a young man in Washington State in 1942, defied the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war against Japan.

Then, lastly, mute, expressionless, still "the Buddha in European clothes," wearing a tuxedo and sunglasses and a whisper-thin moustache: Bob Dylan.

The president chimed in, beaming.

"No one ever picks up a guitar, or fights a disease, or starts a movement, thinking, 'You know what, if I keep this up, in 2012 I could get a medal in the White House from a guy named Barack Obama,' " he said, and everyone laughed.

Pressed against the tapestries, I wondered what the dreams of the honorees had been on the day they turned seven.

Seven-year-old Toni Morrison, then a first-grader named Chloe Wofford at Hawthorne Elementary School in Lorain, Ohio, in 1938, little estimating that oneday there would be a Nobel Prize for literature, or a Toni Morrison Elementary School dedicated in the same town.

Seven-year-old John Glenn, at school in New Concord, Ohio, in 1928, in a luminous haze he fondly would remember decades later, saying, "A boy could not have had a more idyllic early childhood than I did."

Seven-year-old Madeleine Jana Korbel, the daughter of a Czechoslovak diplomat who had escaped the Nazis, growing up in wartime London in 1944, being used in a propaganda film to solicit donations for refugee children, turning seven in the same week the Lancasters obliterate Spinosaurus and her own grandparents, and thousands of other Czech Jews, go bravely singing -- such is the legend -- to the gas chambers.

("Once, at a naturalization ceremony, an Ethiopian man