A Letter From The Publisher, Nov. 24, 1958

POLITICAL democracy as it exists in the U.S., wrote Walt Whitman, is “life’s gymnasium, not of good only, but of all.” Even in Whitman’s day, there were those (mostly those who knew least about politics) who insisted that life’s gymnasium was equipped only with dumbbells, but then and now the fact is that politics shapes the daily life of every U.S. citizen; politics is indeed “not of good only, but of all.” Last week, with the 1958 elections well in the past, the U.S. might have been expected to take a political breather. Not so. People and politicians were rereading the returns and trying to follow them —according to their own interpretations. A liberal Republican said he and those like him should show their muscles ; a forgotten Republican did handsprings trying to trip up an old enemy. But the most exciting activities were the nip-ups of six Democrats trying to fit the election returns into their own futures. They were scattered across the world and, individually, they practiced political yoga in Puerto Rico, foreign-policy pushups in Paris, telephone calisthenics in Texas, crosscountry running from California, deep-breathing exercises in New Jersey, and the running broad jump in Alaska. For their wondrous hex-athlon and a wide-eyed look into the gymnasium, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.

IN the masthead at left this week appears a new name in an old setting. TIME, after several years of reliance on special trips by correspondents for on-the-spot reporting from Russia, now has its own Moscow bureau again. The correspondent: Edmund Stevens, 48, a highly respected. Pulitzer-prizewin-ning reporter who has spent 13 of the past 23 years in Moscow. Denver-born Ed Stevens first went to Russia after graduation from Columbia University, there met (at an economics lecture) and married blonde Nina Andreyevna. Except for time-outs to cover ten World War II battle campaigns, from Finland to the Balkans and North Africa, and a postwar tour in the Mediterranean area, Stevens, a longtime Christian Science Monitor correspondent, has stuck close to the Soviet scene. He is the author of two books on Russia, Russia Is No Riddle and This Is Russia Uncensored. His wife Nina became a U.S. citizen in 1943. is a 1946 graduate of Wellesley. They have one son, Moscow-born Edmund Jr., 22, an M.I.T. graduate, and one daughter, U.S.-born Anastasia, 17, who is studying at Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet School.