ST. LUKE'S SCHOOL
***
1987 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS BY
***
DR. HENRY A. KISSINGER

June 5, 1987

Jason, members of the Class of '87, ladies and gentlemen:

I don't do many commencement addresses, so I asked someone
who does what my proper function ought to be. He replied that
there is one sentence you must say: "Go forth." So, now that
I've uttered it, I will go on to say something else.

When I was your age, I thought that people of my present
years were a different species. They had been put in the world
the way they were while I had been put into the world the way I
was. I honestly believed that I would never get to their
condition, and that there was very little they could say to me
that had any particular relevance.

I attended a conference yesterday which dealt with
information technology. It was clear to me then that I live in a
different world from the one you will live in. I cannot type, I
do not know how to use a computer, I cannot read a computer. I
cannot learn from displays, and have to acquire knowledge from
memoranda. All this creates a different state of mind. It means
that we are now living -- and you will be living -- in a
different world from the one in which I was brought up.

You have available infinitely more information than did my
generation. When I go to Washington these days, I see how huge are

-2-

the differences, even from the days when I first went there. Now
everyone has a computer terminal on his desk; I should add that
many of them have lived to regret it. But all of them can call
forth all kinds of information. And yet, I am bound to ask
myself, why is it that at a time when information has never been
more available, policy making should bear so little a
relationship to reality.

We live, undoubtedly, in a world hugely different from any
that has gone before. Never before has it been possible to tie
the whole world together in a communication network of vast
sophistication. Never before has it been possible, or necessary,
to conduct our foreign policy with the knowledge we now have
available at our fingertips about the 160 other nations that
exist in the world. Never before have nations had the capability
to exterminate each other. And yet never before, or rarely
before, has there been so little relationship between knowledge
and how to use it effectively. The reason for this conundrum is
not so difficult to understand: the most difficult decision
anybody has to make in life, and certainly any policy maker
confronts, is how to go from the world with which we are familiar
to a world where we have never been. No amount of knowledge will
tell us what trends are, or how they will manifest themselves.
If you study the lives of great statesmen, or even successful
statesmen, you will find that they were not necessarily more
intelligent than their contemporaries; rather, they had two unique

-3-

qualities: a sense of the future and the courage to go there--on the basis of assumptions they could not prove true when they made them.

For America this is a very particular difficulty. We have been blessed more than any other country. We began with an empty continent and two great oceans to protect us. We have, except for the South, had no experience of irrevocable disaster. Until fairly recently, every problem we faced has proved to be solvable, and we have had the resources necessary to overcome it. But now these conditions have either changed or are in the process of change; yet, our mental attitudes have not necessarily altered. Most Americans think that foreigners are misunderstood Americans. I have a friend who has the view that there is no such think as an English accent. Rather, the English put it on to intimidate Americans, and that if you can an Englishman unawares -- like waking him up at four in the morning -- he will speak like any other human being.

We have that attitude, as well, with regard to international relations. When you read the statements of American presidents over the decades, they all speak as if international tension was something unusual.

President Roosevelt said that peace depends on friendly human relations, on personal acquaintance, on unassailable sincerity. President Eisenhower spoke of man's long pilgrimage from darkness towards light, and he said too much attention has

-4-

been paid to practical problems, at the expense of human
relations.

President Carter prayed for peace based on human relation-
ships and President Reagan is reputed to be eager to bring Gorbachev
over here so that he can show him how Americans live and how
peacefully inclined we are.

These attitudes show a very attractive side of American
life. But history has been far more complicated. All of you who
have studied history know that international relations have not,
in the past, been a subdivision of psychiatry. They have not
been the same as good personal relations.

Indeed, the American president who was most successful with
the Soviet Union was President Nixon, whom I served. Since he was
somewhat wary of Americans, he was not about to trust Russians.
And, as a result, he insisted that negotiations be concrete,
detailed, and based on strict reciprocity.

I was, at one stage of my life, a professor. Later I was a
policy maker. Thus, I have a sense of the difference in perspective
between the two professions. When you are an outsider -- a
journalist, a professor, an observer -- you can pick your
problem and work on it for as long as you choose. You are
responsible only to whatever constituency matters to you for your
conclusion. You have the privilege of changing your mind. But
when you are a policy maker, you cannot pick your problem. The
problem presents itself. Indeed, the most overwhelming

-5-

experience of a policy maker is that there are more problems on
any day then he can possibly deal with; consequently, a major
part of his task is to select those issues that are most likely to
cause trouble and get them out of the way. The price he pays for
this is that the urgent often drives out the important. The
policy maker is responsible not only for the best that can
happen, like a professor, but also for the worst. There are some
experiments he cannot make, not because it would not be nice if
they succeeded, but because it would be terrible if they failed.

Some of you will no doubt be going to universities where
professors will tell you that all policy makers who are not
criminals are fools. In my experience, most policy makers have
been almost as intelligent as most professors, and not signifi-
cantly more deficient morally. Indeed, anyone who can survive
faculty meetings at Harvard is well equipped for bureaucratic
infighting in Washington.

The difficulty that policy makers face is that they must act
on the basis of assumptions they cannot prove true when they make
them. In 1936, when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, one French
division could have stopped him, and a Ph.D. theses could be
written on whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist or a
maniac bent on world domination. Five years later, everybody
knew what the reality was; it was a knowledge acquired at the
cost of 20 million lives.

-6-

In 1975 the Cubans sent an expeditionary force to Angola.
At that time a very small effort in support of local resistance
forces was believed by us to have a good chance of stopping the
Cuban effort. And that we thought was important, because if a
small Caribbean island could send an expeditionary force
thousands of miles away, the consequences for the United States
could be extremely serious. We could not convince the Congress,
however, so today there are Cuban forces in Angola, Ethiopia, and
Nicaragua.

Right now we are debating in this country about the American
presence in the Persian Gulf, and nobody in this room, including
myself, knows if there is an additional danger that has not
existed before, if that's the correct way of dealing with it, if
the risk is commensurate with the problem. The people who have
to make that decision do not know the answers much better than we
do, but they have to decide, and back their convictions with
action.

The Soviet Union now has a new leader, and there has been
infinite speculation about what his advent means. I confess that
I belong to the more sceptical school; I reflect on the fact that
Mr. Gorbachev was a protege of Suslov, the chief party idealogue,
and of Andropov, the head of the secret police. I hold the
unworthy view that neither gentlemen was a closet dove. And
while I do not exclude the possibility that Gorbachev fooled them

-7-

both, I would consider it an extraordinary historic event if both
super powers were governed at the same time by former actors.

Be that as it may, the fundamental question that one has to
deal with as a policy maker is: to what extent does one believe
the personality of any leader can change policy? And to what
extent does national policy depend on geography, on history, on
national culture? Is it likely that a leader of the Soviet Union
can alter, in a short period of time, 70 years of communist rule
and 400 years of Russian tradition? I have my view on that
subject, but I can no more prove it than those with whom I
disagree.

The most important point I will leave with you is that one
cannot get from here to there without the moral conviction of
faith in one's judgement and faith in one's society. Everybody
lacks experience of the future. All great achievements have been
ideas before they became realities, and it requires a high degree
of national consensus to move a society into the future.

When I was a young professor, no professor ever thought that
he would become a policy maker. Thus, for professors to make a
contribution to the national welfare they had to think five and
ten years ahead, and to put forward the choices and the possibili-
ties that would face the nation in that time frame.

Under the impact of the Vietnam war, Watergate, and other
national traumas, all of which really reflected America's effort
to come to grips with finite possibilities, the intellectual

-8-

community has been split into two groups--potential revolutionaries who specialize in proving the cupidity of all senior government officials, and job applicants who are looking for a position in the next administration and write position papers with this in mind. We run, therefore, a great risk of sliding into a new world without an intellectual framework, and with national leaders more preoccupied with getting into office than with what they are going to do when they get there. Men who, when they get into office, are confronted with a bureaucratic machinery of such cumbersomeness that it absorbs more and more of their energy.

I have no illusions -- none of you will remember the substance of what I say for very long -- but I would like to leave you with at least one thought. Knowledge is important, but a philosophical framework within which to place that knowledge is even more important.

Everybody can escape this dilemma by making the most favorable assumptions about the future. It may be that all our problems will be solved because one morning Soviet leaders will wake up and say it was all a terrible mistake and they are going to become like mid-western Americans. It is possible that the great upheaval going on in the Third World will have a benevolent end without any American role. It is possible that the huge transformation in Asia, the emergence of China, of India, the

-9-

growing power of Japan, the upheaval in Latin America, that all
of this will end well automatically. But it is not likely.

And the fact is that everything worth doing has required
some commitment and some attempt at structure. America has been
most true to itself when, as at the end of World War II, it
rebuilt Europe.

The first American president I ever knew was Harry Truman (I
was working for President Kennedy at the time). During my visit
to Truman he asked me what I had learned. I told him something
that I had picked up at a cocktail party to the effect that the
bureaucracy is the fourth branch of the government, and that not
even the president can do everything he wants. He said something
absolutely unprintable that came as a shock to me from a
president in those days, and followed this with: "That is total
nonsense. The most important thing a president has to know is
where he is going, and then in all likelihood he can get there."

When I asked him what he was most proud of in his
presidency, he said, "The thing I am most proud of is that I was
president when we totally defeated two countries and then we
reintroduced them to the community of nations.

"Only Americans," he said, "could have done that."

Harry Truman had no high reputation at the time, but he had
a lot of history books on his shelves, and he did not suffer from
the nihilistic perfectionism which characterizes so much of our
current intellectual debate, in which every American shortcoming
is used as an excuse for doing nothing.

-10-

I came to this country when I was a little younger than the
Class of '87. I had lived in a totalitarian society, and it
makes me sick when I read these stories about alleged American
crimes and American dictatorial tendencies. There are lots of
things wrong in this society, and a lot of them need improvement,
but any of you who have ever lived anywhere close to a
totalitarian society, or any of you who travel abroad, will know
that with all our imperfections, it is this country that other
people look to for security and for freedom.

So that is our responsibility. It is, unfortunately, an
endless process. There is no point at which we can say the
effort can stop, that peace has been achieved, or justice exists.
It is a process which must continue, but it is a process in which
we will live the words of the poem:

"We shall not cease from our exploration;
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive were we started
And know the place for the first time."

Thank you very much.

The St. Luke's School Bulletin

Volume 9

No. 1

Editor: Ingrid R. Warren

CONTENTS

<table><tbody><tr><td>The 1987 Commencement Address, by Henry A. Kissinger</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>The Valedictorian Address, by Mark Williamson, '87</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>The Salutatorian Address, by Neil Boege, '87</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>The Headmaster's Address, by Richard M. Whitcomb</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Learning How to Learn is St. Luke's Legacy to Grads, by Laura Leonard</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>New Building Opens at St. Luke's</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>The St. Luke's Core Group, by Richard H. Gehman</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>Purposes & Objectives</td><td>19</td></tr><tr><td>"We The Alumni...," by Mark Coogan, '78</td><td>20</td></tr><tr><td>St. Luke's Wins Fairchester Title, by Emery Filmer</td><td>22</td></tr><tr><td>St. Luke's Softballers Win League Title</td><td>24</td></tr><tr><td>Living in Taipei, by Susan Matulonis, '82 & James Salomon, '82</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>Faculty Notes</td><td>29</td></tr><tr><td>Class Notes</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>School Calendar for 1987/88</td><td>36</td></tr></tbody></table>

**Cover photo:** Dr. Henry Kissinger and Student Council President Ashley Logan, '87, exchange greetings before the graduation ceremony on June 5. Behind them are Greg Smith, '87, and Mrs. Marlene Eagleburger, a SLS trustee and the wife of Dr. Kissinger's business collegue, Lawrence Eagleburger, the former Under Secretary of State. (Photo by C. Moorhead)

**Photo this page:** Dr. Kissinger, Dick Whitcomb and Lawrence Eagleburger on the steps of the Episcopal Church in New Canaan. (Photo by C. Moorhead)

Bulletin photo credits (unless otherwise designated): C. Moorhead, M. Toth.

# The 1987 Commencement Address

By Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

On June 5th, Dr. Henry Kissinger's godson, Drew Eagleturger, graduated as a member of the SLS Class of 1987. His class, as well as St. Luke's parents and faculty, had the great pleasure of hearing the following comments by Dr. Kissinger, who was introduced by Drew's brother, Jason, a seventh grader at the school.

Members of the class of 1987, parents, teachers, ladies and gentlemen:

It is a great pleasure for me to introduce our principal speaker today. He is a man who has long occupied an important place in the life of our country and an equally important place in the life of my family.

Once upon a time, when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State and my father worked for him at the State Department, my father, mother and brother, who was about five years old, were at the airport waiting for Dr. Kissinger, who was returning from a trip to the Middle East. One of the Secret Service agents, also waiting for the Secretary to return, asked my brother, "Who is Henry Kissinger?" To which my brother replied with great certainty: "He is my Daddy's secretary."

My brother was wrong then, as he has so often been wrong since. Henry Kissinger was, and is, one of the great Secretaries of State of the United States. He honors all of us by being here today.

Ladies and gentlemen: Henry Kissinger.

I attended a conference yesterday which dealt with information technology. It was clear to me then that I live in a different world from the one you will live in. I cannot type, I do not know how to use a computer, I cannot read a computer. I cannot learn the displays, and have to acquire knowledge from memoranda. All this creates a different state of mind. It means that we are now living — and you will be living — in a different world from the one in which I was brought up.

Dr. Kissinger served as Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977. He is now Chairman of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm in New York City. (Photo by John Bukovcik)

1

You have available infinitely more information than did my generation. When I go to Washington these days, I see how huge are the differences, even from the days when I first went there. Now everyone has a computer terminal on his desk; I should add that many of them have lived to regret it. But all of them can call forth all kinds of information. And yet, I am bound to ask myself, why is it that at a time when information has never been more available, policy making should bear so little a relationship to reality?

> "The most difficult decision anybody has to make in life, and certainly any policy maker confronts, is how to go from the world with which we are familiar to a world where we have never been."

what trends are, or how they will manifest themselves. If you study the lives of great statesmen, or even successful statesmen, you will find that they were not necessarily more intelligent than their contemporaries; rather, they had two unique qualities: a sense of the future and the courage to go there — on the basis of assumptions they could not prove true when they made them.

For America this is very particular difficulty. We have been blessed more than any other country. We began with an empty continent and two great oceans to protect us. We have, except for the South, had no experience of irrevocable disaster. Until fairly recently, every problem we faced has proved to be solvable, and we have had the resources necessary to overcome it. But now these conditions have either changed or are in the process of change; yet, our mental attitudes have not necessarily altered. Most Americans think that foreigners are misunderstood Americans. I have a friend who has the view that there is no such thing as an English accent. Rather, the English put it on to intimidate Americans, and that if you can catch an Englishman unawares — like waking him up at four in the morning — he will speak like any other human being.

President Roosevelt said that peace depends on friendly human relations, on personal acquaintance, on unassailable sincerity. President Eisenhower spoke of man's long pilgrimage from darkness towards light, and he said too much attention has been paid to practical problems, at the expense of human relations.

President Carter prayed for peace based on human relationships and President Reagan is reputed to be eager to bring Gorbachev over here so that he can show him how Americans live and how peacefully inclined we are.

I was, at one stage of my life, a professor. Later I was a policy maker. Thus, I have a sense of the difference in perspective between the two professions. When you are an outsider — a journalist, a professor, an observer — you can pick your problem and work on it for as long as you choose. You are responsible only to whatever constituency matters to you for your conclusion. You have the privilege of changing your mind. But when you are a policy maker, you cannot pick your problem. The problem presents itself. Indeed, the most overwhelming experience of a policy maker is that there are more problems on any day than he can possibly deal with; consequently, a major part of his task is to select those issues that are most likely to cause trouble and get them out of the way. The price he pays for this is that the urgent often drives out the important. The policy maker is responsible not only for the best that can happen, like a professor, but also for the worst. There are some experiments he cannot make, not because it would not be nice if they succeeded, but because it would be terrible if they failed.

Some of you will no doubt be going to universities where professors will tell you that all policy makers who are not criminals are fools. In my experience, most policy makers have been almost as intelligent as most professors, and not significantly more deficient morally. Indeed, anyone who can survive faculty meetings at Harvard is well equipped for bureaucratic infighting in Washington.

2

The Soviet Union now has a new leader, and there has been infinite speculation about what his advent means. I confess that I belong to the more skeptical school; I reflect on the fact that Mr. Gorbachev was a protege of Suslov, the chief party ideologue, and of Andropov, the head of the secret police. I hold the unworthy view that neither gentleman was a closet dove. And while I do not exclude the possibility that Gorbachev fooled them both, I would consider it an extraordinary historic event if both super powers were governed at the same time by former actors.

Dr. Kissinger and his godson, Drew Eagleburger, have a word together before graduation. (Photo by John Bukovcik)

3

The most important point I will leave with you is that one
cannot get from here to there without the moral conviction of
faith in one's judgment and faith in one's society. Everybody
lacks experience of the future. All great achievements have
been ideas before they became realities, and it requires a high
degree of national consensus to move a society into the future.

Everybody can escape this dilemma by making the most
favorable assumptions about the future. It may be that all our
problems will be solved because one morning Soviet leaders
will wake up and say it was all a terrible mistake and they are
going to become like Midwestern Americans. It is possible that
the great upheaval going on in the Third World will have a
benevolent end without any American role. It is possible that the
huge transformation in Asia, the emergence of China, of India,
the growing power of Japan, the upheaval in Latin America,
that all of this will end well automatically. But it is not likely.

> "... one cannot get from here to there without the moral conviction of faith in one's judgment and faith in one's society."

When I was a young professor, no professor ever thought that
he would become a policy maker. Thus, for professors to make
a contribution to the national welfare they had to think five and
ten years ahead, and to put forward the choices and the
possibilities that would face the nation in that time frame.

Under the impact of the Vietnam war, Watergate, and other
national traumas, all of which really reflected America's effort
to come to grips with finite possibilities, the intellectual com-
munity has been split into two groups — potential revolutionar-
ies who specialize in proving the cupidity of all senior govern-
ment officials, and job applicants who are looking for a position
in the next administration and write position papers with this in
mind. We run, therefore, a great risk of sliding into a new world
without an intellectual framework, and with national leaders
more preoccupied with getting into office than with what they
are going to do when they get there. Men who, when they get
into office, are confronted with a bureaucratic machinery of
such cumbersome ness that it absorbs more and more of their
energy.

I have no illusions — none of you will remember the sub-
stance of what I say for very long — but I would like to leave you
with at least one thought. Knowledge is important, but a
philosophical framework within which to place that knowledge
is even more important.

At a brief news conference following the graduation exercises, Dr. Kissinger remarked on the Persian Gulf situation and the media's intrusion into the private lives of public officials, among other topics. His commencement address was covered extensively by the press and by Connecticut Cable TV.

4

When I asked him what he was most proud of in his presi-
dency, he said, "The thing that I am most proud of is that I was
president when we totally defeated two countries and then we
reintroduced them to the community of nations.

Harry Truman had no high reputation at that time, but he had
a lot of history books on his shelves, and he did not suffer from
the nihilistic perfectionism which characterizes so much of our
current intellectual debate, in which every American shortcom-
ing is used as an excuse for doing nothing.

"We shall not cease from our exploration;
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

Thank you very much.

Dr. Kissinger with Mrs. Eagleburger, Drew, and Robert Salomon, Chairman of the SLS Board of Trustees.

5

# The Valedictorian
Address

By Mark Williamson, '87

Fellow students, proud parents, faculty, and distinguished guests...

I was told that I should begin with a joke to make Dr. Kissinger laugh, but I only know one that would be appropriate to tell, and it has nothing to do with my subject, so I'll get on with it.

In the world of religion there is a phenomenon known as speaking in tongues; in the world of 20th century life as we know it, there is a phenomenon known as speaking in numbers. Most of us have never stopped to think of the fact that we are swallowed up in the number game, or if we have, it has not concerned us. Bigger is better. Numbers abound in our culture. The college admissions process that each of us has just completed has caused me to see for the first time an important truth about numbers: they surround us, they quantify our efforts and performance, they try to define us. But they aren't us at all, even as they rise up to drown us in the absolute finality.

Who among us, for example, cannot recite a familiar list of numbers: 365, 747, 1492, 36-22-36 (that's not my locker combination) 7-11, 911, 75 (I'll help you with that one — its what the speed limit ought to be) 45, 357, or 38, 98.6, 555-1212 or 1411, 666, 501's, and finally 0, the number of the class who want to hear my speech.

Those numbers are but a fraction of the Guinness Book approach to reality, if you will, in which we live. Now, let me ask you as graduates to reflect on how you categorize yourself as I mention another list of numbers: A perfect 10, combined SAT's of 1100, 20/20 vision, 83% class average, 40 hrs. of community service, and a 3 on an A.P. test.

The idea that I have been focusing on recently, and the one that I would like you to focus on for the next couple of minutes is certainly a familiar one: Individuality cannot be quantified. Saying so, however, does not really make that a significant fact — to make it meaningful to us as individuals, we need to focus on how and where we find the "gaps" between numbers, the other reality.

Just as Pi, a very significant numerical constant, cannot be numerically defined (for those of you who haven't worried about Pi recently, it is a ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi equals 3.14 (anyone ?) 159265; it is a relationship for which the fractional number cannot be quantified), neither can each of us as individuals be accurately defined with

numbers. What does Einstein's failing math averages in high school tell us about the man? What does an NFL linebacker's 240 lb. weight, 4.3 speed in the 40, and 395 lb. bench press tell us about a man with no desire to win. What do outstanding numbers, including being chosen number 1 in the draft by the Boston Celtics, tell us about Len Bias?

Think about it for a minute — can you really define anyone, good or bad, with a number, or a series of numbers? No! of course you can't. Becoming a number is easy — all you have to do is write the Social Security people — becoming a person is much more difficult. There is no one to do it for you. So, how do we get away from describing ourselves as a certain age? a certain height? a certain salary? a certain blood type? and begin as new graduates to affirm our non-numerical nature?

I think we do so by engaging in a kind of self-examination, one which Outward Bound asks its 16-21 year old participants to engage in during the solo period — a solo being a 1 to 3 day period when each participant is totally alone with his or her thoughts.

Mr. Fancher, my psychology instructor, pointed out that it is very difficult for a person to look closely at himself, and most people only do so when forced in a crisis or some other blunt confrontation with reality. Yet by looking closely at ourselves we can start to define ourselves differently — non-numerically.

So, let me ask you in closing to focus on a couple of ideas expressed in the form of rhetorical questions — rhetorical because the answers are to be given by yourself to help you define yourself.

The first of these questions is perhaps the most global, for it invites a review of your basic life. The question I would like you to consider is this: What are your goals in life? How number determined are they? Are we driven by a need to earn a million by the age of 26?

The second question is to ask, how do we find a balance between quantity and quality? Because only by finding this balance do we lead a responsible life. We must learn to recognize which things in life can't be quantified — an honest effort for one thing is always an absolute effort — it's never a graded effort on a 100% scale. If I give an honest effort to a task and accomplish only 75% of what I had hoped to accomplish, I still have achieved a special kind of success — an honest effort which I repeat is not even to be measured on a numerical scale.

My last question is about your courage — not the macho sort associated with the battlefield. This kind of courage is exemplified in an ability to look at yourself honestly and fairly. Honesty takes courage because it is not quantifiable. We are either honest or we aren't; here is one example of a non-numerical reality.

6