“When Corporal Rubin’s battalion found itself ambushed by thousands of Chinese troops,” the president said at a White House ceremony, “the Americans’ firepower soon dwindled to a single machine gun. The weapon was in an exposed position and three soldiers had already died manning it. That was when Corporal Rubin stepped forward. He fought until his ammunition was gone. He was badly wounded, captured and sent to a P.O.W. camp.”

The episode the president — it was George W. Bush — was describing with frank astonishment and admiration took place at Unsan, North Korea, in the fall of 1950. In a long-overdue tribute, he was speaking more than half a century later, on Sept. 23, 2005, as he prepared to present Tibor Rubin, then 76 years old, with the Medal of Honor.

There was much more to Mr. Bush’s encomium that day, but even he did not tell the whole story of the remarkable courage and forbearance of a Hungarian-born American hero, a man who joined the United States Army to thank the nation and the troops that rescued him from the concentration camp where he had been imprisoned as a teenager, and for whom recognition was delayed for decades because he happened to be Jewish.

Corporal Rubin, who was known familiarly as Ted, had lived quietly in Southern California since the end of the Korean War, mostly working in a liquor store owned by his brother Emery. He was 86 when he died on Saturday at his home in Garden Grove, Calif., a nephew, Robert Huntly, said.