A Letter From The Publisher: Sep. 1, 1961

TIME's cover story this week tells of an insider at work—a man whose essential bartering, bantering mediation between the White House and Congress was never anticipated by the constitutional forefathers. The reporter who dug up most of the material, Neil MacNeil of TIME's Washington bureau, is another insider at work.

MacNeil, whose father was assistant managing editor of the New York Times, majored in American political history at Harvard and at the Columbia School of Graduate Faculties. He has been getting quite a political education outside—and beyond—the textbooks since moving to Washington, D.C., in 1949. First for the United Press...