Concerning the crew that received medals for giving their aircraft to the Chinese...At the time, I was very much against that, and remain so today. Giving medals for not doing your duty cheapens the efforts of others.
My suggestion to another person here on this thread was that perhaps one needed experience and or knowledge of the intelligence gathering service to better view awarding of medals.
Four years ago, I was a guest of NSA for presentation of medals to an aircraft crew that had been shotdown by the Russians in 1952. All of those years our government denied that they had been caught over Russia, the military said they were merely missing on a routine training mission. No medals, nothing.
This crew did what was expected of them, they turned out over the Sea of Japan and the Russian jets sent them into the water. They did their job. No medals, none expected for such a job and none given. I can tell you this, at the time I benefitted from the work of that crew and others like them, thus I was at NSA, with Senators, Congressmen and the military when a handful of surviving family members were presented with medals awarded to those men.
I also alluded to the Silver Star being given to Lyndon Johnson. That affair is a perfect example of how the facts can be distorted to award a medal if that is the desired objective. Johnson was a passenger, received a Silver Star, odd that the crew members recived nothing.