With Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr. due home soon after a five-year hitch in Moscow, the odds-on bet to succeed him is Foreign Service Veteran Foy D. Kohler, 54. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs. A dogged little (5 ft. 6 in., 135 lbs.) career man for 31 years, Kohler was the top-ranking State Department official to accompany Richard Nixon on his 1959 tour of the U.S.S.R.. was in charge of arrangements for Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the U.S. later that year. Thompson will become a special adviser to the State Department on Soviet affairs, replacing Charles E. ("Chip") Bohlen, who may move on to the Paris embassy in a midsummer round of musical chairs.
Along Oxford's narrow streets crowds cheered ''Good old Charlie!" In the Town Hall, Oxonians enthusiastically applauded the little man in mortarboard and scarlet gown, upstaging his seven fellow honorary degree winners, including U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk. But only after he had been handed his Doctor of Letters degree for having given "the greatest pleasure to so many people for so many years'' did British-born Comedian Charlie Chaplin, 73, relax in a toothy grin. "I would have needed a heart of cast iron not to be moved," said he. An exile from the U.S. since 1952 and long a champion of leftist causes, Chaplin chatted amiably with Rusk, but no photographer recorded the event. "The word was," said the Guardian, "that it would have been politically unfortunate if Mr. Dean Rusk had been shown in association with Charlie Chaplin."
As expansive as anyone under the big sky, Vice President Lyndon Johnson forever tells people, "Come and see us, heah?" No less a Texan, Lady Bird Johnson, 49, wound up a talk to lady journalists at a Theta Sigma Phi convention in San Antonio by asking them all over for breakfast. When 50 accepted. Lady Bird, a Theta Sig since her days as a University of Texas journalism student in 1933 chartered a bus for the 78-mile drive to the L.B.J. ranch, laid on a brunch of deer sausages, grits, and homemade peach preserves, sent the newshens away clucking.
Into a trust fund for his widow went the $6,982,000 remainder of the $37.2 million estate left by Broker-Businessman Charles Ulrich Bay--taxes, administrative costs, and bequests to charities took the rest. But Josephine Bay Paul, 61, who took over from her husband as board chairman of American Export Lines and president of Wall Street's A. M. Kidder & Co., is still a very rich woman. She has the $13.5 million Bay left her before he died in 1955, is now married to wealthy Broker-Oilman C. Michael Paul, and cuts such a figure on the New Frontier that Jack and Jackie Kennedy spent Christmas at the Pauls' eight-bedroom Palm Beach mansion.
Her son Tom made the announcement, without the usual society-page flourishes: "Mrs. Anna M. Rosenberg will marry Mr. Paul G. Hoffman on July 19." Those who know them both could hardly believe it. "What do you mean. Paul Hoffman and Anna Rosenberg?" said a friend. "They don't have time to get married." Recently divorced from her husband of 43 years, Anna. 59, became a Democratic power soon after she joined the New Deal in 1934, was Harry Truman's Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower--highest post ever for a woman in the Pentagon's trousered world--now bosses her own public relations agency. Widower Hoffman, 71, a lifelong Republican and a friend for 20 years, is a supersalesman who made a million before he was 35, was the Marshall Plan's first administrator and boss of the Ford Foundation, now manages the U.N.'s Special Fund for underdeveloped nations.
As another friend put it: "She's a Democrat and he's a Republican, but mainly, they're both dynamos.
Out of the Danbury, Conn., federal prison strode Parolee James J. Moran, 61, his red hair turned white after 10 1/2 years, his 220-lb. frame scaled down to 190--and his lips still sealed. A protege of ex-New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer. Moran was nailed in 1951 as the ''guiding genius" in a $500,000-a-year shakedown racket of oil burner contractors. Bigger fish in the city administration were feeding on the take, but Moran, offered a break if he named names, scornfully replied: "I came into this world a man--and I'm going out a man."
Free Enterpriser Barry Goldwater, 53, interrupted his Senate labors for a session at the trading post. For an undisclosed amount of stock in Associated Dry Goods Corp., a department store group with 1961 sales of $326.8 million, the Arizona Republican sold the 102-year-old family stores. Goldwaters of Arizona. With the three Goldwater stores. Associated has 40, including New York's fur-trimmed Lord & Taylor chain. Barry remains Goldwaters' $12,000-a-year chairman.
After two successful three-orbit flights National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists decided that a six-orbit spin, probably in September, would be "well within the capability of the capsule" and of the man who flies it. Tagged for the job: Navy Commander Walter M. Schirra Jr., 39, whose parents were both pilots. Outgoing, witty and completely self-possessed, Schirra (rhymes with hurrah) is married to an admiral's step daughter, has two children. Because of the flight's length, he will be brought down in the Pacific off Midway, not in the Atlantic.
While Financial Whiz Kid Edward M. Gilbert, 38, pondered his sudden flunkout in extradition-proof Brazil, a posse of creditors tried to corral what was left of the fortune he supposedly amassed as president of the E. L. Bruce hardwood flooring firm. All they got was splinters. The Government hit him with a $3,464,472 tax lien, but there was no cash in his bank accounts. Bruce thought it had a lock on the goodies in his Fifth Avenue flat, but aside from the underwear, not much had been paid for. Most of his $524,635 art collection was out on approval, just like the $734,000 assortment of ice that Cartier recently sent over to Eddie's estranged wife Rhoda, 28. At week's end a federal grand jury indicted him for illegally withdrawing $1,953,000 of Bruce funds. Maximum possible sentence: $82,000 in fines, 74 years in stir.
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