The question of presidential involvement is worth noting carefully, as the prompt guardrails require. Various popular accounts credit President Jimmy Carter with the restoration, and the 1977 date falls within the first year of his administration. However, at least one historical account suggests this attribution is probably incorrect or at least imprecise, and that neither the Ford administration nor the Carter administration was specifically the driving force behind the restoration — rather, it was the Army bureaucratic process, the Board for Correction of Military Records, and the recommendation that came from that board to Army Secretary Alexander. The formal legal act was Alexander’s signing of the order, acting on the board’s recommendation. Whatever the precise allocation of credit across the various actors in the federal government in 1977, the documented action was Alexander’s.
The Washington Post covered the story with a June 11, 1977, article titled “Medal of Honor Is Restored To Civil War Woman Doctor.” The restoration came fifty-eight years after Walker’s death and sixty years after the rescission.
## The Specific Language of the Citation
The original 1865 Medal of Honor citation for Mary Edwards Walker is worth examining for what it actually says, because the tension between that language and the rationale for the 1917 rescission is instructive.
The citation credited her with “devoted loyalty to her country, even while a prisoner of war.” It acknowledged her service as “assistant surgeon in charge of female prisoners of Louisville, Kentucky,” her care for “the sick and wounded,” and her work during four months as a prisoner of war. It was a citation for sustained service, sustained endurance, and sustained loyalty rather than for a specific act of battlefield valor.