Big day at New Paltz.(on the right)

NEW YORK, JUNE 2

ARTHUR SULZBERGER JR., the publisher of the New York Times, is himself in the news. What happened is that the State University of New York at New Paltz invited him to be its commencement speaker. The publisher of the Times is ex officio an important person. He is, after all, the dominant figure in the dominant newspaper in the entire world. So newsmongers turned eagerly to his speech, wondering whether it would provide a key to the understanding of world affairs.

The homework Sulzberger did is illuminating. He went back and read "what generations of other commencement speakers had said." If he was thorough in this, that means he read about 30 of my own, though it can't be deduced that from these he learned anything at all. Usually, commencement speakers satisfy themselves with well-composed vapidities.

Years ago I amused myself by using the identical speech at ten different universities, confident that no one in the tallest library stack in the world would detect the repetition. No one did. It was sobering to reflect that I might have been uttering, for the first time, the Sermon on the Mount, and nobody would notice.

What Mr. Sulzberger did was take the blame for the sourness of the world we live in. "You weren't supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land."

That's true. And we weren't supposed to be born into a country fighting a war that was manifestly misbegotten but that was endorsed by the overwhelming majority of legislators, Democrat and Republican. And it isn't misbegotten because it is being fought "in a foreign land." The very best thing about most American wars is that they are fought in foreign lands, not on native soil.

Which of our wars have been outright misbegotten is difficult to say, inasmuch as all wars are testimony to failed diplomacy. Half a million people died in World War I, into which President Woodrow Wilson led us. Liberal intellectuals, we were invited to assume at SUNY, don't do that kind of thing. They are too ...