President Joe Biden honored of the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on Wednesday, Gabrielle Giffords and soccer champion Megan Rapinoe, as well as Steve Jobs. Another recipient, Washington, was to attend but tested positive for Covid. .
Biden said Washington would receive the award later. At the ceremony, the president said that Washington “couldn’t be here but wanted to be.” The White House has testing guidelines in place for people who will be in close contact with the president.
The country’s highest civilian honors are usually awarded annually to a group that includes politicians, activists, artists and scientists.
Honors Among Others Received Honors Sister Simone Campbell, College President Juliet Garcia, Civil Rights Lawyer Fred Gray, Father Alexander Carlotos, Religious Freedom Advocate and Gold Star Father Khizr Khan, Before Covid Respondents included Sandra Lindsay. , civil rights legend and organizer Diane Nash, Olympic gold medalist Megan Rapinoe, former Vice President Alan Simpson, Brigadier General Wilma Watt and civil rights advocate Raul Yazaguire. Senator John McCain and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka were also recognized posthumously.
When the White House announced Medal of Freedom recipients last week, Washington received two Oscars, a Tony Award, two Golden Globes and Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award. The White House also cited his more than 25-year tenure as a spokesman for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
At the ceremony, Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, accepted the honor, as she was recognized as a co-founder of Apple and “made one of the most important companies in history, bringing computing to homes and phones, and our way.” to bring about a revolution”. of life.” Jobs died in 2011.
One of the most personal moments of the ceremony came when Biden honored McCain, an aide, when they both served together in the Senate.
“We hell on the Senate floor. but then we’d go downstairs and have lunch together later,” Biden said. Even though they were each other in 2008 with Republican nominee for president, McCain and Democratic nominee for vice president Biden Ran against, Biden said that “I’ve never stopped admiring John. I have never said anything negative about him in my life because I knew his respect, his courage and his commitment. He was John McCain.’s
widow, Cindy McCain, accepted the honor. He currently serves as the US Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture.
In awarding McCain the Medal of Freedom with Simpson, another former Senate aide, Biden seemed to yearn for another era of politics, when partisan rivals did not personalize their rancor. In contrast, Donald Trump had placed a heavy emphasis on awarding the Medal of Freedom to conservative supporters and sports figures, most famously when he paid the honor to Rush Limbaugh during his 2020 State of the Union address.
“John and I traveled the world together, literally, traveled the world together,” Biden said. “We became friends. We agreed on much more than we disagreed on. … But two things we never talked about – we never talked about his imprisonment at the Hanoi Hilton, nor It’s about the death of my wife and my daughter. The pain was quite different, yet somehow we started to understand each other. It was a long time ago. We both wanted to make things better for the country we both lived in. loved, and he never wavered.”
