A Letter From The Publisher, Sep. 28, 1959

THE peasant face of Nikita Khrushchev, looming on this week’s cover against a symbolic background of the U.S., was painted by Bernard Safran, the son of a Russian immigrant who escaped to the U.S. in 1908 at 18, after being exiled to Siberia from his native town of Priluki (near Kiev) in the Ukraine. U.S.-born Bernie Safran studied hundreds of pictures of Khrushchev in action, finally painted the cocksure impression of a dictator that most Americans will best remember after the guest departs.

For background, Safran selected symbols of the strong, busy nation that Khrushchev would see when and if he had the patience and interest to look: tall Iowa corn; a white-painted New England church; buildings under construction in U.S. cities; an Army Redstone missile; a gate at Brown University in Providence, R.I.; a new U.S. automobile; the presence of the guiding spirit of Abraham Lincoln.

The Khrushchev portrait is Artist Safran’s 13th cover for TIME (others: Queen Elizabeth, Jack Paar, Ludwig Erhard, Mao Tse-tung). Born in Brooklyn 35 years ago, he studied art at Pratt Institute near his home, served with aviation engineers in the China-Burma-India theater during the war (rode a truck on the Burma Road), turned to commercial art and book-jacket illustration after the war. An unashamed copyist, who perfected his techniques by long hours of studying the masterpieces of Velasquez, Rembrandt and Rubens in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he did his first cover for TIME in April 1957 (Morocco’s King Mohammed V).

A second TIME cover artist, Boris Chaliapin, who fled the Soviet Union in 1925, sat in the gallery last week when Khrushchev addressed the U.N. General Assembly in Manhattan, sketched swift, vivid impressions of his own of the Soviet Premier in action (see cut).