For the Best Years of Your Life

As every commencement speaker knows, the sure-fire approach is to bewail the failure of your own generation, and then in ringing tones challenge the next one to do better. Few speakers have more tellingly indicted the old or more specifically counseled the new than Atomic Energy Boss David Lilienthal, addressing the University of Virginia's graduating class last week. Said he:

"Every generation has a philosophy, a theme, a major premise. When my generation sat where you . . . sit today, we, as a generation, had a rather definite philosophy. This guiding principle . . . can be summed up in this phrase: 'Take care of Number One' . . . It seemed eminently sensible . . . If everyone took care of Number One, and concentrated on that--why obviously the sum total of all the Number Ones would be prosperity and happiness all around . . ."

Devil Take the Foremost. "A great many of us, just out of college and professional school or just beginning in business, looked out for Number One, and found it surprisingly profitable. It was, by & large, a time of easy earning and free spending. We did not know then, as we do now, that in a time of rising prices, of inflating values, you really have to be very dumb indeed to fail to make money . . . Each man took care of himself, but the sum total of all this self-reliance was that the devil not only took the hindmost but the foremost and those in between.

"The same philosophy dominated international relations of the '20s . . . Each nation tended to its own affairs, but the net result was not the end of war, but the greatest war of all time . . .

"No, I cannot commend to your generation the philosophy of my own. What I propose in its stead I can compress in this phrase: 'Be an active, living part of your times.' "

Distasteful Duty. "By whom will the public services be manned? By mediocrity and by hacks? Or by our very ablest citizens? I say it must be the latter . . . We all remember . . . that in the early years of the republic, full-time public service, though at least as distasteful as today, was not thought beneath the talents or the dignity of the ablest and most successful men. By any measure, Mr. Washington and Mr. Jefferson were not the least able citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

"In the next three decades I urge that every . . . man and woman to whom this country has given the high privilege of a college education, and who has the qualifications . . . plan definitely to set aside a number of years for the rendering of service in the legislative or executive branches of his local, state, or federal government, and that as nearly as possible this be full-time service . . .

"I am proposing a widespread rotation of the not-too-pleasant duties of the public service. And I do not mean merely part-time 'dollar-a-year' service alone. I propose that out of the best and most productive years of your life, you should carve out a segment in which you put your private career aside to serve your community and your country, and thereby . . . your children, your neighbors, your fellow men, and the cause of freedom."

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