did it during the same month – practically during the same week – that the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, when 22 of Hitler’s top henchmen were sentenced for crimes against humanity.
Let me tell you why this is so important to me.
I was a year old when my father left our home to go to Nuremberg.
He was a 38 year old justice department lawyer who was invited to join the American delegation.
He went to be part of a great team.
By the time the trial ended, my father had become the number two prosecutor for the United States, right behind delegation head, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
Like his colleagues, my father was a member of a generation that defeated fascism, and then came home to build great cities and universities, to help their fellow citizens go to college and live the American Dream.
He began his career as part of the New Deal.
He helped people get jobs during the Depression.
As a justice department attorney, he had a reputation as a good lawyer. He once had to receive police protection leaving Arkansas in the 1930s after he tried and won a case against the Ku Klux Klan.
Later, he crusaded for civil rights in the mid-1950s and 60s as a member of Congress and then the U.S. Senate.
At Nuremberg, his generation had seen the men of a brutal regime who had taken the lives of more than 20 million men, women, and children.
The world asked, when you considered their atrocities: why not just give in to vengeance?
Why not just shoot the Nuremberg defendants, as Churchill wanted to do?
Instead of sending a team of lawyers to Nuremberg, why not just send a team of executioners?
Why not? Because America has always stood for something more.
We are tested at such moments. At Nuremberg, when we affirmed our humanity and commitment to high principles, America established again its exceptional role in the world.
Because of the example we set at Nuremberg, we were joined by half a century of allies in the struggle against Communism.
What people like my father understood and what Dr. King knew so well: that America’s ability to bring about a world of peace and justice was rooted not only in our military might, but also in our moral authority.
Here we are, 6 decades later.
Once again, we’ve had a monstrous attack on America.
Once again, the question is being asked: why not just give in to vengeance?
Why not just abandon due process and the rule of law and the right to a fair trial?
Why not? The answer today is no different than it was sixty years ago: because America still stands for something more.
Our idealism has always been rooted in realism.
We respect the rule of law because it is an expression of our principles, but also because it is a weapon for our security.
We know that torture yields unreliable information, and opens our own troops up to being tortured in the same way.
It’s time we reassert the principle that fairness is not weakness, that being principled is patriotic, and being strong also means being smart.
We may have traveled a crooked road over these past six years.
But it’s not too late to make America and this world right again . . . to become a nation of high ideals and great goals – if we are wise enough to recognize our opportunities, and bold enough to seize them.
Together, let us ask the question that Henry Brewster asked 140 years tomorrow: why not now?
Why not use our power to create, not just a future of peace and security, but a future of prosperity and opportunity, of learning and understanding?
Why not use our wealth to create, not just a world where some profit at the expense of many, but where many can profit to the advantage of all?
Why not use our leadership to create, not a nation of red states and blue states, but a world where people of every race, creed, color and religion come together to solve problems?
Why not use our talent, not as partisans, but as Americans:
To raise the minimum wage;
To rebuild our manufacturing base and stop jobs fleeing our nation;
To make sure you can go to college without going bankrupt;
To make sure small businesses and entrepreneurs can exercise their talent to the fullest extent possible;
To make sure that all Americans have affordable health care coverage;
To build an economy where well-paying jobs are available to every American;
And to build relationships around the world based on mutual respect, where a strong and smart America listens as well as it leads.
And why not, as Robert Kennedy once said;
To judge our success not just by the size of our gross national product;
But by the health of our children;
The quality of their education;
The joy of their play;
And the integrity of our public officials?
Why not now?
As Henry Brewster knew well – the future can’t wait.
Our brave men and women in Iraq can’t wait.
A middle class deprived of rising opportunity can’t wait.
Ending America’s addiction to foreign oil can’t wait.
Forty million people with HIV/AIDS can’t wait
The innocent of Darfur can’t wait.
If, as some have suggested, last week’s election signaled the end of the era of ideologues and indifference;
Then let us today on this campus witness the beginning of a new era of idealism, ingenuity and faith in ourselves and in our future.
Let us say without embarrassment or apology we are calling America once again to embrace a new age of optimism, a new sense of possibility.
And let us ask the question once again: who among us will stand up and lead?
For our nation, for our future, the answer needs to be: all of us.
You and I are going to be judged, and very quickly, by a jury that’s coming along.
One of them is going to be my five year old.
The others will be your children and grandchildren.
They’re going to want to know what you and I did on our watch to keep America strong and secure.
They’re going to know what we did about global warming, to preserve our freedoms, to create a world with more friends than enemies – when we had the chance.
We have but one brief moment in time to get this right. It is our watch.
Let them one day say of us that at the beginning of the 21st Century, after an uncertain start, America returned to her heritage.
Let them say that America preserved freedom and lived up to her highest ideals.
And let them say that in a broken time, we dedicated ourselves to the cause of an America that stands confident and proud and idealistic once again.
Why not now? Why not us? Why not together?
We can – we must.
Thank you.
