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14 September 1964
The honor: The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, was awarded by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., on 14 September 1964 — following, in the university's own account, his work with the United States Commission on Civil Rights, on which he had served since its creation in 1957. Hesburgh was then in the thirteenth year of his thirty-five as president of the University of Notre Dame (1952–1987). The tie is a seated one, stated with its boundary: Hesburgh was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1917, and the presidency that the medal honored was exercised on a campus that stands in the unincorporated Notre Dame CDP adjoining this city, where he lived, worked, and in 2015 died. South Bend's claim is the seat, and it is a real one — the medal came to the man at the desk from which he ran the institution this region is known by — but it is the university's ground, and the ledger prints the boundary with the honor.
Sources:
- University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh memorial record (hesburgh.nd.edu) — the Medal of Freedom awarded by President Johnson on September 14, 1964, following the Civil Rights Commission work.
- Congressional Record, 27 June 2000 — "In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson awarded him the Medal of Freedom."
- University of Notre Dame obituary of Father Hesburgh, 27 February 2015 — the Syracuse birth, the 1952–1987 presidency, the death at Notre Dame.