“The Wapshot Scandal (TIME, Jan. 24), the second of his two novels, is selling at a brisk 2,000 copies a week, and has already topped the total sales of his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle—although the Chronicle won the National Book Award in 1958. Movie rights to both have been bought for $75,000, but it seems likely that any movie will mirror merely the realism. Cheever has been long acknowledged as a master of the short story, of which he has written over a hundred…Ultimately, Cheever tries to ‘celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.’ Says he: ‘One has an impulse to bring glad tidings to someone. My sense of literature is a sense of giving, not a diminishment. I know almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next, and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.’” (Mar. 27, 1964)

“For the President, who takes a special pride in his mastery of foreign policy, there may well be particularly poignant irony in the fact that Kissinger is now widely viewed as an autonomous operator who might well survive the collapse of the Nixon Administration. (Vice President Gerald Ford has made it clear that, should he become President, he would ask Kissinger to stay on.)… Sums up Presidential Aide Alexander Haig: ‘I think the President considers Henry a unique national institution.’ For Kissinger personally, the success of his Moscow trip is particularly crucial for the continuation of his grand vision of American policy, for the maintenance of the accomplishments he has both achieved and has still in the making. So swiftly and dramatically has the Secretary of State worked radical changes in U.S. diplomacy—detente with Moscow, friendship with Peking, progress toward a settlement in the Middle East—that he has acquired something of the mystique of a magician, pulling doves of peace out of a hat for a fascinated circle of world watchers.” (April 1, 1974)

“Although the battlefield produced the usual fog of conflicting reports, at least one thing was made clear with the first salvo: the principal target of Gulf War II is not the Iraqi military but Saddam himself. Inside the U.S. war rooms, quickly decapitating the Iraqi regime is seen as critical to bringing about the destruction of the enemy. ‘We want to turn the Iraqi military into a chicken with its head cut off,’ a senior Navy official says. Saddam ‘might be able to strike back, but it will be uncoordinated and ultimately fruitless.’ Defense sources say that U.S. forces will rush to Baghdad as quickly as possible to try to corner Saddam and flush him out into the open; if a coup or assassination fails to dislodge him, U.S. air and ground forces plan to launch more strikes against critical targets inside the capital in an effort to kill him. A senior U.S official told TIME that covert U.S. intelligence personnel have infiltrated Baghdad, hunting in the shadows for the Iraqi leaders. ‘We've had some folks on the ground over there now for weeks,’ the official says.” (Mar. 31, 2003)

Former TIME Editor-in-Chief Richard Stengel reflects on how he made the buzzy cover choice.