Every Wednesday night--some 48 hours after TIME has gone to press--two documents of considerable importance to our next week's issue arrive at the TIME & LIFE building in Manhattan via teletype from our Washington bureau. They are the Washington Story Suggestions and the Washington Memorandum.

These documents are, in effect, an updating of the national scene for the benefit of TIME'S editors, whose work week begins on Thursday. The Story List, which reaches their desks along with the story suggestions from our other 27 bureaus at home & abroad, is the Washington bureau's idea of what stories from the nation's capital TIME'S forthcoming issue should carry and what background and information the bureau's 17 correspondents can supply for them. The Memorandum is an attempt to fill in our editors on what has been going on behind the Washington scene since they put their last issue to bed.

Together, Story List and Memorandum are a kind of TIME in miniature. Although Washington bureaumen mainly have their eyes on the news of politics and foreign affairs, they are also responsible for the news of medicine, art, science, education, etc. that the capital makes. To keep up-to-date on what has happened and is going to happen in his field (Treasury, State Department, Army & Navy, etc.) each correspondent spends most of his week going his separate way, interviewing sources, etc.--which may include, as it did recently, an assignment to Bikini or a political depth-sounding junket into Pennsylvania. The one time during the week when the whole staff gets together is at the bureau chief's story conference on Wednesday morning.

There, the collective intelligence of the staff is fitted together to get an intimate picture of what is going on in Washington that week. Ed Lockett, TIME'S White House man, usually leads off with his outline of what the President is doing and will do, his mood, what the men around him say. Bureau Chief Robert Elson may take over from there, filling in the outline with information he picked up at a background conference in the State Department. Each reporter "sings" in turn: Frank McNaughton, who watches Congress like a hawk, to predict the fate of an important bill; Anatole Visson to relate some unusual doings among the foreign embassies; Frances Henderson to recount the latest news in atomic science.

Gradually, as stories are accepted, rejected, or postponed for ripening, the week's Story List is made. When all ideas are exhausted, staff members type up .their agreed-on story suggestions.

Seldom longer than three paragraphs, each has to be sharp enough to catch an editor's eye, complete enough to include the relevant details of the story.

Later, if one of his offerings ends up on the editor's story list for that issue, it is up to the correspondent who offered it to supply the facts.

The Washington Memorandum does not suggest stories; it tries to illuminate them. It gives the intimate background of certain events that would be meaningless otherwise, offers guidance from other sources on difficult stories, makes cautious predictions (giving reasons) of events to come. It notes changes in the attitudes and appearance of important Government officials, passes on significant scraps of personal conversations, occasionally deals in the things people say at cocktail parties, which are sometimes more revealing than the utterances of a Cabinet member.

Because it is written solely for the edification of our editors, the Washington Memorandum is painfully frank. It is not, however, "secret." TIME readers receive the full benefit of its guidance and information. Its aim 'is to delineate the behind-the-scenes activities that motivate Government issues and Government men. As a special service for TIME editors, it tries hard to be well and correctly informed on the issues that matter in the nation's capital -- which is precisely what TIME tries to be on the issues that matter all over the world.

Cordially,

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