After last week's cover story was put to bed (it was on French Communist Party Boss Maurice Thorez), TIME'S International-Foreign News editor, Max Ways, cabled congratulations on the story to our Paris bureau and added: "We had a painful time deciding what to leave out."

The Paris bureau took a collective bow, and a day off, then went to work on this week's issue. But I think you may be interested in the way we planned for and got the Thorez story, because it illustrates how TIME covers the news outside the U.S.

Our editors had scheduled a definitive story on the French Communist Party some time ago, but the story would not come into sharp focus until after the vote on France's constitutional referendum. Three weeks ago France gave the answer, and Charles Wertenbaker, chief of our Foreign News Service, alerted his Paris bureau.

For guidance, Ways and Researcher Manon Gaulin, daughter of a U.S. consular official, who knows France like a native after many years of residence and work there, got off a long cable explaining their view of the story and warning Paris that almost all the facts would have to come from there because the information available in the U.S. was of doubtful value.

Fill Calhoun. currently Paris bureau chief, had two weeks in which to deliver a very tough job of reporting. Heretofore, getting French communists to talk had been about as easy as nailing a cherry pie to a wall. Calhoun assigned Bernhard Frizell, an experienced reporter who speaks French fluently, to question ordinary communists as to why they joined the party and to interview Mme. Thorez, who turned out to be strongly reminiscent of Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Veteran Percy Knauth, long familiar with the vagaries of European politics, was sent to examine the actual Communist Party organization and work habits in a limited sector. Knauth, impressed by the contrast between French Communist methods and those of communists in other countries he has covered, was surprised to find himself treated like a visiting dignitary by the Communist sector leader.

To his surprise, too, Andre LaGuerre, who drew the major assignment of analyzing the Party, its leaders, and its effect on the French, was received with open arms by Party leaders. He talked twice with Thorez, who insisted that he had never before granted an inter view. LaGuerre submitted a list of questions to Jacques Duclos, the Party's No. 2 man, and got his answers within 24 hours. Duclos also confirmed the fact that Thorez, not he, was the real boss of the Party.

LaGuerre is a good example of the kind of journalist it takes to do the kind of foreign political reporting you expect to get from TIME. He has an intimate knowledge of French politics; he also knows the American idiom. He spent his boyhood in San Francisco, where his father was a French consular official. He stayed there long enough to graduate from high school and to pick up an unquenchable enthusiasm for American baseball. He completed his education in England and France and, as a private in the French army, was evacuated from Dunkirk. Charles de Gaulle rescued him from sentry duty outside the French embassy in London, where French sentries had to stand without shelter throughout the worst of the blitz. We got to know him as De Gaulle's in telligent, well-informed, fair-minded liaison man with the English language press in Algiers and Paris.

The fruit of his and of the rest of the Paris bureau's labors arrived in Manhattan on schedule for writing and editing. Everything about the report was crystal clear except an explanation of the switchboard in Thorez' regal office. The switchboard was an impressive affair studded with 48 buttons and twinkling red and green lights. LaGuerre, who couldn't take his eyes off of it, asked the leader what it signified. Thorez swore that he never had been able to figure the blamed thing out.

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