A Letter From The Publisher, Jul. 5, 1971

RIGHT after the big story broke,” recalls the New York Times’s Harrison Salisbury, who edits the newspaper’s Op-Ed page, “I approached several people and asked them to write articles commenting on the Viet Nam documents. When they asked me for a summary of the material, which we did not have, I suggested that they wait for the next issue of TIME.” The big story, which the Times broke, was of course the Pentagon papers, our cover subject for the second week in a row. The Nation section’s task is indeed to summarize the welter of disorganized disclosures—and to add a substantial amount of our own exclusive reporting.

Among those who contributed are Writers BJ. Phillips, Edwin Warner, Lee Griggs and William Barnes, and Reporter-Researchers Marguerite Michaels, Robert Goldstein, Isabel Kouri, Jean Vallely and Linda Young. But both this week and last, the demanding job of pulling the disparate pieces together in a cover story fell to the same team.

Associate Editor Ed Magnuson, who wrote the story, is a veteran of 26 TIME covers, dating back to 1962 and encompassing the full range of domestic debate over the war. Magnuson is a former Navy man, having done a two-year hitch before he went on to study journalism at the University of Minnesota in 1948. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Magnuson worked for ten years as a reporter and assistant city editor on the Minneapolis Tribune before coming to TIME in 1960. “Ed has the most professional of gifts: the ability to take an enormous quantity of complicated material and make swift, readable and often eloquent sense of it,” says Nation Senior Editor Jason McManus. Quiet, understated and equipped with a wry sense of humor, Magnuson at the end of each week in Manhattan drives 260 miles to his 22-acre farm in Sutton, N.H., in time to join his wife Mae, their two teen-age daughters and six-year-old son for a leisurely long weekend.

Reporter-Researcher Deborah Murphy, who has worked on nine cover stories, is as eblouissante as Magnuson is restrained. She came to TIME in 1967 after earning a degree in history at Boston University and working for three months on an Israeli kibbutz on the Lebanese border.

Our Medicine section this week carries a story on President Richard Nixon’s latest contribution to the debate over what sort of national health plan the U.S. ought to have. In view of the growing debate on the subject, we now offer free reprints of our June 1 survey “Health Care: Supply, Demand and Politics.” They may be obtained by writing to Room 3137, Time and Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, N.Y. 10020.