At dedication ceremonies for the $3.000.000 Eisenhower Presidential Library in his boyhood home of Abilene, Kans., Dwight Eisenhower had some blunt, plainsman's thoughts for Americans to ponder. Standing before the two-level building, which eventually will hold 20 million documents from his two terms in the White House, Ike wondered aloud: "What has happened to our concept of beauty and decency and morality?" Books and movies are laced with "vulgarity, sensuality, indeed downright filth." People dance "the twist instead of the minuet." Modern paintings look as if they have been "run over by a broken-down tin lizzie loaded with paint.'' He did not think the U.S. would go for it for long. "I per sonally believe," said Ike, "that we are about to see, and are seeing, a renaissance in American pride in America, an American pride in the characteristics that have made America great."

"He had a run of luck," sniffed canny Electrical Industry Wizard Konosuke Matsushita, 67, when Rubber Tycoon Shojiro Ishibashi, president of Bridgestone Tire Co., beat him out as Japan's top 1960 moneymaker. "I'll be back on top again." Good as his word, Matsushita piled up a personal income of $988,000 for 1961 (minus a tax bite of $660,000), to head the list for the sixth time in seven years. Rival Ishibashi, down on his luck, wound up seventh with a mere $330,000.

"He pretty much lets us have our own way," said pretty Margaret Ann Goldwater, 17, and both she and Brother Barry Goldwater Jr., 23, proved the point by announcing their plans for the future.

With nary a peep from Pop -- Arizona's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater --Peggy said that after a few years at Washington, D.C.'s Mount Vernon Junior Col lege, she would like to spend a year trying the wind-blown life on an Israeli kibbutz (collective farm). Barry Jr. said that if the U.S. Air Force does not accept him, he might join the Peace Corps, which his father once warned would attract "a bunch of beatniks who wouldn't work" but has since praised.

Posters showing her legs were once banned from the Paris metro--too tantalizing to straphangers--so when unfading Marlene Dietrich, 57, turned up to show her classic calves for real, the Olympia music hall bulged with appreciative Frenchmen. With the old seductiveness, she caressed 18 songs a night, but drew the heartiest oo-la-las when, turned out in top hat, tails--and bare legs--she did a few coltish kicks. A grateful management held her over an extra week, and grateful admirers despoiled acres of rose gardens to pay her floral tribute.

Nikita Khrushchev, no cube he, guffawed at a showing of Pablo Picasso's cubist paintings last year, but the Spanish master's politics are clearly considered more realistic. For his long devotion to Communist causes (a temporary defection over Hungary was forgiven), the Soviet Union awarded an $11,100 Lenin Peace Prize to Picasso, 80, at the very moment that nine Manhattan galleries were honoring him with "An American Tribute."

Ebony Magazine's list of the 100 wealthiest U.S. Negroes (assets of at least $250,000 apiece) was chockablock with dentists, morticians and real estate moguls, but there was only a handful of familiar names--Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Comedian Eddie ("Rochester") Anderson, Heavyweight Champ Floyd Patterson, Baseball-Hall-of-Famer Jackie Robinson, Singers Marian Anderson. Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Lena Home and Johnny Mathis, who was the only one of the bunch to place among the 35 Negro millionaires. One famous name missing from the list: high-living Horn Man Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong, 61, who once earned $20,000 a week tooting a trumpet with what came to be known as his "million-dollar lips."

Immediate surgery was indicated to replace a detached retina, but Scientist-Author Sir Charles Percy Snow, 56, illuminator of the modern scientific mind in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, first wanted to deliver a speech as 30th Lord Rector of St. Andrews University in Scotland. The operation failed, and he lost the sight in his left eye. "I have no regrets," said Sir Charles in London's Moorfields Eye Hospital. "It was never much good anyway. I still have a good right eye."

Anxious to speed the noisy group on its way, Owner Peter Cook of London's Establishment Club asked sarcastically, "Can I show you the way out?", got a bash in the face for his flippancy. When the ensuing brawl ended, he turned to spirited Actress Siobhan (pronounced Shi-vawn) McKenna, 38, one of the group, and protested, "You scratched me." Quick to pick up a cue, Siobhan studied her hands with the care of a Lady Macbeth, then held them high and blared, "These are Irish hands, and they are clean." Cook was unmoved. "This is a British face," said he, dabbing gingerly at a cut mouth, "and it's bleeding."

It was a reception worthy of visiting royalty, and all for Muzyad Yacoub Kairouz. There was a red-carpet welcome at Beirut's airport, then a feast of roasted sheep, goat and chicken to the throb of drums and the jangle of tambourines in the mountain village of Hasroun. finally the presentation of the nation's highest award, Commander of the Order of the Cedars, for "propagating the good name of Lebanon abroad." To U.S. TV fans, the fuss was readily fathomable. Yacoub is better known as hawk-nosed, ham-on-wry Danny Thomas, 48, Michigan-born son of a Lebanese farmer who left Hasroun at the turn of the century to raise a family of ten children in the U.S.

The big, gold-colored Rolls-Royce swept smoothly up the drive, stopped before a crowd of 500 clustered near the striped canopy, and out stepped silent Film Star Mary Piclcford, 69. "Hi there," said she with a dear smile, only 3 hours and 15 minutes late to preside over the dedication of movieland's first wax museum, a $1,500,000 white stucco building in Buena Park, Calif. Among the 65 sculptures already inside are tableaux of the Barrymores in Rasputin and the Empress, Gable and Leigh in Gone With the Wind, Pickford and Second Husband Douglas Fairbanks Sr., whom she divorced in 1936, in The Taming of the Shrew.

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