Trump awards Army Gen. Jack Keane the Medal of Freedom
President Trump on Tuesday awarded the Medal of Freedom to retired Gen. Jack Keane, a native New Yorker raised on the Lower East Side.
Keane, a Fox News analyst and retired four-star Army general, left the military in 2003 but remained involved in counterinsurgency planning, including in the early 2000s as a White House adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Jack has given me a lot of good advice, too,” Trump said in the White House East Room. “Jack Keane is a visionary, a brilliant strategist and an American hero.”
The president gave Keane an emphatic handshake instead of the more fashionable coronavirus “elbow bump” that many attendees used to greet one another at the event.
Keane, accepting the nation’s highest civilian honor, recalled his “working class Catholic” upbringing in New York and said he learned “the value of life” during the Vietnam War.
After attending scores of funerals for Pentagon coworkers killed on 9/11, he was assigned to liaise with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to provide military support.
“It was personal and I was angry and despite having left the Army 17 years ago, I never left the 9/11 wars and America’s focus on radical Islam and what they did to us,” Keane said.
The general praised Trump’s military buildup and thanked Trump for a “touching and personal phone call” recently. The event was attended by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr.