Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Newsroom
President Obama Awards Presidential Medals of Freedom. Aired 3- 3:30p ET
Aired November 22, 2016 - 15:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[15:00:02]
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: This is -- this Medal of Freedom ceremony will begin any moment now, where, as we keep mentioning, these are -- this is the highest award for a civilian in this country.
President Obama, it's a packed house, awarding 21 architects and scientists, musicians, athletes the nation's highest civilian honor.
So, among this mega-list, you have Hollywood hot shots Robert De Niro and Tom Hanks, NBA All Stars Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and legendary entertainers like Diana Ross and Bruce Springsteen.
CNN's Suzanne Malveaux gets to be there. She is covering all of this for us from the White House.
Suzanne, how many of the people who are on the list will actually be there to receive the award?
SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Brooke.
It's absolutely amazing. It's packed inside the East Room and everyone is here. We have seen some people already take their seats, but most of them are going to make the procession in just a few minutes.
And we really are talking about some of the superstars. A lot of people here are jaded at the White House, but you can't believe the number of press and people and guests that are just -- the excitement is palpable.
I want to just give you a little backstory, if I can. Ellen DeGeneres, who is one of the people who is being honored, couldn't make it into the White House because she didn't have her I.D.
BALDWIN: Oh.
MALVEAUX: And so she tweeted out a photo waiting until somebody got an I.D. and she was able to come in. But the security, as you can imagine, is pretty tight. It always is here at the White House.
But then she went back to the reception room and she did a mannequin challenge with all the other honorees.
BALDWIN: We're looking at it. MALVEAUX: And they posted that. Yes, she posted that on Twitter, too.
So, you can imagine there's a lot of fun that people are having.
BALDWIN: There she is.
MALVEAUX: But we have -- philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates are here, Cicely Tyson, Robert Redford. You mentioned Tom Hank, Robert De Niro, and of course basketball legends, champions, Kareem Abdul- Jabbar, Michael Jordan.
Then we saw the "SNL" creator Lorne Michaels, who is here. We will try to get a question to him, too, see how he's feeling about Trump and Twitter and the political season and how that's been playing out.
Also, as well, Los Angeles dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, he is here. And the Boss, Bruce Springsteen, and Diana Ross, just giants in their fields, in their professions.
And it used to be back in the day, Brooke, when I was covering Bill Clinton that they set up this big tent on the South Lawn and I remember them honoring Muhammad Ali and Liz Taylor and then that was outside.
But this is a smaller venue. It's inside the White House. And 21 people, it's a big number. It's not usually the number of honorees, but President Obama, more than other any president, has decided he is going to bestow this on people who really represent our country and have achieved that extraordinarily high level.
And so really it's just an exciting time to be here and to hear what some of the best in the business -- and their families are here, too. We see Tom Hanks' son sitting next to his wife. We see Ellen's wife, Portia, who is about three rows in, and just luminaries from the administration as well.
We Attorney General Loretta Lynch. And she's by the side of Secretary of State John Kerry, Susan Rice. Professor Henry Louis Gates is in the front row. It's a really interesting and dynamic group of people rubbing elbows here and just making a moment, a pause, if you will, just to celebrate some extraordinary people we have in our country.
BALDWIN: I will let you take a breath, phenomenal, phenomenal color from you and to think Ellen DeGeneres couldn't get in because she left her I.D. at home just makes her all the more human and looks like she did get it and got in.
Let me ask you, though. You alluded to this when you mentioned Lorne Michaels. When these see a lot of these faces pass across the screen, they didn't keep secret their feelings about this past administration. I think Robert De Niro for one in that video and what he said about punching Trump.
It's interesting. There are political leanings and that they're all there together today. MALVEAUX: Well, it's a great point, Brooke, because we did take a
look at the list. And we did a little digging just to see.
And I would say half the group certainly were very vocal in the campaign about their -- in their criticism of president-elect Trump. And, yes, we did hear De Niro say that -- he called Trump a pig, a dog, said he wanted to punch him in the face. Ellen called him a bully. And even the Boss got in. He called him a toxic narcissist.
So these are not necessarily Trump fans. But Trump is probably not fans of -- these are not his fans and he's not a fan of them either. As you know, Lorne Michaels and that big Twitter battle that he's having over Alec Baldwin's impression of him on "SNL," they are going back and forth.
[15:05:05]
And Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, we saw him at the DNC. And they have kind of a spat that is going on. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar actually wrote an op-ed very critical of Trump. And then Trump returned the favor by literally printing out the op-ed and writing, handwriting on top of it and sending it to Jabbar, saying that he didn't know anything about making America great.
And so they have got an ongoing political spat themselves. There's a little bit of that underlying political dynamic. But when it's all said and done -- and we're getting the hush here because I think it's about to begin -- people are taking the moment just to honor and celebrate some diversity and the achievements here, because you're also talking about architecture and science and software, people whose names you might not have heard of, but certainly are part of the mix as well.
Getting very quiet here.
(CROSSTALK)
BALDWIN: Suzanne, hasn't the president broken the record on the number of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients?
MALVEAUX: He has. He has.
And the truth of the matter is, Brooke, he doesn't have to -- there is no limit. There is no limit to how many people he can award. And it was just earlier today after our press briefing, we asked Josh Earnest, the press secretary, why 21 more because it wasn't long ago he was honoring people here at the White House.
And he said, well, we looked at the list of luminaries who have not gotten this distinction and we knew we had to do it again. So here we are in the East Room with sort of just an incredible group of people who are being honored.
BALDWIN: We see the picture. We will take a quick break.
Suzanne Malveaux, you're phenomenal. Thank you so much for us at the White House.
Quick break. We will be right back to watch the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony there from the East Room.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: Here we go. We're going to take you now to the East Room of the White House. And you are going to see this one after another outstanding recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Accepting on behalf of Elouise Cobell.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ellen DeGeneres.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Robert De Niro.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Richard Garwin.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Bill and Melinda Gates.
(APPLAUSE)
[15:10:03]
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Frank Gehry.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Margaret Hamilton.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Tom Hanks.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Debra Marie (ph) accepting on behalf of Grace Hopper.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Michael Jordan.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Maya Lin.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Lorne Michaels. (APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Newt Minow.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Eduardo Padron.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Robert Redford.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Diana Ross.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Vin Scully.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Bruce Springsteen.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Cicely Tyson.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ladies and gentlemen, the vice president of the United States.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States and Mrs. Michelle Obama.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Hello. Hello. Hello.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Everybody, please have a seat. We got some work to do here.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: This is not all fun and games.
Welcome to the White House, everybody.
Today, we celebrate extraordinary Americans who have lifted our spirits, strengthened our union, pushed us towards progress. I always love doing this event. But this is a particularly impressive class.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: We have got innovators and artists, public servants, rabble- rousers...
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: ... athletes, renowned character actors, like the guy from "Space Jam."
(LAUGHTER)
[15:15:02]
OBAMA: We pay tribute to those distinguished individuals with our nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Now, let me tell you a little bit about each of them.
First, we came close to missing out on a Bill and Melinda Gates incredible partnership, because, apparently, Bill's opening line was, "Do you want to go out two weeks from this coming Saturday?"
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: He's good with computers, but, you know?
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: Fortunately, Melinda believes in second chances, and the world is better for it.
For two decades, the Gates Foundation has worked to provide lifesaving medical care to millions, boosting clean water supplies, improving education for our children, rallying aggressive international action on climate change, cutting childhood mortality in half.
The list could go on. These two have donated more money to charitable causes than anyone ever.
Many years ago, Melinda's mom told her an old saying: To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, that is success.
By this and just about any other measure, few in human history have been more successful than these two impatient optimists.
Frank Gehry has never let popular acclaim reverse his impulse to defy convention. "I was an outsider from the beginning," he says, "so for better or worse, I thrived on it."
The child of poor Jewish immigrants, Frank grew up in Los Angeles, and throughout his life, he embraced the spirit of a city defined by an open horizon. He spent his life rethinking shapes and mediums, seemingly the force of gravity itself, the idea of what architecture could be.
He decided to upend, constantly repurposing every material available, from titanium to paper towel tubes. He's inspiring our next generation through his advocacy for arts education in our schools.
From the Guggenheim to Bilbao to Chicago's Millennium Park, our hometown, to his home in Santa Monica, which I understand caused some consternation among his neighbors, Frank's work teaches us that, while buildings may be sturdy and fixed to the ground, like all great art, they can lift our spirits. They can soar and broaden our horizons.
When an undergraduate from rural Appalachia first set foot on the National Mall many years ago, she was trying to find a way to show that war is not just a victory or a loss, but about individual lives. She considered how the landscape might shape that message, rather than the other way around.
The project that Maya Lin designed for her college class earned her a B-plus.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: And a permanent place in American history.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: So, all of you B-plus students out there.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has changed the way we think about monuments, but also about how we think about sacrifice, and patriotism and ourselves.
Maya has given us more than just places for remembering. She has created places for us to make new memories, her sculptures, chapels, homes, physical acts of poetry, each reminding us that the most important element in art or architecture is human emotion.
Three minutes before Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the moon, Apollo 11's lunar lander alarm triggered, red and yellow lights across the board. Our astronauts didn't have much time, but, thankfully, they had Margaret Hamilton.
A young MIT scientist, and a working mom in the '60s, Margaret led the team that created the on-board flight software that allowed the Eagle to land safely. And keep in mind that, at this time, software engineering wasn't even a field yet. There were no textbooks to follow.
So, as Margaret says, there was no choice but to be pioneers. Luckily for us, Margaret never stopped pioneering. And she symbolizes that generation of unsung women who helped send humankind into space. Her software architecture echoes in countless technologies today.
[15:20:01] And her example speaks of the American spirit of discovery that exists
in every little girl and little boy who know that somehow to look beyond the heavens is to look deep within ourselves and to figure out just what is possible.
If Wright is flight, and Edison is light, then Hopper is code. Born in 1906, Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper followed her mother into mathematics, earned her Ph.D. from Yale and set out on a long and storied career.
At age 37, and a full 15 pounds below military guidelines, the gutsy and colorful Grace joined the Navy and was sent to work on one of the first computers, Harvard's Mark I. She saw beyond the boundaries of the possible and invented the first compiler, which allowed programs to be written in regular language and then translated for computers to understand.
While the women who pioneered software were often overlooked, the most prestigious award for young computer scientists now bear her name. From cell phones to Cyber Command, we can thank Grace hopper for opening programming to millions more people, helping to usher in the information age and profoundly shaping our digital world.
Speaking of really smart people, in the summer of 1950, a young University of Chicago physicist found himself at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dick Garwin was there, he said, because Chicago paid his faculty for nine months, but his family ate for 12.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: So, by the next summer, Dick had helped create the hydrogen bomb. And for the rest of his life, he dedicated himself to reducing the threat of nuclear war.
Dick is not just an architect of the atomic age. Ever since he was a Cleveland kid tinkering with his father's movie projectors, he's never met a problem he didn't want to solve. Reconnaissance satellites, the MRI, GPS technology, the touch screen all bear his fingerprints. He even patented a mussel washer for shellfish, which, that, I haven't used.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: The other stuff, I have.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: Where is he?
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: Dick has advised nearly every president since Eisenhower, often rather bluntly.
Enrico Fermi, also a pretty smart guy, is said to have called Dick the only true genius he ever met. I do want to see this mussel washer.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: Along with these scientists, artists and thinkers, we also honor those who have shaped our culture from the stage and the screen.
In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor. She has shaped the whole course of history. Cicely was never the likeliest of Hollywood stars. The daughters of immigrants from the West Indies, she was raised by a hardworking and religious mother who cleaned houses and forbade her children to attend the movies.
But once she got her education and broke into the business, Cicely made a conscious decision not just to say lines, but to speak out. "I would not accept roles," she said, "unless they projected us, particularly women, in a realistic light and dealt with us as human beings."
And from "Sounder" to "The Trip to Bountiful" to "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," Cicely's convictions and grace have helped for us to see the dignity of every single beautiful member of the American family. And she's just gorgeous.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: Yes, she is.
In 1973, a critic wrote of Robert De Niro: "This kid doesn't just act. He takes off into the vapors."
And it was true. His characters are iconic, a Sicilian-father-turned- New-York-mobster, a mobster who runs a casino, a mobster who needs therapy...
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: ... a father-in-law who's scarier than a mobster, Al Capone, a mobster.
Robert combines dramatic precision and, it turns out, comedic timing with his signature eye for detail. And while the name De Niro is synonymous with tough guy, his true gift is the sensitivity that he brings to each role.
This son of New York artists didn't stop at becoming one of the world's great actors. He's also a director, a philanthropist, co- founder of the Tribeca Film Festival.
[15:25:00]
Of his tireless preparation, from learning the saxophone to remaking his body, he once said, "I feel I have to earn the right to play a part."
And the result is honest and authentic art that reveals who we really are.
In 1976, Lorne Michaels implored the Beatles to reunite on his brand- new show.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: In exchange, he offered them $3,000.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: And then he told them they could share it equally or they could give Ringo a smaller cut.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: Which was early proof that Lorne Michaels has a good sense of humor.
On "Saturday Night Live," he's created a world where a band of no- names become comedy's biggest stars, where our friends the Coneheads and cheerleaders and land sharks and basement deadbeats and motivational speakers and an unfrozen caveman lawyer show up and Tom Hanks is on "Black Jeopardy."
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: After four decades, even in this fractured media culture that we have got, "SNL" remains appointment viewing, a mainline into not just our counterculture, but our culture, still a challenge to the powerful, especially folks like me.
And yet, even after all these years, Lorne jokes that his tombstone should bear just a single word that is often found in the show's reviews: "Uneven."
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: As a current U.S. senator would say, doggone it, Lorne, that's why people like you.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: He's produced -- he produced a senator, too. It's pretty impressive.
Ellen DeGeneres has a way of making you laugh about some thing, rather than at someone, except when I danced on her show. She laughed at me.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: But that's OK.
It's easy to forget now, when we have come so far, where now marriage is equal under the law, just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages almost 20 years ago, just how important it was, not just to the LGBT community, but for all of us, to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister, challenge our own assumptions, remind us that we have more in common than we realize, push our country in the direction of justice.
What an incredible burden that was to bear, to risk your career like that. People don't do that very often, and then to have the hopes of millions on your shoulders.
But it's like Ellen says. We all want a tortilla chip that can support the weight of guacamole, which really makes no sense to me.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: But I thought it would break the mood, because I was getting -- I was getting kind of choked up.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: And she did pay a price. We don't remember this. I hadn't remembered it. She did for a pretty long stretch of time, even in Hollywood.
And yet, today, every day, in every way, Ellen counters what too often divides us with the countless things that bind us together, inspires us to be better one joke, one dance at a time.
When the candidate wins his race in the iconic 1972 film of the same name, which continues, by the way, for those of you who haven't seen it, and many of you are too young to be, perhaps, the best movie about what politics is actually like ever, he famously asks his campaign manager the reflective and revealing question, "What do we do now?"
And like the man he played in that movie, Robert Redford has figured it out and applied his talent and charm to achieve success. We admire Bob not just for his remarkable acting, but for having figured out what to do next.
He created a platform for independent filmmakers with the Sundance Institute. He has supported
