Last evening, after enduring what seemed like 7 taxing hours at the health care summit, President Barack Obama returned to the White House to preside over the ceremony for the 20 recipients of the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal.
Winners included Bob Dylan, Clint Eastwood, Frank Stella, architect Maya Lin and Elie Wiesel.
Among the humanities honorees was historian Robert A. Caro who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. In his remarks Obama mentioned that he had read Caro’s book when he was 22 and found it “mesmerizing.”
The other historians honored were Annette Gordon-Reed (The Hemingses of Monticello), David Levering Lewis (W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963) and William H. McNeill (Plagues and Peoples).
More on the event in the Washington Post piece, Obama honors leaders in arts and humanities