From the Publisher: Jul 24 1989

Journalists always want their stories to be the best — and the first. This week’s issue features what we think are two notable examples of excellence and exclusivity. Correspondents Richard Behar and Scott Brown take a penetrating second look at the Exxon Valdez disaster. And in a special five-page section, Washington correspondent David Aikman talks with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the first major interview the Soviet writer has given to any U.S. news organization since 1979.

After all the coverage of last March’s Alaska oil spill, was there anything left to report? Nation editor Jack E. White figured there was. In the Los Angeles bureau, Brown pored over National Transportation Safety Board reports and testimony by tanker crew members and others to unravel the complex chain of events. Then he went back to Valdez to talk with Coast Guard investigators. Says Brown: “I found the web of culpability surrounding the accident was almost as sticky and far-reaching as the spill itself.” Meanwhile, New York correspondent Behar, who wrote the story, interviewed Hazelwood’s family, friends and neighbors in the captain’s — and his own — hometown of Huntington, Long Island.

Aikman jumped at the chance to interview Solzhenitsyn when the Soviet author sent word through his U.S. publisher, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, that he would be willing to talk to TIME. Says Aikman: “For any student of Russian thought and literature in the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn towers above the landscape. He has done more to influence Western views of the Soviet Union than possibly anyone else since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.”

To see the reclusive author, Aikman drove to Solzhenitsyn’s home in Cavendish, Vt. “Solzhenitsyn’s somewhat forbidding reputation as a stern social critic,” says Aikman, “had not prepared me for the gracious host who bounded out of the house to greet me.” The author’s wife Natalya and their son Stepan, 15, listened in as Aikman conducted the 2 1/2-hour interview in Russian. When it was over, Aikman was invited to share an informal family lunch: Russian blinchiki (crepes stuffed with ground beef) prepared by Natalya.