To Our Readers: Aug. 1, 1994

White House correspondent James Carney likes to say his current beat couldn’t be more different from his previous assignment, which was chronicling the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia and the other independent states. “There the story was as vast as the land mass,” Carney notes. “Here the setting is much more intimate, with the focus on the small and overcrowded West Wing of the White House.” Washington bureau chief Dan Goodgame sees it another way. “Covering coup attempts in Moscow and fistfights in the Russian parliament,” Goodgame argues, “has prepared Jay wonderfully well to cover the Clinton White House.”

Goodgame has a point. Tensions and struggles abound in the West Wing power suites, and never more so than on the agonizing issue of health care. For journalists too, the Administration’s effort to revamp the health-care system is a complex story, tangling science, economics, business and politics. The topic has absorbed the efforts of the Washington staff, from science specialist Dick Thompson to Capitol Hill correspondents Julie Johnson and Laurence I. Barrett. But it all has a way of coming back to the White House, which is why Carney has written this week’s story.

“The White House right now is consumed with the health-care issue,” he says. “At this point, no issue matters so much to Bill Clinton, not even Haiti. Certainly no issue will have so large an effect on determining the success or failure of his presidency. Health care so dominates the White House agenda that one official told me, ‘If it’s not your issue, you’re off in space somewhere between Jupiter and Uranus.’ “

Carney’s White House posting has brought him back to his roots: he was born ) in Washington and raised in suburban Virginia. When he joined TIME in 1988 as Miami bureau chief, after a stint with the Miami Herald, it was another homecoming: in 1986, between his junior and senior years at Yale, he was one of the magazine’s summer interns. Along with curiosity and agility, Carney brings a dogged will to his pursuits that is cloaked by a disarmingly easygoing manner. “I once thought Jay might be ‘too nice’ to cover the White House,” admits Goodgame. “But that concern was dispelled for good when I listened to the tape of one of his interviews for a story on Whitewater. I heard a top Clinton aide trying to intimidate Jay by yelling at him, and I heard Jay, without losing his cool, raising his voice right back and demanding that his questions get answered — which they were.”