Ladies and gentlemen, please stand as one in honoring Benjamin Eric Sass.

Thank you. All right, all right, all right.

I'm on a lot of morphine.

You don't want to make me tear up.

I don't know about all of you, but my bingo card did not include Roger describing a pregnancy

check.

I want to thank a lot of friends here tonight, but I won't.

I will say Paul and Betsy and Roger and to all the board of the Manhattan

Institute. Thank you. When you're 54 and you get a terminal diagnosis, people start to act

like you're a lot wiser than they thought you were when you were 54 and you didn't have

a terminal diagnosis. So I'll just say broadly thank you for many friends and for lots of kindness in

this room. Many of you've been extraordinarily generous to me and to my family. And so I'm on the

clock tonight in more ways than one. So I want to make every

minute count. So forgive me for skipping all of those. Thank you. Forgive me also for having the

lack of linear thought that flows from a normal 55 milligrams a day of morphine. Today I'm at 20,

so I can be a little more awake and coherent.

But I'm going to stick closer to written notes than is ever my normal custom. But I want to

make sure we stick at 20 minutes and I don't accidentally go Irish on you and speak for two hours.

I would also ask your indulgence to forgive me for giving a speech tonight that's a little

bit more about what I think America needs to thrive and a little bit less about what the benefactors

in this room might specifically need, but you all care about the same project, which is

America needs renewal.

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