Back when the Apollo astronauts were feted as heroes for pushing out into other worlds, a hero of another breed landed in Washington to be recognized for his high service to this one. Sir Kenneth Clark (1903-1983), the eminent British art historian, was invited to the National Gallery to accept a medal for Distinguished Service to Education in Art. The medal was not a surprise. The frenzied throngs who shattered the serenity of those stately halls to welcome him, though, were: “For God’s sake, don’t go in through the front door,” the new director of the gallery, J. Carter Brown, warned Clark before he arrived for the event. “You’ll be mobbed.”

Before making his remarks to what he had thought might be an appreciative klatsch of art devotees and Washington socialites, Clark, a genially private man, was made to walk the entire length of the gallery to thunderously reverberant cheers; by the time he reached the speaker’s platform, surprised and shaken, tears poured down his cheeks. At that moment, he later wrote, he felt like nothing so much as “some visitor to a plague-stricken country who has been mistaken for a doctor.” It was a strange kind of tribute to come to such a man at such a time.