The more you learn about Helen Keller’s life, the more remarkable it seems. The first deaf and blind person in the U.S. to earn a college degree, she also co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 and met every president from the time she was 7 years old until her death more than 80 years later. 

The 13 leaders in question were Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. She met the same number of presidents as Queen Elizabeth II, who met every commander-in-chief from Truman to Joe Biden with the exception of Johnson. LBJ even awarded Keller the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1964. At the ceremony, he described her as “an example of courage to all mankind” who “has devoted her life to illuminating the dark world of the blind and the handicapped.” 

Indeed, Keller often entreated the presidents to advocate for blind people, such as in 1947, when she wrote Truman a letter asking if he would “be so gracious as to send the blind of Japan a message of good-will warm from the heart of America whom you represent.”