[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 14 (Tuesday, January 24, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1394-S1396]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SPEECH OF JACK VALENTI
Mr. COHEN. Mr. President, I recently read a speech that I believe
deserves the attention of all Senators. Jack Valenti, the president and
chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, a
former aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and one of the most
articulate and thoughtful people I know, delivered the speech in New
York City, as the first in the Louis Nizer lecture series.
Jack Valenti's words that evening carry a special resonance for me
and I think they will for others. They are words of optimism about our
future, in a time when too many in our country do not feel optimistic.
But they are also words of caution, directed toward all of us in this
body and all of us in this city, who create the policies under which
Americans live. They stress the importance of the family, of education,
of appropriate moral conduct, of individual--not governmental--
responsibility.
They are words to which we should all give careful consideration.
I ask unanimous consent that, following my remarks, the full text of
Jack Valenti's speech be included in the Congressional Record.
[[Page S1395]] There being no objection, the speech was ordered to
be printed in the Record, as follows:
William Faulkner's Old Verities: It's Planting Time in America!
(By Jack Valenti)
The issues of liberty and the replenishment of community
values stirred restlessly within Louis Nizer. He and I talked
often about the compass course of the society. We both had
read the purifying speech of William Faulkner when he
received the Nobel Prize for Literature, on December 10,
1950. Like me, Louis found in Faulkner's words a dark
punishing wisdom, a plain, spare design for civic conduct. It
is from Faulkner's vision that what I say tonight has taken
wings. I think Louis would approve. Let me begin, then, by
admiring this man, Louis Nizer, who has drawn so many of you
here tonight.
In the muscular and musical English language which Louis
knew so well, loved so much and illuminated so elegantly,
there exits two words which perfectly describe him.
They are ``polymath'' and ``fidelity.''
Polymath means an artisan of immense learning in many
fields.
Francis Bacon once said he had taken all knowledge to be
his province. For Bacon it was not an immodest objective. But
such were Louis Nizer's vast and diverse talents, he is the
only man I know or knew who could come close to matching
Francis Bacon. Lawyer, courtroom genius, public speaker, best
selling author, painter, composer, lyricist, historian,
counselor to presidents and public officials, he was all of
these and more. And in each he performed with excelling
intellect and ascending success.
Fidelity means faithfulness to obligations and observances.
Louis Nizer gave special meaning to the word ``fidelity.''
In his binding to the law, fidelity took on a richer meaning.
The law in all its glory was the core of his life. It was the
reservoir from which his daily tasks drew nourishment.
I first met Louis Nizer almost twenty-nine years ago when
he came to visit with me in my office in the White House. I
was about to resign as Special Assistant to the President, to
become the President of the Motion Picture Association of
America. He was to become the MPAA general counsel. Our paths
that day not only crossed, but became intimately interwoven
and forever sealed in friendship and trust.
His long, fruitful life is now over. Death, as it does to
every mortal, has finally came to Louis Nizer. I can say that
I am so grateful to a beneficent God that I was given to know
Louis so intimately, so gloriously, so lovingly. He was a
noble man. There are so few of his kind.
Any enterprise that bears Louis' name is valuable to me.
This evening then, to me, has great worth. May the Louis
Nizer Lecture series flourish in the decades ahead. May I do
it as little damage as possible tonight.
I have been fortunate to spend my entire working career in
two of life's fascinations, politics and movies. I have
worked the precincts of my native Texas, within City Hall and
county courthouses and the state capitol. I have been privy
to decision making in the White House, at the side of a
brave, extraordinary President. And I have for a long time
been among and within the creative and executive communities
of Hollywood and the world cinema.
Both arenas, movies and politics, and sprung from the same
DNA. Their aims are the same: to entice voters and audiences
to yield to their persuasions. What is the value of those
persuasions? What is real? What is right? What is truth? Who
determines it? Who furnishes the boundaries for the daily
moral grind of a functioning society? How is that society to
be
governed? How do you shape a foundation for a nation's prime
objective to endure, always striving to reach for the
ascending curve?
These are ancient queries. Answers are available but often
they are porous, not readily translated into specific
behavior. Sometimes they are cast in different shapes to
different people. Which answer is true? ``What is truth,''
said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
I have thought a lot about this, though thinking about
these matters is like trying to pick up mercury with a fork.
It is maddeningly elusive. But we have to keep trying.
Herodotus tells the story of Athenians so emotionally
affected by the drama, ``The Capture of Miletus'', by the
poet Phrynichus, that the whole theater wept openly. When
their passions had cooled, Athenian officials passed a law
forbidding Phrynichus ever again to offer this play to the
public. He was fined a thousand drachmas for reminding his
fellows citizens of their own sorrows. It is an apt metaphor
for our current scene. Nothing so much describes the
perversity of political and social conduct, and calls to
judgment the resorting to morality by public officials as an
instrument of domestic and foreign policy.
It's a dicey political game to play. Like the Athenians we
are deeply involved in that which tugs at both our practical
minds and our moral conscience. Also like the Athenians we
find the real world, the morning after, not so desirable as
we had previously thought.
If morality is a rostrum from which we survey our lives,
then it is also a principle on which we stand. Principles,
unless one rises above them, are cruelly steadfast. If a
principle is ignored, for whatever practical reasons, or
bent, for whatever
seemingly rational decision, then it is no longer a
principle. It becomes a weak reed on which we lean at our
own peril.
So it is that Presidents and Members of Congress, as well
as officials of state and local governments, find themselves
dealing with morality on a ``yes, but'' logic. If you tried
to draw up a catalogue of the good guys and the bad guys, you
wind up with public officials from the President down being
judged on the same basis as that well known medieval monarch,
Philip the Good, renowned in his time for both the number of
his bastards and the piety of his fasts. Too often our
officials, in both political parties, see issues through
their own personal prism. To that end, the historian
Procopius wrote about the Emperor Justinian: ``He didn't
think that the slaying of men was murder unless they happened
to share his own religious view.''
We are poised for a great debate in this land. It has to do
with the reach of government, how wide, how narrow. But I
daresay the debate will be waged on the wrong platform.
Emerson may have gotten it right when he wrote: ``God offers
to everyone his choice between truth and repose. Take what
you please, you can never have both.'' Emerson is also
speaking to this generation as well.
I am not a pessimist. Never have been. Don't intend to
start now. This country did not survive more than 200 years
of cruel disjointings to be undone at this particular moment
by discomforts cataloged at length, mainly by TV commentators
and political consultants. These are the new political Druids
who convince their viewers and their clients that they alone
are capable of inspecting the entrails of a pig and thereby
are solely in possession of the bewitchery which will lead
voters to a proper decision.
But this scrambling, unquiet, violent time is one of the
rare moments in our history when those who govern us and
those
who are governed are in concert. Fear is the scarlet thread
which runs like a twanging wire through the nation. Fear
of tomorrow; fear of losing one's job; fear that children
will find their future less attractive than did their
parents; fear of crime, in the neighborhoods and in the
home; fear that the old bindings which held the nation
together are snapping: in too many cities there are too
many broken homes, too much loss of the affection which
thickens family ties, too much crazy drug use and users,
too many guns in the hands of too many children, too many
babies having babies, abandonment of the church, schools
without discipline, life without hope, anger fed by
imagined slights and bigoted blights.
No wonder there is fear. The first thing we have to do to
combat fear is understand that no matter how well intentioned
we are, unless we are guided by a basic moral compass, we
will neither begin nor finish the journey. Make no mistake,
the politicians are listening. There is nothing so compelling
to a public official as the angry buzz of the local
multitudes.
Therefore (ah, `Therefore' is a wondrous word. It says
enough of the rhetoric, what do you do tomorrow morning?),
Therefore:
We ought to start with William Faulkner. In his speech in
1950, he cited what he called ``the old universal verities
and truth of the heart, the old universal truth lacking which
any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity
and pride and compassion and sacrifice. He might have added
``and duty and loyalty and service to one's family and
friends and country.''
Faulkner's old verities have weight because they are what
an enduring nation is all about. Old fashioned words? Yes,
they are. Long-living words? Yes, they are. All the more
reason why words which have sustained themselves in myth and
reality are
never out of date. These words describe neither religion nor
ideology nor political affiliation. No group or faction or
political party has a monopoly on interpreting their
meaning.
What Faulkner's verities represent is a code of conduct
between human beings, between the citizen and the state,
between neighbors, friends, associates. They are better
guides than a political poll, or the blatherings demagogues,
or those earnest folks who insist they alone possess God's
wisdom. We have an old prayer in Texas when we encounter
these human repositories of divine Truth: ``Dear Lord, let me
seek the truth, but spare me the company of those who have
found it.'' Nice prayer. I say it often.
So, we begin with Faulkner's proposition that there are
basics deep rooted in those crevices where each of us stores
our beliefs and our passions. Without them we are barren of
aim or cause or reason. Or as Faulkner said, without them we
``labor under a curse.''
Government cannot, ought not, be a national nanny, nor the
custodian of our faith nor the divine arbiter of our lives.
Each citizen must be responsible for his or her actions,
fathers, mothers, sons, daughters. Parents must be
responsible for their children. Adults responsible for there
decisions. Young people responsible for what they do. Playing
``victim'', copping a plea that ``the Devil made me do it,''
these are mocking charades in which the foolish listen to the
dunces and the dimwits lead the mob.
Taking responsibility for one's life, for one's action,
does not mean turning away from the helpless and the
hopeless. What it does mean is that if there is not a civic
commitment to be individually responsible, the
[[Page S1396]] future is pockmarked with detours and
disappointment. But we must be wary in the months ahead.
Strenuous efforts will be made to amputate the national
government's intervention in the lives of those pressed
against the wall because of circumstances over which they
have no control. It would be tragic to do that. It would
be worse than a crime. It would be a blunder. It cannot be
allowed to happen.
To give Faulkner's old verities a communal reality, we have
to begin within the family, for parents to care enough,
believe enough, do enough to begin the process. Parents,
sufficiently armed with passion, can do the most.
Alongside this familial commitment has to be a zealous
attention to teachers and schools. We have to be willing to
pay for first class public education or it continues to be
lousy education. We can't build enough prisons, or wield
enough judicial sabers, or legislate enough tough death
penalty laws to compensate for the collapse of discipline in
the classroom, or the graduation from high school of too many
who can't read or write or the total loss of Faulkner's
verities. In a time when our national obligations are larger
than our capacity to fulfill them all at the same time, our
leaders must make it clear--painful, discomforting,
frustrating as it may be--that we have to reinstall the
family and the school and the church as the central teaching
centers for young people. We have to begin the journey back
into ourselves before we can go forward into our future. Too
idealistic? Too namby-pamby? too impossible? `Yes,' to all of
those descriptions if you think a society can just amble
along and keep its liberties alive when so much of its core
convictions are in a state of decay. I don't. Every day
liberty must be guarded, because like virtue it is every day
besieged.
Then, why am I optimistic? Because all things are always in
flux. Nothing lasts forever, neither triumph nor tragedy, nor
the omissions of the human spirit. So long as we understand
who we are, why we are what we are, and how we became so,
then we will always be able to know where it is that we ought
to turn and where we must go. Of course, this requires a
national conviction. Without conviction, said Lord Macaulay,
a man or woman will be right only by accident.
President Kennedy supposedly told the story of a French
general in Algeria who wanted to plant a special kind of tree
to line the road to his chateau. ``But,'' protested his
gardener, ``that tree takes a 100 years to bloom.'' The
general smiled and said: ``Then we have no time to lose.
Start planting today.''
It's planting time in America. Faulkner's old verities will
take root again much sooner than the General's trees.
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