    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
    [August 8, 1994]
    [Pages 1447-1449]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1447]]

    Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medals of Freedom
    August 8, 1994

        The President. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to
    the White House. As you might imagine, one of the great pleasures of the
    Presidency is selecting recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
    the highest honor given to civilians by the United States of America.
        If I might begin on a very personal and immediate note, last fall
    this annual ceremony was held on a very happy day for me and for those
    of us who want a safer and more humane United States. It was the day we
    made the Brady bill the law of the land. Today as we gather here,
    Congress is on the verge of voting on the most comprehensive anticrime
    bill in history. But that bill has been held hostage for 11 days by
    certain special interest groups. So as we recognize the contributions of
    civilians to our country's way of life, I'd like to take this
    opportunity to call on those groups who are blocking the crime bill to
    let it come to a vote and ask the other citizens of the United States to
    ask the Congress for the same thing. Many people we honor here today
    have given their whole lives to enriching the fabric of the future, and
    we can do no less.
        This afternoon we will present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to
    nine remarkable individuals whose service to our democracy and to
    humanity has advanced the common interest of freedom-loving people, not
    only here at home but throughout the world: Herbert Block, the late
    Cesar Chavez, Arthur Flemming, Dorothy Height, Barbara Jordan, Lane
    Kirkland, Robert Michel, and Sargent Shriver.
        The medals these Americans receive today has a special history. It
    was established by President Truman in 1945 at first to reward notable
    service in the war. In 1963 President Kennedy amended the award for
    distinguished civilian service in peacetime. The honorees that year
    included the singer Marian Anderson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, diplomat
    John McCloy, labor leader George Meany, the writer E.B. White,
    playwright Thornton Wilder, and the artist Andrew Wyeth. By the time
    that first ceremony was held here in the White House in December of
    1963, President Johnson had added to the roll of names President Kennedy
    and His Holiness Pope John XXIII.
        Listen to this: At that time, Under Secretary of State George Ball
    said that the President is establishing what we can proudly call an
    American civil honors list. How many of our greatest citizens, who went
    on to achieve other things, said that the greatest thing that could ever
    be said about them was that they were good citizens. That is true in
    every way of those we honor today.
        Herbert Block, or ``Herblock'' as we know him, became an editorial
    cartoonist with the Chicago Daily News in 1929, not a very good year to
    begin writing funny cartoons. [Laughter] His long and prolific career
    has spanned the Presidencies of 11 different Presidents. The fact that
    he gets to choose the targets in cartoons may have something to do with
    the longevity of his career. His cartoons have appeared in the
    Washington Post since 1946, the year I was born. [Laughter] He educates
    and persuades public opinion with effectiveness, artistry, warmth, and
    great good humor. He has a big heart. He sides with the little guy,
    people of common sense, and all who hold healthy irreverence for any
    sort of pretensions.
        Cesar Chavez, before his death in April of last year, had become a
    champion of working people everywhere. Born into Depression-era poverty
    in Arizona in 1927, he served in the United States Navy in the Second
    World War and rose to become one of our greatest advocates of nonviolent
    change. He was, for his own people, a Moses figure. The farm workers who
    labored in the fields and yearned for respect and self-sufficiency
    pinned their hopes on this remarkable man, who with faith and
    discipline, with soft-spoken humility and amazing inner strength led a
    very courageous life and in so doing brought dignity to the lives of so
    many others and provided for us inspiration for the rest of our Nation's
    history. We are honored to have his wife, friend, and longtime working
    partner, Helen Chavez, to be with us today to receive the award.
        Arthur Flemming served every President from Franklin Roosevelt to
    Ronald Reagan as the Republican member of the Civil Service Commis-

    [[Page 1448]]

    sion, as a member of the Hoover commission on the executive branch
    established by President Truman, as Director of Defense Mobilization and
    a member of President Eisenhower's National Security Council, and as
    Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. In addition to being an
    able administrator, Dr. Flemming is also a respected educator and former
    journalist. Over the course of his long and eminent career in public
    service, he contributed to the struggles for Social Security, civil
    rights, and most recently health care reform, something for which the
    First Lady and I are particularly in his debt. These three struggles he
    calls the greatest domestic crusades of his lifetime.
        James Grant is the remarkable executive director of the United
    Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, where he has tirelessly waged a global
    crusade on behalf of the world's children. Like his father before him,
    he was born and raised in China, where he took up his family's tradition
    of offering assistance abroad and first went to work for the United
    Nations at the end of World War II. In the fall of 1992 he helped to
    broker a brief cease-fire during the siege of Sarajevo and personally
    directed the safe passage of a convoy carrying winter supplies of
    clothing, blankets, and food. As the international community's guardian
    of innocent children in troubled regions, he oversees the delivery of
    humanitarian assistance that without him might otherwise never reach
    those in need.
        Dorothy Height is one of the world's most tireless and accomplished
    advocates of civil rights, the rights of women, and the health and
    stability of family and community life. From the days when she helped
    Eleanor Roosevelt to organize the World Youth Conference in 1938, she
    has remained engaged in the public arena for 60 years and more. As a
    leader of the National Council of Negro Women and the Young Women's
    Christian Association, she's been a powerful voice for equal opportunity
    here and in developing nations around the world. In recent years, her
    Black Family Reunion celebrations have reminded our society that self-
    help and self-reliance within loving extended families are the dominant
    cultural traditions of the African-American community.
        For 20 years Barbara Jordan has been the most outspoken moral voice
    of the American political system, a position she reached soon after
    becoming the first black Congresswoman elected from the deep South from
    her native Texas in 1972. From national platforms she has captured the
    Nation's attention and awakened its conscience in defense of our
    Constitution, the American dream, and the commonality we share as
    American citizens. As professor of ethics and public policy at the
    Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, she ensures that the next
    generation of our public servants will be worthy of the legacy she has
    done so much to build.
        Lane Kirkland has been at the center of the American labor movement
    for almost 50 years. After serving in the merchant marine during the
    Second World War and his subsequent graduation from the School of
    Foreign Service at Georgetown University, he became a researcher for
    organized labor in the same year that he worked as a 26-year-old
    speechwriter in the 1948 campaign of Harry Truman and his running mate,
    Alben Barkley. Throughout the cold war, when some leaders saw only the
    threats to our freedom overseas and neglected the barriers to freedom
    and inequality within our own land, Kirkland showed America that you can
    stand up to communism abroad just as forcefully as you can stand up for
    working men and women here at home. As president of the AFL-CIO for the
    last 15 years, he has helped to teach us that solidarity is a powerful
    word in any language and that a vibrant labor movement is essential to
    every free society.
        Robert Michel has served in the United States House of
    Representatives since 1957. That is the second longest tenure of any
    Republican in American history. As minority leader in the House for the
    last 13 years, he has served his party well, but he has also served our
    Nation well, choosing the pragmatic but harder course of conciliation
    more often than the divisive but easier course of confrontation. In the
    best sense he is a gentleman legislator who, in spite of the great
    swings in public opinion from year to year, has remained always true to
    the midwestern values he represents so faithfully in the House. He
    retires at the end of this year, generally regarded by Democrats and
    Republicans alike as one of the most decent and respected leaders with
    which any President has had the privilege to work.
        Sargent Shriver is the man who launched the Peace Corps 33 years
    ago. Because of his creativity, his idealism, his brilliance, the Peace
    Corps remains one of the most popular Government initiatives ever
    undertaken. From the time

    [[Page 1449]]

    he and his wife, Eunice, helped to organize a conference on juvenile
    delinquency for the Attorney General in 1947 to his efforts for public
    education in Chicago in the 1950's, to his leadership of Head Start and
    legal services and now the Special Olympics, Sargent Shriver has
    awakened millions of Americans, including many in this administration,
    to the responsibilities of service, the possibilities of change, and the
    sheer joy of making the effort.
        These recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom represent
    different political parties, different ideologies, different
    professions, indeed, even different ages. Their different eras,
    different races, different generations in American history cannot be
    permitted to obscure the fact of what they share in common: an unusually
    profound sense of responsibility to improve the lives of their fellow
    men and women, to improve the future for our children, to embody the
    best of what we mean by the term ``American citizen.'' By their
    remarkable records of service and by their incredible spirit, we have
    all been enriched.
        And now I would ask the military aide to read the citations as I
    present the Medal of Freedom.

    [At this point, Major Leo Mercado, Jr., USMC, Marine Corps aide to the
    President, read the citations, and the President presented the medals.]

        The President. Ladies and gentlemen, in closing let me say that I
    couldn't help thinking, as the citations were read and I looked into the
    faces of our honorees and their families, friends, and admirers here,
    that we too often reserve our greatest accolades for our citizens when
    they are gone. I wish that Cesar Chavez could be here today. I am
    grateful that his wife is here, and I am so grateful that all these
    others are here.
        Let us remember today that the greatest gift any of us can give the
    Founders of this Constitution and this Republic is to emulate the work
    of these citizens whom we honor today, every day, each in our own way.
        Thank you for being here. God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 4:40 p.m. in the East Room at the White
    House.