A CHARTERED Pan American jet aircraft landed without incident at the Lebanon [N.H.] Regional Airport yesterday morning," reported The Dartmouth. "Local gossip had it that had the plane crashed upon landing, the European economy would have collapsed." Hyperbole, of course, but there was some truth as well in the student newspaper's observation. On board the plane were 27 of Western Europe's top businessmen (see box), representing industrial enterprises with annual sales of more than $35 billion and financial institutions with assets of around $20 billion. They were the participants in TIME'S latest News Tour, entitled "Report on America."
The News Tour, we feel, has become a unique TIME institution. The first one, in 1963, set the pattern. We invite a group of business leaders —who always pay their own way—in effect to turn themselves into reporters under the auspices of our correspondents and editors. The idea is to enable economic decision makers to become familiar with the issues and the personalities that make current history. The first News Tour, to Western Europe and Russia, resulted in a long and memorable interview with Nikita Khrushchev. On three subsequent tours to Asia and Eastern Europe, participants met Marshal Tito, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Indonesian President Suharto, Pakistan's then-President Ayub Khan, Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.
This time the difference was that, instead of taking American businessmen abroad, we invited European businessmen to the U.S. because, as I explained in welcoming the group: "The U.S. is topic A on all your minds in this day and age. We have had some five years of social revolution going on. This year, for the first time in decades, the U.S. has encountered an economic crisis, one that resounds with impact all over the
world." In the same vein, Managing Editor Henry Grunwald observed at the start of the tour: "You are arriving in America at a moment of pause when we are waiting for the outcome of several large enterprises and experiments."
The timing of the trip could hardly have been better since it coincided with the President's announcement of Phase II of his economic program. Given the current international trade and monetary crisis, our visitors engaged in lively debate with U.S. officials. While our primary purpose was to acquaint our guests with U.S. problems and policies, we like to think that the important Americans they met also found it useful to hear the questions and concerns of the Europeans.
The packed six-day program, arranged by Chief of Correspondents Murray Gart, Senior Correspondent John Steele, Public Affairs Director Robert Ankerson and many of their colleagues, started in New York.