December 23, 1984

FOR years, two American businessmen - both of them strong, egotistical men who often seemed larger than life - engaged in an exceedingly harsh personal and professional fight that involved elemental issues of personality, class and power. One - the brash, flamboyant Lido Anthony Iacocca - was born to Italian immigrant parents and raised in the industrial town of Allentown, Pa. He arrived in Detroit on the Red Arrow train in 1946, with engineering degrees from Lehigh and Princeton and $50 in his pocket. In 30 years, through a remarkable sense of automobiles and salesmanship, he rose to become president of the Ford Motor Company in a career that could have come from a best-selling novel. The other, Henry Ford II, large, gruff, was the leader of an industrial family that is almost an American dynasty. His grandfather, Henry Ford, had developed the first commercial automobile, the industrial assembly line, the $5 day. The blood of the grandfather seemed to be that of his grandson: both men were autocratic, sometimes tyrannical; given, at times, to making decisions on whim.

MOUTH OF WILSON, Va. FOR most of his basketball playing life, Rodney Strickland has prided himself on making the play. Like any outstanding point guard, his stock in trade has been his ability to see the court, weigh the options and then, in a flash, make the best play with the least effort. But last summer Strickland found himself faced with a set of options that seemed to range from bad to worse. ''I got a call out of the blue from Steve Lappas, my high school coach,'' said Strickland, who had just enjoyed an outstanding junior season at Truman High School in the Bronx. Lappas, now an assistant at Villanova, told Strickland that the player didn't have the cumulative 2.0 (or C) average needed to get into a major college and wouldn't graduate from high school with those grades unless he took one of two drastic measures.

For more than 70 years, seamen from all over the world have found lodging, reasonably priced meals and companionship at the Seamen's Church Institute in lower Manhattan. But the 15-story building the Institute built at 15 State Street in 1968 will be sold.

In ''Protocol,'' Goldie Hawn plays a cocktail waitress who becomes a diplomat. Along the way she gets embroiled in Middle Eastern politics, fights off the amorous advances of an Arab emir and is the cause of a riot in which almost everyone she knows winds up in jail. It seems an appropriate vehicle for Miss Hawn's brand of naive humor and wide-eyed vulnerability. But there is a surprise. The comedy's got a message: Washington is in the hands of corrupt politicians and it's up to the ''little people'' to get it back. This may sound like a thinly disguised morality play, and it is. The film, written by Buck Henry, was conceived by Miss Hawn, who is both star and executive producer. It centers around the United States Protocol Department in Washington, an open field for satire, where questions such as whether or not you can cross your legs in the presence of an African chief are major preoccupations. It paints a little mustache on all the iconography of 80's issues and personalities: politicians, reporters, foreign dignitaries, gurus, homosexuals and feminists.

The civilians in charge of America's space shuttle flights are eager for publicity, but it was always assumed that once the military began lifting payloads into orbit, things would be different. They are.