Once every four years TIME'S National Affairs department--aided and abetted by all pertinent resources of TIME Inc.--squares off to meet one of the most exciting and exacting news coverage problems on the American scene: the nominating conventions that produce the two major candidates for President of the United States. This week the Republicans are convening in Philadelphia, and TIME'S representatives are there--as they will be three weeks from now for the Democratic convention--to try to tell you what happened and why.

At this juncture the pundits have pretty much had their say. From now on until the Republican nominee is chosen, 'the journalist's job is not only to record the events that occur but also to tell how they came about. That takes considerable doing--and shoe leather, for which, as in the case of good detective work, there is sometimes no substitute.

At the Democrats' 1944 convention, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt having the nomination securely salted away, the big story was the selection of a Vice President. It began with a pre-convention meeting of party bosses in the White House, continued through innumerable secret and widely separated caucuses at the Chicago convention, involved the famed C.I.O. Political Action Committee (the P.A.C.), some adroit maneuvering on the convention floor and, especially, "Private Room H" under the convention platform, where the big bosses were busy putting over their choice.

The big bosses were New Jersey's Frank Hague, Chicago's Ed Kelly, and National Chairman Bob Hannegan. They took scores of delegates into Room H and introduced them to Harry Truman. From time to time snatches of conversation drifted out: "I think we got California in shape," "Don't worry too much about Alabama," etc. TIME'S story ran for eight columns in the issue of July 31, 1944, and it took the work of a dozen good political reporters to fit all of its complicated parts together.

Now, four years later, TIME is again prepared to get the story and tell it. For a review of some of the important pre-convention maneuvering see this issue's cover story on Pennsylvania's Governor, Jim Duff.

For general and specific coverage of the convention hall, the speeches and political jockeying on the floor, the hotel room conferences, caucuses, the squabbling and horse-trading among the voting delegations, Senior Editor Otto Fuerbringer and the entire National Affairs staff, Washington Bureau Chief James Shepley and his staff, and Chief of U.S. Correspondents David Hulburd, will be on hand. They will have all the mechanical conveniences that we can give them: a workroom in the basement of convention hall complete with teletype, television facilities,* and direct telephone communication with TIME'S New York and Washington offices, the press gallery on the convention floor, and our central headquarters in a local hotel.

Other TIME correspondents will join these forces at Philadelphia. They are the men who have been covering the campaigns of the leading Republican candidates (e.g., the Chicago office's Jim Bell, who has been with Harold Stassen; Boston's Jeff Wylie, who will be with Governor Dewey, San Francisco's Fritz Goodwin, who arrives with Governor Warren), and Frank McNaughton, our chief Congressional correspondent and chairman of the Periodical Correspondents' Association executive committee, who has been close to Senators Vandenberg and Taft.

When the convention is over and the Republican nominee is known, TIME hopes by these methods to be able to tell you in detail how and why he won, what he stands for -- and then to do it all over again for the Democrats' convention three weeks hence.

Cordially,

* TIME'S staff will also assist the editors of LIFE, who have joined forces with the Nation al Broadcasting Co. to report the convention via television, as well as in the pages of LIFE.

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