Novelist Jacqueline Susann deftly turned the other cheek on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, disappointing the sleepless millions who awaited her delayed reply to Truman Capote's allegation that she looked, among other things, "like a truck driver in drag." As the author of The Love Machine went through her chat with Carson, the subject never came up. Just as she was to leave, her host asked innocently: "What do you think of Truman?" "Truman . . . Truman," she considered gravely. "I think history will prove he was one of the best Presidents we've had."

"This is not Lyndon Johnson's school. It's a school named for Lyndon Johnson. No one is going to be whispering in my ear and telling me how to run it." So said former Postmaster General and Ambassador to Poland John Gronouski, eager to declare his independence but knowing to whom he owed his appointment as dean of the University of Texas' Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs. Delighted with the job, Gronouski said that he hopes Barry Goldwater, "some of Nixon's people" and even old Great Society gadfly William Fulbright will join Johnson in lecturing at the graduate school.

Another male bastion has fallen. After 222 years of masculinity, Princeton College last week opened its portals to 171 coeds enrolled for the fall term. The girls reported a warm reception. Consider, for example, June Fletcher, 18, a statuesque blonde from Elberon, N.J., who was named Miss Bikini, U.S.A., this summer. A ringer? Not at all, said an admissions official, pointing out that the lovely Tigress was in the top 1% of her high school class and won several public speaking contests. Purred June: "I've met so many boys today, they're all just one big blur."

"You're still one of the youngest fellows around," read the birthday telegram from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and the ex-Governor justified the historian's compliment with a six-mile ride across the Kansas countryside on his red Morgan horse. At 82, Alf London is a Topeka squire who keeps in touch with young people by conducting four seminars a year at Kansas State. "I answer all questions on all subjects," boasted Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 opponent, adding that he, for one, is not turned off by the Now Generation.

By definition, Atlantic City's Miss America Pageant leans heavily on traditional values and red, white and blue patriotism. But, in this day of the rebellious young, the Establishment has seldom had a friend so true as Pamela Anne Eldred, Miss America 1970. After convincing the judges with a ballet routine and a 34-21-34 figure, the blonde coed from Detroit held forth for the press. The Viet Nam war was right, she reasoned, because otherwise the Government would never have gotten into it. "I feel that the people who were voted into office must have the intelligence to know what to do," said Pamela Anne. Sighed a middle-aged pageant official: "God love you."

He graduated first in his class in 1903, returned to West Point 16 years later as the military academy's youngest (39) superintendent, and went on to fame in three wars, eventually becoming a five-star General of the Army. Now, five years after his death, West Point has honored Douglas MacArthur by erecting an 8-ft. bronze statue to his memory. Still looking sprightly despite her 70 years, Mrs. MacArthur took a widow's pleasure in traveling up to the Point for the dedication of the statue, as well as a new, six-story dormitory wing that will be known as MacArthur Barrack.

"I suppose I'll have to stop swearing now," said the lady last month, after President Nixon nominated her as chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission. But old habits die hard, especially for a veteran newspaper hand like Mrs. Helen Delich Bentley, 45, for 16 years maritime editor of the Baltimore Sun. So there she was last week, still at work pending Senate confirmation, dictating a story over ship-to-shore radio from the mammoth ice-breaking tanker S.S. Manhattan on its voyage through the Northwest Passage to Alaska. It must have been a salty yarn, too, because a monitoring station in Iowa picked up some unprintable language--which, of course, is against FCC regulations. Upshot of it all: the Humble Oil & Refining Co., the ship's owner, banned all voice transmissions, not only for Mrs. Bentley but for every reporter on the trip. "I just used a common Anglo-Saxon expletive," she was quoted as saying, "to express my impatience with a rewrite man."

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