"I may not have the wisdom of Lincoln, the intellect of Jefferson, or the beauty of Kennedy," cries the presidential hopeful, "but compared to Lyndon Johnson, I blaze like the sun!" The line is part of Gore Vidal's new play, Weekend, which opened its pre-Broadway run in Washington. It got a big laugh from most of the audience, notably excepting Lynda Bird Robb, 23, who had been warned that the play was cuttingly anti-L.B.J. but went to see it anyway. Lynda had nothing official to say after the show, but the playwright swears he overheard her exclaim as she swept past him at the back of the theater: "Gore Vidal must be the nastiest man in the world."

It seems that the inexorable trend in women's clothing is toward more mini, mightier micro and ultimate ultimate. So at least promises Buckminster Fuller, 72, scientist, humanist, inventor of the geodesic dome and the world's leading expert. Contributing to a McCall's magazine roundelay on "Women and the Future," Fuller foresaw that "the tendency to expose the female body will continue to ever greater degree, until woman regains her Garden of Eden freedom and grace." One advantage to general nudity, Bucky concluded, is that it will slow the birthrate. "It was not until Eve put on her leaf," he noted, "that baby-making started."

One would think that now and then they might have the grace to hide in a cave for a week, just to give everyone a rest, but Liz and Richard won't let go. What they've done now is to charter a 200-ton yacht at $2,400 a week as a floating kennel for their four dogs. Looked at through the right lens, it even makes sense of a sort. Burton is shooting a movie in London for the next few weeks, but the British won't let the Burton Pekes and Lhasa Apsos into the country without impounding them for six months. Ergo the leasing of a huge dockside doghouse named the Beatriz, which the Burtons can also use as a gracious pad on the Thames near the Tower of London.

The author's son testified that the documents were genuine, a handwriting expert verified the calligraphy, and no one could deny that the gaseous prose sounded exactly like Benito Mussolini: "What has become of my great dream, the faith, the enterprise, the creation to which I have dedicated so much of myself?" Thus reassured, London's Sunday Times paid out $72,000 of the total price of $588,000 to a Milanese go-between and came into possession of the long-lost Mussolini diaries. Just then the Italian police allowed that two little old Piedmontese ladies had forged these very diaries twelve years ago. The ladies had even been convicted of it at the time--a bit of overseas news that the Sunday Times had never managed to gather.

Stockholm's classy Moderna Museet knocked itself blue putting on a giant show celebrating American Popinjay Andy Warhol, 36. This earned the supreme tribute--an appearance by the artist himself, with his clownish protegee, Viva, in tow and cutting up for photographers. "I was going to send someone that looked like me," said Warhol. "It worked once before." So it did, just three weeks ago, in fact, when Warhol without notice sent a buddy named Alan Midgette to impersonate him in a lecture tour of Western colleges. The ruse wasn't uncovered until someone in Oregon thought to call Andy in New York. Warhol's inspiration to pull the same dodge in Stockholm was dashed when he recalled that he has known the Moderna Museet's director since the early 1960s.

"No, she isn't getting married" replaced "hello" last week in the telephone vocabulary of Jacqueline Kennedy's secretarial staff. The new salutation was pressed into service as a result of headlined rumors that Jackie was about to marry Lord Harlech, 49, former ambassador to Washington and Jackie's companion on her recent trip to Cambodia. Come the weekend, lady and lord were 3,000 miles apart, he in London and she on the ski slopes of Quebec's Mont Tremblant with Caroline and young John. The big crowds at Tremblant left Jackie to herself, but Lord Harlech was bugged by transatlantic phone calls from U.S. reporters. "There's no truth in this story," pleaded his lordship at 2 o'clock one morning. "I have no plans to marry in the near future."

At least one of the things that 20th Century-Fox hoped to do when it paid $2,000,000 plus a percentage for the movie rights to Hello, Dolly! was maybe to make the movie. But until 1971, the cameras can't roll while the Broadway show runs--a conflict that has been prolonged past all reason by the ingenuity of Producer David Merriclc, 55. When Dolly! seemed about to expire three months ago, for example, Merrick restaged and revitalized the show with Pearl Bailey and an all-black cast, leaving Fox with $2,000,000 worth of sets, Barbra Streisand on hand, and no place to go. Fox is now seeking a legal gambit to foreclose on Dolly!, but Merrick is unflapped. "After Pearl, it'll be Liberace," he mused. "In that red dress. Coming down that staircase "

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