"We almost fell off our stools when we saw it," said an astonished Pentagon man. Saw what? The letter to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, 48, that read: "I have been in the Reserve and National Guard at various times for the past 34 years, and I must say that of the two, the Guard training is by far superior. I think your move incorporating the Reserve and the Guard is a just one." It was signed: "With best personal wishes, Barry Goldwater," whose major general's rank in the Air Force Reserve may eventually go on the shelf as a result of McNamara's decision.

'Tis the winter of our discotheque, and with a pair of teen-agers like Prince Charles, 16, and Princess Anne, 14, Mum and Dad might have known what to expect. To celebrate the holidays, the royal rockers rolled back the red carpet in the drawing room of Windsor Castle, then asked 120 chums over for a dinner of hors d'oeuvres and turkey. Main course was the frug, to the big beat played for Their Highnesses by a disk jockey who rents himself and his $3,000 hi-fi rig for just such occasions. Party over, host and hostess hopped off with Prince Philip to Liechtenstein for a few days of skiing--but not before taking in a Paris hoite, where Princess Anne relaxed enough over a glass of red Margaux (vintage: '53) to toss kisses at one of the folk singers.

"Ello," quoth the Beetle. "This is John, speaking with is voice." You could have fooled the 155 Beatle fan clubs in the U.S., but their 20,000 members faithfully wore out the "little bit o' plastic" record that the Beatles sent their fans free for Christmas. Meanwhile, back in London's Odeon Theater, the furry foursome made their first onstage scene since Ringo had his tonsils clipped. Surprise again. This time the mops were all covered up with Eskimo gear. But everybody knew who they were the minute they cranked up to shoot down Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Georgi Griner plays Ghenry Ghiggins with a Kiev accent, and The Rain in Spain came out Carl Stole Clara's Corals. Even if something were lost in translation, Maya Prekrasnaya Ledy brought 2,700 first-nighters to their feet in Moscow's Operetta Theater. "A great success," trumpeted Tass. But not everybody could have danced all night. "The Soviets did not go through proper channels," groused CBS, which bought the foreign rights to My Fair Lady from Authors Alan Lerner, 46, and Frederick Loewe, 60, in 1960. The Russians, of course, paid no one a ruble. But Producer Herman Levin had a thought: "Maybe if I went to Moscow and complained, they'd give me a free pass."

The driver having trouble parking his yellow Cadillac looked familiar, and Denver police moved in for a closer look. Sure enough, there was Sonny Liston, apparently full of yuletide cheer, or so the cops thought. It took ten bulls to wrestle the Big Bear off to city jail, and another two or three deputies to wring out his fingerprints. The prints were hardly necessary. He was nabbed last March for speeding and for packing a concealed pistol, for which he was fined $600 and given a suspended jail sentence. This time the rap is drunken driving, and if convicted at his trial on Jan. 29, he faces a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.

Among her papers, Queens (N.Y.) College Literature Professor Mary Doyle Curran found a poem written last spring by Andrew Goodman, 20, just before he left for Mississippi, where he and two other civil rights workers were murdered a few weeks later. Called Corollary to a Poem by A. E. Houseman, it tells of dark foreboding:

Then peacefully the night

Puts out the reddened day

And the jaws that used to bite

Are sterile where we lay.

Only one thing was really different about the International Debutante Ball in Manhattan's Astor Hotel for the 53 girls whisked into society from 14 foreign lands and 19 U.S. states: their escorts bore flags identifying their homelands. Some people insisted that this year's deb crop was "taller than ever," and once again the Texas girls drew the most applause for their forehead-to-floor curtsies, a tradition that Austin's Patricia Ann Morrison, 18, tried to explain: "The gettin' down's easy; it's the gettin' up that's hard." Deb of the evening? Finch College Freshman Patricia Nixon, 18, who had the father of the evening in tow. "My first advice to fathers of teenage daughters," cracked Richard Nixon, "is never get yourself in a position where you have to dance with them." It was not required at the International Ball, and so he didn't.

The name of the group is LEMAR, for Legalize Marijuana, and the activist San Francisco branch has even held puffins to protest the laws that forbid its use. Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg, 38, concedes that puffins might be foolhardy, but he's all for protests. So together with Fellow LEMARite Peter Orlovsky he donned Japanese finger cymbals and showed up outside New York's Department of Welfare carrying a sign which read: SMOKE POT, IT'S CHEAPER AND HEALTHIER THAN LIQUOR. New York's narcotics experts were contemplating a demonstration of their own for Ginsberg & Co. "They should be picked up by the scruff of their necks," said Harlem's Dr. Robert Baird, "and scrubbed down with Tide and Lestoil."

You can always count on John Wayne, 57; he never steps out of character. "I kicked the Big C," growled the movie toughie, admitting that it was lung cancer that put him in Los Angeles' Good Samaritan Hospital for surgery last September. Why so secretive? "Because my advisers thought it would ruin my he-man image," drawled the Duke with a touch of contempt. "I was sick as hell," he added, remembering his post-surgical convalescence. "I started coughing so hard I busted all the stitches, and they had to open me up again. That was the worst night of my life." What now? Wayne's 22nd Western, The Sons of Katie Elder, and complete recovery, he hopes. And oh yes. He's kicking his five-pack-a-day habit.

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