The president of the Republic of France, Jacques Chirac, awarded Hoover Institution senior fellow Dennis L. Bark the Knight's Cross of the National Légion of Honor of the Republic of France (Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur).
The presentation was made on October 4 by the Count Olivier de Sugny, Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, at the Chateau de Genétines in the department of the Loire.
Monsieur Bertrand Landrieu, director of the Cabinet of the Office of President Chirac, announced the honor in a letter to Bark:
This prestigious distinction, whose title he [President Chirac] wishes to confer from the personal reserve of medals of the president, is in recognition of the quality of the services you have provided to our country, and in recognition of the attachment you have always shown to it.
Monsieur Jacques Chirac has requested me to transmit his most cordial congratulations for this tribute, so well deserved, which France is able to demonstrate in this way.
Bark, in his letter of response, wrote, in part:
The commitment of the heritage of liberty shared by France and the United States is of an abiding nature, a friendship which began with Benjamin Franklin's first visit to Paris in the eighteenth century.
Today America continues to recognize the enduring consequence of this friendship; it was a deliberate choice to name the square opposite the White House in Washington, D.C., after Lafayette. This friendship applies to France in equal measure; it is not an accident that the ties which unite two great countries were given unique meaning by France's gift of the Statue of Liberty that has stood at the entrance to the harbor of New York City for more than a century. And both countries share a love of freedom symbolized by the American flag that flies at the French grave of Lafayette in the cemetery of Picpus in Paris.
Bark has specialized in European affairs since he came to the Hoover Institution in 1970 on a postdoctoral fellowship. His book on the postwar history of Germany (1989), coauthored with David Gress, was published in a French translation in 1992 by the distinguished French publisher Robert Laffont.
In 1997, Bark served as editor and contributor to the volume Reflections on Europe: Half a Century of the European-American Relationship, which also contained essays from scholars in England, France, Germany, and the United States.
More recently, Bark participated in a conference cosponsored by the Institution with the Club Temoin of Paris, held in December 2000 in the Palais de Luxembourg, hosted by the president of the French senate. The subject of the conference was Franco-American cooperation and the French Resistance during World War II.
In 1997, Bark received the Knight's Cross of the Legion of Merit (Das Bundesverdienstkreuz Erste Klasse der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) from the president of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs.
