'Humbled' Spielberg accepts Liberty Medal

Steven Spielberg has grown accustomed to praise.

One of the world's most successful filmmakers, ever, anywhere, he has received Oscars and honorary doctorates, won awards for public service and humanitarianism, and been granted nearly every superlative a man of art, thought, and heart could imagine. But he still seemed sincerely moved last night to be joining the ranks of the distinguished recipients of Philadelphia's Liberty Medal.

"I am very, very genuinely humbled by this," Spielberg said after bowing his head so former President Bill Clinton, chairman of the National Constitution Center, could slip on the red, white, and blue ribbon with the heavy medallion.

The 90-minute ceremony was punctuated with clips from some of Spielberg's most moving films. And in the speeches, he was lauded indirectly for sharing the same kind of nobility with the protagonists in his movies.

On the screen, the audience viewed one of the final scenes from Schindler's List, in which Ben Kingsley's character tells Oskar Schindler, "You did so much."

The echo was unmistakable when Mayor Nutter told Spielberg, "You have become a global ambassador of hope."

In his remarks, Spielberg, whose early hits include Jaws and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, said that as his career had evolved, he had taken on "darker" subjects. He speculated that this seriousness resulted from his becoming a father and feeling a responsibility to shape the kind of world his seven children will inherit.

"Art is one way the human community remembers what it has been through," he said, and can serve as a mitzvah in "repairing a broken world."

Spielberg, who spent part of his boyhood in Camden County, also made pointed references to the need for government to support the arts. While his films have made him unfathomably wealthy, he said, "I've never believed that the marketplace is a congenial place for all artists," and urged more funding for arts education and for artists who test limits.

He suggested that perhaps government would be more willing to join forces with artists if it recognized that honorable and effective leadership is an art as well.

"Would the Union have endured if Lincoln hadn't been a writer of genius?" he asked, adding that political leaders, like filmmakers, need to maintain "regular honest contact with their own souls."

For most of the event, Spielberg, with his usual gray-bristled beard but missing his trademark baseball cap, sat with his hands folded in his lap before an audience of Holocaust survivors, bankers, World War II veterans, philanthropists, community activists, high school students, and one semiretired federal judge.

He broke into a broad smile when Gov. Rendell recalled Spielberg's father's service in Burma during World War II. Spielberg then laughed when Rendell recalled how, after seeing Jaws, his wife, Marjorie, refused to go into the ocean unless someone else swam interference, someone preferably with more flesh for a shark.

The solemnity was shattered again when Spielberg's friend Whoopi Goldberg praised him for defending the "rights of illegal aliens to phone home" in E.T.

Goldberg, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Spielberg's The Color Purple, described him as "a bit of an alien."

"He knows what it feels like on the other side," she said.

Although Spielberg is most famous for his movies, he was also honored for establishing the Shoah Foundation, an archive of 105,000 hours of testimony from survivors of the Holocaust and of personal histories from those who endured the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Midway through the ceremony, a pianist and a violinist from the Curtis Institute of Music performed the searing theme song from Schindler's List. The ceremony closed with the traditional song "Motherless Child," performed by the folksinger and guitarist Richie Havens.

Watching from a prime spot among the viewers in white chairs on the lawn was Norma Shapiro, senior judge of U.S. District Court. She listened carefully as Clinton described Spielberg as "a man who has always been able to make a simple story . . . and remind us of the greatness in us all."

"Mr. Spielberg is a very worthy recipient," said Shapiro, accompanied by her 17-year-old grandson, Justin.

Shapiro said she had attended numerous Liberty Medal awards. "These events are inspiring," she said. "And it's nice to be inspired."