I NTERVIEWING people is the most important way of getting ' news. We do it all the time, and the job is mostly up to our correspondents, but researchers, writers and editors enthusiastically join in when they get the opportunity. So we have occasionally wondered just what it feels like to be interviewed by TIME.

Harrowing, we have been told by some. It may not be all that bad. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John Gardner was interviewed at length for this week's cover story by Reporter Michael McManus, both in his office and at home, and seems to have weathered the ordeal well. "It's been driving energy all the way," he said gamely, "and that's what I like."

A few weeks ago, Publisher Bennett Cerf also enjoyed the experience. "What greater joy is there in the world," he asked, "than talking about yourself to someone who's paid to listen?"

Not all the people interviewed for a TIME cover take it so ebulliently. Industrialist-Art Collector Norton Simon compared his sessions to a "threeday physical exam at a clinic. You know you'll be poked, probed and punctured, and you'd better tell all because they'll find out anyway." The late Author John Marquand told Reporter Ruth Mehrtens that the interviews were better than being psychoanalyzed. Oceanographer Jacques Yves Cousteau recalls with a shudder, and some slight exaggeration, that he was rarely alone for three months: "Your reporters followed me everywhere. Once I tried to hide in a motel, but they found me." And Architect William Pereira likened his interview to an initiation rite: "You approach it with apprehension and endure it with what you hope is a convincing show of manly valor."

Simon, Cousteau and Pereira all were pleased with the finished stories, which we hope is the case most of the time. But it is not always. "It was tantamount to a mountain laboring to bring forth a mouse," thundered Boston's Cardinal Gushing after he read our cover on him. Said Producer David Merrick, who will say anything: "Is it true the entire staff of TIME is on LSD?"

Not many people are as relaxed as Author Jean Kerr, who remarks: "I didn't bother to be discreet. I thought, if I have to be careful I just won't tell anything. So I told everything." Each interviewer has his own questioning techniques, but what they all strive for is a rapport that will allow the subject to relax enough to show his real character. "It's wonderful if people will talk freely, just bubble on," says Theater Critic Theodore Kalem. "Lauren Bacall happens to be the bar-buddy sort of girl who is easy to talk to." New York's Mayor John Lindsay told Correspondent Nick Thimmesch: "Everybody in government would like to write his own story. Short of that, you just have to trust the reporter." And, he might have added, the writers and editors, who are responsible for how the reporter's interview is used in TIME.

From our point of view, some pretty valuable advice to prospective interviewees comes from Heavyweight Champion Cassius Clay: "Look your best. Treat the reporter extra nice. Give him extra time. There are so many people in line to get on that cover."

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