Barack Obama has hosted poets, basketball players, bluesmen and many others from a diverse background at the White House this year. But he's never had a group as eclectic as the one gathered in the east room yesterday.
Among them were a veteran of the civil rights movement, a tennis player who advocated gay rights, the last living High Plains Indian war chief and British cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
They were among the first 16 recipients of Obama's presidential medal of freedom, the country's highest civil honour. This was a roll call of Obama's heroes and heroines, people who had resonated throughout his life.
"This is a chance for me and for the United States of America to say thank you to some of the finest citizens of this country, and of all countries," he said.
Obama is often portrayed as one of the most liberal occupants in the history of the White House and the people he chose to award reflected this, champions of civil rights, human rights, gay rights, feminism, and anti-poverty campaigns. In the case of Hawking, it was for overcoming disability to push the boundaries of science.
Hawking, in a wheelchair, lined up with the other recipients on either side of Obama in front of an audience of several hundred.
Obama joked that Hawking had been a "brilliant man but a mediocre student". He went on to praise the author of a Brief History of Time who "from his wheelchair has led us on a journey to the farthest and strangest reaches of to the furthest corners of the cosmos. In so doing, he has stirred our imagination and shown us the power of the human spirit here on earth."
He then bent down to tie the blue and white ribbon round Hawking's neck.
The most striking figure among the 16 was Joseph Medicine Crow, a historian and champion of American Indian culture whose grandfather had been a scout with Custer at the battle of Little Big Horn. He wore a traditional chief's feathered headdress, which made it difficult for Obama to place the medal round his neck.
Obama recounted how Medicine Crow, who became the first member of the Crow tribe to complete higher education, had been a warrior, fighting in the second world war with war paint under his uniform and a feather under his helmet. Among feats that added to his reputation, he stole about 50 horses from an SS unit.
Medicine Crow, who is now in his 90s, failed to stifle a yawn as Obama retold the tales.
Not all the 16 were present. Senator Ted Kennedy, who has championed healthcare reform throughout his career, was too ill to attend and the award was picked up by his daughter, Kara. For Harvey Milk, the gay rights icon who became one of the first openly homosexual men to be elected to public office, it was a posthumous award, as it was for Jack Kemp, the former champion US footballer and Republican congressman.
Milk, whose story was popularised in a film last year starring Sean Penn, was shot dead in 1978 at the age of 48. His nephew, Stuart, picked up the award on his behalf.
Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, tripped as she entered the east room to take her place in the line-up. Her award, as a prominent crusader for women's rights, has been attacked by some Jewish organisations in the US for her criticism of Israel's human rights record.
Others to receive the award included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa; Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman ever on the US supreme court; Reverend Joseph Lowery, the civil rights veteran who led the bus boycotts in Alabama in the 1950s and the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965; Billie Jean King, the tennis player who advanced gay rights by publicly declaring she was a lesbian; and Sidney Poitier, one of the first African-Americans to make it big in Hollywood.
Rounding out the list were Nancy Goodman Brinker, who transformed the US approach to breast cancer; Dr Pedro Jose Greer, who fought to extend medical services to those in Florida who could not afford it; Chita Rivera, the actor famous for West Side Story; Janet Davison Rowley, the scientist for her work on cancer; and Muhammad Yunus, who has helped combat poverty by offering access to credit.
