Arms Control, Security Affairs Experts Accept Medal of Freedom From Reagan

President Reagan on Thursday presented the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to arms control adviser Paul H. Nitze and to Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, a Los Angeles couple who specialize in national security affairs.

In a White House ceremony, Reagan lauded the three medal recipients for their “great contributions to the security of the United States.” Nitze and the Wohlstetters are “the innovators who are leading mankind to the next step forward--peace based on protection, rather than on retaliation,” he said.

Nitze, whose career has spanned nine presidencies, is now a special adviser to Reagan who possesses what the President called “unmatched experience and expertise.” He formerly served as secretary of the Navy and headed the U.S. delegation at the 1981-83 talks with the Soviet Union on intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Albert Wohlstetter, described by Reagan as “influential in helping to design and deploy our strategic forces,” is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and is president of the European-American Institute for Security Research. Roberta Wohlstetter is the author of an award-winning book on apparent U.S. intelligence failures that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Advisers to Kennedy

Both Wohlstetters, who also have written on such issues as terrorism and nuclear deterrence, were advisers to President John F. Kennedy during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

In accepting the medal, Nitze told Reagan that he has “really a marvelous team helping you on foreign policy” and “a most able team of negotiators in Geneva” at U.S.-Soviet arms control talks.

Albert Wohlstetter, meanwhile, said he was proud to receive the award “from a President who’s stressed that it’s freedom that we’re defending, that we have to defend it without bringing on a holocaust that would end both free and unfree societies.”

The Medal of Freedom, given in recognition of contributions to the national interest or national security in a variety of fields, is presented at the discretion of the President.