To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

As was only right for a national newspaper, TIME had its own independent coverage of what actually happened all along the way while the President was making the coast-to-coast swing that has stirred up such a censorship storm. TIME was the only U.S. newspaper or magazine that had this independent coverage; and consequently TIME was the only publication whose report did not have to be turned in for an O.K. aboard the presidential train before it was released.

And the story of how we got our story is such a good example of how TIME lines up its staff to follow the news that perhaps you might like to hear it.

Before the President left Washington the only official announcement of his trip came from the Office of Censorship, which said that Mr. Roosevelt was "making a trip to a number of war plants and camps" and that nothing was to be published until he got back.

Not a hint was dropped as to where he was going. So that night cryptic instructions were rushed to TIME'S correspondents in a hundred cities from coast to coast, to be on the lookout for a very important personage, to get complete details on his visit if he should happen into their territory, and to send us their report in a specially sealed envelope for use when the news blackout was over.

Bob Strother in Detroit was the first correspondent to pick up the trail, and it was Bob whose 1,000-word report included the fascinating little sidelight about the son of Chrysler's famed K. T. Keller. ("My God, it's the President! Why didn't my old man tell me?") Next Welch and Hagy in Chicago located the President behind all the naval precautions at the Great Lakes Training Station, with such intimate details as how every sailor at the Post was frisked at the gates when he came back from leave, and how the pool was kept heated to exactly 75 degrees on the chance the President might want a swim. Then Schwandner in Milwaukee and Aslakson in Minneapolis took up the thread; and from Montana came a regular Philo Vance clue: the President's dog Fala had been walked early in the morning on the station platform at Billings.

I can't begin to tell you here just what part each and every correspondent along the route played in piecing together TIME'S story--Don Scott in Spokane, Eyre in Portland, Sullivan in Seattle (where FBI men were so thick that many people thought the Boettiger kids had been kidnapped). Martha McGahan of the San Francisco office was on the scene for Mr. Roosevelt's unannounced visit to the wounded war heroes in the naval hospital at Mare Island. But Bill Gray in Los Angeles had to start his report: "We did not have the good luck to see The Visitor, but we have been able to backtrack rather carefully."

In San Diego Harold Keen watched the President parade through the streets between rows of soldiers with fixed bayonets, said that "if the Secret Service wanted to keep his presence dark they had a peculiar way of doing it." Ben Avery in Phoenix trailed his nonstop passage across Arizona; O'Neill told us about El Paso's rumor that the mysterious man who never left the train was really Joe Stalin. And so on across the country--Barr in Fort Worth, Kintzley in New Orleans, Cauthen in Columbia, and many another--there was hardly an hour that some TIME Correspondent was not on the job close at hand. All told, their reports ran something like 20,000 fascinating words, and it really did seem a shame that we had to boil them all down to a page in TIME.

Cordially,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.