    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [November 30, 1993]
    [Pages 2081-2084]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medals of Freedom
    November 30, 1993

        Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests,
    all. We have Members of Congress here, members and former members of the
    United States Supreme Court, and a number of distinguished Americans who
    share in common a friendship with one or more of our distinguished
    honorees today. I welcome you all here.
        One of the greatest pleasures of being President is the authority to
    choose recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest
    honor given to civilians by the United States. And so today it is my
    honor to award the Medal of Freedom to five great reformers of the 20th
    century who changed America for the better: Mrs. Marjory Stoneman
    Douglas, the late Joseph

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    Rauh, Judge John Minor Wisdom, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, and
    Justice William Brennan.
        Today they join a distinguished list of citizens in a process
    initiated by my great predecessor Harry Truman in 1945. Like Harry
    Truman, all five of them rank among our Nation's great champions of the
    underdog. Indeed, most of their lives are stories of underdogs
    themselves. Two of them are sons of immigrants. Justice Brennan's
    parents came here from Ireland near the time that Mr. Rauh's father and
    grandfather came here from Germany. One, Justice Marshall, was the
    great-grandson of slaves. And one, Mrs. Douglas, is descended from a
    founder of the Underground Railroad. America gave them the freedom to be
    their best, and they honored our country by becoming five legendary
    defenders of our freedoms in return.
        When this medal was created at the end of World War II, America had
    great decisions to make about what kind of nation we wanted to be. The
    postwar years were those which unlocked great forces that would
    transform our society profoundly and permanently. A baby boom and a
    development boom brought Americans more mobility and more economic
    opportunity than they had ever enjoyed before. But this new mobility
    also opened our eyes to problems we had been previously unwilling to
    acknowledge: the legal barriers set up to prevent black Americans and
    working people from sharing in the opportunities afforded to others; the
    growth that devoured the value of our disappearing regional identities
    and fragile natural landscapes.
        It was during this time in 1947 that Marjory Stoneman Douglas
    published her best-selling book, ``The Everglades: River of Grass,'' a
    monumental work on Florida's unique ecosystem, one of our Nation's
    greatest natural resources. The next year, 1948, gave us the Democratic
    National Convention that nominated Harry Truman, where Hubert Humphrey
    delivered one of the earliest and most impassioned speeches on behalf of
    civil rights ever given from a national platform. There Joseph Rauh,
    Jr., won his fight to make civil rights a part of the National
    Democratic Party platform and an indelible part of our national agenda.
        In 1954 Thurgood Marshall won a case before the United States
    Supreme Court called Brown v. Board of Education, the decisive blow
    against legal segregation, a decision that would have more impact on
    civil rights in America than any other single action since President
    Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation just upstairs in this White
    House.
        In 1955, Joe Rauh and others celebrated victory over McCarthyism,
    whose abuses of freedom they had fought so fearlessly.
        In 1956, President Eisenhower named New Jersey Supreme Court Justice
    William Brennan to the United States Supreme Court, launching one of the
    most influential careers in the Court's entire history. And the
    following year, in 1957, Eisenhower named John Minor Wisdom to the U.S.
    Court of Appeals, where he and his colleagues pioneered our Nation's
    landmark decisions on civil rights. He made a lot of good appointments,
    Mr. Eisenhower.
        We honor these people not for any private success, not for any
    personal pursuit of glory but for their selfless devotion to the public
    interest and their tireless lifetime of achievement in the public arena.
    Because of what they did, our Nation is a better place, and our lives,
    all of us, are richer. I'd like to briefly review that before the
    official citations are read.
        Marjory Stoneman Douglas, all of 103 years old, has always been
    ahead of her time. She was born in Minneapolis on April 7th, 1890,
    raised in Massachusetts, graduated from Wellesley College in 1912, and
    moved to Florida. She was one of the pioneering women in journalism when
    she joined the staff of the Miami Herald in 1914. She served the Red
    Cross in Europe during World War II and returned to the United States to
    wage a campaign for the passage of the women's suffrage amendment--I
    said World War II; I meant World War I--and to continue a career writing
    about the distinctive regional character of southern Florida.
        Her advocacy on behalf of the Everglades in Florida long before
    there was ever an Earth Day is legendary. It has been an inspiration to
    generations of conservationists, environmentalists, and preservationists
    throughout our Nation and especially to my administration, in the work
    of Vice President Gore and the Administrator of the EPA, another woman
    from Florida, Carol Browner. She is much admired by the Attorney General
    who shares her south Florida roots, and I am glad to see her here today,
    also.
        Beyond Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas is a mentor for all who
    desire to preserve what we southerners affectionately call ``a sense of

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    place.'' And Mrs. Douglas, the next time I hear someone mention the
    timeless wonders and powers of Mother Nature, I'll be thinking about
    you.
        Joseph Rauh grew up in an immigrant family to become America's
    leading labor lawyer and advocate of civil liberties. He studied under
    Felix Frankfurter, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo
    and then Frankfurter when he was named Cardozo's successor by President
    Franklin Roosevelt. He was a champion of working people and labor
    movement reforms. Among his clients were Walter Reuther's United Auto
    Workers, A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and
    Joseph Yablonski's wing of the United Mine Workers.
        When he returned from the Army after the Second World War, he
    founded Americans for Democratic Action to help stem the influence of
    communism in the United States, and he was elected its vice chairman, a
    post once held by Vice President Humphrey, Arthur Schlesinger, and the
    theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
        Later, as the group's chairman, he called the ADA a group of
    independent-minded people grappling with the old line machines of both
    parties on behalf of good government, not a bad slogan. He represented
    playwright Arthur Miller against the Government intrusion of the
    McCarthy committee and was an outspoken champion of civil liberties
    until his death last year. He may have left us with the most appropriate
    quotation for this ceremony when he said, ``What our generation has done
    is bring equality into law. The next generation has to bring equality in
    fact.''
        John Minor Wisdom, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals at
    88\1/2\ years old, still handles a caseload as large as any active judge
    on the bench. But he stands out among his peers as a truly first-class
    legal scholar who writes brilliant opinions, including his landmark
    opinion on voting rights in United States v. State of Louisiana in 1963,
    and his historic opinions to open the University of Mississippi to black
    students in Meredith v. Fair in 1962. He is a son of the old South who
    became an architect of the new South. His father attended Washington
    College in Virginia when its students marched in the funeral of its
    president, Robert E. Lee. His background makes his progressive decisions
    all the more remarkable, because I don't think the South could have made
    it through those trying times without leaders like Judge Wisdom.
        He may be the only medal recipient today who was once a member of
    the Republican National Committee. He became the father of the modern
    Republican Party in Louisiana when he moved it away from reactionary
    isolationism to the moderation of President Eisenhower. His outspoken
    calls for reform in government and public education and civil rights are
    something of which all southerners and members of both political parties
    can justly be proud.
        None of our advances in civil rights would have been possible
    without the indefatigable energy of the late Thurgood Marshall. As an
    attorney and later as Solicitor General of the United States under
    President Johnson, he presented the most monumental arguments before the
    Supreme Court since Daniel Webster in the early years of our Republic,
    more than a century earlier. If President Kennedy had not named him an
    appeals court judge in 1961 or President Johnson had not named him the
    first black Justice on the United States Supreme Court in 1967, his mark
    on America would still loom very, very large today.
        He gave his career to defend black people from violence carried out
    by mobs in the name of justice. As founder and chief counsel of the
    NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund, he waged systematic war
    against laws that kept black people out of voting booths and their
    children out of publicly funded schools. He did more to make Martin
    Luther King's dream of equality real in the lives of our people than
    anyone in our time. Together, he and Justice Brennan became the twin
    pillars of liberty and equality on the Court.
        Justice Marshall's son, Thurgood, Jr., who coordinates legislative
    affairs in the office of the Vice President, said his father would have
    been most proud of this award by being honored alongside Justice
    Brennan, his close friend and colleague through so many years of
    battles.
        Justice Brennan is the author of the most enduring constitutional
    decisions of our last decades, including Baker v. Carr on one person,
    one vote, and Times v. Sullivan which brought the free speech doctrine
    into the latter half of the 20th century. He's already been acknowledged
    by friends as well as foes as one of the most pivotal giants in the
    history of the Court, perhaps its staunchest defender of freedom of the
    individual against Government intrusions. As

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    he once told Bill Moyers, the role of the Constitution is, and I quote,
    ``the protection of the dignity of the human being and the recognition
    that every individual has fundamental rights which Government cannot
    deny.''
        Justice Brennan served longer than any Justice in this century but
    two, and his impact and legacy have changed the Court in our country for
    all time.
        For all these people here, it must be a great sense of honor to be
    joined by so many distinguished Americans, members of the Cabinet,
    former members of the Cabinet, members of the Supreme Court, former
    members of the Supreme Court, and Members of the Congress. I thank all
    of you for being here. But I think we should all recognize that the
    people who should really be grateful to all of them are ordinary
    Americans, many of whom may not even know their names but whose lives
    have been forever changed by their labors.
        I'd like now to ask my military aide to read the citations.

    [At this point, Maj. Leo Mercado, Jr., USMC, Marine Corps aide to the
    President, read the citations.]

        My fellow Americans, we often pay our debts, by acknowledging it, to
    our Founders. In the beginning of this country, Thomas Jefferson told us
    something we dare never forget, which is that we must also pay our debts
    to our reformers, for all the Founders did was to give us something that
    has to be recreated in every age and time. Today we have acknowledged
    that debt to five great reformers. We can only repay it if we follow in
    their footsteps.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:48 p.m. in the East Room at the White
    House.