President Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Friday to a host of prominent Americans, including several of his most important political allies like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina.
With an election six months away, Mr. Biden assembled a list of 19 people to honor that was heavy with major Democratic Party figures and others he has worked with over the years, including former Vice President Al Gore and former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. The one well-known Republican to be honored is former Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina.
“Today, we have another extraordinary honor,” Mr. Biden said at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, noting that he was bestowing the nation’s highest civilian honor on “19 incredible people whose relentless curiosity, inventiveness, ingenuity and hope kept faith in a better tomorrow.”
The medal was established in its current form by President John F. Kennedy and meant to honor “any person who has made an especially meritorious contribution” to national security, world peace or “cultural or other significant public or private endeavors,” as the original executive order put it.
Aside from political recipients, the president selected a handful of well-known figures from the worlds of civil rights, sports, entertainment and space exploration.
Among the honorees were Clarence B. Jones, a civil rights activist who helped draft the “I Have a Dream” speech delivered by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington in 1963; Opal Lee, an educator who in 2016, at age 89, walked from her home in Texas to Washington to lobby to make Juneteenth a federally recognized holiday marking the end of slavery; and Judy Shepard, who helped found the Matthew Shepard Foundation to combat anti-gay hate crimes after her son was brutally murdered in 1998.