A Letter From The Publisher: Jun. 26, 1964

AT the airport in Vientiane, Correspondent Frank McCulloch watched a young Laotian in dungarees servicing a small aircraft. The youth drained fuel from the plane into an open bucket, carried the pail into a shed where 500-lb. bombs, rockets and machine-gun ammunition were stored, picked up a tool box and sauntered back to the airplane. Only then did he throw away the cigarette he had been smoking all the while.

Watching such vignettes in the Southeast Asian powder keg last week, Hong Kong Bureau Chief McCulloch mused that “covering Laos is like being Alice in Wonderland—surrealistic, exasperating, frequently incomprehensible but often utterly delightful.” A lunch with the cover subject, General Kong Le, in his headquarters village of Vang Vieng was a study in the country’s need as well as its plenty. It was served on a table covered by a red checked tablecloth “with so many holes in it that it must have been riddled by a shotgun.” But no one needed to go away hungry from the meal—bamboo sprouts, fish, large bowls of glutinous rice, tiny cubes of dried smoked water buffalo, eggs fried with garlic, cucumbers, oranges and pineapple. After flying low across the embattled countryside with Kong Le, McCulloch wrote: “Laos is one of the loveliest lands on earth, and it is a bitter travesty that such a land and the gentle people who inhabit it should be caught up in a war they are ill prepared to fight but cannot be allowed to lose.”

With McCulloch’s firsthand reporting, supported by backgrounding from the rest of the Hong Kong staff and the Washington bureau, the cover story written by Robert Jones and edited by Henry Grunwald throws the sharpest light yet on the plight and possibilities of Laos and the U.S. in the jungle of neutralism.

OF all the stories in this week’s issue that called for reporting from a wide array of sources, none came from a wider net than the WORLD BUSINESS story “Doctors of Development.” Work on this report of the activities and powers of economists around the world was begun some three weeks ago, involved 35 interviews by correspondents in 15 countries. One of the economists who was a source for the story was Holland’s Jan Tinbergen, who had never before granted an interview to the press. When TIME’s correspondent was leaving after their talk, the economist said: “If you really are going to have an article in TIME, please mention my wife. Her name is Tine de Wit. She has supported me enormously. She is a great woman. I would love to see that in print somewhere.” There it is, Dr. Tinbergen.