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because I was studying politics and government. In hindsight, I wish I had majored in history. A few members of the faculty in the political science department were far to the left. I was struck by the way one professor in particular seemed to disdain the private sector as rife with corruption and unethical behavior. The business world was an abstraction to him. He seemed to have little concept of what hardworking, ethical people like my father did every day.
    Students at Princeton were required to write a senior thesis for graduation. I chose as my subject President Truman’s seizure of the steel industry two years earlier, during the Korean War. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer , Sawyer being Truman’s secretary of commerce, the Supreme Court ruled that Truman’s wartime seizure of the industry had been unconstitutional. I argued in my thesis that the Court’s decision was “timely and reassuring.” 13 It hadn’t provoked much discussion outside legal circles at the time, but the 1952 case would become an important decision about the limits of executive power in wartime.
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    A s we prepared for our graduation in March 1954, I attended our senior class banquet. The speaker was a Princeton alumnus and the former governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson. He was best known for being the unfortunate Democrat to run for the presidency against the popular Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, two years earlier. Stevenson was frequently considered an aloof intellectual—an “egghead” in the parlance of the 1950s. “Egg-heads of the world, unite,” Stevenson once replied in a play on Karl Marx’s famous quote, “You have nothing to lose but your yolks!” I couldn’t help but admire his good humor and perspective.
    Stevenson’s speech that evening had more influence on me than any I had heard before. I knew I would next be serving in the Navy, but I was not certain whether I would stay in it and if not, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It might seem strange considering my later career that the one who so strongly sparked the idea of public service for me was a liberal Democrat and self-proclaimed egghead. But his comments came to me at a formative time in my life and a turning point for the country. With an armistice reached in Korea in 1953, America had just ended its involvement in a second war in a decade. Mounting concerns about communism, nuclear exchanges, and the possibility of more armed conflict were intensified by the first test of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs of World War II.
    Stevenson put the future into an important and new context for me. He talked about the responsibility of citizenship in whatever path we might choose, and the stark consequences awaiting us all if we failed in our responsibilities. “If those young Americans who have the advantage of education, perspective, and self-discipline do not participate to the fullest extent of their ability,” he warned, “America will stumble, and if America stumbles the world falls.” 14
    He reflected on the weighty responsibility of the American people in our democracy to be involved in helping to guide and direct their government. He said, “For the power, for good or evil, of this American political organization is virtually beyond measurement. The decisions which it makes, the uses to which it devotes its immense resources, the leadership which it provides on moral as well as material questions, all appear likely to determine the fate of the modern world.
    â€œYour days are short here,” he added in closing, “this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem. You will go away with old, good friends. Don’t forget when you leave why you came.” Stevenson’s eloquent and inspiring words opened my mind to the need