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Honorary Degree Recipient
Chris Matthews
Broadcast Journalist
 Chris Matthews |
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Commencement
Address |
Chairman of the Board of Trustees Joseph Jacovini, President Constantine
Papadakis, Provost Harvill Eaton, distinguished faculty and, most important,
the Drexel University class of 2003.
My younger
brother Bruce graduated from Drexel, loved it and is now an engineer with
Buckeye out in Ohio. He also loved a fellow graduate, our dear Carol,
and married her. My older brother Herb earned his M-B-A from Drexel and
is here today. So is my father, who graduated from here in 1949.
Dad,
one of that Greatest Generation, finished in three and a half years. The
World War II navy was his co-op. A Drexel professor once saluted him for
turning in such neat papers, especially since he had to write them with
two kids balanced on his knees.
I was the second of those kids and - you can believe this or not - I have a distinct memory of Dad's graduation ceremony at the Academy of Music. One thing kids remember is tedium.
So I promise to keep this short
today. As Britain's King Henry VIII told each of his many wives, I won't
keep you long.
But first, as the son of one Drexel graduate, the brother of two others,
the brother-in-law of still another, I'd like to pay warm and much-deserved
tributes to the other Drexel families here today. Here's to those who
made it all possible: the proud parents of the Drexel University graduates
of 2003.
- Okay, now
- In ten minutes flat, I'm going to tell you how to fight for your best values, find your way in this world, pursue your dreams, follow-up on the very best hunch you ever had about yourself.
Rule One: Get yourself in the game.
Ever watch a little kid at the local playground who stands patiently and attentively while the big kids play basketball? When a ball goes out of bounds, he runs for it and passes it back in - quickly and smartly. As time goes on, when an older kid has to get home for dinner, somebody yells, "Hey punk, wanna play?"
That's it, the heart of it really: the first rule of career-building. If you want to play a game go to where it's played and find a way to show your stuff.
Three things happen when you do:
You learn how the game is played, but also how the players act with each other. You learn the game's manner, its cadence, its culture.
Second, you meet people. It's not who you know; let's face it, it's who you get to know.
Third, you're there when the lightning strikes!
When I came back from Africa and the Peace Corps, I went to Washington looking for a job in Congress. I must have knocked on 200 doors.
Finally, I came face-to-face with a US Congressman who was downright enthusiastic at meeting someone who'd just been in the Peace Corps. In fact, he had been one of the sponsors of the bill creating the Peace Corps. He even showed me the pen the President had used in signing it.
Sadly for both of us, the Congressman who liked me was on his way to
federal
prison. Some mob guy had planted a body in his basement. Nice fellow,
though. I always thought he did me a favor by not putting me on his payroll.
That body in the basement was a bad way to end a political career, and an even worse way to start one!
I kept looking. I got an interview with a fairly hardnosed fellow from rural Texas. Didn't like my "hair style" - too long - or my voice - too fast. Too Philly! But he gave me what I needed most: encouragement.
Politics, he said, is like selling insurance door to door, what he'd done himself before running for Congress.
You visit ten families. Three invite you back to make your pitch. One buys a policy.
You don't get the sale without the three pitches. You don't get to make the three pitches without first making the ten visits.
Keep trying, he said.
Finally, I knocked on the magic door. A top aide to a Utah senator had worked for both Robert and Ted Kennedy and loved the fact I'd been in the Peace Corps and had majored in economics for the simple reason that nobody else in the office had!
He offered me not just one job but two: working during the day in the office answering the complicated mail and writing short speeches, then working the evening shift as an armed Capitol policeman.
That was the way it worked back then. Every senior senator got a handful of patronage jobs to fill with whomever he wanted - operating the elevators, working in the mailroom or
walking around carrying a .38 police special.
"It'll pay for the groceries," he said catching my disappointment.
- It did more than that
- it got me in the game. Within three months, I asked for and was given a full-time job working as a United States senator's legislative assistant, the job I'd come looking for in the first place.
"If you knock long enough and loud enough at the gate you are bound to wake up somebody." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
- That's Rule Two
- If you want something, ask for it! Some people aren't going to like the cut of your jib. But those who do will change your life. They will open doors for you. If nine people will say "No" to you, then ask ten.
It's like dating.
It takes only one strike to transform a prospector into a gold miner, only one "Yes" to turn a proposal into a marriage.
There is magic that results when a person invests in you. He becomes a big- time investor in your success, a stockholder in your dreams.
Because, when you ask someone for help, you are really asking him to place a bet on you. The more people you get to bet on you, the larger your network of investors and the shorter your odds.
"If you want to make a friend," said Benjamin Franklin, a fellow who grows wiser the older I get, "let someone do you a favor."
Many people hesitate to ask for help. They see it as an admission of weakness. But this do-it-yourself mentality can be lethal. It can limit and isolate you, leave you without allies.
People spend their whole lives resisting having others do favors for them. In doing so, they forfeit not only the help but the new alliance. And people are most likely to invest in someone they've helped before. It's the way people are.
Know that and you know a lot.
How did I get to be a Presidential speechwriter? I met a guy while working in a Congressional campaign in Brooklyn. We've been friends ever since. He introduced me to a Presidential speechwriter. When that fellow moved up to chief speechwriter, he put me up for his job. My try-out was to write the Catholic Charities speech. I was the one guy working at the White House who knew the material.
How'd I get a TV show?
I was having dinner one night in Beverly Hills with Joe McGinniss, who, before he started writing best-selling books, wrote a dynamite three-time-a-week column for the Philadelphia Inquirier. He was interviewing me for a book he was writing on Senator Ted Kennedy. As we were finishing dinner, Joe told me he was having drinks afterward over at the Four Seasons with some guy he thought I would hit it off with.
Over the years that guy and
I would meet in New York and talk about my idea of doing a fast-paced
TV show. In 1994, that guy, Roger Ailes, gave me my first TV show.
That's Rule Three: Follow Your Hunch.
And hustle!
There's a false assumption out there that talent will surely be recognized. Just get good at something and the world will beat a path to your door.
Don't believe it. The world is not checking in with us to see what skills we've picked up, what idea we've concocted, what dreams we carry in our hearts.
When a job opens up whether it's in the chorus line or on the assembly line, it goes to the person standing there. It goes to the eager beaver the boss sees when he looks up from his work: the pint-sized kid standing at courtside waiting for one of the older boys to head home for supper. "Hey, kid, wanna play?"
I hope that what I've just said will help.
We, all of us, are lucky to live in a country where many things are possible. America is a self-invented country filled with rebellious self-invented people.
Try to picture two guys on horses overlooking a stretch of marshland. One was a young architect, the other a trained surveyor. One was Pierre L'Enfant, armed with a commission to design a capital city for a new nation. The other was the man after whom the city would be named, George Washington.
And if it seemed precocious for a French-born architect and a former surveyor who'd never done anything like it before to design a national capital, it was more precocious still for a group of men meeting here in Philadelphia who had never done anything like it before to confect a country that guarantees as unalienable a set of rights the world had never before recognized, to ensure not only its citizens' lives and liberty but also their right to "pursue happiness."
All that started, as it will for you in your life, with a notion. I urge you to make it a grand one.
I happened to be in Budapest early in 1989. It was just months before the fall of Communism but the world didn't know it. I was sitting having tea with a soft- spoken economics professor as he spoke with hope. Writers and intellectuals and other peoples were meeting in the countryside. People were watching Boris Yeltsin challenge the old Soviet order and they were gaining courage. "Freedom is contagious," he said to me.
I couldn't know that within five months the government in Budapest would rip down the Iron Curtain, that within a year Hungary would be a free republic, that the man sitting across from me was its foreign minister.
I was in East Berlin that drizzly night the Wall was about to open. I stood in a crowd of people waiting at the Brandenburg Gate and organized a little rump session of "Hardball." I decided to ask the crowd of East Germans who had lived their whole lives without it - what "freedom" meant to them.
"Was ist Freiheit?" I kept asking. What is freedom?
Finally, a young man in his twenties looked at this American reporter he'd never met before and said in dead seriousness: "Talking to you."
I was in South Africa the day of the first-ever all-races election. I watched lines of voters stretching from one horizon to the next. Waiting in one was a young South African white woman. She said: "This is the day I've waited for my whole life." I will never forget the way she said that word: her whole life.
- So
- Get in the game, be quick to ask for help, but most important, be true to your ideals, starting with the ideal you hold of yourself.
That's right, with true self-respect. Do I have to tell you, warn you, that you will meet people out there - you've met them already - who aren't honest, who don't deal in truth. They will lie and cheat to get what they want. Their only code is what will get them what they want.
How can they live with themselves you'll ask. Don't they know they're giving away the one thing that matters from the start - that will always matter - their integrity? Don't they know that is who they are?
So today is your day. But don't worry. There will be time to dream, to think, to try, to fail, to learn, to carry on, to dream some more. You leave here with two gems for which men and women have come here to seek from the world over:
A rebellious spirit that triumphs even now over repressive government.
An only-in-America attitude toward what is possible.
They are
this country's crown jewels and today they are yours.
