Justin Dart dreams big: Love, empowerment, truth, freedom and justice for all. But the great orator of the disability rights movement also has struggled with his own pettiness. "When I was a businessman and athlete in the '50s," he says, "I thought that disability rights activists were a bunch of old ladies talking about infirmities, while I was out doing important, macho things."

Now Dart, 67, a full-time independent advocate in Washington, D.C., admits his faults like a fallen evangelist. "I made every fashionable mistake--alcohol, prescription drugs, womanizing, divorces, bad mouthing, big mouthing, bad parenting and outrageous self-advertising."

His turnaround couldn't be more dramatic. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Bill Clinton presented Dart the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award for service to the country. The award honors Dart as a leading architect of the Americans With Disabilities Act and a driving force behind its passage.

"Justin Dart," declares the certificate, "has earned our thanks for helping us to realize the possibility within each individual and for tenaciously advocating equal access to the American Dream for all our people."

Seeds of Awareness

Dart's grandfather lived the American Dream to the hilt. He started Walgreen's drugstores and got very rich, very fast. The Walgreens' daughter, Ruth, grew up extremely wealthy, but surprised everyone by becoming an avant-garde intellectual, a passionately independent thinker. She married Justin Dart Sr., a conservative businessman, and had two sons, Justin Jr. in 1930 and Peter in 1932.

Justin Dart Jr. spent his youth playing the rotten little rich boy--hurling insults at anyone who would listen and, among other accomplishments, breaking Humphrey Bogart's demerit record at Andover prep school. He abandoned his obnoxious antics--but not his basic rebelliousness--only after a near-fatal bout with polio in 1948. He emerged from the hospital humbled by the kindness he received there and by his new status as a wheelchair-user in a land of conformity.

Dart was 20 years old and lost. He felt pressured by his father to continue on the elite track, but he needed to assert his independence. "I was searching for something to believe in," he says. What he found was Gandhi's book, My Experiments With Truth. "As a person who was assaulted from every side with everybody telling me what to do--different, conflicting things--here's what I was looking for," he says. "It gave me a vision, a passionate vision that permeated my whole consciousness and still does. It's a pretty simple idea--to find your own personal truth and live it--but it takes a lifetime of experimentation."

Empowered by his new philosophy, Dart distanced himself from his family and its money. He threw himself into his education, formed an organization for racial desegregation at the University of Houston, and co-founded a progressive political party called the Harris County Democrats.

But social change rarely comes quickly. Impatient, Dart decided to pursue his goals through business. He sought a position with Rexall Drug and Chemical, but was rejected by its president--his father--as unproven in management. Frustrated, Dart borrowed $35,000 for his own enterprise--two bowling alleys--which he sold for a profit in 1961.

His success didn't go unnoticed. Dart's father soon tapped him for a risky venture overseas: launching Japan Tupperware. Dart made good in two short years, growing the company from four employees to 25,000. But the corporate life led him astray.

"I got off the Gandhi track and I got on the Donald Trump track," Dart says. "I told myself that this was my truth, so I'm going to go along with the system and infiltrate it with a more profound truth. But I found that I was conning myself and I was just doing the ordinary thing: being flamboyant and doing photo ops, making money by any means, drinking and chasing women."

Dart failed to fulfill the macho stereotype completely. He promoted female executives--a radical policy in Japan--employed formerly institutionalized paraplegics and sponsored a wheelchair basketball team. When he resigned from Japan Tupperware, he started a greeting card company that benefited people with disabilities.

Still, the flashy lifestyle was at odds with his humanitarian urges. The press called him St. Justin in a Wheelchair, but Dart knew he was a fake. And after a 1966 media event at a Saigon "institution" for children with polio--a 15,000-square foot pavilion with a tin roof and a concrete floor--his self-disgust became intolerable.

"The floor of the whole place was covered with children ages 4 to 10, with bloated stomachs and matchstick limbs," he recalls. "They were starving to death and lying in their own urine and feces, covered with flies. A little girl reached up to me and looked into my eyes. I automatically took her hand and my photographer took pictures. She had the most serene look I have ever seen--and it penetrated to the deepest part of my consciousness. I thought, here is a person almost dead, and she knows it. She's reaching out for God and has found a counterfeit saint doing a photo op. I was engulfed by the devastating perception that I have met real evil, and I am a part of it. The way I'm living and dealing with disability is killing this little girl. I'm going to go to my hotel, drink Johnnie Walker, eat a steak, and this picture is going to be in some magazine. I told [my fiancée] Yoshiko, 'We cannot go on as we have been. Our lives have got to mean something. We have got to get into this fight and stop this evil.'"

Society and Self

Shortly after his revelation, Dart and Yoshiko got married and retreated to a remote Japanese farmhouse with no indoor plumbing, where--in between foreign travels--they studied philosophy and politics for six years. It was a lesson in simple living, a detox from drugs and society, a "Revolution in I Universe."

"We became comrades in the fight for social justice and an attempt to be better human beings," says Yoshiko Dart. "We didn't know exactly what our best talent was--what way we could contribute most in this society. But after all the reading, traveling and writing, Justin realized that for all the things that we criticize about our parents or our government or our business, the change must begin with me, with I. We call it Revolution in I Universe."

Today, Dart hammers this point in his speeches. "Society is nothing more than what you do and say every day. When you speak, society speaks. When you change, society changes."

In an attempt to live these words, the Darts began foster-parenting young people with disabilities or "some kind of trouble that doesn't fit society." Over the next 30 years, 80 foster daughters and two foster sons graduated from the Darts' kitchen-table independent living program.

Ironically, Dart wasn't yet ready to join the independent living movement. He moved back to the States after his mother's death in 1974, and vowed to use his inheritance for the struggle, but he avoided joining any groups. Finally, after getting nowhere alone, he moved from Seattle to Austin, Texas, where in 1978 he connected with the disability rights vanguard and co-founded an independent living center. He sought the advice of experienced leaders in the movement, including its "father" and "mother," Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann. "They took me to kindergarten," he says.

Dart was a quick study, and he spent the 1980s as a government appointee in posts that included vice chair of the National Council on Disability, head of the Rehabilitation Services Administration (from which President Reagan asked him to resign for pointing out its paternalism) and chair of the President's Committee on Employment of People With Disabilities. All tallied, Dart held five gubernatorial, one congressional and five presidential appointments in the area of disability policy.

Predictably, he aspired to be more than a policy wonk. Many of his reports and recommendations helped shape the ADA, but he poured his real energy into ensuring its passage. Wearing his now-famous ADA cowboy hat, he visited every state several times, spoke at every possible forum and haunted the halls of Capitol Hill. He became a nagging conscience to the nation.

His relentless advocacy--along with the work of many others--finally paid off with the signing of the ADA in 1990. Afterward, members of Congress are said to have joked, "We had to pass the ADA to get that hat out of the halls."

The Weight of the World

With his record of civil rights advocacy, it's easy to forget that Dart considers himself a Republican. But that doesn't mean he buys the conservative rhetoric--the GOP's "Contract With America" hit Dart hard, and he grew alarmed by his party's efforts to amend the ADA.

So in 1993, Dart resigned from the President's Committee on Employment to spend his time holding ground against the country's swing to the right. Once again an independent advocate, he defended the ADA, joined the fight for universal health care and canceled his own Blue Cross policy in protest of elitism. In the '96 election campaign, he publicly endorsed President Clinton.

Was it the right choice? The ADA stands, and Dart has no regrets.

Today, Dart and Yoshiko work through Justice for All--an organization he co-founded in 1995 to serve as a communication base for grass-roots organizers and a lobbying force in Washington, and funds with his own money. When he's not traveling for the cause, he's reading and writing in his modest two-bedroom apartment, looking up from time to time at his photo of Gandhi or the picture of his brother, Peter, who apparently took his own life after a long struggle with disabilities from polio and a head injury.

"That shocked me," Dart says, "because when I was out preaching to the world about empowerment and independence, my own brother needed my attention, didn't get it and died."

At first Dart told himself that his brother had rejected him, so what could he have done? "And then I'd say, 'Bullshit, Justin: You could have reached out.'" Ironically, on the day Peter died, Justin had arranged for him to go to the independent living center for a review because family members had alerted him to Peter's distress.

"I was too late," Dart says. "I'm looking at his picture right nowñI have it up over my desk to remind me about my life-and-death responsibilities to real people. And that it does make a difference what I do. I also keep it up there to remind me when I get all these awards and hear all this praise from people, there's a case where I could have exercised more responsibility and I didn't, because it wasn't real comfortable."

The Price of Freedom

Dart is willing to shoulder tremendous responsibility without asking much credit for it. Last month, after receiving the Freedom Medal and descending the dais, he took off the medal and put it around Yoshiko's neck. It was a quintessential Dart gesture, at once humble and flamboyant, but ultimately sincere.

"I got very emotional," says Yoshiko. "We have lived together and fought for justice together. He really showed his love and respect and appreciation to me in that way. And not just as his wife, but as a comrade and soldier together in the struggle."

The Darts went on to thank all those who have worked for empowerment. To everyone in the movement, Justin says: "This is your medal. I am so proud to be one of you. I will fight at your side until the last breath."

Some are worried that that day may come too soon. In December, Dart had a massive heart attack, and his health has been failing ever since. He left the hospital, against doctor's orders, to assert the right of people with disabilities to live and die at home.

"We should have the same funding, the same social and moral support, to live and die in our homes that we have to be incarcerated in nursing homes and hospitals," Dart says. "I might live a little longer in the hospital, but I make what may be my final protest. A responsible society should enable people to be full partners in their health care, in their own homes."

Does Dart ever feel overwhelmed by the responsibility he takes for creating a responsible society?

"I do," he says. "But then I think of Ed Roberts dreaming up a revolution of independence in his iron lung, and I think of many others on my list of empowering people, and I just can't very well feel sorry for myself. These are big responsibilities, but they're responsibilities that we have to take."