King, prime ministers, writers, ambassadors and Nobel laureates have all spoken a Harvard's Commencement. This year, outgoing President Derek C. Bok will be joining this procession.

Historically, speakers have used Commencement's principal address to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. Some have made weighty proclamations, like Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who announced the decline of Western culture. Former U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall disclosed a plan, later named after him, which was to shape the post-World War II era.

Marshall spoke in 1947, and Solzhenitsyn spoke in 1978. Are these the only two memorable characters? Hardly. As evidenced by the past 10 Commencement speakers, Harvard can still draw a celebrity or two.

1981

The decade had an inauspicious start when then-U.S. President Ronald W. Reagan declined Harvard's invitation to speak, despite strong indications that the chief executive would have liked to do so. Harvard quickly rallied its forces of persuasion, however, and successfully invited IBM chief and former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Thomas J. Watson.

Hailed by Fortune magazine as the most successful capitalist who ever lived, the 1937 graduate of Brown received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1975. Watson is believed to be the first person since Benjamin Franklin to have received honorary degrees from both Harvard and Yale in the same month.

Harvard had hoped to set a different record with the Reagan speech, which would have been the first time a sitting president had spoken since Theodore Roosevelt (Class of 1880) in 1905.

Watson is said to have "awed" Wall Street by generating $36 billion for IBM. In his capacity as ambassador under former President Jimmy Carter, Watson played a pivotal role in determining foreign policy during the initial Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

It is believed that Watson was the force behind recommendations that the U.S. boycott the Olympics and institute a grain embargo and restrictions on the export of high technology.

1982

In 1982, Harvard decided to break tradition by inviting one of its own to speak at Commencement. Eliot Professor of Greek emeritus John H. Finley Jr. '25, described as the last immortal professor at Harvard, agreed to speak at the graduation exercises.

Finley, who was master of Eliot House from 1942 to 1968, was an undergraduate and doctoral student at Harvard. His association with the University extended over 50 years, and according to outgoing Eliot Master Alan E. Heimert '48, Finley was "an embodiment of the Golden Age of Harvard."

Talking of life in the Harvard houses, Finley said, "the more fetching sex, among its many superior gifts, heeds life's enticing summons. In this pre-medical era, a girl of course takes chemistry and biology but, life being beautiful, does some fine arts and acquires a picture or two. She reads, and her bookcase shows some Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. In deference to modernity, she even does some sociology. Then when a member of my obsessive sex who simple-heartedly looks to business school via economics seeks to make headway with her, she starts educating him--needless to say, a lifelong process."

1983

Harvard's reputation seemed to be taking a dip when Polish President Lech Walesa, who was then the leader of the Solidarity movement, declined to speak in 1983 after earlier agreeing to do so.