She billed her farewell speech to the National Press Club as "The Swan Song of a Lame Duck." But Liz Carpenter, 48, Lady Bird Johnson's press secretary, might better have called it "The Last Hurrahs." There were plenty: "The big question is what Senator McCarthy plans to do. When reporters ask, he doesn't say anything. But he does let them kiss his ring ... I offered myself to Governor Walter Hickel as a national monument. He took one look and said, I don't believe in conservation just for conservation's sake.' . . . All the new people want an office close to the President's. You should see them scramble. It's like fighting for a deck chair on the Titanic." sbsbsb As it circled lightly over the R.A.F. field at Bassingbourn, the tiny, single-engine trainer looked dwarfed by the huge jet bombers at the base. But the bright red Chipmunk craft nonchalantly settled to a perfect landing and taxied over to a hangar. There, a crowd of R.A.F. officers raised a cheer. Out of the plane stepped Britain's Prince Charles, flashing a broad grin. After 14 hours of instruction, the 20-year-old heir to the throne had logged his first solo flight and was well on his way to earning his pilot's license. sbsbsb The pews in the chapel of St. Luke's Church in McLean, Va., were filled with relatives and friends. Aunt Jackie had flown from New York. Uncle Ted and Aunt Joan were there. So were the Charles Percys, George McGoverns, Robert McNamaras and Mike Mansfields. But the young lady who was the focus of attention had missed her nap; she ignored the distinguished company and gave vent to lusty cries until she was soothed by her mother and her new godparents, Michael Kennedy, 10, and Mary Kennedy, 9. With calm restored, Ethel Kennedy stood aside to watch New York Archbishop Terence Cooke christen one-month-old Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's eleventh child. sbsbsb In June of 1770, midway on his first voyage around the globe, England's Captain James Cook was navigating the Endeavour along Australia's Great Barrier Reef when his ship suddenly grated to a stop on jagged coral shoals. The resourceful Cook saved his vessel by heaving ballast overboard, along with six heavy cast-iron cannon; the Endeavour floated free on the high tides. In the years since, numerous searchers have tried to recover the cannon. Finally last week, a team from Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, using a magnetic device suspended from a helicopter, succeeded in locating the coral-encrusted guns off Endeavour Reef. "We went to collect specimens of fish," said Academy Director H. Radclyffe Roberts. "Finding the cannon was the fun side of it." sbsbsb When his wife told a Tokyo reporter last month that he used to consort with geishas, beat her, and "smash things," Japan's Premier Eisaku Sato kept a discreet and diplomatic silence. The Premier was more talkative at his year-end bash for the press. "Mr. Prime Minister," asked one reporter, "did you beat your wife?" Certainly, Sato answered. Do you still beat her? "No, I don't," he replied. "Times have changed, haven't they?" Or have they? When Sato asked: "Do you fellows beat your wives?" fully half the newsmen answered yes. Off on another tack, a reporter asked whether Sato really did party it up with geishas. "Oh, yes," smiled Sato. "We wanted to show the older generation that having a good time with a geisha was not their monopoly. Too bad prices are so high nowadays." sbsbsb Canada's swinging Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau has never been one to shun the public eye. So when he went to London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conference, he took along a planeload of newsmen. Then reporters got Divorcee Eva Rittinghausen to gush after a date with the P.M., "it was love at first sight." And photographers would not go away when Trudeau and Actress Jennifer Hales tried to steal away to the theater. Annoyed at last, Trudeau made it clear that a public figure--and especially a 49-year-old bachelor--is still a private person. "I do not think it's your damned business what a particular person thinks about me, or how we behave," he snapped to the press. "Perhaps the police could question the women you have been seen with." sbsbsb

Said Arizona's Barry Goldwater, upon resuming his seat in the U.S. Senate: "After what happened to me four years ago, I feel like the only kamikaze pilot who ever made a round trip." sbsbsb That steely impresario of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, Rudolf Bing, has grown so used to skirmishes with the critics that his defenses have nearly become reflex actions. In announcing the six new productions he will mount at the Met next season, Bing simultaneously unleashed a blast at the waiting critics. "What is the press? Six or eight people with their own opinions," snapped Bing. "If critics were acrobats, they would all long ago be dead." sbsbsb Ill lay: German Foreign Minister Willy Brandt, 55, in Bonn with an attack of pleurisy that caused him to cancel last week's scheduled trip to Asia; baseball's Casey Stengel, 77, recovering in Glendale, Calif, from major surgery for a perforated peptic ulcer; Lawyer Percy Foreman, 66, in Houston with a case of pneumonia that could prevent him from preparing the defense of James Earl Ray in time for the March 3 trial opening; Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, 73, resting in Rochester, N.Y., after slipping on an icy sidewalk and breaking his left arm; Admiral John S. McCain, 58, commander of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific, in Honolulu's Tripler Army Hospital after suffering what doctors described as a mild stroke.

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