President Joe Biden today awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to 17 people in a wide variety of endeavors, including gymnast Simone Biles, Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington and, posthumously, inventor Steve Jobs and former senator John McCain.
Biden’s list of recipients, his first as president, includes stalwarts of politics, sports, entertainment, religion, civil rights, labor and the military.
Welcoming the recipients in the White House East Room, Biden called them “an extraordinary, extraordinary group of Americans” who strive for the idea of America as the “the cause of freedom shines like the sun to light up the future of the world.”
The honorees range from Biles, 25, the most decorated U.S. gymnast in history, to former senator Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., 90, the sharp-tongued politician and governor’s son who served 18 years in the Senate and was outspoken on the issue of fiscal responsibility.
Of Biles, Biden joked, “Today, she adds to her medal count of 32.”
Other honorees include Sister Simone Campbell, former director of Network, a Catholic social justice organization, who was instrumental in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. Biden once joined her “Nuns on the Bus” tour.
The president also is recognizing Washington, an actor, director and producer who has served as the national spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for more than 25 years; and Megan Rapinoe, a member of the U.S. women’s national soccer team since 2006 who has won one Olympic gold medal and two World Cup championships. She is also captain of OL Reign, a Seattle-based pro team in the National Women’s Soccer League.
During his four years in office, President Donald Trump honored 24 people, a list populated by practitioners of his favorite sport, golf – Tiger Woods, Gary Player and Annika Sorenstam – and some political allies, such as radio host Rush Limbaugh and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
Biden’s list of political honorees includes Republicans and Democrats. Former representative Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., co-founded Giffords, a nonprofit focused on preventing gun violence, after she was shot in the head at a constituent event in Tucson in January 2011 and gravely wounded. She is married to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former astronaut who is up for reelection this year.
Biden served in the Senate with McCain, R-Ariz., the 2008 Republican presidential nominee and decorated Vietnam War veteran who died in 2018 of brain cancer. McCain’s widow, Cindy, endorsed Biden in 2020 as the Democrat reversed the party’s fortunes in Arizona, winning the state. Cindy McCain is now the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture.
McCain, in an interview Thursday with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, said the honor is particularly meaningful given that her late husband was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and a half years.
“The fact that it’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom means more to us, I think, than most people,” McCain said. “John was denied his freedom for so long. … He was without freedom as a prisoner of war. When he was released, his respect for not only freedom itself, but … how we maintain it, is a large part of who he was and what he stood for.”
Jobs, who died of cancer in 2011, was co-founder and chief executive of Apple, whose company’s inventions revolutionized the lives of billions of people worldwide.
The list also includes Khizr Khan, a Gold Star father who has been an advocate for the rule of law and religious freedom while serving on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom; and Gen. Wilma Vaught, one of the most decorated women in the history of the U.S. military.
Biden will honor Fred Gray, one of the first Black members of the Alabama legislature since Reconstruction and an attorney who represented civil rights activists such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, along with the NAACP. Other honorees include Raúl Yzaguirre, a civil rights advocate who served as chief executive and president of National Council of La Raza for 30 years, and Diane Nash, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Other recipients are:
– Juliet García, the former president of the University of Texas at Brownsville and the first Mexican American woman to serve as a college president.
– Sandra Lindsay, a New York critical-care nurse who served on the front lines of the pandemic response. She was the first person in the U.S. to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
(c) 2022, The Washington Post · Eugene Scott
She was not the first person in the US to receive the COVID vaccine. It was tested on many others before her.
Had she taken the real covid jab, not the saline, she’d been dead or severely injured.
The presidential medal of freedom is give to people who contributed greatly to the country.
Megan Rapinoe “contributed” by promoting Toeivah and hatered, and saying she’s ashamed of the US…