DEMAND EXCELLENCE, TAKE RISKS

Paul L. Leventhal, Class of '59
President, Nuclear Control Institute

It has been 42 years since I sat, as you are sitting, as a member of the graduating class of Franklin and Marshall College, looking up at the commencement speaker and thinking to myself, as you may well be thinking, "This guy is the last thing standing between me and my diploma."

With that in mind, let me tell you a story about Mario Cuomo, the former Governor of New York when he received his first invitation to speak at a graduation from his alma mater, St. John's University. He asked Father Flynn, the President of St. John's University how he should approach it. "Commencement speakers," said Father Flynn, "should think of themselves as the body at an old-fashioned Irish wake. They need you in order to have the party, but nobody expects you to say very much."

That's advice I intend to follow today, and I thank President Kneedler and the college trustees for giving me this opportunity to return to F & M and deliver my first graduation speech. And I will particularly cherish the Doctor of Laws degree I have just received. I am an ex-newspaperman who works in Washington and is always surrounded by lawyers. Now I outrank most of them.

At my graduation in 1959, I felt what many of you may be feeling today---above all, a magnificent and exultant sense of relief, but beneath it all, a persistent sense of confusion and trepidation about what lies ahead. Today marks your day of commencement, so let me help you put this glorious and conflicted moment of self-esteem and self-doubt into perspective. Consider this the friendly shove that launches you on that proverbial journey of a thousand miles that begins with but a single step.

First, let me assure you that while that first step is a big one, you come well-equipped for the journey. I have grown to appreciate the remarkable education I received here at F & M, and I think over time, each of you will come to your own appreciation of what it is about this college that serves you so well over a lifetime. For me, it is an appreciation of Franklin & Marshall as, above all, a teaching school. Here there is a faculty of scholars who love to teach, and to reach the students they teach, and the impact these teachers had upon me was profound.

From Professor Vanderzell, in constitutional law, I learned of the overriding importance of the test of reasonableness, not only in assessing the political orientation of the Supreme Court at various periods in its history, but in evaluating the policies of the Executive Branch and the initiatives of Congress. The F & M Department of Government in those days had but three professors, extraordinary teachers all. We government majors used to joke about them being Philosopher Kings, the ruling elite from Plato's "The Republic." I owe a special debt to those three professors---John Vanderzell, Sid Wise and Dick Schier---because they disciplined my mind, taught me the values of social justice, stimulated my appetite for public affairs and---perhaps most important---got me used to unreasonable demands and hard work.

Which brings me back to the voyage upon which you are about to embark. What kind of trip will it be? You are embarking in an auspicious year.

The year 2001, thanks to the combined genius of screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick, has a special meaning associated with human discovery and evolution. But while art often imitates life, life rarely lives up to the expectations of art. Mankind has not yet colonized the moon, much less sent an expedition of human beings to Saturn. Yet, the inscrutable complexities of this remarkable motion picture, especially its soaring finale of re-birth, somehow seem to be reflected in a technology-driven self-confidence that characterizes the human spirit we find in America today.

Compare this vision of 2001 with George Orwell's vision of 1984. To me and my F & M classmates in 1959, Orwell provided a disturbingly plausible version of what the future might hold. We had just lived through the political nightmare of McCarthyism and we were still living under the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a threat that was to reach its crescendo in the Cuban missile crisis three years later. Fortunately, 1984 came and went without a nuclear war, nor with an Orwellian Big Brother and his Thought Police displacing American democracy.

Yet, the question of whether American democracy is becoming dangerously dysfunctional has been the subject of a lively debate at F & M this year, with one visiting scholar warning that self-government is devolving into what he called "a process of socialization in which a political class tells us how to live." Today there is a growing sense of powerlessness in the face of Big Government, Big Money and the combining of the two into Big Power over our daily lives. More and more Americans are tuning out the politicians and the political process and are lasering in on making a good living and enjoying the good life. This pursuit of happiness, of course, is as American as apple pie, not to mention the Bill of Rights.

But these science- and political-fiction visions of the future are pertinent to the journey you begin today because, in truth, we have no way of predicting what the future will bring, or what our own role in shaping that future might be. Einstein once said, "Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be." But of one thing we can be quite sure. Whether we ultimately experience a great spiritual rebirth on the wings of technology, as envisioned in 2001, the movie, or a subjugation of the human spirit, as foreseen by Orwell, or a "return of the Stone Age on the wings of science," as Winston Churchill described the nuclear peril in 1946, depends not on some cosmic roll of the dice, but on a personal commitment by you to engage in the decisions by your government on which your future depends.

Be vigilant because, even in these seemingly good and peaceful times, there are dangers that are not widely understood and sometimes not easily seen, both at home and abroad. If we fail to recognize and reverse them, they could threaten our very survival. One such danger that I have been addressing in my work is the spread of nuclear weapons to additional nations and possibly even to terrorist groups. But when I set out 42 years ago as you are doing today, I had no way of knowing I would wind up, of all things, a nuclear non-proliferator.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I graduated from F & M. I wanted to be a journalist, and spent a decade in pursuit of this dream, most of it at Newsday as an investigative and political reporter. Journalism is a wonderful career because you never know what you might be covering next or where your work will lead. A classmate of mine at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism who was also a night copyboy with me at The New York Times was Joseph Lelyveld, now the Executive Editor of the Times. He recently told me, "What I've liked about this business from the start is that you can't see your path to the grave as clearly as you can in the more respectable professions."

I eventually came to feel, after covering politicians at the local, state and national levels, that a journalist was confined to being an observer, a commentator. The real challenge, I decided, was to get inside government and try to make it work. My big break came when the press secretary's job opened up in the office of a brainy, gutsy and workaholic United States Senator, Jacob Javits of New York, and he hired me to come to Washington. Javits was a liberal Republican. (In those days, "liberal Republican" was not an oxymoron!) I joined him in turbulent times at the start of the Nixon-Agnew Administration when Washington was under siege by anti-Vietnam War protesters. What a political learning experience that was!

By the way, perhaps the best piece of advice I ever got came from Javits, and I'd like to pass it on to you now. It was some years later when he was suffering the ravages of Lou Gehrig's disease. This disease destroys the body but leaves the brain intact. Sitting in a wheelchair and hooked to a respirator, Javits bid farewell to a reunion of his Senate staff "I leave you with four words," he whispered, which made us take notice because this Senator was famous for not being able to say anything in less than four thousand. And he said: "Demand excellence, take risks." Brilliant, I thought. Those words surely summed up his distinguished career, which began in poverty on New York's Lower East Side. And I have sought to apply them to my own work. And I say to you, if you demand excellence of yourself and those who may someday work for you, and you are prepared to take risks, you will probably reach where you are trying to go.

It's when I later went to work for a Democratic Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, that I had my first encounter with atomic energy. As an aide to a government operations subcommittee chaired by Ribicoff, I was assigned to handle a bill that came from the Nixon White House to reorganize the Atomic Energy Commission. We needed to transform the AEC into an all-energy agency capable of responding to challenges posed by the first Arab oil embargo of 1973. So, by chance of a bill referral, I was introduced to atomic energy.

For me, it was a baptism in fire, with no advanced warning, and it changed my life. This was the first time atomic energy legislation was assigned to a Congressional committee other than the then all-powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which had close ties with the nuclear industry and bureaucracy. But I saw a need to do things different from the way the Joint Committee wanted things done---in particular, to make a clean break between regulation and promotion of atomic energy. There was a need to eliminate conflicts of interest inside the AEC that compromised the safety and security of nuclear power plants. So, with support from Chairman Ribicoff, we overcame objections from the Joint Committee and crafted a new law that "fissioned" the AEC---split it into the present-day Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy.

There were some eye-openers for me in the course of doing this work. I learned that plutonium, the essential material of nuclear weapons, is produced in civilian nuclear power plants as a byproduct of generating electricity with uranium fuel. The United States was planning to extract plutonium from the highly radioactive, self-protecting spent fuel of these plants. And we were going to give permission to other countries to remove plutonium from the uranium we exported to them for use in their plants. This atom bomb material was going to be "recycled" as fuel in civilian nuclear plants. But there was a big problem, and that was that the level of protection against thefts and diversions of civilian plutonium was far below protection of military plutonium. And there was another problem: Plutonium is so poisonous that if a speck of it the size of a pollen grain gets caught in the lung, it causes cancer.

Through domestic law and regulation, we stopped the plutonium business in the United States. Spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants is now supposed to be disposed of as waste inside a mountain in Nevada, without recovering plutonium. But export controls enacted in another law I worked on---the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978---failed to stop extraction of plutonium from fuel the United States supplied to Europe and Japan. And the flow of nuclear technology and materials from industrial countries to the developing world has continued. As a result, there is now more plutonium in civilian hands than in all of the nuclear weapons in the world. And some of it has already been turned into bombs, as in India, Pakistan and North Korea, while others have used or are now using civilian nuclear programs as a cover for weapons programs. Of greatest immediate concern are Iran and Iraq, and Japan's neighbors are wondering why the Japanese are accumulating so much plutonium.

I founded the Nuclear Control Institute 20 years ago after the Reagan landslide cost me my Democratic Senate job, then with Gary Hart of Colorado. I had just finished co-directing the Senate's investigation of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and became acutely aware of that ineffable combination of human fallibility and mechanical failure that makes nuclear plants vulnerable to accidents, and also sabotage. This institute now serves as a research and advocacy center where work can continue on reducing nuclear dangers, especially on preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons and raising effective barriers against nuclear terrorism.

So, what lessons can I share with you from my own journey since graduating from Franklin & Marshall College? The first is this: Be prepared to be surprised, just as I was surprised to become a nuclear specialist. You never know where your work will lead. If you have no clear career objective now, that's O.K. The important thing is to get a job, work hard at it, and see where it leads. If you know what you want to do, pursue that career passionately and see if it leads to where you want to go.

I ended up working in public affairs. You surely don't get rich laboring in the public interest, but it can be an enriching experience. At the same time, if you manage to be effective in taking on powerful political and industrial interests, the frustrations can run high and the going can get rough. For the large majority of you who will work in the private sector, you still have a responsibility to engage in public affairs. President Eisenhower, in his famous farewell, warned of "the acquisition of unwarranted influenceÉby the military-industrial complex." But he also declared that "only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" can ensure "that security and liberty may prosper together."

Vigilance and tenacity are absolutely essential. In public affairs, it is distressing to find that there is a tendency for issues to come full circle, and to find yourself back where you started. I will offer a few examples from my field.