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.