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Each year, on or around the Fourth of July, the President of the United States traditionally awards The Presidential Medal of Freedom to recipients who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural, or other significant public or private endeavors."
The list of recipients of the prize, established by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, is a long one, which can be found on Wikipedia. Winners have included Cesar Chavez, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Barbara Streisand, Joan Ganz Cooney, Ellen de Generes, and Bill Cosby, among others, such as William F. Buckley, Robert Conquest, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Whittaker Chambers.
One name lamentably still missing from the long list of recipients is author and activist David Horowitz, founder of the eponymous David Horowitz Freedom Center, soon to enter his eighth decade of fighting the good fight.
The time has come to right this sin of omission.
Perhaps no living American has done more for the cause of Freedom than David Horowitz.To those who know him, his personal trajectory from Communist Youth to Patriotic Senior Citizen serves as a Pilgrim's Progress towards Freedom, charting a path towards Americanism through tumultuous events the past century. Throughout it all, Horowitz was striving for freedom for himself and his fellow citizens, sometimes making mistakes, but always with his eye on the prize of Freedom. Earlier in his life, David was active in the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements. He went to England to work on the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and was a friend of Isaac Deutscher, as well as a protege of Ralph Milliband, the British Marxist professor, who was father of Labour Party Leader Ed Milliband and brother David Milliband, currently head of the International Rescue Committee. He edited Ramparts Magazine, helped at the founding of the Black Panthers, and In These Times Magazine...and then, after the tragic murder of his bookkeeper Betty Van Patter in 1974, had second thoughts about the road to Freedom he had chosen to take.
With Peter Collier, he published a series of best-selling dynastic biographies of the Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Ford families. Subsequently, he and Collier published an article in the Washington Post under the title "Lefties for Regan" (changed later to "Goodbye to All That"). They concluded:
One of the few saving graces of age is a deeper perspective on the passions of youth. Looking back on the left's revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years, we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: that we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse -- much worse. This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime's experience, it seems about right.After that, he dedicated himself to fighting Communism, and after the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11, its partner totalitarian ideology, Islamic Fundamentalism.
In addition to a lengthy list of publications, studies, and memoirs, including the 9-volume Black Book of the American Left, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has supported American freedom fighters through websites, conferences, events and videos, providing intellectual, moral, and tactical support to beleaguered patriots in a hostile cultural climate.
Last but certainly not least, he wrote THE BIG AGENDA: President Trumps Plan to Save America in 2017, a New York Times Bestseller, and one of the first books to explain how "Americans could roll up their sleeves and begin the hard work of restoring the nation to greatness again."
One could go on and on, but the bottom line is that no other American better personifies the pathway to patriotism than David Horowitz--who abandoned Communist totalitarianism, race-hatred, and anti-Americanism in order to champion the cause of Freedom and Love of Country and preserve, protect, and defend the USA--at the risk of his own life and limb (he needs a bodyguard to speak on college campuses).
For his supreme dedication to Freedom, as well as lifelong record of writing, scholarship, service, and activism, David Horowitz deserves to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the Trump Administration.
