When George Bush was President and Jim Baker was his foreign policy czar, nobody logged more frequent-flyer miles for TIME than J.F.O. ("Jef") McAllister, our State Department correspondent. Accompanying the peripatetic Secretary of State on his shuttle-diplomacy marathons, McAllister quickly mastered the technological rigors of modern journalism -- banging out dispatches on his Toshiba laptop in airplanes, airports, briefing rooms and run-down hotels. He once typed a file while stuck in a broken elevator in Kislovodsk, a spa town in the heartland of Russia.
McAllister is flying less these days (mostly because Warren Christopher doesn't travel as much as his predecessor...