Denzel Washington received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden during a January 4 ceremony at the White House, where he was described as a generational talent and national role model.

“The admiration of audiences and peers is only exceeded by that of the countless young people he inspires,” the White House citation read. “With unmatched dignity, extraordinary talent, and unflinching faith in God and family, Denzel Washington is a defining character of the American story.”

Washington was one of 19 “truly extraordinary people” Biden recognized for “their sacred effort to shape the culture and the cause of America.” World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and primatologist Jane Goodall were among the other honorees.

The award was a year and a half in the making for Washington, whose many honors include two Academy Awards, a Tony Award, two Golden Globes, and the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award. He had been slated to receive the medal from Biden in July 2022, but a case of COVID-19 kept him from attending the ceremony that year.

This year’s honor comes on the heels of his starring role in the film Gladiator II, and as he prepares to return to Broadway to star alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in a revival of Shakespeare’s Othello. Performances are scheduled to begin on February 24 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Washington last played Shakespeare’s “noble Moor” five decades ago, as a Fordham senior. He starred in a March 1977 production of the play at the University’s Lincoln Center campus, about a dozen blocks north of where he’ll reprise the role next month.

Fordham Roots—and a Legacy of Giving Back

Washington grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, not far from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. He has often said that he “kind of backed into” acting—and fell in love with it—during his time at the University.

One of the first people on campus to recognize Washington’s potential was English professor Robert Stone. Decades earlier, he had acted with the legendary Paul Robeson in a Broadway production of Othello.

“Denzel gave the best performance of Othello I’d ever seen,” Stone told Fordham Magazine in 1990, referring to the 1977 Fordham production. “He has something which even Robeson didn’t have … not only beauty but love, hatred, majesty, violence.”

Since his college days, Washington has become a Hollywood and Broadway legend, deeply respected not only as an actor but also as a producer and director.

No matter how many accolades he amasses, however, he makes time to give back: For more than 25 years, he’s served as national spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. And he gives to the Fordham community. In 2011, he made a $2 million gift to endow the Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre and a $250,000 gift to establish the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholarship for an undergraduate student studying theatre at Fordham.

Through the chair, scholarship, and campus visits, Washington has been a mentor to young Fordham artists.

Eric Lawrence Taylor, FCLC ’18, a former recipient of the Denzel Washington Endowed Scholarship, described the actor’s subtle mentoring style best in a 2018 interview: “In a very cool, non-publicity-seeking way, Denzel Washington has been mentoring artists of color for a long time,” he said, “and really providing space for a lot of us to succeed.”

VIDEO: Watch Denzel Washington Receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Fordham’s 6 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients

The Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor—is presented to individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, to world peace, or to other significant societal, public, or private endeavors.

Washington is now the sixth Fordham graduate to receive the medal since 1963, when it was established by President John F. Kennedy. Here are Fordham’s other honorees:

Cardinal Terence Cooke: A New York City native, Cooke was ordained a Catholic priest in 1945 by Fordham graduate Cardinal Francis Spellman, archbishop of New York. He taught at the University’s Graduate School of Social Service during the 1950s and earned a master’s degree from Fordham in 1957. After Cardinal Spellman’s death in 1968, Cooke was named archbishop of New York and, later, military vicar to the U.S. armed forces.

President Ronald Reagan honored him posthumously in April 1984, six months after Cardinal Cooke died of leukemia at age 62, calling him a “man of compassion, courage, and personal holiness.”

Sister M. Isolina Ferré: Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1914, the youngest daughter of one of the island’s wealthiest families, Ferré entered the Missionary Servants of the Holy Trinity in 1935. In the 1950s, her work as a nun brought her to New York. She earned a master’s degree in sociology from Fordham in 1961 while gaining national recognition for her work with Puerto Rican youth gangs in Brooklyn. She later established community aid centers in Ponce, and in 1988 founded Trinity College of Puerto Rico, a school that provides leadership and vocational training.

President
 Bill Clinton honored her in August 1999, praising her ability to combine “her deep religious faith with her compassionate and creative advocacy for the disadvantaged.”

Irving R. Kaufman: A 1931 Fordham Law School graduate, Kaufman is perhaps best known as the federal judge who sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death on April 5, 1951. But he also ruled in some landmark First Amendment, antitrust, and civil rights cases during four decades on the bench.

When he died in 1992 at age 81,
 The New York Times wrote, “It was Judge Kaufman’s hope that he would 
be remembered for his role not in the Rosenberg case, the espionage trial of the century, but as the judge whose order was the first to desegregate a public school 
in the North, who was instrumental 
in streamlining court procedures, who rendered innovative decisions in antitrust law and, most of all, whose rulings expanded the freedom of the press.”

President Ronald Reagan honored Kaufman in 1987 for his “exemplary service to our country” and “his multifaceted effort to promote an understanding of the law and our legal tradition.”

Jack Keane: A retired four-star U.S. Army general and widely respected national security and foreign policy expert, Keane grew up in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He began his military career at Fordham as a cadet in the University’s Army ROTC program. After graduating in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, he served as a platoon leader and company commander during the Vietnam War, where he was decorated for valor. A career paratrooper, he rose to command the 101st Airborne Division and the 18th Airborne Corps before he was named vice chief of staff of the Army in 1999. Since retiring in 2003, he has often provided expert testimony to Congress. He received the Fordham Founder’s Award in 2004, and he is a Fordham trustee fellow.

President Donald Trump honored Keane in 2020, lauding him as “a visionary, a brilliant strategist, and an American hero.”

Vin Scully: A 1949 Fordham graduate, Scully is best known for his nearly seven-decade stint as voice of the Dodgers—first in Brooklyn, later in Los Angeles—and widely considered one of the best sports broadcasters of all time. He got his start at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, announcing football, basketball, and baseball games before joining the Dodgers broadcast team in 1950. Scully was inducted into the broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, and Fordham presented him with an honorary degree in 2000.

President Barack Obama honored Scully in 2016. “Vin taught us the game and introduced us to its players. He narrated the improbable years, the impossible heroics, [and] turned contests into conversations,” Obama said.

On Oct. 31, administrators from both schools met at the Rose Hill campus with Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham, and the executor of Scully’s estate to accept the gift to the University and to speak to the importance of Scully’s legacy. “With this gift, we celebrate Vin’s talents and fundamental decency, and teach them to the next generation,” Tetlow said.

“He loved these schools, and this is a way for him to express his gratitude,” said the executor, Edward White, during the meeting. He visited both schools to go over the gifts, which can be used however each institution sees fit.

Also on hand to celebrate the gift were Ed Kull, Fordham’s athletic director, and Chuck Singleton, general manager of WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, where Scully worked as a student broadcaster before gaining renown as the Voice of the Dodgers, the baseball franchise that moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles in 1957.

Sometimes referred to as the Velvet Voice, Scully was beloved for his eloquence and iconic style as an announcer, and provided inspiration for generations of sports broadcasters. Scully served the Dodgers for 67 years, retiring in 2016. He was 94 at the time of his passing on August 2.

His many awards and honors include induction into the University’s Hall of Honor and into the broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, as well as a Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by President Barack Obama in 2016.

On Nov. 1, Scully was honored with a video tribute at WFUV’s annual On the Record awards dinner. On March 20, he will be honored with a posthumous Founder’s Award at the 2023 Fordham Founder’s Dinner, to be held at The Glasshouse in Manhattan, with Scully’s family accepting the award on his behalf. Two days later, on March 22, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, will celebrate a memorial Mass in Scully’s honor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 10 a.m.

In addition, the press box at Houlihan Park at Jack Coffey Field will be renamed in Scully’s honor, among other initiatives to honor his legacy, the University announced on Nov. 14.

Setting the Tone

The son of Irish immigrants, Vincent Edward Scully graduated from Fordham Prep in 1944 and went on to call baseball, basketball, and football games for WFUV—which was founded during his student years at Fordham College at Rose Hill.

“WFUV turns 75 this fall, and in the beginning, there was Vin Scully,” Singleton said. “Vin set the tone in 1947, and his influence echoes today in the quality work of WFUV’s talented young sports journalists.”

Scully kept up with Fordham over the years, taking interviews from FUV student journalists, hosting some workshops for them, and returning to campus as commencement speaker in 2000 and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University. His presence is also felt in Fordham athletics, since he played for the baseball team as a student.

In remarks after the meeting, Kull said Scully was “more than just a voice; he was an institution and a true master of his craft.”

“The impact he made on not only baseball, but the entire sports media industry, is humbling,” Kull said. “His story, with his Fordham and Bronx roots, continues to inspire our Rams and the entire Fordham family.”

A Bond with Fordham

Scully’s Fordham baseball career included a game against Yale, whose team included a future U.S. president, George H.W. Bush. When Bush was president, he met Scully for golf and later sent him a framed photo taken of them, White noted at the meeting.

“He frequently spoke very fondly of his experience at WFUV, and always felt that he was a part of the Fordham family … and wanted to contribute equally to Fordham Prep and Fordham University, which is exactly what he did,” said White, Scully’s business manager and friend for over 40 years, after the meeting.

“As a lifelong Catholic, he had a deep appreciation for the faith foundation provided at this exceptional Jesuit institution,” said White, senior partner with Edward White & Co., LLP, in Woodland Hills, California. He noted that Scully sponsored him during his own conversion to Catholicism. “He loved the foundation that he received, spiritually and academically. Every time he spoke of Fordham, it was glowing.”

He sometimes glimpsed Scully’s kindness and generosity—as well as his fame—while traveling with him, along with Scully’s late wife, Sandra, and his own wife, Mary White, who also attended the Oct. 31 meeting.

“Wherever we went, he was so well received, and so appreciated and so loved, and people would oftentimes stand in line to see if they couldn’t get his autograph or if they could have a photograph of him,” White said. “He was very thoughtful and compassionate to everyone. Whether he was speaking to a parking attendant or a most senior person [in politics]or in the commercial world, he treated everyone equally.”

During his trip to New York, White attended another event with a small Fordham connection—a Nov. 1 ceremony in which another client of his, the late singer and actress Lena Horne, a 1997 Fordham honorary degree recipient, became the first Black woman to have a Broadway theater named after her.

It was a joy to see where Scully attended school, White said. “He was truly a wonderful, giving, loving human being. We all loved him. We miss him indeed.”

“General, you will be remembered as one of the finest and most dedicated soldiers in a long and storied history of the United States military, no question about it,” the president said after describing Keane’s distinguished 38-year Army career stretching from his time as a cadet in the Fordham ROTC program to the Vietnam War to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Among other achievements, Trump said, Keane “designed new training methods to ensure that military leaders would always be extremely well prepared for the intensity of combat command,” and also designed “state-of-the-art” counterinsurgency combat training for both urban and rugged environments.

In his own remarks, Keane said he was “deeply honored by this extraordinary award.”

“To receive it here in the White House, surrounded by family, by friends, and by senior government officials, is really quite overwhelming, and you can hear it in my voice,” he said. “I thank God for guiding me in the journey of life,” he said, also mentioning his “two great loves”—his wife Theresa, or Terry, who died in 2016, and the political commentator and author Angela McGlowan, “who I will love for the remainder of my life.”

“With all honesty, I wouldn’t be standing here without their love and their devotion,” he said.

Fordham Ties

Keane is the sixth Fordham graduate to receive the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The most recent alumni recipient was sportscaster Vin Sully, FCRH ’49, awarded the medal by President Barack Obama in 2016.

Keane has advised President Trump and has often provided expert testimony to Congress since retiring as vice chief of staff of the Army in 2003. He is a Fordham trustee fellow and a 2004 recipient of the Fordham Founder’s Award.

Keane grew up in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and was the first member of his family to attend college. He had 16 years of Catholic education, including his time at Fordham, where there was a prevailing idea that “you should have a sense of giving things back, and finding ways to do that,” he said in an interview last week on Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson Show.

Six other Fordham alumni, including some who were his contemporaries at Fordham, attended the ceremony. One of them, Joe Jordan, GABELLI ’74, said he’s impressed with how Keane, on television, “can say so much in such a short time that makes sense.”

“He attributes a lot of it to the philosophy courses he took at Fordham,” said Jordan, an author and speaker specializing in financial services who met Keane about 15 years ago, when he was a senior executive at MetLife and Keane was on the board. “He’s a guy who’s extremely successful, extremely humble, has a common touch, and always remembers his friends and attributes a lot of his success not to himself but to the people around him, and the people who helped form him.”

Also in attendance was retired General Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, who has appeared at Fordham events, including the International Conference on Cyber Security.

Turning Points

Keane earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1966. He became a career paratrooper, going to Vietnam to serve with the 101st Airborne Division, which he later commanded.

He was decorated for valor in Vietnam, which was a turning point for him, with its close combat in which “death was always a silent companion,” he said.

“It was there I truly learned the value of life, the value of human life—to treasure it, to protect it,” he said in his White House remarks. “The experience crystallized for me the critical importance of our soldiers to be properly prepared with necessary skill and the appropriate amount of will to succeed in combat.”

He said he spent his Army career “among heroes who inspired me, and I’m still in awe of them today.”

“My sergeants, my fellow officers, and my mentors shaped me significantly, and several times they saved me from myself,” he said. “That’s the truth of it.”

The 9/11 attacks were a second major turning point for him, he said. He was in the Pentagon when it was attacked, and helped evacuate the injured. He lost 85 Army teammates, he said, and two days later was dispatched to New York City to take part in the response to the World Trade Center attacks.

“It was personal, and I was angry,” he said. “I could not have imagined that I would stay so involved in national security and foreign policy” after leaving the Army, he said. “My motivation is pretty simple: Do whatever I can, even in a small way, to keep America and the American people safe.”

Watch the ceremony honoring General Keane

Several Fordham alumni attended a reception honoring General Keane on March 10. From left: Scott Hartshorn, GABELLI ’98; Phil Crotty, FCRH ’64; the Rev. Charles Gallagher, FCRH ’06; Paul Decker, GABELLI ’65; Laurie Crotty, GSE ’77; General Jack Keane, GABELLI ’66; and Joe Jordan, GABELLI ’74. On the right is Roger A. Milici, Jr., vice president for development and university relations at Fordham.

Scully, legendary Dodgers broadcaster and 1949 Fordham graduate, will receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom in a special ceremony at the White House this afternoon. The medal is presented to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

Scully joins an illustrious list of recipients, including philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates; basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; NASA scientist Margaret H. Hamilton; and actor Tom Hanks.

“The Presidential Medal of Freedom is not just our nation’s highest civilian honor—it’s a tribute to the idea that all of us, no matter where we come from, have the opportunity to change this country for the better,” President Obama said in a statement.

“From scientists, philanthropists, and public servants to activists, athletes, and artists, these 21 individuals have helped push America forward, inspiring millions of people around the world along the way.”

Watch the live ceremony starting at 2:55 p.m.