I spoke about the awareness of the gap between the expectations my class brought to college and the reality we experienced. Most of us had come from sheltered backgrounds, and the personal and public events we encountered caused us to question the authenticity, even the reality, of our pre-college lives. Our four years had been a rite of passage different from the experiences of our parents’ generation, which had faced greater external challenges like the Depression and World War II. So we started asking questions, first about Wellesley’s policies, then about the meaning of a liberal arts education, then about civil rights, women’s roles, Vietnam. I defended protest as “an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age” and as a way of “coming to terms with our humanness.” It was part of the “unique American experience” and “if the experiment in human living doesn’t work in this country, in this age, it’s not going to work anywhere.”
When I had asked the class at our graduation rehearsal what they wanted me to say for them, everyone answered, “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.” I acknowledged how hard it was to convey a feeling that permeates a generation.
And, finally, I spoke of the struggle to establish a “mutuality of respect between people.”
Running throughout my words, however, was an acknowledgment of the fears many of us felt about the future. I referred to a conversation from the previous day with a classmate’s mother “who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she’s afraid.” I said, “Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it. Not now.”
The speech was, as I admitted, an attempt to “come to grasp with some of the inarticulate, maybe even inarticulable things that we’re feeling” as we are “exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty.” This speech may not have been the most coherent one I have ever delivered, but it struck a chord with my class, which gave me an enthusiastic standing ovation, partly, I believe, because my efforts to make sense of our time and place―played out on a stage in front of two thousand spectators―reflected the countless conversations, questions, doubts and hopes each of us brought to that moment, not just as Wellesley graduates, but also as women and Americans whose lives would exemplify the changes and choices facing our generation at the end of the twentieth century.
Later that afternoon, I took one last swim in Lake Waban. Instead of going to the little beach by the boathouse, I decided to wade in near my dorm, an area officially off-limits to swimming. I stripped down to my bathing suit and left my cut-off jeans and T-shirt in a pile on the shore with my aviator-like eyeglasses on top. I didn’t have a care in the world as I swam out toward the middle, and because of my nearsightedness, my surroundings looked like an Impressionist painting. I had loved being at Wellesley and had taken great solace in all seasons from its natural beauty. The swim was a final goodbye. When I got back to shore, I couldn’t find my clothes or my glasses.
I finally had to ask a campus security officer if he had seen my belongings. He told me that President Adams had seen me swimming from her house and directed him to confiscate them. Apparently, she was sorry she had ever let me speak. Dripping wet, I followed him, somewhat blindly, to retrieve my possessions.
I had no idea that my speech would generate interest far beyond Wellesley. I had only hoped that my friends thought I had been true to their hopes, and their positive reaction heartened me. When I called home, however, my mother told me that she had been fielding phone calls from reporters and television shows asking me for interviews and appearances.
I appeared on Irv Kupcinet’s interview show on a local Chicago channel, and Life magazine featured me and a student activist named Ira Magaziner, who addressed his graduating class at Brown University. My mother reported that opinion about my speech seemed to be divided between the overly effusive―“she spoke for a generation”―to the exceedingly negative―“who does she think she is?” The accolades and attacks turned out to be a preview of things to come: I have never been as good as or as bad as my most fervid supporters and opponents claimed.
With a big sigh of relief I took off for a summer of working my way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mt. McKinley National Park (now known as Denali National Park and Preserve) and sliming fish in Valdez in a temporary salmon factory on a pier. My job required me to wear knee-high boots and stand in bloody water while removing guts from the salmon with a spoon. When I didn’t slime fast enough, the supervisors yelled at me to speed up. Then I was moved to the assembly packing line, where I helped pack the salmon in boxes for shipping to the large floating processing plant offshore. I noticed that some of the fish looked bad. When I told the manager, he fired me and told me to come back the next afternoon to pick up my last check. When I showed up, the entire operation was gone. During a visit to Alaska when I was First Lady, I joked to an audience that of all the jobs I’ve had,
