[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 32 (Monday, August 15, 1994)]
[Pages 1646-1649]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

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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 Commission, 
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

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a brief ceasefire 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 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

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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.