Dear TIME-Reader:

WHILE President Eisenhower was still in Key West, Brazil's President-elect Juscelino Kubitschek visited the White House especially to learn how the Administration's staff system operates. When he expressed this wish, presidential aides produced a copy of TIME'S Jan. 9 issue, with a portrait of White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams on the cover, and opened it to our report on the White House office and its staff, illustrated with a chart by R. M. Chapin Jr. This, Ike's aides told their distinguished guest, was the latest and most accurate picture available of the White House staff organization.

"Kubitschek," said John L. Steele, our White House correspondent, "sat on a couch in Dwight Eisenhower's office and studied Chapin's chart. After that, in a skull session which may serve him well in setting up his own administration in Brazil, he followed the chart, actually walking from office to office to trace the course that a piece of executive business would take to the President's desk."

After his brief visit, Brazil's President-elect left the White House with many new administrative ideas in mind and the Jan. 9 issue of TIME safely tucked under his arm.

President-elect Kubitschek is not the first to discover how well Bob Chapin's charts and maps can clarify a subject, from geography or medicine to economics or government. Among the reprint requests that come to my office each month, many ask permission to use TIME'S charts and maps. Since Chapin joined our staff in 1937, his work has been reproduced by foreign governments, the U.S. State Department, Air Force, Army, Navy, numerous universities, and publishers of textbooks and encyclopedias. At the moment he is devoting his spare " time to a four-color map in global perspective that he is doing for NATO under TIME sponsorship.

Chapin started out to become an architect (University of Pennsylvania '33), but taught himself to draw maps when the building business dried up during the Depression. He still finds time to design an occasional house, including his own at Sharon, Conn. "Bob Chapin is far more than a cartographer," says Houghton Mifflin's Textbook Editor William E. Spaulding. "He approaches the job of illustrating in the spirit of a constructive and imaginative teacher."

Bob has two cartographers, Vince Puglisi and Jere Donovan, helping him in our map room, but his own work in and on TIME (cover map of liberated Paris, Sept. 4, 1944, and the map of Jerusalem cover, Aug. 26, 1946) has been so prolific in the past 18 years that some readers can't believe it was done by one man -- or even one generation. One reader wrote Chapin: "I've enjoyed the maps that you and your father have done for TIME."

Cordially yours,

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