May 23, 1982
Former Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, professor at the Harvard Law School, legal scholar and chairman of Common Cause, spoke at Vassar’s 116th Commencement on “The Worst of Times: The Best of Times.” Fired from his post an special prosecutor by President Richard Nixon in the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, Cox told the graduates, “I hope you will never become patient about the gap between what is and what ought to be, yet I hope you will have acquired from your years at Vassar a sense of perspective and an awareness that the one indestructible human quality is the ability of men and women to do things for the first time, to do what has never been done before.”
Speaking in a cold and steady rain, Cox challenged the graduating class, saying, “1983 will be a critical year. Will you help to muster the public pressure to excise this cancer, or will you acknowledge that the dream has died, that government of, by and for the people is to become government of money, by and for money?”
The New York Times, Vassar Views