Joelle Attinger remembers precisely the moment when she decided she wanted to become a journalist. At 17, Attinger, our newly appointed chief of correspondents and TIME's first ever female top editor, read an interview of North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap by famed Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci. "She had such a wonderful way of bringing people out," says Attinger. "That she was a woman made me say, 'This is possible.' "
Attinger, who until recently oversaw our domestic bureaus, began her career at TIME in 1973 as a secretary in the Paris-based Europe bureau. When she wasn't clipping news wires, she...