THE Air Force KC-135 jet tanker that crashed at Massachusetts' Westover Air Base last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) took with it James Lukens McConaughy Jr., 42, chief of TIME-LIFE Washington Bureau since August, 1957, one of the most respected correspondents in the capital.

A journalist was all that big, slow-talking, prematurely grey Jim McConaughy ever wanted to be. Son of James Lukens McConaughy, president of Wesleyan University and Connecticut's Republican Governor from 1946 to 1948, Jim got a job with the Hartford Times while still at Wesleyan, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. In 1938 he came to TIME and asked for a job. The only place open at the time was as a copy boy; he took it. Later he went to Chicago as a correspondent, returned to New York as a writer. In 1944 he traveled to Parris Island, S.C. on assignment to cover the Marine Corps' athletic program there. He came back a marine, served as a combat intelligence captain in the Pacific, where a Luzon airfield was named after his older daughter Phoebe.

After the war, McConaughy worked as TIME's bureau chief in Ottawa and Seattle, but it was on Washington's Capitol Hill that he found his real home. Often mistaken by tourists for a Senator, McConaughy liked the members of Congress, and they liked him. He averaged about five miles a day walking down congressional corridors into congressional offices, was a welcome guest in congressional homes, an after-hours regular in the private sanctums of Vice President Richard Nixon, House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. He played a leading part in covering the 1952 and 1956 presidential nominating conventions for TIME, crisscrossed the U.S. both before and during the campaigns. He dogged the footsteps of Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy for six years, and his work resulted in two memorable cover stories (TIME, Oct. 22, 1951; March 8, 1954). Among the many other covers on which McConaughy reported: Adlai Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, McCarthy Committee Lawyer Ray Jenkins, Georgia's Senator Walter George. Last year, weeks before the historic Senate battle on civil rights legislation reached its climax, Jim McConaughy laid down clearly and accurately the complex strategic and tactical lines, furnished the reporting on a cover about Georgia's Senator Richard Russell. Just six weeks ago he traveled to California, reported that Democrat Pat Brown would lead Republican Bill Knowland by 600,000 votes in the pivotal gubernatorial primary. McConaughy was off--by a fraction of 1%.

Last week, when news of Jim McConaughy's death saddened Capitol Hill, Senator after Senator arose to pay him tribute as man and newsman. Said Acting Majority Leader Mike Mansfield: "He was a great newspaperman, a good friend." And TIME's Editor-in-Chief Henry R. Luce spoke for us all in mourning Jim McConaughy: "He was dedicated to the service of his country and of truth."

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