AWARDED. To the late Whittaker Chambers, onetime TIME editor and confessed Soviet agent whose testimony helped convict Alger Hiss, an ex-State Department official and accused Communist spy, of perjury in 1950; a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award. Chambers, who died in 1961, was one of 14 recipients of this year's medal. Others included the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the late baseball great Jackie Robinson, Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr., Actor James Cagney, Country Singer Tennessee Ernie Ford, Writer Louis L'Amour and the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale.

DIED. David, 12, the longest survivor of severe combined immunodeficiency; 15 days after being released from a lifetime of isolation inside a plastic "bubble"; of complications after a bone-marrow transplant; in Houston (see MEDICINE).

DIED. Ya'acov Levinson, 52, former head of Israel's Bank Hapoalim, who was under police investigation for possible financial irregularities; of a self-inflicted gunshot wound; in Ramat Gan, Israel. The bank, Israel's second largest, has been accused of making questionable transfers of assets to its U.S. subsidiary, Ampal-American Israel Corp. Israeli newspapers have suggested that profits from illegal deals may have been diverted into a Labor Party slush fund. Levinson left a note proclaiming his innocence.

DIED. Mikhail Sholokhov, 78, Soviet author of And Quiet Flows the Don, an epic of Cossack life in the years following the Russian Revolution, and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature; in Veshenskaya, a village 440 miles south of Moscow. Sholokhov's masterpiece, published between 1928 and 1940, was praised by both Western critics and Soviet authorities. A member of the Communist Party since 1932, he publicly denounced dissident Soviet writers, including fellow Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in turn charged Sholokhov with having plagiarized large sections of And Quiet Flows the Don from a lesser-known Cossack writer. Sholokhov's obituary was signed by Soviet Leader Konstantin Chernenko and other top officials.

DIED. Jessamyn West, 81, gentle-spirited novelist and short-story writer, best known for her first collection of stories, The Friendly Persuasion, about a Quaker family on the Indiana frontier during the Civil War; in Napa, Calif. Born into a Quaker family (Richard Nixon is her distant cousin), West set much of her fiction in her native Indiana, although she lived most of her life in California. "I am by all I know a Californian," she once said, "and by all I imagine a Hoosier."