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When Lyndon Baines Johnson was President
of the United States, he was, of course,
making speeches all over the country about
the Vietnam War and the war on poverty,
and one of his principal speech writers was
Peter Benchley. Peter Benchley had been fired
as speech writer, but he had written one last
speech and it was to be delivered in Detroit.
Somebody had thought to take a look at what
he had drafted before the President delivered
the speech, which turned out to be very
fortunate.
The speech started out marvelously.
Johnson began by saying, "There are those
who say we cannot wage war in Vietnam
and not raise taxes, but I say we can.
There are those of you who say we cannot
save
the American cities and not raise taxes,
but I say we can. There are those of you
who say we cannot save the environment
and not raise taxes, but I say we can.
And now, I will tell you how..."
Then there was a series of dotted lines and
the punch line was "Okay, Lyndon, from now
on, you're on your own."
Again the relevancy to legal education is fairly
great. Up to a certain point, we, the faculty,
can lead you through the cases, we can tell
you certain things, but there comes a point
where you're well on your own. You have
to put together the big picture, you have to
sort out the moose from the rest of the pie.
It's up to you — that's what legal education in a very real sense is all about.
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