The President Gives Commencement a Hand

Thank you very much. President Freedman Acting President Wright; Governor Merrill, thank you foryour warm welcome to my distinguished fellow honorees, I was thinking when they were all introduced, all the others who won this distinction of your honorary degrees, that if my blessed mother were still alive, she would be saying, "See, Bill, they accomplished something. You're just a politician." I am honored to be in their company and I thank them all for the contribution they have made to the richness that is American life.

To the Board of Trustees, and especially to the parents and families and members of the Class of 1995: Let me begin on a very personal note. I always love coming to New Hampshire. I am delighted to be back at Dartmouth, but I am especially grateful to be here seeing my good friend President Jim Freedman looking so very well and back here at this graduation.

I also want to thank Dartmouth for something else-for contributing to my administration with the Secretary of Labor Bob Reich, who came with me today. I understand that I have caused something of an inconvenience here and that we are now breaking tradition here at Memorial Field, having left Baker Lawn. But I did a little historical inquiry and determined that when President Eisenhower came here in 1953, Baker Lawn replaced the Bema as the site of Commencement. I am reliably informed, however, that the next time a President shows up, you will not have to move to the parking lot at the West Lebanon shopping center.

You know, when President Eisenhower came here, he said, this is what a college is supposed to look like. And I have to tell you, even in the rain it looks very, very good to me.

I want to thank you, too, for honoring the class of 1945 See them there? They did not have a proper Commencement because they left right away to finish the work of World War II. One of the greatest privileges of my presidency has been to express over the last year the profound gratitude of the American people for the generation that won World War II. A year ago this past Tuesday, I stood on the bluffs of Normandy to say to the brave people who won a foothold for freedom there, we are the children of your sacrifice. I say again to the class of 1945: The class of 1995, the generation of your grandchildren, and all of us in between, are the children of your sacrifice, and we thank you

To those of you in this class, the 50 years that have elapsed since they sat where you sit today have been a very eventful time for this old world. It has seen the ultimate victory of freedom and democracy in the Cold War, the dominance of market economics and the development of a truly global economy, a revolution in information telecommunications and technology which has changed the way we live and work and opened up vast new possibilities for good—and for evil.

The challenge of your time will be to face these new realities and to make some sense out of them in a way that is consistent with our historic values and the things that will make your own lives richer. The challenge of your time, in short, will be to redeem the promise of this great country.

Now there are unparalleled opportunities for those of you with a wonderful education in this global economy in this Information Age. And you don't have to worry about things that your parents used to worry about all the time. I am very proud of the fact that in the last two years, for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there are no Russian missiles pointed at the people of the United States of America. And I might add, there are no American missiles pointed at the people of Russia.

From the Middle East to Northern Ireland, from South Africa to Haiti, where, as the citation said, my friend Bill Gray did such great work to restore democracy, we see ancient conflicts giving way to peace and freedom and democracy in a genuine spirit of reconciliation. Hundreds of millions of people now breathe the air of freedom who, less than a decade ago, found it a distant dream. Every country in Latin America but one is now a democracy.

I am proud that our nation could support these developments. But as all of you know, this new world is not free of difficulty, for the forces of opportunity contained within them seeds of destruction. The heavy hand of communism and dictatorships has given way to bloody conflicts rooted in primitive religious, ethnic, and racial hatreds from Europe to Africa. The mobility of money and people and the advance of technology have strengthened the hand of organized crime and drug traffickers from Latin America to Asia to the former Soviet Union. And we have all been reminded recently that none of us in this open, free-flowing world of ours is immune from the forces of organized evil and terrorism.

The possibilities of more rapid economic development have posed new threats to the global environment, Rapid changes in the world economy have brought vast new opportunities, but they have also brought uncertainty, stagnant incomes, and indeed, rapid insecurities, even in the wealthiest countries in the world. And we have seen it in ours.

Here at home, though we have made progress on our deficit and expanding our trade and taking serious action against crime and trying to increase the ability of our country to educate our people and to welcome those from around the world as so many of you have come to find your educational opportunity here, we know that for the first time since this generation left in World War II, Americans are worried that their children will not have a better life than they enjoyed. Half of all of our people are working harder for less than they were making 15 years ago, because the global economy punishes people who don't have the skills to learn to compete and to win in a world that is changing daily; indeed, hourly.

In our nation, for the first time since World War II, we have watched over the last decade and more, the great American middle class, which is the core of our idea of America, begin to split apart along the fault line of education. And, of course, we all know that our social fabric today in this country is being rent apart by what is happening to our children. More and more of them are subject to violence and abuse. A higher and higher percentage of them are born into poverty. More and more of them are having children while they're still children.

Even though tie overall crime rate in this country has gone down, random violence among children is still increasing. More and more children are spending their lives with oneparent families, sometimes trapped on welfare, but more often, far more often, being raised by utterly exhausted parents who are working two or more jobs to give their children a chance, just a chance, at a good life.

Because in the 1980s we were unable to resolve these problems, because inequality and insecurity increased, because the realities of today and tomorrow were not addressed, the American people have continued to lose faith in the ability of their government and sometimes, even more importantly, in the ability of our society to solve these problems. And perhaps the most important difficulty we face is the increasing cynicism of our own people.

Today in Washington we're having a great debate about what to do about all this, and that's a very good thing. On the one side, we have people who say that most of these problems are personal and cultural, and if all of us would just straighten up and fly right we wouldn't have these problems anymore. And, of course, at a certain level that is self-evidently true. None of you would have a diploma today if you hadn't done the right thing to earn it. And nothing can be done for anyone to get out of a tight spot in life unless people are willing to do for themselves.

But that ignores the other side of the debate which is that there are plain economic and social factors that are not even common to the United States, putting pressure on people and taking away their hopes and threatening their dreams.

We have a great debate about what the most important thing for our government to do is. On the one side are those who say that the government can't really do anything to solve our problems anyway, so the most important thing is to balance the budget as quickly as possible without regard to the consequences. On the other hand, there are those who say we have a budget deficit and we ought to do something about it, but we have an education deficit as well. And when we have so many poor children, we need to invest in people to make sure they can live up to their Godgiven potential, and that that is also important.

Today what I want to say to you is, wherever you come down in all these great debates, the most important thing is that you should be a part of the debate because your life will be far more affected by what happens in the next two years than my life. I have been given the opportunity of the American Dream. I was the first person in my family ever to graduate from college. When I was a young boy growing up in Arkansas, one of our honorees President Overholser's father, was the Presbyterian minister in my home town. He raised one daughter to be the president of Duke; the other daughter to be the editor of the Des Moines Register. We came out of a place that, at the end of World War II, had an income barely over half the national average. But we were fortunate enough to live through a time when opportunity was expanding and when we were trying to come to grips with our racial and other problems in this country.

And what I wish to say to you is that you are going into the time of greatest human possibility in all history, but you must address the fact that all of our forces of opportunity have seeds of destruction. You must make sense and clarity out of complex problems. And I think you must do it with a much greater sense of optimism and hope than we are seeing in most debate today. There is nothing wrong with this country that cannot be solved by what is right with it, and you should never forget that.

We have a lot of things to do here in America. We have to grow our middle class again and shrink our underclass, and give our children something to say yes to. We have to strengthen our families and our communities and make the idea of work more real to people for whom it has become unattainable. We have to preserve our environment and enhance our security at home and abroad. And I would argue that we must maintain the leadership of the United States in the world as a force for peace and freedom.

To all those who want to withdraw, who want to turn away, who want to abolish our foreign-assistance programs, let me remind you: Look at the history of the twentieth century; every time America turned away from the world we wound up with a war that we had to clean up and win at far greater costs than if we simply stayed involved in a responsible manner.

But our most important mission today, I would argue, is to help people make the most of their own lives. You can come down in many places on all these debates in Washington and around the country, but it is self-evident that unless people in this country, wherever they come from, whatever their race or economic standing or region, can make the most of their own lives, whatever it is that is in there - the magic inside all of us - we will not fulfill our common destiny.

And today, more than ever before, it really does all begin with education—what we know and what we can learn. The class of 1945 saw the greatest explosion of economic opportunity in all human history after World War IT, in no small measure because ever)' one who participated was given the opportunity to get a higher education through the G.I. Bill. And I am absolutely convinced that that was one of the two or three reasons that the United States of America developed the finest, largest, broadest, deepest system of higher learning in the entire world. And it is still the best system in the entire world because of what happened then.

When President Eisenhower faced the dilemma of the Soviets beating the United States into space, and the fact that we had let a lot of our educational opportunities go downhill, he launched a great education initiative - giving loans to people all across the country and giving them good opportunities to pay them back. And they called it then the National Defense Education Act. The idea was that even in the late fifties, education was a part of our national security.

I tell you that that is more important today than it was in 1945, and more important today than it was in the late fifties. Men my age, between 45 and 55, grew up believing that when we reached this age, we'd have the security of knowing we could send our children to college, we'd have a decent retirement, we'd be living in our own homes, if illness came we'd be able to take care of it. We took these things for granted if we worked hard, obeyed the law, and paid our taxes.

In the last ten years, earnings of men between the ages of 45 and 55 have gone down 14 percent because in the global economy, if you live in a wealthy country and you don't have an education, you are in trouble. We cannot walk away from our obligation to invest in the education of every American at every age.

And to those who think there is no publicrole in that, I say: Just remember, all of those whoneed those student loans, who need those Pellgrants, all the universities who benefit from the research investments, there is a role for our nation in the national education agenda of our future, and we should maintain it.

But let me make one other point as well. Education is about more than making money and mastering technology, even in the twentieth century. It's about making connections and mastering the complexities of the world. It's about seeing the world as it is and advancing the cause of human dignity. Money without purpose leads to an empty life. Technology without compassion and wisdom and a devotion to truth can lead to nightmares.

The sarin gas in the Japanese subway was a miracle of technology. The bomb that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City was a miracle of technology. We have got to use our knowledge to become wiser about the things which we do not understand, and to find ways to use our knowledge to bring us together in ways that reinforce our common humanity.

I want to thank Governor Merrill for his support here in New Hampshire for our national service program, AmeriCorps, because I think it exemplifies that kind of objective. I want to thank Dartmouth for participating in it.

The idea behind national service is to make a connection between ideas and the real world of need out there beyond ivory towers of academia to make a connection between earning an education and advancing the quality of life for others who may not have it, a connection to be wanting to be respected for who you are and what you believe and not demeaning or demonizing those who are different.

I want to say a special word of thanks to the Medical School for the Partnership in Health Education Project of the Koop Institute, which sends medical students into elementary schools up here in New Hampshire and in Vermont to help to promote health and prevent disease amongyoung people. That also is a purpose of education - building connections, giving to others, helping to bind us together.

A society is not a collection of people pursuing their individual economic, material self-interests. It is a collection of people who believe that by working together they can raise better children, have stronger families, have more meaningful lives and have something to pass on to the generation that comes behind. That also is the purpose of education, and we need it more than ever today.

And so, my fellow Americans, and those of you who will live and work here, you must decide, what is this new world going to be like? You can probably do fine, regardless. You have a world-class education at a wonderful institution. You have the luxury of deciding: Will you devote your lives and your compassion and your conviction to saying that everybody ought to have the opportunity that you had? Will you believe that there is a common good and it's worth investing a little of what you earn as a result of your education? Will you believe that education is about more than economics, that it's also about civilization and character? You must decide. Will you work for more equality and more opportunities?

Will the information superhighway be traveled by all, even poor kids in distant rural areas? Will they be connected to the rest of the world or will the information superhighway simply give access on the Internet to paranoids who tell you how to make bombs? Will education lead you to lives of service and genuine citizenship, or a politics of hollow, reactionary rhetoric where, in the name of reducing government, we abandon the public interests to the private forces of short-term gain?

Just a few days ago, at Harvard, President Vaclev Havel of the Czech Republic said that our conscience must catch up with our reason or all is lost. I say today, we are having a great debate in the nation's capital, and we ought to have it. It can be a good and healthy thing. But some things must be beyond debate. We are all in this together.

A country at a crossroads has a chance always to redeem its promise. America is the longest-lasting democracy in human history because at every crossroads we have redeemed that promise. And you must do it again today.

We've got a real chance to make a real life together, folks. Yes, there's more ethnic and racial diversity in this country than in any other large country. Yes, there's more income differential and that's getting worse, and it's troubling. But this is still, for my money, the country that's the best bet to keep alive hope and decency and opportunity for all different kinds of people well into the next century.

I've had the privilege of representing you all over the world, and I think all the time, every day, about what it's going to be like in 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years, when you come back here for that remarkable reunion that they're celebrating today. And I am telling you, if you will simply use what you have been given in your lives, from God and the people who have helped you along the way, to rebuild this country and to bring it back together, and not to let us be divided by all these forces, to lift up these forces of opportunity and to stamp out the seeds of destruction, you still are at the moment of greatest possibility in all human history.

Your late president, John Kemeny, who came to this country after fleeing Hungary, told the last Commencement he presided over in 1981, the following: "The most dangerous voice you'll ever hear is the evil voice of pre judice that divides black from white, man from woman, Jew from Gentile. Listen to the voice that says, man can live in harmony. Use your very considerable talents to make the world better." Then he ended the speech with, as I understand, the words with which he ended every Commencement: "Women and men of Dartmouth, all mankind is your brother. And you are your brother's keeper. Do not let people divide you one from another."

Do not let people make you cynical. And do not think for a minute that you can have a good, full life if you don't care about what happens to the other people who share this nation and this planet with you. Good luck and God bless you. Hi

THE PRESIDENT PUT THEM TOGETHER FOR THE GRADS AND GRIPPED 1 ,522 OF THEIR HANDS.

PAY ATTENTION, GLASS: '95S GOT A SOAKING AS WELL AS AN EARFUL. THE TOTALLY WIRED STAYED DRY WATCHING THE PRESIDENT ON THE INTERNET.

HARDY '45S WERE LPS AS THEY SAT THROUGH THE WEATHER AND GARNERED PRESIDENTIAL PRAISE.

FDLLOWING ARISING DARTMOUTHTRADITION, MANYNATIVE AMERICANSWORE TRIBALREGALIA.

How CAN YOU CALL 8T A TRIUMPH when it pours rain, Commencement switches to the football stadium, and a public-relations coup gets upstaged by a political lovefest in Claremont? Well, it was a triumph, at least according to the people we talked to among the 18,000 guests. It was the first time in history that a sitting President shook the hand of every graduate. The class of '95 somehow remained the focus of the whole event. And Clinton's 28-minute speech stuck mostly to education and to the College itself. It was a truly Dartmouth event, with the most powerful man in the world as honored guest. Below is the full text of the President's speech, along with notes by the editors and invited writers.

WRONG BET A Secret Service man bet Dean Holly Sateia $5 that the faculty procession would not start on time. Why? Because President Clinton is o/woys late, he said. The procession started late—a bit. The class of 1995 was told to report to Leede Arena starting at 6:30 Sunday morning for a security check. The seniors waited outside in the rain for more than half an hour because the Secret Service did not finish preparing the building until seven.

TIME OUT The media center in Leverone Field House doubled as a warming hut for folks who were having trouble dealing with the wet weather. Seated in space reserved for network TV editing: a set of four-month-old triplets.

ON THE BALL When College Librarian Emeritus Edward Connery Latham brought out the College's silver montieth, one Secret Service agent said to another, "I didn't know the Stanley Cup was here."

THE HDNOREES William Jefferson Clinton wasn't the only luminary hooded and cited with an honorary degree at Commencement, "if my blessed mother were still alive," the newly minted Doctor of Laws told the crowd in acknowledgment, "she would be saying, 'See, Bill, they accomplished something. You're just a politician."' Also honored: Rita Dove Poet Laureate of the United States 1993-1995, novelist, and Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Doctor of Letters. Freeman John Dyson Theoretical physicist, writer, professor emeritus at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, former Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth. Doctor of Science. William H. Gray III President and CEO: of the United Negro College Fund; special advisor to the President of the United States on Haiti. Doctor of Laws. Nanner Overholser Keohane President of Duke University, former president of Wellesley College, and por litical philosopher. Doctor of Humane Letters. Anna Quindlen Novelist, social critic, and former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist. Doctor of Letters. Derek Alton Walcott Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright, and creative-writing and theatre professor at Boston University. Doctor of Letters,

BILL AND IKE'SEXCELLENT COMMENCEMENTS:A COMPARISON Bill Ike Location of ceremony changed................Y......... Y White House chief of staff a Dartmouth grad N..........Y President rides from Lebanon airport to Hanover in an open car N Y Campus tour includes visit with golf pro..................N .................Y Prez spends night on Webster Avenue N.................Y Above-average number of faculty march .Y Y Record crowd attends Cofftniencement.....................Y.................Y Outdoor ceremony marred by downpour............ .Y.................N Made an "Honorary Whooper" by the governor of New Hampshire N Y President official Commencement speaker .Y N Speech garners national attention N Y Prez shakes hands with every senior Y N Prez exposed to meningitis at ceremony .Y N Commencement broadcast live on the Internet Y N Prepresented with a senior cane N Y Prez leaves Hanover ahead of schedule N Y Prez leaves Hanover behind schedule Y N

ADVANCE KING Two months after becoming assistant to White House communications director Mark Gearan, Angus King '93 asked for aweek off. He planned to hike Mount Cube oh, and aiso use part of his break to do advance work for President Clinton's Dartmouth appearance. The College made most of the arrangements for handling the Presidential party, King reported. "The advance team just made minor adjustments." For his part, King made sure the President fully understood that Dartmouth focuses on undergraduate education.

SIGNED AND DELIVERED President Freedman, a noted bibliophile, presented President Clinton with a signed and numbered limited first-edition copy of New Hampshire, a poem with Notes and Grace Notes, by Robert Frost, class of 1896.

LOVE ALL Alison Mann '95,awheelchairtennis player who has gained a national reputation for iter prowess on the courts, was tlte first A.B. candidate to approach the platform. President Clinton, Dean Pelton, and Acting President James Wright alf descended the stairs to shake her hand.

As SHAKESPEARE LIKED IT Whatwould Shakespeare, who usually crowned his plays with grand ceremonial finales, think of Dartmouth's closing ceremony, Commencement? It has many Shakespearean features: trumpets, song, banners, processions, prayer, oration, officials in bright costume, raised chairs for powerful people. But Shakespeare's finales correspond to Dartmouth's in a way deeper than pageantry. They recognize the fundaments! paradox of closure, that it is a human effort to draw a line where life insists on continuance. Graduation is the final event of the college year and of a college career, but we call it "Commencement." If is in the plays on English history, recent and volatile events for Shakespeare's time, that Shakespearean closure most closely resembles College Commencement. People attempt to declare a morally dear condition (as do Richmond at the end of Richard Wand Henry V after Agincourt) or impose upon a striking event an unambiguous meaning (as do those who participate in or inherit the deposition of Richard II). People seek to set a permanent shape upon history, to channel its development into purely beneficent paths. The rhetoric of formal Shakespearean closure thus resembles strongly the rhetoric of valedictorian, college president, and guest speaker, each of whom tries to shape the future by elaborating the significance of the immediate past and the present moment.And in both the Shakespearean and the collegiate worlds, the end echoes the beginning. Henry IV had started his play by describing the end of intestine conflict and the advent of peace. The student, the president, and the guest at Commencement echo their counterparts at Convocation, telling us that college is a unique privilege that carries an obligation to the world. The end is a fiction, devised to be consonant with a fictional beginning. We need the fictions to make the flux at least momentarily comprehensible to ourselves. We are, as Shakespeare knew so well, always in medias res. Peter Saccio Professor of English and Willard Professor of Drama and Oratory

Yau MAKE THE CALL The Hall-Bennett Lounge in the Davis Varsity House football offices served as the holding room for the President before Commencement. Secretaries Cindy Falzarano and Reggie Dear had left a big message on the marker board in the lounge, reading: "Dartmouth Football Welcomes President Bill Clinton." They also left a Dartmouth football sweatshirt and T-shirt. When Falzarano and Dear got to the office Monday, they found a return message on the board reading: "Thanks forthe shirts. Call me for some good plays. Bill Clinton."

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT Seeing their big opportunity, many graduating students grabbed the President's attention while they were grabbing his hand. Ileana Perez went even further. Perez, who received her master's in electro-acoustic music, left Cuba illegally and wants to stay in the States. While receiving her degree she handed Clinton a letter requesting permanent resident status. The President said he would read it.

AND DR. SEUSS FDR ALWAYS At the post-Commencement reception at Baker Library, Hanover state representative Marion Copenhavergaveanew campaign button to the President. It read: Dartmouth '95, Clinton '96. Copenhaver, needless to say, is a Democrat.

SETTING THE STAGE Decorators spent weeks hunting Dartmouth-green paint. They stapled; more than a mile of white and green nylon to the fences surrounding Memorial Stadium and to the base of the bleachers. They raised three tents on platforms in the north end zone. They made trap doors in the audio towers for the Secret Service and its bomb-sniffing dogs. Dozens of production crew members, from designers to sounddelay experts, worked 12-hour days to ready the scene for Dartmouth's first stadium Commencement. "When people walk in they don't want to realize it's a football field," said decorating crew member Carrie-Ann Sarao. "They want to be overwhelmed."

JSEAMING BILL UP "It's the first time a world leader has been broadcast live on the Internet," claims Andy Williams '90, who manages Dartmouth's computer resource center, Using the program CD- SeeHe. College computer whizzes put both video and audio of Clinton's speech on the Net. Called "BillVision," the program was produced by Williams, engineering doctoral student John Erickson, and a team of Thayer engineering students.

THE BEST-LAID PLANS It was the first Commencecement that Dartmouth's director of public programs Barbara Whipple '85, ever planned. We asked her for the inside skinny. Most frantic moment: When the seniors marched out to find a row of chairs missing. Weirdest: The week before Commencement, Whipple's office received a phone call from a woman wanting to "seed the clouds" to ensure good weather. "Perhaps we should have followed up," says Whipple. Biggest challenge: "Ensuring that the staging platforms did not look like a rock concert, as they did at Michigan State University, where President Clinton had spoken at an earlier commencement." Moment of truth: Waiting in Davis Varsity House with Dartmouth President James 0. freedman Trustees Chairman John Rosenwald, and the White House and Secret Service staff for President Clinton's arrival. "Once the announcement came over the walkie-talkie that he had landed and was en route, an eerie silence fell upon the room."

GRANITE IN THEIR BRAINS Secret Service agents Waring gowns were seated in the first and last seats of the first row of seniors. When the time came to go shoulder to shoulder and sing the alma mater one woman put her arm around an agent and he started swaying. The other agent didn't catch the same school spirit.

IN MEMORIAM There was one tragic note to the weekend. Silla Hullei '95 was looking forward to having his parents travel from their home in Kenya to watch him graduate. His mother, Veronica Mullei, never made it. A traffic accident outside Boston claimed her life.

MEDIA HEADACHE Although the impromptu get-together between Clinton and Gingrich in Claremont, New Hampshire, diverted most national media attention away from Dartmouth, the College made it to national TV news for something unexpected. A '95 complaining of flu and headache was diagnosed with meningitis a day after Commencement. Doctors put Clinton on antibiotics. His chances of actually contracting the potentially fatal disease were nil, according to Director of College Health Services Dr. Jack Turco, who had alerted the White House. The '95 made a quick recovery.

WET SEAT It took longer than usual for seniors to assemble before the podium. Before they could sit, they had to bail rainwater from their chairs. Even so, most Ii3u wet backsides when they shook hands with the nation's leader. Helpers brought in large garbage bags by the armload. Smart graduates managed to stay dry and look proper by wearing the bags under their robes. Because of the rain, diplomas were not handed out during the ceremony. Students had to pick up their sheepskins at Thompson Arena afterward.

HANDSHAKES BY THE NUMBERS Below is a breakdown of the groups who shook the President's hand on the day he came to Dartmouth. "This guy likes people," says Terry Schumaker '70, a New Hampshire FOB. Commencement: ..1,500 Reception in Baker Library: 250 Tower Room at Baker, the Dartmouth staff who arranged Commencement: 30 Photo ops with Hanover police, Dartmouth security, Hanover Inn dining staff, and others: ....50 Claremont senior center: 100 Claremont airport: 250 Boston fundraiser for Sen. Kerrey: 300Approximate total for the day: ...................2,480

READ MY MORTARBOARD With the President in town, students sported more political messages on their motorboards than usual. They included "SAVE NEA," "SAVE BOSNIA," and several with "Veto the Contract" a reference to the Republicans' Contract with America.

AANYONE LISTENING? A member of the magazine's staff who was a driver in the Presidential motorcade sat in the VIP van during Commencement. Tuning in the ceremony on College radio station WDCR, he heard some unofficial voices. A sample: "Do we need somebody in the tower!" "Nah, we've got that covered." Turns out the VIP van was parked next to the Secret Service's communications van.

MOUSE TRAP A man wearing a Mickey Mouse poncho wandered into Leverone and left with two cups of coffee. When asked for his press credentials. he replied that his name was Michael Eisner and he wouldn't be back. Head of the Disney empire, Eisner was watching son Eric graduate.