People, may 7, 1956

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In Manhattan, the battle of Central Park was joined when outraged mothers, with toddlers and perambulated infants in tow, formed a human barricade to stymie a bulldozer sent to flatten the flora on a half-acre dear to the kiddies but now slated to become a parking lot for patrons of the park's fancy-menued Tavern-on-the-Green. The man behind the man who manned the 'dozer: New York City's fireballing, thin-skinned Park Commissioner Robert Moses. He lost no time putting down the citizens' rebellion, had a storm fence thrown up around the disputed territory between one midnight and dawn, glowed next day in victory as the trees began to fall. At week's end, however, able, despotic City Planner Moses had a setback; acting on a citizens' petition, a Manhattan judge ordered a four-day cease-fire to give the combatants time to file their briefs.

Temporarily sprung from the Lewisburg, Pa. federal pen to testify before the Senate's Internal Security subcommittee, Atom Spies Harry Gold (doing a 30-year stretch) and David Greenglass (15 years) provided some intriguing marginal notes to the history of U.S. treason. Admitting that the Russians had done "a superb psychological job" on him, onetime Philadelphia Chemist Gold, 45, drew snickers in the Washington hearing room when he debunked the "trash" written to explain why he turned traitor. Said he of one theory: "I haven't been uniformly successful in love, but I didn't get into espionage for that reason." Nor was it because of an inferiority complex or a desire for acclaim that he devoted eleven years to passing atomic secrets to the Russians. "Somewhere in me, through the years, I got a basic disrespect—it got so I thought I could ignore authority if I thought I was right. I was cocksure." With what seemed genuine remorse, Harry Gold summed up how the spy ring manipulated him: "Like a virtuoso would play a violin."

Onetime Army Sergeant Greenglass, 34, had also had time in stir to think and find regrets. Of domestic Communism's most glorified modern-day martyrs, electrocuted Spies Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel (Greenglass' sister), David Greenglass, whose testimony had convicted them, spoke with mixed emotions. "It is a hard thing to be called a murderer," said he of himself. "These people were my flesh and blood. I felt affection for them, and still do, but if they had not wanted to be martyrs, they could have just put up their hands and said 'Stop!' and told the truth."

As guest of honor at a church charity ball in a London hotel, Britain's petite (5 ft.) Princess Margaret showed a few flashes of her old gaiety, seemed especially amused when she danced with towering— and crouching—Major Raymond Seymour.