[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 31, Number 39 (Monday, October 2, 1995)]
[Pages 1734-1739]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom

September 29, 1995

    Good morning, and welcome to all of you, especially to the honorees, 
their family members, their friends, the distinguished Members of 
Congress.
    The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest honor given to 
civilians in the United States. It has a special history, established 50 
years ago by President Truman, to honor noble service in time of war. In 
1963, President Kennedy expanded its purpose, making it an honor for 
distinguished civilian service in peacetime. The 12 Americans we honor 
today embody the best qualities in our national character. All have 
committed themselves, both publicly and privately, to expanding the 
circle of freedom and the opportunities the responsible exercise of 
freedom brings, at home and around the world.
    In this time of change, where people's living patterns and working 
patterns are undergoing such dramatic transformation, it is necessary 
and fashionable to focus on new ideas and new visions of the future. We 
are here today to celebrate people who have always been for change and 
who have changed America for the better but who have done it based on 
the enduring values that make this country great: the belief that we 
have to give all of our citizens the chance to live up to the fullest of 
their God-given capacities; the conviction that we have to do everything 
we can to strengthen our families and our communities; the certainty 
that when the chips are down, we have to do what is good and right, even 
if it is unpopular in the short run; the understanding that we have the 
obligation to honor those who came before us by passing better lives and 
brighter opportunities on to those who come after.
    This medal commemorates the remarkable service and indelible spirit 
of individual Americans. But it also serves as a beacon to all Americans 
and especially to our children.

[[Page 1735]]

For our children, especially now when so many of their lives have been 
darkened by violence and irresponsible or absent role models, the 
robbers of innocence, is poverty and drug abuse and gang life, the 
excesses of our modern commercial media culture and other forces that 
are undermining the fabric of good lives, all of these things require 
more and more people to live by the values and measure up to the example 
of the winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They represent in 
so many ways the true face of American heroism today.
    Let me begin now by introducing each of them in turn.
    As a young mother 27 years ago, Peggy Charren took a good look at 
her children's frequent companion, television. And she did not like what 
she saw. But unlike others who simply bemoan the problem, she actually 
did something about it. She took a stand against entrenched and powerful 
institutions in Government and in business, and she made them listen. 
She started Action for Children's Television. As a result, she uplifted 
the quality of what comes into our homes and inspired a whole generation 
of citizen activists. In 1990, the campaign that began in front of Peggy 
Charren's television set reached Capitol Hill when Congress passed the 
Children's Television Act. And for the first time, the television 
industry was challenged to fulfill its responsibility to educate our 
children, not just to entertain them. Peggy Charren, mother and now 
grandmother, leader and reformer in the best American tradition, has put 
all of our children first, and we thank her for it.
    Now, I'm going to change the order here a minute, just a little, and 
go to Joan Ganz Cooney. While Peggy Charren forced television to change 
its ways from the outside, Joan Ganz Cooney did the same thing from the 
inside. In 1968, she launched the Children's Television Workshop, and a 
whole new landscape of joyful education opened up before our children's 
eyes. Out of this effort came ``Sesame Street,'' ``The Electric 
Company,'' ``3-2-1 Contact,'' and other programs that enlighten not only 
our youngsters but older people as well. With a host of lovable 
characters like the Cookie Monster and Big Bird, who became as familiar 
to me at one point in our family life as the people I grew up with--
[laughter]--these shows have helped teach a generation of children to 
count and to read and to think. They also teach us more about how we 
should live together. We all know that Grover and Kermit reinforce 
rather than undermine the values we work so hard to teach our children, 
showing kids every day what it means to share, to respect differences, 
and to recognize that it's not easy being green. [Laughter]
    Joan Ganz Cooney has proven in living color that the powerful medium 
of television can be a tool to build reason, not reaction, for growth, 
not stifling, to help build young lives up rather than tear them down. 
We all know that TV is here to stay. Most of us, frankly, love it even 
when we curse it. But we also know that there are clear damaging effects 
to excessive exposure to destructive patterns of television. As the Vice 
President and Mrs. Gore have pointed out on so many occasions and as 
their recent family conference on media and the family demonstrated, the 
numbing effects of violence or the numbing inability to concentrate that 
comes from overexposure to mindless, repetitive programming are things 
that we have to fight against.
    Peggy Charren sounded the alarm; Joan Ganz Cooney developed an 
alternative. And even today as we grapple with this challenge--how to 
get the best and repress the worst--we know that we would be nowhere 
near where we are were it not for these two remarkable American heroes. 
We thank them. Thank you so much.
    William T. Coleman, Jr.'s first public act to advance equal 
opportunity came early in his life. He tried out for his high school 
swim team, and in response, the school disbanded the team. [Laughter] 
For four decades in the courtroom, the boardroom, the halls of power, 
Bill Coleman has put his brilliant legal intellect in service to our 
country. He was the first African-American accepted on the Harvard Law 
Review, the first to serve as a clerk on the United States Supreme 
Court, the first to serve in the President's Cabinet--the second to 
serve in the President's Cabinet, and the first to reach the pinnacle of 
the corporate bar. As Secretary of Transportation to President Ford, he 
helped

[[Page 1736]]

to open the doors of opportunity to thousands of black entrepreneurs. As 
a corporate director, he broke the color barrier in the Nation's 
executive suites. Today, as chairman of the board of the NAACP Legal 
Defense and Education Fund, he continues the fight.
    I have known Bill Coleman for a long time. I had the honor and 
pleasure of being his son's roommate for a year in law school. I think 
it is fair to say that the first time we saw each other, he never 
dreamed that I would be here and he would be there. [Laughter]
    But I can honestly say, if you are looking for an example of 
constancy, consistency, disciplined devotion to the things that make 
this country a great place, you have no further to look than William 
Coleman, Jr. Thank you.
    Fifty years ago, John Hope Franklin was on a train in North 
Carolina, jammed into a compartment reserved for baggage and for 
African-Americans. When he asked the conductor if he and his fellow 
passengers could move to a near-empty car occupied by just five white 
men, he was told it couldn't be done, for the men, the conductor said, 
were German prisoners of war. John Hope Franklin and those with him were 
prisoners of something else, American racism.
    John Hope Franklin has both lived and chronicled the history of race 
in America. He is the author of many books, including the classic ``From 
Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans.'' He provided 
Thurgood Marshall with critical historical research for the landmark 
case of Brown v. Board of Education. He has taught throughout America 
and around the world, and he has influenced countless, countless 
students of the American scene with his profound scholarship.
    ``I look history straight in the eye and call it like it is,'' John 
Hope Franklin has said. This has meant telling the untold stories of 
northern racism and of slaves successfully striking for better 
conditions under the sinful confines of slavery. It has meant blazing a 
trail through the academy, but never confusing his role as an advocate 
with his role as a scholar. It has meant holding to the conviction that 
integration is a national necessity if we are to truly live by the 
values enshrined in the Constitution.
    John Hope Franklin, the Son of the South, has always been a moral 
compass for America, always pointing us in the direction of truth. I 
think I can speak for Hillary and for the Vice President and Mrs. Gore 
in saying that one of the most memorable moments of our campaign in 1992 
was having John Hope Franklin take a ride with us on our campaign bus. 
And he sat in the front. [Laughter]
    In 1944, at the age of 16, Leon Higginbotham arrived at his 
midwestern college only to be pushed back by the icy hand of racism. 
There, he and 12 other African-American students were housed in an 
unheated attic. Fed up with sub-zero nights, Leon Higginbotham went to 
the university president to protest. ``Higginbotham,'' the president 
said, ``the law doesn't require us to let colored students in the dorm, 
and you either accept things as they are or leave the university.'' So 
Leon Higginbotham set out to change the law. He went to Yale Law School, 
and after he was rejected by every major Philadelphia law firm because 
of his race, he turned to public service, working as a community lawyer 
and a State and Federal official.
    When Leon Higginbotham was named to the Federal bench at the age of 
36 by President Kennedy, he was the youngest Federal judge to be 
appointed in three decades. He served with distinction and eventually 
became judge of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He also found the 
time to write and speak with idealism and rigor on the great dilemmas of 
race and justice.
    His retirement has been spent, remarkably, helping to draft the 
constitution for a democratic South Africa and teaching a fresh 
generation of students at Harvard. We honor Judge Higginbotham whose 
life as much as his scholarship has set an example of commitment, 
enlargement, and service to new minds at home, and now, thank God, to a 
newly free South Africa an ocean away.
    Thank you, Leon Higginbotham.
    Judge Frank Johnson could not be here today and so had to send the 
young gentleman to my left to receive his award for him. He was advised 
by his doctor not to travel. I admire that doctor. I imagine that he is 
the first person who ever got Frank

[[Page 1737]]

Johnson to do something he did not want to do. [Laughter]
    For his steadfastness, his constitutional vision, his courage to 
uphold the value of equal opportunity, even at the expense of his own 
personal safety, for these things, we honor Frank Johnson with the 
Presidential Medal of Freedom.
    During 40 years on the bench, Judge Johnson made it his mission to 
see to it that justice was done within the framework of law. In the face 
of unremitting social and political pressure to uphold the traditions of 
oppression and neglect in his native South, never once did he yield. His 
landmark decisions in the areas of desegregation, voting rights, and 
civil liberties transformed our understanding of the Constitution. He 
fought for the right of Rosa Parks to sit where she wanted on the bus 
and battled for the right of Martin Luther King and others to march from 
Selma to Montgomery.
    Armed with a gavel and the Constitution, Frank Johnson changed the 
face of the South. He challenged America to move closer to the ideals 
upon which it is founded and forever will be an inspiration to all who 
admire courage and value freedom. We wish you were here with us today, 
but his spirit is in this place, and we thank him.
    For a good long while now, Dr. C. Everett Koop, as Surgeon General 
of the United States and afterward as America's most well-known private 
doctor, has told the Nation the truth as he sees it, whether we want to 
hear it or not. In so doing, he has saved countless lives and left an 
enduring legacy of the doctor as a healer in the broadest and deepest 
sense of the word.
    Dr. Koop's life has been defined by doing the right thing. He chose 
children's medicine for the simple reason that his colleagues were 
ignoring it. He refused to let political considerations leave Americans 
vulnerable to the epidemics of AIDS and teen pregnancy. He fought for 
sex education knowing that if he were to be true to the value of 
protecting our children, we could not let them live in perilous 
ignorance. He told America that tobacco is addictive, that it kills, and 
that we have to get cigarettes out of our children's hands.
    He helped us to come to grips with the painful shortcomings in 
America's health care delivery system and what it means for children 
that over 40 million of our people have no health insurance. And we 
value his support for the action now being taken to try to protect 
children's lives from the epidemic of smoking, which embraces 3,000 of 
them a day and will shorten 1,000 of their lives every day.
    Dr. Koop's record is a priceless reminder that disease is immune to 
ideology and that viruses do not play politics. Over the course of his 
career, I have seen him attacked from both the left and the right for 
his strong convictions. But all of us who have watched him, not only in 
public but as Hillary and I have had the chance to do in private, know 
that in the very best sense, he stands for life in America and for the 
potential of all of our children. And for that, the United States should 
be eternally grateful to C. Everett Koop.
    Twenty-five years ago this year, Americans came together for the 
very first Earth Day. They came together to make it clear that dirty 
air, poison water, spoiled land were simply unacceptable. They came 
together to say that preserving our natural heritage for our children is 
a national value. And they came together, more than anything else, 
because of one American, Gaylord Nelson. His career as Wisconsin's 
Governor, United States Senator, and now as counselor of the Wilderness 
Society has been marked by integrity, civility, and vision. His legacy 
is inscribed in legislation, including the National Environmental 
Education Act and the 1964 Wilderness Act,
    As the father of Earth Day, he is the grandfather of all that grew 
out of that event: the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, 
the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act. He also set a standard 
for people in public service to care about the environment and to try to 
do something about it. And I think that the Vice President would want me 
to say that young people like Al Gore, back in 1970, realized, because 
of Gaylord Nelson, that if they got into public service, they could do 
something to preserve our environment for future generations.
    In the 1970's, when a river was so polluted it actually caught on 
fire, Gaylord Nelson

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spoke up. He insisted that Americans deserved the safety that comes from 
knowing the world we live in will not make us sick. He warned that our 
leaders should never let partisan politics divert us from responsibility 
to our shared environment. He inspired us to remember that the 
stewardship of our natural resources is the stewardship of the American 
dream. He is the worthy heir of the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, and 
the Vice President's work and that of all other environmentalists today 
is the worthy heir of Gaylord Nelson.
    Today as much as at any time in modern American history, we need to 
remember what we share on this precious planet and in this beloved 
country. And I hope that Gaylord's Nelson shining example will 
illuminate all the debates in this city for years to come.
    Walter Reuther was an American visionary so far ahead of his times 
that although he died a quarter of a century ago, our nation has yet to 
catch up to his dreams. A tool and die maker by trade, Walter Reuther 
built a great union that lifted industrial workers into the middle 
class. But he always understood that the UAW stood for something greater 
and nobler than a few more dollars in the paycheck. So he fought for 
causes on the edge of America's horizon, from racial justice to small 
cars that would conserve fuel and compete successfully both here and 
abroad.
    He wanted America to create an economy strong and supple enough to 
convert from peacetime production to defense work and back again without 
costing workers and their families their livelihoods. As the journalist 
Murray Kempton said later, ``Walter Reuther was one man who could 
reminisce about the future.'' The union he led and the future he built 
stand as a memorial to what is bravest and best in the American spirit. 
Would that we had more people like him today. We are honored that his 
daughters are here and that his award will be received by his young 
grandson. Walter Reuther.
    Our homes, our cities, our neighborhoods, our communities, all these 
represent who we are. With the helping hand of James Rouse, many of 
these places have come to reflect our best values. In the 1960's, James 
Rouse saw a problem. Poorly planned suburban neighborhoods did more than 
take away from the landscape, they had a corrosive effect on our sense 
of community. So he did something about it; he conceived and built 
Columbia, Maryland. By updating the colonial village for modern times, 
he gave a generation of architects and designers a blueprint for 
reviving community all across our Nation.
    A decade later, James Rouse turned to another monumental task, 
healing the torn-out heart of America's cities. He met the challenge 
head-on. With Boston's Faneuil Hall, Baltimore Harbor Place, and other 
developments, he put the town square, squarely back into America's urban 
life. He proved that we could reclaim and recreate our urban frontiers. 
Adviser to Presidents, foe of economic and racial segregation, champion 
of high-quality, affordable housing, James Rouse's life has been defined 
by faith in the American spirit. He has made our cities and our 
neighborhoods as beautiful as the lives that pass through them.
    He has shown us that we can build communities worthy of the 
character and optimism of our people. I know that he has had a special 
impact on our Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Henry 
Cisneros. And I can tell you that he has had a very special impact on my 
life. Every time I see James Rouse I think, if every American developer 
had done what James Rouse has done with his life, we would have lower 
crime rates, fewer gangs, less drugs; our children would have a better 
future; our cities would be delightful places to live; we would not walk 
in fear, we would walk in pride down the streets of our cities, just as 
we still can in the small towns in America. James Rouse has changed this 
country. And if more will follow his lead, we can do the entire job we 
need to do in our cities. Mr. James Rouse.
    His name was William C. Velasquez, but everyone knew his as Willie. 
Willie was and is now a name synonymous with democracy in America. 
Through the organization he founded, the Southwest Voter Registration 
Education Project, he nearly doubled Hispanic voter registration, and 
dramatically increased the number of Latino elected officials in this 
Nation. His appeal to the Hispanic community was simple, passionate, and 
direct: ``Su voto es su voz,'' your vote is your voice.

[[Page 1739]]

    The movement he began here at home went on to support democracy 
abroad in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico, and in South Africa. From 
the farm fields of California, where he organized workers with Cesar 
Chavez, to the halls of Harvard, where he taught politics, Willie 
Velasquez was driven by an unwavering belief that every American should 
have a role in our democracy and a share in the opportunities of our 
great Nation.
    Willie Velasquez died too young. He was just 44 when he passed away 
in 1988. But in his vibrant life, he restored faith in our ideals and in 
ourselves. And no person in modern America who has run for public office 
wherever Hispanic Americans live has failed to feel the hand of Willie 
Velasquez. He made this a greater country and we're honored that his 
wife is here with us today.
    It is not surprising that Lew Wasserman has devoted his life to 
helping others to see. For it was his vision that led him from the 
streets of Cleveland to the top of Hollywood and his perspective that 
inspired him to give so much back to a nation that had given so much to 
him. Lew Wasserman helped to build MCA from a small booking agency into 
a vast multimedia company. His feat awakened the world to the infinite 
promise of the American entertainment industry.
    It also showed a new generation of American business leaders that a 
company's success can be measured by the depth of its values as well as 
by the size of its revenues. In honor of MCA's founder, the eye doctor 
Jules Stein, Lew Wasserman has made an astonishing contribution to treat 
and to cure blindness. He has devoted himself to strengthening the 
American community through his role as citizen adviser to almost a half 
century of Presidents, of both parties, and with his support for 
countless humanitarian efforts.
    Never for a moment has he forgotten his roots, the value of hard 
work, or the importance of giving people in far, far less fortunate 
conditions a chance to make something of their lives. The story of Lew 
Wasserman is the story of the American dream, not--not--just for what he 
has achieved but far more important for what he has given back. I have 
met a lot of philanthropists and successful people in my life. I don't 
know that I ever met anybody that more consistently every day looked for 
another opportunity to do something for somebody else, to give somebody 
else the chance to enjoy the success that he had in life.
    I thank you, Lew Wasserman.
    Let me close, before we hear from the official citation and present 
the medals, by saying that I think that all the people who are here, 
were they to speak, would tell you that they did not come here alone. 
They were guided by parents and teachers, by neighbors and mentors. Many 
were inspired by other great Americans who themselves at some time in 
the past received this very medal.
    The miracle of American life is that this cycle can be repeated over 
and over again with each succeeding generation; and that with each 
succeeding generation, we make freedom a little more real and full to 
all Americans. I ask all of you to think about that. You couldn't help 
feeling, when you heard these stories, that this is a very great 
country. And we do not have to give in to our lesser selves. We do not 
have to be divided. We do not have to achieve less than we can. If we 
will follow their examples, we will make sure that in the next century, 
this country will be all it was meant to be for all of our children.
    I'd like to now ask the Military Aide to read the citations as I 
present the Medals of Freedom.

Note: The President spoke at 9:45 a.m. in the East Room at the White 
House.