I’m very pleased to be here because as I look around on this side I feel that this is the first audience that I’ve ever spoken to where nobody can criticize my haircut. And there has been some criticism, and I feel that I’m in a sympathetic group. Some of the business community at various times have been critical, but my wife says that I’m doing much better with the business community, that they like me much better, and then they took a poll. One of the financial magazines took a poll of 500 leading businessmen. They asked them to list the political leader they most admired and whom they would like to see go on to higher political office. So you can understand what an illustrious personage you have here tonight—out of 500 votes, I got one. And I understand they’re looking for him.

When I was Attorney General, I argued in front of the Supreme Court the case of one man, one vote, but this is carrying it a little too far. I’m the only person in the United States in political life who can take all his supporters to lunch.

But if you haven’t got someone popular with that group, you have got someone who means something in the U.S. Senate. For instance, I was sick last year and they sent me a card. From my colleagues in the Senate: “Dear Sen. Kennedy, we understand that you are sick. We hope that you recover; the vote was 46–42.”

Bismarck said about the youth of Germany that one-third of the students die from overwork, one-third die from drink or pot (I don’t know if he used that expression or not), and one-third go on to be the rulers of their country. And I look at this group here and I know what third came.

But I think there’s greater attention on young people now than at any other time in the history of our country, and at any time in the history of the world. Look at the great revolutions that are taking place all over the world. All over our globe since the end of the Second World War, young people have been involved in one way or another. Young people in Japan, the youth in Indonesia, the same thing is true in Latin America, Africa—nearly all across the globe. And the young people have of course been playing greater and greater roles in the political efforts and the political life of the United States. Goethe once said that the future of a nation was determined by the opinions of its young people under the age of 25. I think that’s true. And I’m sure it’s more true now than at any other time in the history of this country and in the history of mankind. Perhaps it’s because there’s more young people.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons, but also I think it’s because it is our young people who have the advantage of an education, who go on to school, who go on to college, and who are taking a greater interest in the future of their own country and the future of the world, the future of the globe, the future of mankind. They feel they have a greater stake and therefore take a greater interest. I think with that interest comes a greater responsibility. You here are members of the most exclusive minority in the world: you have the advantage of an education, and you’re going to a private school. That makes you even more exclusive. And with that exclusivity comes a great responsibility, a responsibility to all those who don’t have this advantage, who do not have the rights that you have, the advantages you have by having this kind of an education. You think of Latin Amerca, where less than 50% of the people—despite all of the efforts that we’ve made in that part of the world, despite the efforts that have been made by some of the people in some of the countries in Latin America—less than 50% of them have an education. Less than 50% of them are literate, less than 50% of them have gone above second or third grade.

Take Africa—97% of the people in Tanzania are illiterate. So here we are, here in this school, and here in the United States, where so many have the advantage of an education, so many of our young people have the ability to go on to school and then go on to college, go on to post-graduate school. With that advantage comes this great responsibility to other people of mankind, to try to solve problems that affect mankind; to try to deal with the great problems of our own country; and to deal with these great problems that affect us all over the globe.

And we can’t say that we’ve dealt with these problems, even in the United States. We have a Gross National Product of 800 billion dollars. We had an increase in the GNP last year that was twice as great as the GNP of all of Africa, of all of black Africa. The profits of AT&T were just announced last week, their profits after taxes were 2,200,000,000 dollars. That’s more than the GNP of 70 countries of the world. All this wealth, and yet we haven’t solved the great problems that affect us here in this country. We still have the great divisions that divide the Negroes and the whites, the more affluent part of our population and those who are less well off. And think of all the speeches that have been made, all the proclamations that have been issued about poverty, all of the bills and legislation that’s [sic] been considered in the Congress of the United States to try to give equal rights to all our citizens.

And yet the high rate of unemployment that still exists in the ghetto, the difficult time that a young man or a young girl in the ghetto has to have an education—. I visited the Benjamin Franklin School; there, about 330 students started the 9th grade, 120 are left by the 12th grade, and then about 25 or 30 get academic degrees [diplomas] while only a small percentage of those go on to college. What happens to all the rest who drop out from school, who drop out in the 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th grades or who are unable to get academic degrees, not able to improve their education, not able to hold down jobs, not able to find decent jobs so that they can raise their families, so that they go on welfare like their mother or father went on welfare before them? Who live under the kind of conditions that they have to live [under]? They’re unable to get jobs, unable to get employment opportunities for anyone else in their family, so they in turn are filled with hopelessness, with despair about what’s going to happen to them, to their families. 43% of the houses in the ghettoes of New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles are dilapidated or rundown. Between a third and a fifth of all the young men in the ghettoes do not even appear in the statistics, are just lost to the government, lost to all our Federal agencies so that they appear only in times of great crisis or great turmoil. That’s the only time that anyone even knows that they exist.

These kinds of problems still exist in this country. Even though we have a GNP of 800 billion dollars, we have young children here in this country who are starving to death. A half a million young children in the US starving to death, a third of the children that live in this country at this time are under the poverty level. I’ve been to the state of Mississippi and seen the children there with their distended stomachs, with sores on their faces that come from starvation, from lack of nutrition. If they have two meals a day, they consider themselves very lucky. And yet we have this great wealth, this great talent, and we haven’t been able to take care of those who are in such great need. I visited some Indian reservations out in the West where children the same age as you; the greatest source of death among teenagers is suicide. They have the feeling that there is no place to go, they have no place in society, the feeling of hopelessness and the feeling of despair, they feel that nobody cares about them, nobody’s interested in them, nobody’s going to look out for them. These are some of the problems that still exist and still affect out country.

The question is, what are we going to do about them? What any one of us, those of you in this room, who go to this school, who have the advantage of this education, or me, who is in public life, what we are going to do, what kind of contribution we are going to make. Whether we are going to use the advantages that we have for our own selfish interest or to further our own economic life, the economics of our family; or whether we are going to use the talents we might have for others, whether we’re going to use the education that we have to contribute to others, whether we’re going to try to help those who so desperately need help, here within our own country or elsewhere around the globe.

There’s nothing I’ve been more impressed with as I’ve traveled than those young men and women who have served in the Peace Corps, working under the most difficult conditions all over the globe. I remember when my wife and I were traveling up the Amazon River, we stopped in a small village and people said to us that that was the first time that Americans had come anywhere near there. We went swimming in a small stream and as we were swimming, along the path came four Americans, four young people who were serving in the Peace Corps and had come there for a vacation from somewhere else in Brazil. These people were contributing their lives in order to try and help others. It’s the best thing that we have going for us here in the United States—the fact that we have this unselfish spirit, people who are interested in others, who feel they can make a contribution to others.

I think that’s the basic question you have to ask yourselves. There are so many ways of really turning off here in this country, especially with this great wealth that makes it easier. In the thirties, it wasn’t possible because everybody was just struggling in order to survive. During the forties, young men served in the military services, 18–19 million of them went away and again, it was a struggle to survive. Then, during the fifties, coming out of the service and trying to raise a family and send the children on to school. But this generation of the late sixties is the generation that doesn’t have those kinds of problems. The great question is whether those who have the talent and have the wealth and those who have the great advantages, whether they are going to turn off, start to think just of themselves, or whether they’re going to feel that they can make a contribution to others who so desperately need it? That’s what I think, in the last analysis, is the question we have to ask ourselves when we look in the mirror in the morning. So that we’ve not only met our responsibilities to others, but we’ve met our responsibilities to ourselves. If we don’t make that kind of an effort, then this whole country is going to suffer.

We have problems here, we have problems in our relationships with other nations, problems in Southeast Asia, problems in the control of atomic weapons. For the first time in the history of mankind, we have the power to destroy all of mankind. We have that power here in the United States, the Soviet Union has that power, China will soon have that power and the capability of delivering that power, but a lot of small nations all over the world will have that power as well by the end of this century.

We have the talent to make that power, but whether we have the talent also to control ourselves, the talent and the knowledge to control mankind itself? whether you’ll turn your energy and your talent to that great task? whether you’ll turn your energy and your talent to those who so desperately need it, in the ghettos of the United States, who so desperately need help? To go out, and not to say this is what I’m going to do for you, but this is what I want to do with you. To try to help your life and my life. And whether you’re going to turn your talents and your energies to trying to solve the great problems not only in this country, but in our relationships with other nations; or whether you’re going to be filled with despair, feel that there’s no future for you and that there’s no future in anything you have to contribute—that seems to me the basic question that we’re going to have to ask.

I’m not, I suppose, terribly optimistic about the future; I’m not pessimistic; but I think, in the last analysis, why I spend some time, or as much time as I do, with young people is because I think you have the greatest stake in this country, the greatest stake in mankind, and you also have the greatest ability, and the greatest chance of doing something about it. But it really is going to depend, in the last analysis, on yourselves, whether you’re willing to do that.

And it’s going to require a sacrifice, it’s going to require an effort, and it’s going to require ridding ourselves of cynicism. It’s easy to sit back and say, “they’ve made a botch of it, the older generation, and Lyndon Johnson doesn’t know what he’s doing, Congress is not doing enough about civil rights, or other elements or branches in the government are corrupt or dishonest or don’t understand the great problems.” But the way to deal with that is to become involved yourselves, to become actively interested yourselves, not to talk about these problems which affect us on an emotional basis, but to know what the facts are. To have some opinion about it and voice that opinion, and then become actively involved yourselves in trying to find a solution. If we don’t do that, if people like yourselves don’t do that, and people all over this country who are in colleges and universities don’t do that, then this country is going to suffer. We’re going to have a very difficult time.

If you do, we’ll make mistakes, we’ll err as we go along, but in the last analysis we’ll find answers. We’re not going to find complete solutions to these problems, but we’ll certainly make progress. And I think we will have met what the poet wrote more than two thousand yeras ago, we will have that to guide us, to feel the giant agony of the world and more like slaves to humanity, labor for mortal good.

Thank you very much.

From a tape recording by Adam Block. My thanks to Phil Hess for typing it up back in ’68, and to Jonathan Melrod, who recently sent me a photocopy of the typewritten transcript. I apologize for any errors that may’ve crept in after this long game of Telephone.

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