Brokaw quoted these words from A. Bartlett Giamatti — Yale president, baseball commissioner, and 'Renaissance man' — who had delivered them at another commencement. The full quote included the charge 'to commit to your best in the brief, precious time that each of us is blessed to have.' Brokaw invoked Giamatti in the context of what he saw as a dangerous cynicism about public institutions — 'the separation from the traditional institutions of public life, city hall, state house, especially Washington.' Against this, he proposed that idealism was not naive but energizing, not passive but active. The incomplete journey was the point: striving itself was the source of power, not the arrival at a destination.