Major General Ralph W. Zwicker, 57, one of those people fated to remain famous for a peripheral incident in life (he successfully defied Joe McCarthy's badgering question: "Who promoted Peress?"), will soon retire after 33 years in the uniform McCarthy said (quite wrongly, of course) that he was "unfit to wear." Since the McCarthy demagoguery, Zwicker won a second star, served as commander of the 1st Cavalry Division in the Far East, is now commander of the Ohio-based XX Army Corps.

On the premise that a U.S. Congressman has a right to travel anywhere in the world in the name of legislative duty, Oregon's headline-hankering Democratic Representative Charles Orlando Porter last June sniffed the air, caught scents of legislative duty calling him to Red China. The State Department denied him a special visa, refusing to exempt him from its blanket ban on U.S. citizens' going behind the Bamboo Curtain. Porter promptly sued, claimed violation of his constitutional rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals last week upheld a lower court decision against Porter. The decision: Porter rates no better than any other citizen in trying to crash State's travel barrier.

Britain's ace Grand Prix driver, Stirling Moss, 30, fined $140, his British driver's license lifted for a year because he collided head-on with a truck while passing another car on a British road, complained: "If my name hadn't been Stirling Moss, the police wouldn't have brought the case."

As board chairman and chief executive officer of the world's biggest industrial firm, General Motors' Frederic Garrett Donner, 57, pulled down a healthy $670,350 in compensation last year, according to a G.M. statement issued last week. Donner's income: salaries and fees, $201,350; bonuses, $351,750; contingent credits (on stock options), $117,250. Estimated income after taxes: $111,782.

In the Nationalist China capital of Taipei, Mme. Chiang Kai-shek unveiled a bronze bust of China's good friend and defender, Lieut. General Claire Chennault, the original Flying Tiger, dead since 1958. The likeness, catching the essence of Chennault's leathery, steel-spined courage, is in a children's playground and faces Chiang's official mansion. Cabled the President of the U.S.: "While his mortal remains lie among those of America's soldiers of all wars [in Arlington National Cemetery], his spirit is memorialized today in Free China."

One of the least amicable borders in the world is the endlessly patrolled line between Turkey and its ancient enemy, the U.S.S.R. Thus it seemed odd to some quarters of the Arab world when Turkey's Premier Adrian Menderes and the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev last week accepted reciprocal invitations for official visits. But then, everybody's visiting everybody these days. Menderes will toddle up to Moscow some time in July; Khrushchev will soar down to Ankara at a later date.

The Democratic Committee of Roxbury, Conn. solemnly met to pick its two delegates to the Fifth Congressional District convention that will be held in June. Up rose a committeeman to suggest: "Wouldn't it be nice if Marilyn could be a delegate to the convention?" There being general agreement on the proposition, enrolled Roxbury Democrat Marilyn Monroe will be an alternate delegate to the district meeting, may have a chance to prove that she can swing votes as well as hips.

Manhattan cops showed no compassion for Irish-born Actor Edward Mulhare, Rex Harrison's successor as the tweedy Professor Higgins in long-running My Fair Lady. Thrice in the same day, twice in the same spot, traffic patrolmen hung $15 tickets on Mulhare's white Dodge convertible for illegal parking. Late that afternoon Mulhare made a fast getaway to Moscow along with Fair Lady's national company and 72 tons of scenery, props and luggage. Five chartered planes carried the troupe for an eight-week Russian tour. Fair Lady tickets were selling like cabbages at 60 rubles a head--highest price ever charged for tickets in Moscow, almost twice the amount exacted for the best seats at the Bolshoi Ballet.

In 1933, three years before he was defeated as the Republican presidential candidate, Kansas' Governor Alfred Mossman London signed a bill restoring capital punishment to the Kansas penal code. Therefore, when Kansas' current Governor, George Docking, recently commuted the death sentence of a man convicted of a brutal murder, he drew a sharp rap from Alf Landon, now 72. Last week, Docking, only half in jest, snapped: "If Landon likes capital punishment so well, we'll just offer him the job of state executioner at $100 a throw. I'll throw in free cigarettes." Replied Landon icily: "That comment sounds about as psychopathic as some of his other remarks."

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