A Letter From The Publisher: Aug. 24, 1962

ALL right, fellows, I’m going out there with the troops. What are you going to do to make me feel secure?” “I hope there won’t be any war, but let us be prepared.” “Anybody who believes that the United States of America doesn’t have a bright future should have his brain examined.” “I don’t admit there is a gap. I’m a little tired of that word. I’ve heard enough of it.” “I was born a good child. Had I lost both of my parents at the age of three or four, I still might have become a good man.” “I quit running at 95.” “It was just as pleasant as a good restaurant.” Who said which? These quotes, out of this week’s TIME, were said (but not in the same order) by Jawaharlal Nehru, Pavel Popovich, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Matthew J. Culligan, Douglas MacArthur, Niccoló Tucci and Dwight Eisenhower. One way to find out is to try to match the quote with the speaker. Another way is to read this week’s TIME.

BESIDES four pages in color on the art festival at Spoleto, this issue features four salt-sprayed pages of pictures of the America’s Cup challengers. The reporting assignment fell to Lansing Lamont, 32, of our Washington bureau (whose most recent sailing cup dates from the North Haven, Me., midget dinghy series of 1940). Covering Congress and Cape Canaveral and nuclear testing, Lamont is used to avalanches of garrulity, as well as fits of secrecy. But rarely has he had such trouble getting a story as in the waters off Newport. The cup racers and selection committee members are all business, suspicious of outsiders, wary of the press, and usually “have a quaint idea that sailing is still for the upper classes.”

But Lamont, by one device or another, managed to get to his sources. Having coffee with “Glit” Shields of the Columbia, he noticed that Shields had a clarinet with him, was on his way to a teen-age hop to play at intermission. “I asked him if he needed a piano player, and he said ‘Great.'” Over some Benny Goodman tunes, Lamont wangled a trip on the Columbia. “Glit had me playing the mainsheet like a yoyo, and what I thought would be a free ride ended up a workout.”

Hardest to get aboard was Gretel, the Australian challenger, but Sir Frank Packer finally relented. Her Aussie crew told Lamont that he was the first newsman ever allowed to sail on her, and the cruise Lamont took, in pelting rain and a 25-knot wind, had another distinction: it was the roughest weather Gretel had ever sailed in. Lamont had to pay for that passage too: he was ordered to help raise the main by winding in 400 ft. of wire on a portable plywood winch. By week’s end, Lamont was happy to be all quiet on the Potomac.