[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 48 (Monday, December 6, 1993)]
[Pages 2479-2482]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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 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,

[[Page 2480]]

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 
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

[[Page 2481]]

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 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

[[Page 2482]]

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.