When Evangelist Billy Graham, 45, marched on Boston with his "Crusade for Christ" last month, Richard Cardinal Gushing, 69, then in Rome, issued a statement welcoming him. Last week in Boston, Billy called on the cardinal to thank him, and the meeting turned into a regular love feast. His Eminence asked Graham how he managed to look so fit. "I trust in the Lord and take vitamins," quipped Graham. Then he added: "I feel I have known you a long time. The police in Boston think you are the greatest." "You can see why I've never come within the arm of the law," chuckled Gushing. Said Billy: "I feel closer to many Catholic traditions than I do to some of the most liberal Protestants." Agreed the cardinal: "No Catholic can listen to you and not become a better Catholic."

"It's safer to stay with something you know something about" was clearly said by the grandson of the man who said, "People can have the Model T in any color, so long as it's black." Only Henry Ford I meant it, while that daredevil Henry Ford II, 44, threw caution aside and took a $1,600 flyer in a Broadway musical, Sugar City, due in March. The auto heir has backed "two or three" other shows, none of which earned him a dime. But, as Granddad used to say, history is more or less bunk.

Washington's Henry ("Scoop") Jackson was first to go, then Oregon's Maurine Neuberger. Finally the founding member of the U.S. Senate's Pacific Northwest lonelyhearts club moved to adjourn permanently. In a Shoreham Hotel suite, Senate Chaplain Rev. Dr. Frederick Brown Harris married Washington's Warren G. Magnuson, 59, one of the capital's most sociable eligibles since shortly after his first marriage ended in divorce in 1935, to Mrs. Jermaine Peralta, 41, a Seattle widow. The 20 guests included Lyndon and Lady Bird, but though the bride looked properly serene, those wedding bells nearly broke up poor old Maggie.

Eleven days in the intensive-care unit at Los Angeles' Good Samaritan Hospital nearly did the old movie hero in. "They kept bringing in all those cardiac cases," growled John Wayne, 57. "I was ready to shoot my way out." Hastily, they moved him to another floor to finish recovering from surgery for the removal of a lung abscess. Finally, 10 lbs. (and several shades of tan) lighter, the Duke strode from the sickbed into a brigade of reporters. Had it been cancer? A heart attack? "There's nothing to that," he roared, ripping open his shirt and showing his scar. "Take a look for yourself."

"He was my first colonel, who showed me the gift and art of command," says Charles de Gaulle in his memoirs, and he sorrowed in 1945 when Marshal Henri Petain, hero of Verdun, was found guilty of treason for his chieftaincy of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. De Gaulle commuted the old man's death sentence to life imprisonment. Now, 13 years after Petain's death and burial on the Ile d'Yeu in the Bay of Biscay, the French press is alive with rumors that De Gaulle may accede to Petain's wish to be interred at Verdun. So he may, but le chef has been angered by the buzz-buzz. The earliest date for reburial is now the 50th anniversary of the battle of Verdun, in 1966.

One has a husband in show business, the other a husband in shoe business, but Elizabeth Taylor, 32, and Debbie Reynolds, 32, do have something in common: an ex-husband. They also managed last week to land in the same boat, the Queen Elizabeth, bound from New York to Europe. Hordes of reporters descended on Pier 92 as the shipmates came aboard: Debbie with Husband Harry Karl; Liz with 127 pieces of luggage, four children, and oh, yes, someone in dark glasses whom a newsman called "Mr. Taylor." Another asked Liz if she planned to meet Debbie. "I would have dinner," she replied, "if invited." Would the unsinkable Mrs. Karl buy the Burtons a drink? "I'd have to ask my husband," she dimpled. "He has the money."

In Norfolk, Va., the estate of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who died in April at 84, was appraised at $2,131,941.89, bequeathed to his widow, Jean Faircloth MacArthur. Composed primarily of securities, it included 2,205 shares of G.M. (worth $180,258.75), Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority and Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel bonds (together worth $291,007), and 1,903 shares ($34,254) in Sperry Rand Corp., whose chairman he had been since 1955.

"I believe philanthropy generally is not attuned to the times," said John D. Rockefeller III, 58, at a banquet in Manhattan. "We are too ready to settle for the tried and proven. Rather than venture, we dwell on the problems of yesterday, neglectful of the new needs of today and the impatient future." Rockefeller urged that private philanthropists delegate more responsibility to Government for established needs in public health and welfare, devote private funds to speculative areas, such as population research and the arts.

Claiming they had suffered "embarrassment and mental agony," Robert Welch, 64, president of the John Birch Society, two aides and the society itself sued NBC in Fort Worth for $8,000,000 in damages. A May 20 broadcast by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, said the plaintiffs, falsely reported that the FBI had arrested "parties engaged in selling arms to the society." Said their lawyer: "More than likely, the broadcast went out all over the U.S., and we could have sued almost anywhere, but we wanted a more favorable climate, as distinguished from a climate that is ultraliberal."

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