"Fortunately," went the lead editorial in the Washington Post, "there is no disposition in this country to search for scapegoats to blame for the situation [in Viet Nam]. Americans are singularly free from the disposition to vent a sanguinary fury on officials who have the misfortune to preside at disagreeable affairs . . ." Pondering this thought in his Georgetown home, Dean Acheson, 72, allowed as how it was not always thus. Perhaps recalling several brushes with Senator Joe McCarthy as well as his Secretary of Stateship during the Korean War, Acheson displayed his precise literary style in a twelve-line poem to the Post's editor. A couplet:

Reading, as always, at your bidding,

I wonder who the hell you're kidding.

"DeEr ReedER: ONE of The AmAZIN FACKS abouT the RITEr of this bOOK is he nose a lil SUMPthin $$$$$$ ABOut The SUBjeck he writ ABOut. He was a skOOL DRop-oUT." So begins the latest federal literature out of Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity--a comic book called Li'l Abner and the Creatures from Drop-Outer Space. Cartoonist Al Capp, 55, plucks Li'l Abner out of Dogpatch, the world's most bizarre poverty pocket, installs him as a "brilliant young technician with a big job, and even bigger feet, who befriends Danny Driftwood, a nice but undesirable young man," and persuades him to ditch his gal Sloppy-Belle and get into the Job Corps. Next scene: having been thoroughly rehabilitated, Danny Driftwood wins Bouncy-Belle, a nubile if ungrammatical Sekkatery. The Job Corps is stashing 500,000 copies of the book in neighborhoods where comics pass for literature in the hope that potential no-goodniks will get (GASP!) the message.

Had Rudolf Nureyev, 27, ballet's temperamental Tartar, ever heard of Jimmy Durante? "Nyet," muttered Rudi. They didn't get to know each other much better during the Hollywood taping of an ABC television special to be shown in October. "How about dat!" marveled proboscidiferous Durante, 72, as he watched Nureyev exercising for 40 minutes before his performance. "He takes all dat time to get ready to dance? Me--I start in cold." Fascinated, Jimmy whispered: "He's got awful long hair, too. Dat ain't a wig, is it? He's got a big nose--not as big as mine, but a big nose gets da goils every time."

She learned to ride a pony when she was four, and as she grew up, Britain's Princess Anne always seemed a typically English young girl, a bit of a tomboy thunking around the riding stables in boots and blue jeans. But the princess is a young lady of 14 now, and she seemed anything but awkward as she waited, pensive and elegantly cowled in a riding cloak, to represent her boarding school, Beneden, in a horse meet at the Moat House Riding School in Kent, where she finished fourth in the dressage test.

Work on the portrait progressed slowly through the rainy summer of 1853. Critic John Ruskin (Stones of Venice) stood posed on the rocks below Glenfinlas Falls in the Scottish Highlands, his esthete's face delicate, benevolent, distracted. Was he distracted because the portrait painter, young Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, was falling in love with his wife? Evidently not. In this quaint mid-Victorian triangle, Ruskin meditated upon Glenfinlas' "wonderful torrent," while Effie brooded over her husband's neglect (their five-year marriage had never been consummated), and Millais fumed with passion for Effie. All this was brought up again in an emphatically post-Raphaelite 20th century when the portrait was auctioned off last week in London for $70,560. Ruskin himself had owned the canvas for years, but he never got the picture. His marriage was annulled in 1854 "by reason of the [husband's] incurable impotency." Everett Millais and Effie thereupon embarked on a long and happy marriage.

Retiring after nearly 50 years of military service to the Empire, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, 65, wore a lot of what he had to show for it--for example, the Grand Cross of the White Elephant of Siam and the Special Grand Cordon of the Order of the Cloud of China. "Lord Montgomery always counts them," he chuckled, pointing to the ten rows of 34 ribbons and decorations covering the left chest of his admiral's uniform. "I don't know whether he thinks I've popped in one or two that I'm not entitled to." Then Queen Victoria's great-grandson formally stepped down as Britain's Chief of the Defense Staff, got a rousing "Hip, hip, hooray!" from the gold-braided service chiefs, faded away to his country home, Broadlands, in Hampshire.

After bewailing the Beatles' recent Italian tour ("evenings of madness, collective hysteria, fury"), the Vatican's L'Osservatore della Domenica continued to survey the sulphurous plains of modern show business and suddenly came upon that cool, unfurious paragon Pat Boone, 31. Ah, sighed the weekly's writer in an open letter: "No shouts, no grimaces, no contortions: a deep, velvety, measured voice." But it was Pat's home life that really charmed L'Osservatore: "No grandeur, no scandal, no 'loves,' a picture of moral and professional probity"--in contrast to "some sharks we know. Even if you are not of our faith, for this example we thank you wholeheartedly, Signore Pat Boone."

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