In the last days of the expiring Eisenhower Administration, high-ranking Republicans were demonstrating mountain-goat agility in a last-minute scramble for new spots:

Presidential Press Secretary James C. Hagerty, 51, landed nimbly in the American Broadcasting Co. as vice president in charge of news and public affairs, a position worth an estimated $50,000 a year--or $29,000 more than Hagerty's White House remuneration.

Budget Bureau Director Maurice H. Stans will take over the Firstamerica Corp., a bank holding company controlling 24 banks in eleven Western states.

USIA Director George V. Allen was already lecture-touring the South as president of the Tobacco Institute.

Arthur S. Flemming, departing Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, awaited word of his appointment as president of the University of Oregon.

Some retiring Eisenhower aides slipped quietly into nests back home: Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson planned to resume his Mormon duties in Utah as member of the church's governing Council of Twelve, and Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton headed for Hastings, Neb. to pick up his chain of eight dailies in four states (Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Wyoming), where he left them over seven years ago. Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell decided to stay in politics for a while at least, prepared to run for Governor of New Jersey.

The new patient at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn, sported a scraggy white beard and a phony name. And, surprisingly, the nom de plumage lasted six weeks. Then last week the secret leaked out; the man back of the brush and calling himself Mr. George Saviers was Nobel Prizewinning Author Ernest Hemingway. After surviving war wounds, safari accidents and the assorted contusions of a life spent emulating the energetic characters in his own novels, Papa Hemingway, 61, had taken sick while on an Idaho hunting trip. Diagnosis: incipient diabetes complicated by high blood pressure.

The Bishop of Oslo had refused to marry her to the divorced commoner, but last week Norway's Princess Astrid, 28, followed a torchlight procession into a small, red-brick Lutheran church outside town to wed prosperous Haberdasher Johan Martin Ferner, 33, and to be read out of royalty. The procession, which was led through 10DEG-below-zero cold by Astrid's sister, Princess Ragnhild (who had married a commoner in the same church seven years before), included uncommon cousins from three European kingdoms, among them a sympathetic Princess Margaret of Britain. Last came Astrid and her father, King Olav V, who had originally objected to his daughter's cup-winning yachtmate. After the ceremony, performed by a retired bishop in accordance with a church concession, Astrid was excluded from succession to the throne, lost the title "Her Royal Highness." Her new title: Princess Astrid, Fru Ferner.

A recognized leader but a reluctant follower among art museum directors, longtime Avant-Gardist James Johnson Sweeney, 60, stayed only a year with the painting and sculpture department of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, spiraled out of the new Guggenheim Museum building nine months after it opened. Last week he gave up provincial New York, accepted a directorship where he was less likely to be fenced in--the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. With ambitions as grandiose as its new Mies van der Rohe-designed wing and with an acquisition fund that Texas oil money could float into the millions, the Houston institution seemed an ideal spot for Sweeney, a man who not only knows art but knows what he does not like.

Disturbed by the dismal state of amateur tennis, a jaunty figure from the game's golden days popped up in New Zealand and made a pitch for giving the pros a chance to bring crowds back to the courts. Jean Borotra, 62, the "Bounding Basque" of France's famed "Four Musketeers" who won the Davis Cup from 1927 to 1932, argued that the men who play for pay should get a crack at the big silver punch bowl. To cynical doubters, Borotra carefully elaborated: "I am confident that the professionals would be willing to play for their country for bare expenses."

In the three decades since he helped achieve the first artificial release of nuclear energy, British Physicist Sir John Cockcroft has earned a truckload of honors and become the Grand Panjandrum of British atomic affairs. Last week, in recognition of all his accomplishments, Sir John got the richest prize in his profession: the $75,000 Atoms for Peace Award established by the Ford Motor Co. as a memorial to Henry and Edsel Ford.

"He says it's all over. All the wind is gone. And this punk kid here, Kennedy--he calls him punk kid--he'll be gone too." The time was June 1959: the "he" of the tape-recorded conversation was Teamster Czar James Hoffa; the "punk kid" was Bobby Kennedy, Hoffa's archenemy of the past and--as U.S. Attorney General-designate--his probable future nemesis. The tape was played back last week in a Senate investigations subcommittee hearing room. The speaker, testified New York City detectives, who had bugged his Queens apartment, was Bernard Stein, secretary-treasurer of New York Teamster Local 239, passing the word from Hoffa to one Antonio ("Tony Ducks") Corallo, the local's former vice president. Tony Ducks also got the word on how a union parasite could beef up his own bankroll while playing the part of a loyal teamster. As Stein was reported to have relayed it from Boss Hoffa: "Tony, the guy told me straight out--and I ain't makin' like my own words, I'm sayin' his words: 'I don't care if you want to steal, you want to rob. Go ahead,' he says. 'Don't get caught, don't get caught!' he says. And he says, 'Listen, you're worried about money? I don't care how you take the money. I don't care how you take it! Get it under the table! Get it any way you want!' "

During a quarter century of prowling and prophesying in and about Washington, Columnist Joseph Alsop, 50, has remained one of the capital's most conspicuously eligible bachelors. Off the job his interests have centered on architecture (he designed his own Georgetown house), his birds (parrots, finches, parakeets), cooking, good wines, antiques. In his office, problems are more mundane. Suddenly swamped with routine chores when a recent secretary quit and got married, Alsop was heard to grouse: "I never lose people except to marriage--but don't get the idea I disapprove of marriage." Last week, demonstrating his approval, Alsop announced his engagement to wealthy Paris Socialite Susan Mary Jay Patten, 42, widow of International Banker William S. Patten. They will be married in the spring.*

Having kept his voice to a whisper throughout the presidential campaign, Boston's Richard Cardinal Gushing finally opened up on politics--not to hail victorious Roman Catholic John Kennedy but to give lavish praise to the Quaker loser. Said the Cardinal: "If I were asked to name the good-will man of 1960, I would unhesitatingly give the accolade to Richard Nixon. During the recent campaign he never exploited the religious or any other issue that would tend to divide the American people. When he lost, he was magnificent in defeat."

* In West Hartford, Conn., Joe's brother John D. Alsop, 45, president of Mutual Insurance Co. of Hartford, furthered his campaign last week for Connecticut's G.O.P. gubernatorial nomination in 1962. Speaking to Young Republicans, he took the trouble carefully to disassociate himself from Brother Joe's "enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket" and declared: "I am not a prophet of gloom and doom like my brother, Joseph--whose keeper I am not!"

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