People: Apr. 20, 1970

His efforts to impugn Barry Goldwater's sanity during the 1964 presidential campaign have cost Publisher Ralph Ginzburg and his now defunct Fact magazine $91,795.08 in libel settlements. After mailing his personal check to the Senator's office, the flamboyant Ginzburg vowed to "continue to speak out on any issue that I consider important to the American people. To paraphrase Patrick Henry, I care not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me debt."

Her tastes run more toward Günter Grass, but fiction buff Mrs. Willy Brandt, wife of the West German Chancellor, conscientiously boned up on the American novel before visiting Washington with her husband. Rut Brandt's reading choice: Jacqueline Susann's lurid Valley of the Dolls.

A group of leading citizens want to rename Main Street in New London, Conn., after the city's most famous summer resident. But it will only become Eugene O'Neill Drive over the dead body of Mayor Thomas Griffin, 78. "What did O'Neill do for New London," asks Griffin, himself a Connecticut Irishman, "besides write a few books?"

Though it was a sticky wicket, rain in Canberra did nothing to diminish a shining performance by Australian Prime Minister John Gorton. Leading his parliamentary cricket team to a hard-won 121-119 victory over the capital press eleven, the P.M. hit seven runs and bowled out one press batter with a style characterized by a newsman as "unpredictable and suspect."

"Having watched myself respond to my children's flirtation with peril in sheer panic," Author-Critic Leslie Fiedler wrote in his book Being Busted, "as if I had never run risks myself, I grew ashamed." The "peril" was drugs. A Buffalo judge admitted portions of Fiedler's book into evidence at a trial in which the critic and his wife were convicted of allowing their sons and friends to smoke marijuana in their home. The jury chose to ignore Busted's preface, which warns the reader that "the following account is more parable than history."

A polite letter from the president of a Princeton debating society invited Cartoonist Al Capp to take part in a seminar for an "honorarium" of $800. Student protest's most abrasive critic said no. Besides, he wrote, his fee is $3,500, plus an extra $1,000 in "combat pay" from Ivy League schools because of the savage tactics of dissenters. "Princeton is dedicated to training subhumans," said Capp. "When Ivy League schools get rid of presidents who 'don't know how' to tame the animals they breed, and when they're replaced, as inevitably they must be, by retired Marine brigadier generals, when beasts no longer roam campuses but are locked in cages, then, and not until then, will any sane man accept your invitation."

"I haven't had much to do," said the old gentleman. "But then I haven't had many people to help me." Former Selective Service Director Lewis B. Hershey, 76, who once gave orders to a staff of thousands and controlled the futures of millions of potential draftees, now bosses a single secretary and drafts memos as a presidential "adviser." "I don't know if anybody reads them or not," he admits.