People, Aug. 8, 1960

While their husbands were hurrying around Chicago at top political speed attending to sterner G.O.P. Convention affairs, the wives of eleven Republican bigwigs, plus the daughter of a twelfth, climbed into fancy period gowns for a "Great Ladies" lunch at the Conrad Hil ton Hotel. Guests of honor at the costume party were Mamie Eisenhower, who saw herself impersonated, and Pat Nixon, who could dream that she would join the roster of the dozen Republican First Ladies whose inaugural finery was reproduced for the occasion.

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, 56, director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, has not worked for the Federal Government since 1954, when he was branded a "potential security risk" and discharged as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission. But his standing with the United Nations has apparently not suffered. Last week Oppenheimer, a prime architect of the Abomb, a conscientious objector to the H-bomb, was confirmed as the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency's official representative to the forthcoming Tenth Annual High Energy Physics Conference. The man who appointed him: the U.N. agency's director-general, W. Sterling Cole, onetime G.O.P. Representative and a congressional overseer of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time of Dr. Oppenheimer's tribulations.

Upon arriving at her summer villa near Parma, the Metropolitan Opera's latest girl wonder, pretty, Pennsylvania-born Soprano Anna Moffo, was asked by a spokesman for several Italian opera companies to restrain the Italian press from swooning in print over "L'Esotica's" glamorous charms—the home-grown prima donnas are hitting high "C with jealousy. But Anna only shrugged: "Who ever heard of telling the press what to say? I'm not in the business of smoothing the ruffled feathers of other divas! Opera is a dog-eat-dog business!"

Into the forbidding portals of the Soviet embassy in Washington last week walked a tired-faced women, Barbara Powers, 24, wife of ill-fated U-2 Pilot Francis Powers, who will be tried this month in Moscow for espionage. When Barbara emerged, she looked tireder still. She had been hoping for some word on her request for a Soviet visa. But "three third secretaries" had told her that they had heard nothing from Moscow. Said she despondently, "His letters have such an air of sadness—as though he is just doomed." At week's end, Barbara, through her lawyer, cabled a personal plea to Nikita Khrushchev.