AMERICA: Barack Obama this week honoured 14 US citizens, people he called "the best of who we are and who we aspire to be"
THEY SAT like ageing school- children in two rows facing the audience in the East Room of the White House.
Some were too frail to stand when President Barack Obama fastened the royal blue ribbon with the star and eagle emblem of the Medal of Freedom around their necks.
George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president, who also served as a navy pilot, ambassador to the UN and China, CIA director and vice president, is now 86 years old.
He clasped Obama’s hand to pull himself to his feet, then was gently guided back to his chair by a US marine. Obama gazed fondly on the senior Bush, who lowered his eyes when the 44th president praised his “humility and decency” and announced: “This is a gentleman.”
Obama noted his own sister was named after poet Maya Angelou, whose dark glasses could not hide her sob of emotion as the president bestowed the medal on her.
Sylvia Mendez, the Mexican- American civil rights activist who endured a court battle as a child to gain the right to attend school with white children, grinned and cried simultaneously when she received hers.
Along with the Congressional Gold Medal, the Medal of Freedom is the highest honour the US gives to civilians. It was started by Harry Truman in 1945 and revived by John F Kennedy in 1963.
The ceremony is “one of the things that I most look forward to every year”, Obama said this week, calling his 14 honorees “the best of who we are and who we aspire to be”.
Most had visited the White House before. Stan Musial was photographed in the Oval Office with JFK after an All-Star Game in 1962. Obama used to call his own grandfather “Stan the Man,” after the former St Louis Cardinals baseball star who hit five home runs in a single day.
Yo-yo Ma, the son of Chinese parents, whom Obama called “the world’s greatest cellist”, played for JFK in the White House at the age of seven.
Irish-Americans Jean Kennedy Smith and trade unionist John Sweeney received their awards with more gaiety than solemnity.
Obama praised Kennedy Smith, the last survivor of nine Kennedy siblings, for founding Very Special Arts to help disabled youths. He reminded the audience of her “pivotal role” in the Northern Ireland peace process when she was the US ambassador to Ireland.
The best moment of the ceremony, captured in newspaper photographs and television clips across the country, was when retired Boston Celtics basketball star Bill Russell (77) rose to accept his medal. At 6ft 9in, Russell towered over Obama, who is 6ft 1in.
The audience burst into laughter at the comical and graceful sight of Obama standing on his toes while Russell bent his knees, so the president could hang the medal around his neck.
Isabel Wilkerson's new book, The Warmth of Other Suns; the Epic Story of America's Great Migration,recounts the great black migration from the south to the north and west. The Russell family's story is among them.
Bill Russell was nine when his parents fled racism in Louisiana, where his father was ordered to wait at gunpoint while whites were served first at a petrol station. Russell’s mother wept at the kitchen table after a policeman threatened to arrest her for wearing a new suit “like a white woman”.
In the East Room, Obama recalled that with Russell, the Boston Celtics won 11 of 13 seasons, “a record unmatched in any sport”. Russell became the first African-American to coach a major league sports team.
He never stopped fighting for equality, marching with Martin Luther King, refusing to play a scheduled game because a restaurant would not serve black members of the Celtics.
There were other moving stories, of Gerda Weissman Klein, the emaciated Holocaust survivor who married the US soldier who rescued her from an abandoned bicycle factory, then worked with him to promote tolerance, respect and students’ rights around the world.
“Never, ever give up,” Obama quoted Klein.
Elizabeth Little blinked back tears as she accepted the medal for her husband, Thomas Emmett Little, an optometrist who worked for decades giving sight to the people of Afghanistan. He was murdered there last year, with nine team members.
A different but also heartwarming ceremony took place in the State Department on Thursday, when secretary of state Hillary Clinton swore in Kris Balderston as her special representative for global partnerships.
Balderston is one of the myriad Irish-Americans who inhabit the ranks of US government. He and his wife, Patti Reilly, are loyal friends of the Irish embassy here.
Speaking before 300 guests, many of them Balderston’s friends and family from Little Falls, New York, Mrs Clinton called him “a real buddy . . . the guy I can always count on to get a hit”.
Washington, she said, “is filled with people who have got ahead by being meaner and tougher, but it’s far rarer to find someone like Kris, who has succeeded because people really like him”.
