A Letter From The Publisher: Jul. 5, 1963

OUT of Paris last week, by one of those electronic marvels that seem commonplace these days (even when they are not), came files from our European correspondents, over transatlantic telephone, at the rate of 10,000 words in ten minutes.

Last week’s quick-marching of news copy was the first ever transmitted from the Continent, and came over our new Digitronics Dial-O-Verter. All this may seem like a lot of words, coming awfully fast, from France—but Paris happens to be the central transmission point for the cables to New York from our bureaus in London, Bonn, Rome, and even such African points as Leopoldville and Elisabethville.

For this week’s issue, in addition to our European correspondents, we have been hearing extensively from our roving White House correspond; ent, Hugh Sidey, following Seán Ó Cinnéide around Germany and Ireland. And across the grey border of Berlin was TIME’S Moscow Correspondent Israel Shenker, who found himself unexpectedly invited by the East German government to watch Nikita Khrushchev appear on his own side of the Berlin Wall. Shenkers trip from Moscow to East Berlin was no ad for either German or Communist efficiency—the Communist airline officials lost his typewriter; the East German propagandists were not expecting him, and Shenker could only wander about, without credentials, through groups of people being drilled on how to cheer as Khrushchev passed.

In the beginning, TIME was frankly a digest of what others reported. Our mission still is to be concise; but our new high-speed transmitter shows how much TIME has become a magazine that sees for itself the complexity of events and hears the prolixity of talk before reducing it to an evening’s reading. Our overseas correspondents file 975,000 words a month. Most of the words come from our 43 regular staff correspondents abroad, the rest from our valued, though little-sung, 120 part-time correspondents (or “stringers”) in such out-of-the-way places as Zanzibar, Sarawak, Macao and Katmandu.

One of our most decorative (as well as one of our few feminine stringers) is Pamela Sanders, who, to use the highest accolade in Southeast Asia, is “Numbah One,” in Laos as well as Viet Nam, Cambodia and Thailand, to pilots and mechanics of Huey helicopters and Air Force bombers. She is a much respected friend of local politicians, international truce inspectors as well as G.I.s, has taken part in countless dangerous missions in the past year. Recently, spending five days at Neutralist General Kong Le’s headquarters in the Plain of Jars, she was enlisted to teach English to members of his battalion. Back home in the capital of Vientiane, in the apartment court she shares with American transport pilots and their families, she was startled to receive a return social call from Kong Le, who —ever mindful of security—had his tough little paratroopers block traffic on the road and station themselves with machine guns on the steps of her apartment as he called.