First lady Laura Bush will appear before Vanderbilt University's senior class, as well as graduates of Roger Williams College in Rhode Island. But top honors for the most creative graduation ceremony go to George Washington University, which will welcome on stage both former President Bush and his wife, Barbara, for a "commencement co-address," if you will.

Other notable 2006 speakers from the political arena include former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards, a Democrat, who will resurface at the University of Maine; his running mate, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, a guest of Kenyon College in Ohio; retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who will appear at the University of Texas at Austin; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at Arlington's Marymount University; Arizona Sen. John McCain at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University; Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as guest of Northwestern University; and former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, who sounds off at Southern Methodist University.

From the pulpit, Australia's most prominent church leader, George Cardinal Pell, will join Christendom College's graduating class of 2006 in Front Royal, Va., while Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick will be welcomed to Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu is honored guest of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg.

Crashing Fort Lauderdale this spring break will be Salman Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses," appearing no doubt under tight security at Nova Southeastern University. Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw is off to Florida State University, while Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan is to grace the beautiful campus of High Point University in North Carolina.

From the Fourth Estate, columnist Robert D. Novak hopefully will expand on the CIA-leak case during his remarks to students of Thomas More College in Kentucky. And last but never least, CNN's Wolf Blitzer will address esteemed graduates of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, this columnist's alma mater, which will confer an honorary doctorate of humane letters on "The Situation Room" host.


MEET THE BEETLES

Number of beetles that right-wing entomologists have named after Bush administration officials: 3 - Harper's Index, May 2006


1918 AND 1996

After reading Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter's new book about the first hundred days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, it becomes clear why the ghost of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt chose 1996 - the year of President Clinton's scandalous affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky - to "converse" with first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Actually, "commiserate" is a better word.

It was in 1918, while unpacking Mr. Roosevelt's bags after a trip to Europe, that Mrs. Roosevelt discovered a bundle of love letters to her husband from her former social secretary, Lucy Mercer, the author recalls in "The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope."

While her husband's affair, like Clinton's in 1996, lasted only a few months, Mrs. Roosevelt's "wound would be permanent, but so was her determination to continue investing in Franklin's future," Alter notes. "In the remaining 27 years of their marriage, they formed a political partnership in which she became her husband's willing instrument."

As Mrs. Roosevelt recalled: "He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in other people."

At the time of Mrs. Roosevelt's death in 1962, reveals Alter, a tattered clipping was discovered atop her bedside table. It was the poem "Psyche," by Virginia Moore, with the lines: "The soul that had believed/and was deceived/ends by believing more/than ever before."

Scrawled across the top was simply: "1918."


WATERSHED MOMENTS

"Promptly a few minutes before 12 I looked up from the desk and there stood Stalin in the doorway."

Or so we read for the first time in President Truman's personal diary, describing his first meeting with Josef Stalin on July 17, 1945. The diary is just one sample of a major exhibition entitled "Eyewitness: American originals from the National Archives" - letters, diaries, photographs and other materials selected from billions of documents in the holdings of the Archives - set to open in Washington this summer.