Dick Cheney got one (as secretary of defense), so did Donald Rumsfeld (back in 1977), not to speak of Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, and General H. Norman Schwartzkopf (for Gulf War I). Of course, so did Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, and (posthumously) César Chávez, not to speak of Estée Lauder. President George W. Bush hit the trifecta in a single ceremony, awarding one to General Tommy Franks (who commanded U.S. forces in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and who, the president said, “led the forces that fought and won two wars in the defense of the world’s security and helped liberate more than 50 million people from two of the worst tyrannies in the world”), another to George Tenet (who oversaw the CIA through the torture and black-sites era), and a third to L. Paul Bremer III (the American proconsul in Baghdad during our ill-fated occupation of Iraq, whom the president praised for “work[ing] day and night in difficult and dangerous conditions to stabilize the country, to help its people rebuild and to establish a political process that would lead to justice and liberty”). More recently, Barack Obama bestowed one on former British Prime Minister (and Iraq War enthusiast) Tony Blair and, in a surprise move barely a week ago, to “one of the nation’s finest public servants,” retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
I’m talking, of course, about America’s highest civilian honor (even if it can be awarded to generals), the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Gates award was bestowed unexpectedly at a Pentagon retirement ceremony for the Secretary of Defense who, visibly moved, ad libbed, “It is a big surprise. But we should have known a couple of months ago that you’re getting pretty good at this covert ops stuff.” It was the same week that unnamed “American officials” leaked the latest covert ops news to the New York Times – that “the clandestine American military campaign to combat al-Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen is expanding to fight the Islamist militancy in Somalia” and that a U.S. drone aircraft had attacked militants there for the first time since 2009. Consider this the seventh war the Obama administration is now pursuing in the Greater Middle East.
