HONORARY DEGREE CITATIONS
It is not merely your having been born on April first or even your editorship of humor at Yale that makes you slightly suspect as the author of "the real story of Bill Benton," a character who in your words, "all his life has worked much harder than necessary to make ends meet." First it was cash registers peddled from a truck, then "Certo" sold by radio until ends were so well met that at 36 you retired to be vice president of the University of Chicago whose ends also had need to meet. Purchasing what the University declined to be given, you became the publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and thereby the master peddler of all man's knowledge. And there were other ends yet to be met as Assistant Secretary of State, United States Senator, and as ambassador to UNESCO. Along the way you became a notable patron of American art and an equally notable critic of Khrushchev's communism, the first McCarthy's anti-communism, and of de Gaulle's grandeur. Today as Britannica celebrates 200 years of sustained effort to tell all, Dartmouth salutes you as a Doctor of Laws whose service to man's need to know has transcended both reward and duty.
Your life and career exemplify the urban version of the American legend. Born of immigrant parents, raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as the son of the janitor in a slum tenement, you literally learned at your mother's knee about slum housing, racial prejudice, and the economics of supporting a family by peddling crockery out of a pushcart. Few have scratched harder for their schooling. Out of this classical syndrome of unequal opportunity you liberated yourself from what is all too often the manifest destiny of ending in human blight because that was the way life began. Your liberation is not merely an American saga for the example of others; it is the foundation in which a career dedicated to the liberation of all men is grounded. Today as the senior Senator from New York in what, despite its shortcomings and long talk, is still the pre- eminent deliberative body of the world, you, as "the pros" say, are "the compleat Senator" who does his homework and who in the confidence of his own very individual convictions and conscience "simply will not be silenced." And that is why this academic community has wanted you with us as one of us on this occasion and why Dartmouth is privileged to make you a member of her family as a lawmaker who deserves to be a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.
Today yours is a name known to fame mainly among practitioners and students of international trade policy but if tomorrow world trade supports mankind more fully because it flows more freely your contribution to that outcome will rank with that of any statesman, not excluding that pioneering patron saint of freer trade, America's Cordell Hull. A graduate in law of the University of London and later a member of the faculty at the London School of Economics and Political Science, schooled in foreign affairs as a wartime British diplomat, for nearly a quarter of a century you have personified the rare international civil servant who combines talent, vision, integrity, and the confidence of others in a way that brings nations together in common cause almost in spite of themselves. Throughout the postwar era you have been the principal mediator on behalf of economic sanity in the trade relations of a perilously nationalistic world. Just a year ago this June nearly fifty nations concluded five arduous years of the most significant trade liberalization negotiations ever attempted — the so-called Kennedy Round. Only now is it permissible to say that you were indispensable to this great work, and in appreciative testimony thereof Dartmouth awards you her highest honor, the Doctorate of Laws, honoris causa.
You have goneyour Great-aunt Margaret one better: she merely accepted the universe, you preach total immersion in it. And if any doubter should ask whether you really believe in salvation through such immersion you might well respond: "Believe in it? Shucks, I've done it!" True, you call your kind of salvation "comprehensive design," but let's not quibble about words; you are a thinker who literally as well as figuratively rejects all walls — except, of course, those of geodesic dome design — and who believes that only as man "goes for broke" with his mind can he hope from here on out to win any hand in the human game. Few among us (indeed is there one respected other?) would dare say with you, "I made a bargain with myself that I'd discover the principles operative in the universe and turn them over to my fellow man." How far you've gone in keeping that bargain no man today can know for sure, and that of itself is saying an awful lot. A friend of the human future, you as a builder of that future are the first man of the twenty-first, or perhaps even of the twenty-third, century to whom Dartmouth presumes to award her Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa.
To be responsible for what millions can know or do not know about their daily lot is to stand at the heart of the democratic process even as for better or for worse it may also be to stand as an .unwitting actor in the ceaseless drama of individual lives. Great heritage and tragic circumstance combined to place this responsibility on you. Our purpose here today is simply to admire your fulfillment of the trust you bear as ohe of the world's most influential merchants of news and opinion in every form. May Dartmouth's Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa, be a witness of appreciation and abiding encouragement to you.
To a minister of the Christian faith Voltaire's Candide can hardly be a favorite gospel, and yet you ar6 today America's foremost apostle of that classic's powerful line: "Work keeps at bay three great evils — boredom, vice, and need." You have taught us by your work that the poisoned leisure of the unemployables is largely the product of an industrial society's unemployed imagination. The sharp prod of your "selective patronage" program helped business leadership realize that a discriminated-against customer can soon be no customer at all and then, as the doors of opportunity slowly opened, you in turn were not slow to realize, as you put it, "that integration without preparation is frustration ... and that preparation has to be education." Out of this newly shared understanding that integration will work and can produce work for those who are prepared, you invented a self-help educational program which works so well for those who want and need it that even that earlier Philadelphia pragmatist, Mr. Franklin, would surely concur in Dartmouth's judgment that you are a Doctor of Divinity whose religion is relevant to the human now as well as the heavenly hereafter.
Almost certainly no man in this College's history, not excluding the founder, can be compared to you as an authority on the historical American Indian. Dartmouth A.B. and Yale M.A. in anthropology and a disciple of Clark Wissler in Indian studies, perceptive student of painting, out of scholarship and years of field research with the Black- foot, the Blood, the Flathead and other tribes, you created new knowledge and fresh interpretations of the life and culture of the Plains Indians. Through six books and more than a hundred monographs and articles you have enriched both scholarship and literature. Incidentally, but also wonderfully, if there still be those among us who, eschewing TV Westerns, would enjoy taking their Indians and horses straight, let them repair with confidence to your study of The Horse in Black-foot Culture. Museum expert as well as scholar, recipient of the first Smithsonian Award for Exceptional Service, you are a son whose earned distinction honors Dartmouth and graces the award to him of her Doctorate of Science, honoris causa.
In an extraordinary way your extraordinary scientific career has paralleled the evolution of life on earth; both began with the sea, both have since pretty well covered the continents, and both are now met in the em- bracing question of population control. As a product, professor, and director of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography you pioneered the development of oceanography as an integrated science comprehending the basic sciences from geology to genetics, and you became one of the historic explorers of the Pacific Ocean from top to beneath the bottom, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. For you it was not enough merely to discover and to know; you needed to move from the sea into the deeper waters of the human plight. Whether the problem was misused land in Pakistan, educational reform in India, or as now the fathomless question of man's capacity for self-control as a reproducing animal and as a human being, you have been prepared to match your wits with its perplexities. To a scientist whose varied careers demonstrate the power of hybrid vigor to produce unprecedented results, Dartmouth is proud to award her Doctorate of Science, honoris causa.
WILLIAM BENTON Chairman and Publisher, Encyclopaedia Britannica;U. S. Representative to UNESCO DOCTOR OF LAWS
JACOB KOPPEL JAVITS United States Senator from New York DOCTOR OF LAWS
SIR ERIC WYNDHAM WHITE Former Director-General, General Agreement on Tariffs andTrade DOCTOR OF LAWS
RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER Engineer, Inventor, Educator, Poet DOCTOR OF HUMANE LETTERS
KATHARINE MEYER GRAHAMPublisher and President, The Washington PostDOCTOR OF HUMANE LETTERS
THE REV. LEON HOWARD SULLIVAN Minister, Zion Baptist Church, Philadelphia; Founder,Opportunities Industrialization Center, Philadelphia DOCTOR OF DIVINITY
JOHN CANFIELD EWERS '31 Director, Museum of History and Technology, SmithsonianInstitution DOCTOR OF SCIENCE
ROGER RANDALL REVELLEDirector, Center of Population Studies, Harvard UniversityDOCTOR OF SCIENCE
