Legendary guitarist Chuck Berry, actor Clint Eastwood and tenor Angela Lansbury and ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov were also honored during the 2000 Kennedy Center Honors at a White House reception.
“Each in their own way, tonight’s honorees have brought to a venerable art form a spark of the new and unexpected, and each has left it more modern, more brilliant and forever changed for the better,” said Glenn Close, actor Goldie Hawn.
Eastwood, who bucked the system by wearing a white tie at the black tie event, was regarded by Clinton as “a star for the ages.”
The president also drew laughs from the audience with a political pun about Domingo, saying: “He has always been more than a voice, as a young man he prepared for later life in Washington as an amateur bullfighter.”
