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Into the White House, amidst a week roiling with campaign screamings and baseball meemies, strolled serene highness in the persons of young-jowled Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco. All tokens pointed to continued good relations between the U.S. and the vestpocket principality, as President Eisenhower and the royal couple chatted easily of places they've all visited and people they've known—and fishing. Rummaging in his desk drawer for a gift for Rainier, Ike pulled out a velvet-swathed box, then suddenly changed his mind and instead handed the Prince a handsome leathercovered box with a "fishing lighter" for cigarettes. After their 25-minute social call, Monaco's rulers moved on to a press conference in the office of Press Secretary James Hagerty. Although eligible to vote in the presidential elections, Grace declined to say whether she is a Democrat (her millionaire papa, John B. Kelly Sr., is a big-wheel Democrat in Philadelphia) or for whom she would vote; in fact, she doubted that she would vote for anyone because of "my marriage to the head of a foreign state." Smiled the Prince: "She's a Monagasque." After they limousined away, the White Housers, sighing over the afternoon's dash of glamour, went back to work.
Back at his Pentagon desk for the first time since his prostate operation, jovial Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson sorted through a pile of well-wishers' messages, waved one that especially tickled him: "Dear Sir: I wouldn't vote Republican for less than $100,000 . . . but I like you and hope you get well soon. [Signed] A Democrat." "Engine Charlie" later allowed that he was feeling fine and drew guffaws from reporters by boomeranging a bit of Democratic drollery about the health issue. "I might flippantly say," quipped Wilson, "that I'm qualified now to run for some kind of a high office." In a pronouncement recorded for Voice of America broadcasts, British Prophet Arnold (A Study of History) Toynbee admonished his listeners: "Is mankind going to rid itself of two of its three traditional scourges—war and pestilence—only to be done to death by the third scourge, famine? Surely we are not going to be so stupid as that!" With no more war and everybody living longer, however, Toynbee foresaw no way for the human race to avoid wholesale starvation unless it faces "the problem of limiting the birth rate." This could be done, said he, by persuading or compelling parents to limit the size of their broods. It would be necessary, of course, added Toynbee, to persuade some people to change "some of the tenets of their ancestral religion . . . Man's new religion may hardly be recognizable."
After having graced most lists of the world's best-dressed women ever since she became a best-dressed duchess (in 1937), the redoubtable Duchess of Windsor abruptly slapped the hands of the arbiters who have long applauded her. Snapped she: "How could such a list be anything but phony, when most of the judges seldom see me or the other people they are voting for?"