"If there had been a place to hide," said Five-Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 70, after he reviewed 2,500 West Point cadets and heard a citation honoring him, "I would have gone off and bawled like a baby." But Ike stood smartly at attention for 30 minutes, doffed his grey fedora as plumed battalion commanders saluted him with sabers. Later the old grad (class of '15), who made a cadet career of breaking as many Academy rules as he dared, became the fourth man to win the Sylvanus Thayer Medal* (named for a 19th century superintendent known as the Father of the Academy), for "devotion and service to his country." Said Ike, describing the ideals that Thayer handed down to generations of the long grey line: "It's something in the heart. As long as it stays, America will be safe."

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., beefy (6 ft. 4 in., more than 250 lbs.) British Press Lord Cecil Harmsworth King, whose tabloid London Daily Mirror has the world's largest daily circulation though little else to brag about, offered a disdainful critique of U.S. newspapers: "A lot of little parish magazines . . . with acres of soggy verbiage, cubic miles of repetitious reports, incredibly bad headlines, nonexistent layouts and ludicrous handling of pictures."

Luxuriantly bearded Playboy Nubar Gulbenkian, 64, counts his fortune in the millions, not the billions, rates as a bush leaguer next to his father, the late oil-rich Calouste ("Mr. Five Percent")

Gulbenkian. In London last week, Nubar recalled his own pride in closing in two minutes a deal that netted him -L-100,000 ($280,000 at current exchange rates). But Papa Calouste was not impressed: "He said I should have made -L-150,000."

Wistful Anna Maria Alberghetti, who

gave her first concert at six and was a Carnegie Hall sensation at 13, spent years trying to live down her public image as a gaunt, pig-tailed prodigy in knee stockings. So when twelve full months were mistakenly shaved from her age last week, she took the unwomanly step of setting the record straight. Some invitations to her birthday party had made her 24. Anna Maria, the waiflike Lili of the Broadway musical Carnival!, puffed out the candles on her two-tiered cake and announced determinedly: "I'm 25--a quarter of a century old."

Appearing at a panel discussion on Henry Ford's old Fairlane estate (a $5,000,000, 56-room tax headache turned over to the University of Michigan), British Historian Arnold J. Toynbee applied a tidy syllogism to the automaker's most famous pronouncement. "Well," said Toynbee, "Henry Ford is history. History is bunk. Therefore, by his logic, he is bunk."

Decked out in a black toga, a gold cape and a reddish-orange cap that looked like a cross between a Russian astrakhan hat and a medieval tilting helmet--or perhaps a lamp shade--pear-shaped West German Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard bounced onstage at the University of Madrid to receive an honorary degree. Even the sobersided Frankfurter Allgemeine tittered: "The cap, obviously styled for Spanish heads, only partially accommodated German proportions." Having unexpectedly stung Senate Republican Leader Everett M: Dirksen by accusing him of "pompous verbosity," evidently convinced that "Old Bear Grease" enjoyed his reputation for persistent purple prose. Tennessee's Senator Albert Gore rose next day to offer an apology so verbose that fellow Senators fled for the nearest dictionary. Unctuously referring to Dirksen as "one of the most ariose, mellifluous, dulcifluent orators" in the upper house. Gore said he hoped the argument would make no more than "an inconsequential ripple in the flowing tide of rhetoric which I have . . . enjoyed exchanging with the inimitable and euphonious sockdolager from Illinois." Temporarily silenced, Dirksen agreeably promised to reply, once he has refurbished his vocabulary. O worthiest Cousin! . .

Thou art so far before

That swiftest wing of recompense is slow

To overtake thee. Would thou hadst less deserv'd . . .

More is thy due than more than all can pay.

Thus did Duncan greet Macbeth in Act I. National Broadcasting Co. moguls should have been just as grateful last week to worthy William Shakespeare for helping them bring home an armful of Emmy Awards. Five of the 24 Emmy statuettes went to Macbeth: program of the year, outstanding drama of the year, best dramatic director, best actress (Judith Anderson] and best actor (Maurice Evans). Special awards for enlivening the air in last fall's presidential campaign went to Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

*Previous winners of the award, established by West Point alumni in 1958: Nobel Prizewinning Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, former U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.