Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service
Established by the Eisenhower Fellowships’ board of trustees in 1988, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service is awarded annually to a business leader, statesmen, or other public figure who has achieved, through direct personal contacts across boundaries, widely-recognized advances toward President Eisenhower’s vision of peace and productivity through person-to-person international dialogue. The first Eisenhower medals were presented to two of the organization’s founding trustees: Walter H. Annenberg, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, and Thomas J. Watson, Jr., former Chairman of IBM and Ambassador to the Soviet Union, in May 1988. Since then, 20 awards have been presented. Past recipients have included: former U.S. Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; United States Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, U.S. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, and Economist and Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.
The Eisenhower Medal is awarded at a private gala dinner in Philadelphia, where recipients are honored by trustees, sponsors and current Eisenhower Fellows. For the past few years, the medal ceremony has taken place at the annual board of trustees’ dinner, which is held each May at The Rittenhouse Hotel.
