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Thank you, Dean Weinstein, for your lovely introduction. I wish you were my speech writer. Hello to all of you, American and international graduates of 2025 of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Let me just say, I was going to try to start with a joke, but I’m not good at jokes, so I’m just going to say that today, when I got up a few hours before I came here, I took a walk, and it’s beautiful. Your city is absolutely beautiful. And I looked down certain, side streets, and it reminded me with such nostalgia, of when I was in Providence, Rhode Island. I was at URI, and to name drop a little bit, it filled me with some nostalgia, because my great friend throughout his life was John F. Kennedy Jr. We were at college at the same time—he at Brown, me at URI, We shared a house, and now here I find myself addressing you all at the school named after his father, and I wonder sometimes what a great leader, John, my friend, might have been. And boy, do we need great leaders.  

It's quite something to be in this particular place, addressing this particular group of graduates at this particular time. I am delighted to have been invited to the Kennedy School of Government, to Harvard, which is leading the struggle and scoring significant gains in this current battle for academic freedom. Make no mistake about it, academics, education are on the front lines of the current struggle between the two halves of America. As you know, we over there in Europe are happy to lay out the welcome mat for all of those here who were having their roles taken away. We want your scientists, your researchers, your professionals, but we hope they get to come back here and start up their vital work, which is for the common good, not for individuals, for the common good again.  

Hello to all of you Americans, and especially foreign students at this particular time. We need all of your diversity. We need your smarts. We need your energy, and we need your determination. I was a foreign student here. I’m still a foreigner. I was here 45 years ago. I worked hard. I followed the American dream. I followed my own ambitions, and I made it. It made me, and I more than gave back, as all of you will, too. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in pre-revolutionary Iran, where America was great and we all loved President Kennedy. In Tehran, we had a Kennedy Boulevard. There were Kennedy Squares and Avenues and Memorials all over the world, even in the most unlikely places. I was just listening to a radio interview a few weeks ago, and I thought it was a perfect one for today. It was Laurie Anderson, you know, the pioneering performance artist and musician. She basically was waxing rhapsodic about what an impact, a game-changing, life-changing impact then-Senator John F Kennedy had had on her life. She said he had come to her home state to campaign. So she decided to write him a letter: “Dear Senator Kennedy, you’re running a great campaign, and I’m running for student council president. I wonder if you could give me some tips.” He said, “Don’t be an idealist. Be a representative. Find out what the students want and promise it.” Notice, he didn’t say, deliver it. But anyway, so she did. She found out that the students in her high school wanted a different lunchroom. Go figure. She arranged it. She then sent Kennedy a second letter. She had some chutzpah. “I won the election,” she said. “I followed your advice, and best of luck in your own election.” She says he then sent her a telegram and a dozen roses. How beautiful a story is that? All the civics, all the grace, the encouragement, the can-do spirit of America summed up in a few lines to a high school student government leader. What an amazing education and exposure you have all had here at this phenomenal graduate school. Joseph Nye, your former and your late dean, personified soft power, an indispensable tool that, in all my reporting and travels to far flung and distant lands I have come to greatly appreciate. But this is what I find so interesting and so counterintuitive in today’s zero-sum world. He said that the important thing is the power to solve problems. He said this makes power a positive sum game. He told policymakers and elites—who you will be and who you are—to pay more attention to economic inequality, to help those disrupted by change and to stimulate broad-based economic growth. And he warned that Americans and others may not notice the security and the prosperity that the liberal order provides until they are gone, but by then it might be too late.  

American grads, international grads, that is your challenge and your destiny: peacemakers, statesmen and -women and yes, government workers, because government can be good. Nothing like a little housekeeping, a little reform to clean up around the edges. But wholesale destruction will only do harm and may be irreversible. USAID, the Peace Corps, government in general, is being stripped bare, and yet here you all are, and you will find your ways to make a difference. You know that President Kennedy started USAID to launch America’s soft power, partly in response to a book that he had read. It was a political thriller, and it was called The Ugly American. We want—we need—the beautiful American, the beautiful America.  

You are graduating from this school at a particularly fraught time. You will have to learn how to play cat-and-mouse with the current crackdowns and the current system, as I have witnessed, civilians all over many parts of the world play cat-and-mouse with their own authoritarian regimes in order to advance their own freedom and to be able to really strive for a future that they know they need. 

You will have to decide how you choose to lead, what to stand up, what to believe in: the rule of law, freedom of speech, equal rights, constitutional democracy, civil rights. As Kennedy said in his own soaring, soaring inaugural, “Let public service be the very best service.”  

So, let me explain why this matters, especially to a group of future leaders, civil and foreign service professionals. It’s because generosity, humanity, moral values, promoting democracy is a huge part of what America stands for. What makes you special, exceptional, even. It is your brand. So, if you ever doubt the value of this education and your training at this particular time, I highly recommend an inspiring new book. It’s called “Who is Government,” and it was curated by the bestselling author and former financier Michael Lewis. The stories are exceptional. They tell the tales of the unsung, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of workers who toil and travel to make things happen, to make a great country work. I interviewed Michael Lewis about it, but I want to read a little bit from his blurb. 

He basically says the profiles themselves serve as a balm for the chaos of our government. Now to read them is to drift off into an alternative universe filled with the most thoughtful and caring people doing hard things, all for the right reasons. A former IRS commissioner is quoted who says, “The quality of life that we have, it’s all government. Government touches you 100 times before breakfast, and you don’t even know it.” The book shows how much safer, how much more secure, daily life is today than it was even a generation ago. But more than that, the book is filled with thousands of reminders of why we have government, because no one else will do this work. There is no profit motive in much of the work, no private business that will step in and spend years or decades solving these difficult challenges. That’s true today, and it always will be.  

So, you keep the faith, both American and international graduates. I suggest this time to go east, my friends, to go abroad. Go abroad and start your career. I say that in many graduations, and I’m saying it today for a reason. Find your government work and your public service while you need to in other countries. The world needs you, and most certainly, America needs ambassadors like you. Look, as I said, I was raised and lived much of my life in monarchies, under revolutions and authoritarian environments. As a journalist, I’ve been covering these situations. I’ve spent a lifetime watching the king cause otherwise smart, educated, strong, moral, rich people laugh at even his silliest comments. I’ve seen them acclaim his dumbest ideas. I’ve seen them bend to his bullying and exhaust all manner of obsequiousness before realizing too late that as sycophants they have lost their souls and that the king doesn’t care. He still has contempt.  

As I said, I was a foreign student here in the United States 45 years ago. I came when the ayatollahs, as Dean Weinstein said, took over my country, and my childhood, my family, my future livelihood, were all tossed dangerously into the air. But here, as a half-Iranian at that time, I was very much part of a targeted group, given that the Islamic Republic of Iran was holding 52 American diplomats hostage. They held them for more than a year. It was bad timing. I still hear the chants on campus and elsewhere of “bomb, bomb Iran.” Remember there was a group—I think it was the Beach Boys—was it, “Barbara Ann?” Anyway, “bomb, bomb Iran” was set to that music. I still remember stones and projectiles being tossed on campus and elsewhere at fellow Iranian students. And, by the way, anybody who looked like they might be Iranian.  

I also think, of course, that universities must be places of ideological diversity. If not here, where? If not when you are students, then at what point in your lives? Now, as often as I can, I do that in my own program, without fear nor favor. I bring together people from opposite sides, not in a cable slug fest, but to talk and to listen and to understand.  

I believe really strongly that you can only move the dial forward when you learn the story of the other. It’s all about empathy, which is the foundational stone for any peacebuilding, for any nation-building.  

I’m even now going a step further. I have a new podcast. Yes, I’m late, but I have a new podcast, and it’s called The EX-Files. And it's called The EX-Files because I’m doing with my ex-husband. And the point is, we discuss the hardest foreign policy issues from our perspectives: he as a former government official until just recently, and me as a journalist—from our perspectives as government and journalist when we were married. And I figured, if a divorced couple can do that, then surely anybody can.  

And I think it is precisely the kind of North Star for you, government graduates, and frankly, for all of us, to fix your, our gazes upon. I also happen to believe that academic institutions and all institutions need to do a better job of practical education and understanding about the world. Are you really modeling how to bridge any major divide? If not, how will generations learn to get into the mindset of a problem-solver and a peacebuilder? One of my favorite quotes comes during the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. It was in 1993, and afterwards, the chief Israeli negotiator, Uri Savir, wrote a book in which he said he was struck by the words of his Palestinian PLO counterpart, Ahmed Qurei, also known as Abu Alaa, and this is the quote, “I believe we’ve arrived at the root of the problem. We have learned that our rejection of you will not bring us freedom. You can see that your control of us will not bring you security. We must live side by side in peace, equality and cooperation.”  

I believe those words ring true still to this day, and that was about 30 years ago. How many people today know really about the Oslo Accords or that 30 years ago, the bitterest sectarian divide that killed thousands of people in Northern Ireland ended in a peace accord, and it was shepherded by President Clinton, by Senator George Mitchell, by the Prime Ministers of Britain and Ireland? That was leadership. And just a few years before that, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela emerged from 28 unjust years in prison. He modeled the ultimate in reconciliation and in peacebuilding. He almost single-handedly, and most certainly, persuaded the radicals on all sides to protect their moment of liberation. He talked them down from the very real threat of civil war after he was released from jail and navigated his nation out of the brutal oppression of apartheid. 

I think of that when I see Afrikaner minorities who were the perpetrators of apartheid being brought into this country as refugees. I think of that when I see Cyril Ramaphosa, who was the chief negotiator in the post-apartheid reconciliation, have his time in the White House. 

Bridge building, peacemaking, seeking, above all, Joseph Nye’s exhortation on the power to solve problems, to make power a positive-sum game—a win-win—are all vital.  

Now I believe journalism is a public service, and even more, as Dean Weinstein said, a vital pillar of any civil society and functioning democracy. So Did Thomas Jefferson. In 1786, he said, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press. Why did I become a journalist? To fly around the world and have fun on someone else’s dime? That is true. But also to tell stories from around the world to be part of a community of eyewitnesses and problem solvers. I believe in journalism as a force for good, and good also means holding power to account.  

News was never political for me throughout my CNN career and with all my side gigs at 60 Minutes, ABC, PBS. I figured, with all these platforms, I must reach just about every corner of the earth, every political planet, every socioeconomic, cultural demographic. And so that meant that I needed to be credible and trustworthy to all reporting the genocide in Bosnia, which no Western nation wanted to stop, until it was almost too late.  

I came up with my own code of objectivity, and my mantra is to be truthful and not neutral. That’s when I learned to refuse to equate victim and aggressor. And the glass is more than half full when it comes to journalism today. Everywhere we look, left, right and center, we see democratic institutions, the distressing sight of them bending.  

But guess who’s not bending? We, the press. You, Harvard academia. Some corporate owners of ours, maybe they are coming after us. But you can still find plenty of excellent, fact-based, evidence-driven, consequential, and even game-changing journalism right now in the “1984”-“Animal Farm” vortex that we are caught up in right now. 

The truth will still get out, no matter how many words are banned, how many news organizations are shuttered and threatened. How many journalists are threatened and intimidated? We will not be silenced, not then, not now, not ever. And no administration should be surprised. 

That is just who we are. I may be Pollyanna, but I do believe that our professions, your profession, your professions, academia and everyone, should have at our core a common defense strategy and a common defense fund. I believe an attack on one should be taken as an attack on all.  

But then again, my beliefs were forged in the in the field, under fire on the battlefield. You can only survive if allies and friends and coworkers have your back: teamwork to make the dream work. Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, VOA: all vital tools of American soft power. They are resisting all the threats against them. And if those threats are successful, they will only thrill the dictators and illiberal democrats in whose sides this independent journalism has always been a thorn.  

How about this story? In the summer of 1991 when the Soviet Army led a coup against the reforming President Mikhail Gorbachev, they shut down their media. It was state media. They still shut it down. The news of what was happening was only available on Radio Liberty .Boris Yeltsin, another reformer then went on Radio Liberty to call on all the people to come out and to position themselves between the parliament and the Soviet tanks. Coup failed, and the Soviet Union collapsed several months later.  

Now, these organizations are not luxuries. They’re truth-food for all of those stuck behind iron curtains, bamboo curtains, and any other state-run propaganda machines around the world. They have sustained many an imprisoned revolutionary and future democratic leaders.  

At this point, I would like to again refer you to, not a book this time, but a play. It’s called “Good Night and Good luck,” and it is on Broadway right now. George Clooney plays our patron saint of broadcast journalism, Edward R. Morrow. And let me just say, if you can’t afford the ticket (which you may not be able to; it’s really expensive) “Good Night and Good Luck” will be streamed from Broadway on CNN, June 7, and I really am pleased, because this is an incredible story.  

Not only was Morrow a brilliant World War Two foreign correspondent, but after the war, he did battle here at home against Senator Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare. In the play, Morrow quotes Shakespeare’s Caesar: “Cassius was right. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  

Now we still have a First Amendment and a free press, but we have to defend our right to free speech, and if not, we will be as culpable and as much to blame for losing it as anyone. I don’t want to keep fighting, keep putting my head above the parapet, but apparently I do. I have to do so. 

 No matter what profession all and any of you choose, as Robert F. Kennedy once said, moral courage can often be harder, even, than physical bravery. And believe me, sometimes, somewhere, each and every one of you will be called upon to speak up, to not follow the herd, to break with the tribe, to be brave. 

So always remember, as Edward R. Murrow said, that dissent is not disloyalty. Dissent is actually an invaluable part of our democratic process. We cannot surrender to any system that deems only power approved, speech or thought is allowed. The whole point of journalism and any other academic enterprise is to investigate power, speak truth to power, hold power accountable without fear nor favor.  

And this is not the first time the press the fourth estate has come under such sustained threat from the executive branch. After President Nixon's reelection in 1972 and amid the Washington Post’s remarkable Watergate reporting, the Nixon administration challenged TV licenses that the Washington Post had, as well as a whole lot of other pressure. There are tapes of Nixon telling his people to ban the Washington Post reporters and photographers from the White House press room. A New York Times article quotes publisher Katherine Graham from her memoir. She said the administration’s power and anger were at their greatest after the landslide election, and we were at our weakest. We were scared, and yet they continued. I understand that I am scared when I go to war zones, for instance. I’m sometimes scared when I talk truth to power.  

Thomas Jefferson warned that freedom is lost slowly. Some have talked about the frog in the pot, where the water is slowly turned up and the heat slowly comes to boiling before they even recognize it. 150 years later, Benito Mussolini crowed that democracy brings us so much freedom, even the freedom to destroy itself. Edward R. Morrow said on his programs holding Senator Joe McCarthy to account, “No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices. So, everybody, that’s my message to you. Let's get on with it, while the glass is still half full. Good luck to you.