Three hours after the jury in Manhattan's Communist trial had brought in its verdict of guilty Duncan Norton-Taylor, National Affairs writer and one of TIME's senior editors, had a two-hour interview with Judge Harold Medina in his chambers. Two days later he finished his draft of the Medina cover story (TIME, Oct. 24) and sent it along to the editors. It was about (he has lost actual count) his 50th TIME cover story--a record that no other TIME writer can claim.

Ten years before--almost to the day --Dunc Taylor had taken the one-a-day train out of Oxford, Md., a quiet fishing hamlet on the Eastern Shore, and gone to work for TIME. Born in East Orange, N.J., educated at Brown University ('26), he had done a reporter's hitch on the Newark Star-Eagle and Brooklyn Daily Times, spent eight years editing a detective story magazine, and had retired to Oxford to free lance. "In 1939," he says, "the world seemed to be going to hell. I couldn't go on writing fiction."

As the world crisis developed Taylor shifted from National Affairs and the domestic scene to Army & Navy and World Battlefronts. From 1942 to 1946 even a partial list of his cover subjects, through whom TIME told part of the story of World War II, reads like a rollcall of the war years: Leahy, Alexander, Gort, Tedder, Doolittle, Montgomery, Spaatz, Spruance, Eisenhower, Wainwright, Forrestal, Bradley. Early in 1943 Taylor went to the Pacific as a correspondent to see and report the war firsthand. The climax of his tour of duty there was his unplanned presence at the night sea battle of Kula Gulf, which he watched from the bridge of the engaged cruiser St. Louis. The way he felt about it became the title of his book on the war in the Pacific: With My Heart in My Mouth. Taylor Is inclined to believe that some sort of rough justice is indicated by the fact that soon after returning unscathed from the Pacific an icicle from the 33rd floor of the TIME & LIFE Building scored a direct hit on his head and laid him low.

From war's end to now Taylor has been back on the domestic scene, writing the story of U.S. politics, labor-management problems, the economy. A few of his other cover subjects : John L. Lewis, Tom Dewey, Robert Taft, Dean Acheson, Eugene Dennis, Richard Mellon. A fine craftsman and a thoroughly professional journalist, he has a special talent for sizing up his man in his lead paragraph. His cover story on former Speaker of the House Joe Martin (TIME, Nov. 18, 1946) began: "About all that little Joe ever did was brush the flies off the horses' big rumps while his old man did the shoeing. Little Joe never actually worked at his father's trade. But he grew up to have his old man's squat build. And in the politician's trade, which Joe Martin took up, he worked in the manner of a blacksmith -- a nail here, a nail there, working most of the time close to the ground . . ."

Unlike some of his colleagues, Dunc Taylor does not line the walls of his office with the TIME cover portraits of his subjects. "I don't like to have them all staring at me, once I've had my say about them, "he says. Occasionally some underworld character whom Taylor knew back in his detective fiction story days drops by his office. He spends two and a half hours a day commuting to Maplewood, N.J., and whenever he can, gets back to Oxford for some sailing, carpentry ("a kind of hobby") and a renewal of his rearguard action against honeysuckle and other stubborn aspects of nature that infest his summer home.

A deceptively mild, small man with grey-blue eyes, a stubborn independence, and three daughters (including twins) all in college, whom he wishes he could see more often, Dunc Taylor often feels after a week of grappling with the news that it might have been better to have been a house carpenter. Says he: "If I had known what was going to happen to the world when I took that train out of Oxford ten years ago, I might have stayed there and tonged oysters. It's one crisis after another in National Affairs. The job never gets any easier."

Cordially yours,

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