Remarks at the Unveiling
of the Knute Rockne
Commemorative Stamp at the
Thank
you. And, Moose, when I was young and reading about George Gipp,
I never thought I'd come back as the Gipper.
[Laughter] Well, thank you, Reverend Malloy and Governor, Lieutenant Governor,
distinguished guests. And a special hello to the Rockne family. I brought with me Dick Lyng, our Secretary of Agriculture and Notre Dame's
representative in the Cabinet, and the five -- not the four -- horsemen from
Congress --
It's
a pleasure to visit once again the home of the Fighting Irish. With St.
Patrick's Day coming up and after seeing those film clips, it brings to mind
another deathbed scene. You know, apparently the town rogue of one small Irish
hamlet lay on his deathbed as the priest prepared for the atonement. ``Do you
renounce the devil?'' ``Do you renounce him and all his works?'' the priest
asked. And the rogue opened one eye and said, ``Father, this is no time for
making enemies.'' [Laughter]
But,
it's great to be back here. I've said this before, but I want you to know the
first time I ever saw Notre Dame was when I came here as a sports announcer, 2
years out of college, to broadcast a football game. You won, or I wouldn't have
mentioned it. [Laughter] And then, of course, I was here with Pat O'Brien and a
whole host of
``Knute Rockne: All American'' --
how I had wanted to make that movie and play the part of George Gipp. Of course, the goal was -- or the role was a young
actor's dream: It had a great entrance, an action
middle, and a death scene right out of the opera. [Laughter] But it was more
than that. I know that to many of you today Rockne is a revered name, a symbol of greatness and, yes, a
face now on a postage stamp. But my generation, well, we actually knew the
legend as it happened. We saw it unfold, and we felt it was saying something
important about us as a people and a nation. And there was little room for
skepticism or cynicism; we knew the legend was based on fact.
I
would like to interject here, if I could, that it's difficult to stand before
you and make you understand how great that legend was at that time. It isn't
just a memory here and of those who knew him, but throughout this nation he was
a living legend. Millions of Americans just automatically rooted for him on
Saturday afternoon and rooted, therefore, for Notre Dame. Now, of course, the Rockne legend stood for fairplay
and honor, but you know, it was thoroughly American in another way. It was
practical. It placed a value on devastating quickness and agility and on
confounding the opposition with good old American cleverness. But most of all,
the Rockne legend meant this -- when you think about
it, it's what's been taught here at Notre Dame since her founding: that on or
off the field, it is faith that makes the difference, it is faith that makes
great things happen.
And
believe me, it took faith -- and a lot of it -- for an
unknown actor to think that he could get the part of George Gipp.
I was under contract to Warner Brothers, but I had been all over the studio
talking about my idea for a story. Having come from sports announcing to the
movies, I said I thought that the movies ought to make the life story of Knute Rockne. And then one day I
picked up the Daily Variety and read where Warner Brothers was announcing that
they were making the life story of Knute Rockne and were starting to cast the film. Well, all I'd
ever wanted was to play the Gipper if they some day
made the film. And I approached Pat O'Brien, who was going to play Rockne -- he'd been my choice -- and he told me bluntly
that I talked too much and that's where Warner's got the idea. [Laughter] And I
told him what my ambition was, and he said, ``Well, they're looking for a name
actor.'' But Pat did intervene with the head of the studio, the top producer,
Hal Wallis. Hal was, to put it mildly, unimpressed with my credentials.
[Laughter] He started by telling me I didn't look big enough for the part.
Well,
I wasn't very polite, because I told him, ``You're producing the picture, and
you don't know that George Gipp weighed 5 pounds less
than I weigh right now. He walked with a kind of a slouch and almost a limp. He
looked like a football player only when he was on the field.'' And then I went
home, because some cameramen had told me that the fellas
in the front office, they only knew what they saw on film. And I dug down in
the trunk and came up with my own pictures of myself playing football in college
and brought them back and showed them to Hal Wallis.
Well,
he finally let me do a test for the part, and Pat O'Brien, knowing of my
nervousness and desire, graciously agreed to be a part of it and play in the
scene with me. Well, of course, I had an advantage. I had known George Gipp's story for years, and the lines were straight from Knute Rockne's diary. And the
test scene was one that said something about what Rockne
liked to see in his players. It was George Gipp's
first practice. You saw that scene where he was told to get into uniform. And Rockne told him to carry the ball, and Gipp
just looked back at Rockne and cocked an eyebrow and
said, ``How far?''
Well,
I mentioned all this because, as I say, Knute liked
spirit in his ball players. Grantland Rice tells us
that once when he was working with the four backfield stars who became known as
the ``Four Horsemen'' the fellow named Jimmy Crowley just couldn't get it
right. Now, you know, I never tell ethnic jokes anymore unless they're about
the Irish. [Laughter] But in view of the spirit of this occasion, maybe I can
be permitted some leeway. Rockne, who, by the way,
was Norwegian, was commonly called the ``Swede.'' He finally got exasperated
after
Well,
that was Rockne. And you know, not too long ago I was
questioned about the George Gipp story. And this
interviewer had really done his research. In fact, he'd even gone back and
talked to my old football coach, Ralph McKenzie, at
Well,
anyway, I was asked whether I knew that George Gipp
was no angel, that he played in some pool games and
card games in his time. And of course, that was true, and I said so. But it was
also true of George Gipp -- and it is legitimately
part of the legend -- that he used his winnings from those games to buy food
for destitute families and to help other students pay their way through Notre
Dame. And the reason he got so sick and later died from pneumonia was because
he had promised a former teammate who had become a high school coach that he
would give his students some pointers. Author James Cox tells us it was during
that training session in
And
I've always thought that it was no mere coincidence that the legend of George Gipp and Knute Rockne emerged from this great institution of higher
learning not simply because of its academic excellence but because it stands
among the winds of subjectivity for lasting values and principles that are the
heart of our civilization and on which all human progress is built -- Notre
Dame not only educates its students in the development of honesty, courage, and
all the other things we call character. Rockne once
wrote: ``Sportsmanship means fairplay. It means
having a little respect for the other fellow's point of view. It means a real
application of the Golden Rule.''
And
I know a fine example of this is the charitable care 80 of
you students give the handicapped children at the
Rockne stressed character. He knew, instinctively, the
relationship between the physical and moral. That is as true of nations as it
is of people. Charles Lindbergh, also a hero of that time, once said:
``Short-term survival may depend on the knowledge of nuclear physicists and the
performance of supersonic aircraft, but long-term survival depends alone on the
character of man.'' Rockne believed in competition,
yet he did not rely on brute force for winning the victory. Instead, he's
remembered as the man who brought ingenuity, speed, and agility into this most
American of sports.
May
I interrupt myself here for a second and tell you something else about him? As
a sports announcer, I was told by many of the great coaches in this land whose
teams had played against Notre Dame teams under Rockne
that one of their hardest problems when playing Notre Dame was that their team
worshiped Rockne -- [laughter] -- that they were fans
of his, and that when they came out in the field the first thing they looked
for was where was this great, great coach. Rockne,
you see, was a man of vision. And that's how he came by his reputation as
someone larger than life and a miracle man. Because of his tremendous success
in sports, it's easy to forget that he was something else as well, something
not too many people knew about him. He was also a man of science, having taught
chemistry here at Notre Dame for 4 years. I must believe that he would not be
at all surprised at the enormous advances that have taken place over the five
decades since his death.
Much
has been said about the technological revolution in which we are living. Every
time we turn around, it seems to be staring us in the face. Typewriters are
being replaced in corporate offices throughout the country by highly efficient
word processors. With the almost universal proliferation of copy machines,
carbon paper has almost gone the way of the buggy whip. Not only deregulation,
but design and technology have made our airlines more efficient.
The
American workplace, in recent years, has undergone a dramatic transformation.
Just in the last 5 years, manufacturing productivity of our working people has
increased 4.7 percent annually. And from the plant floor to the corporate
boardroom, there is more cooperation, a sense of common purpose, more of a
winning spirit, and state-of-the-art equipment and machinery available to do
the job. I've seen it in the many companies that I've visited all across this
nation, and I've heard it from the working people themselves. And don't let all
the gloom and doomers tell you any different. There's
a will to succeed evident in our land. I happen to have always believed in the
American people. Don't ever sell them short. Given the proper tools and a level
playing ground, our workers can outproduce and outcompete anyone, anywhere.
It's
a far different picture than the agonizing sight of a decade ago, when many
were counting out American workers and American industry. We were told that
Americans would no longer go the extra mile, no longer had the drive to excel;
that our country was in decline and that we, as a people, should lower our
expectations. Well, today we see an
What
is propelling our country forward? -- that fundamental
element of the American character that no tyranny and few of our competitors
can ever hope to match. Knute Rockne
knew and appreciated it -- the creative genius and omnipresent optimism of our
people. We had faith in them these last 7 years, and they did the rest. That's
why, instead of giving up, we set our sights high. We didn't raise taxes, drain
the investment pool, and tell our working people and business leaders to hunker
down and prepare for the worst, to lower their expectations. We asked them to
dream great dreams, to reach for the stars. We left resources in the private
sector that others would have drained into the bureaucracy.
The
heavy investment made in our economy during the early part of this decade is
paying off now, in a big way. President Franklin Roosevelt once said: ``The only limit on our realization of tomorrow will be our
doubts of today.'' Well, together, we, the American people, have proven the
doubters wrong, time and again. We've done it by keeping our eyes on the
future, by setting our sights on what can be done rather than on complaining
about how much there is to do. We've done it by viewing every problem as an
opportunity. I happen to believe in something former astronaut John Swigert once said: ``Technology and commitment can overcome
any challenge.''
The
individual investment made in companies, large and small; the retraining of our
work force to handle the jobs in this technological age; the search for new
ideas and innovative approaches; the modernization of older industries and
investment in the new; energy, creativity, and, yes, hard work on a massive
scale throughout our country, from the bottom up -- this is the foundation of
our prosperity and the impetus for national progress. Our program has been to
foster innovation and to keep our country in the forefront of change.
And
that's why last year we committed ourselves to building the world's largest
particle accelerator, superconducting supercollider to maintain our leadership
in high-energy physics research and
Rockne exemplified the American spirit of never giving
up. That spirit is the reason why you and your generation are going to succeed.
That's why we're not just going to compete, we're going to win. And that's also
why this year we'll see the return of the American space shuttle, symbolic of
Technology
in these last decades has reshaped our lives. It's opened vast opportunity for
the common man and has brought all of mankind into one community. Today
worldwide communications and transportation have linked productive citizens of
every free land. Through advances in medicine, our people are living longer,
and the quality of their later years has been vastly improved. I like to remind
people that I've already lived some 23 years longer than the average life
expectancy when I was born. That's a source of frustration to a number of
people. [Laughter]
And
you know there are always those who say the problem's
too big, it can't be helped, let's prepare for the worst. But a few years ago,
we heard that about the drug problem here in
We
still have a long way to go, and when Nancy and I see stories saying just that
in the newspaper, we welcome them. But let's also remember that the shock of
recognition is not a sign of defeat: It's the beginning of victory. And victory
will be ours. And I hope that each of you will join us in saying that drugs
hurt, drugs kill, that each of us must just say no to drugs and drug users, and
most of all in giving America what America deserves: your very best. And that
means a drug free generation. And may I challenge you? Why not? Why not make
your generation the one that said, once and for all, no more drugs in the
Excellence
too is returning to our schools. We've learned what's always been known here at
Notre Dame: that values are an essential part of
educational excellence. Throughout the Nation, parents and teachers are gaining
greater control over local curriculums, emphasizing basics and making their
children's education a priority in all of our lives. And they're right to do
so, because all of the wonderful gains I've talked about so far, especially
those gains built on the growth of technology, depend on young Americans who
know how to think, calculate, write, and communicate.
Now,
there are those who see a dark side to our technological progress. Yes, they
admit our well-being has been enhanced in so many ways. Technological advances
now are making it more likely, for example, that our natural resources will be
spared as long-haul telephone lines and electrical cable give way to the
satellite transmissions and computer chips. I spoke to the young people of
Yet
it is pointed out that, regretfully, as man has advanced into this new age, so
has his capability to kill and destroy; and it's no longer just those in
uniform who are victimized. In World War I, more than 8 million military
personnel lost their lives and over 12 million civilians died. During the
Second World War, almost 20 million in uniform lost their lives; however, there
were about 14 million civilians killed. And if there's ever another such
conflagration, a Third World War, hundreds of millions will lose their lives.
And it's estimated that 90 percent of the casualties will be civilian.
When
I was in college, I remember a debate in one of my classes. This was back in
the days when the bomber was just being recognized as the potent weapon that it
later became in the post-World War I days. Our class debated whether or not
Americans -- people who, to our way of thinking, stood for high moral standards
-- would ever drop bombs from an airplane on a city. And the class was about
evenly divided. Half felt it might be necessary. The others felt bombing
civilians would always be beyond the pale of decency, totally unacceptable
human conduct, no matter how heinous the enemy. Well, a decade later, few, if
any, who had been in that room objected to our country's
wholesale bombing of cities. Civilization's standards of morality had changed.
The thought of killing more and more people, noncombatants, became more and
more acceptable.
Well,
today, technology is pointing toward a way out of this dilemma. It's given us
the promise of basing our security in the future on protection rather than the
threat of retaliation. SDI offers a chance to reverse not only the nuclear arms
buildup but also to reverse the trend that in effect has put a lower and lower
value on human life. Technology offers you young people who debate in today's
classroom an option that threatens no one and offers a shield rather than ever
sharper, more deadly swords. It offers you young people a chance to raise the
moral standards of mankind.
When
I came here in 1981 for one of the first major addresses of my Presidency, I
acknowledged the difficulties we faced in the world, not only the threat of
nuclear war but also totalitarian expansion around the world, especially in
places like
And
something that got a warm response from you undergraduates, but was treated
very skeptically in Washington, was my suggestion that these values were so
strong and this inner strength was so great that, in the long run, the West
would not contain communism: We would transcend communism, that the era of the
nuclear threat and totalitarian darkness would someday be put behind us, that
we would look again with all the people of the Earth to the bright, sunlit
uplands of world peace, world prosperity, and yes, world freedom. How much has
changed since those days. And as we look back at 7 years of peace as well as
progress in arms reductions and the hope of a Soviet exit from
And
that inner strength is what Notre Dame and the legend of Rockne
are all about. You know, so much is said about Rockne's
influence on his ballplayers, but actually he liked to talk about their
influence on him. In his autobiography, he described his inability to sleep one
night before a big game. So, he was up early in the lobby and saw 2 of his boys
come down the stairs and go out, and then others came and followed them. And
though he had a pretty good idea of what was going on, he decided to follow
along. ``They didn't realize it,'' he said in his diary, ``but these youngsters
were making a powerful impression on me.'' And he said, ``When I saw them
walking up to the Communion rail to receive and realized the hours of sleep
they had sacrificed, I understood what a powerful ally their religion was to
them in their work on the football field.''
And
after Rockne found -- here at Notre Dame -- his own
religious faith, a friend of his at the
Yes,
we've seen more change in the last 50 years, since Knute
Rockne was with us, than in all the other epics of
history combined. You are the beneficiaries of this, and it is you who'll
continue the struggle and carry mankind to greater and greater heights. As
Americans, as free people, you must stand firm, even when it's uncomfortable
for you to do so. It won't always be easy. There will be moments of joy, of
triumph. There will also be times of despair, times when all those around you
are ready to give up.
It's
then I want you to remember our meeting today. And ``some time when the team is
up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there
with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper.
I don't know where I'll be then, but I'll know about it, and I'll be happy.''
Good luck in the years ahead, and God bless you all.
Thank you.
Note: The President
spoke to the students and faculty at