BEING interviewed by TIME for a cover story, says Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is "like an interview with my friend Erving Goffman, the sociologist. He watches you, and you watch him watching you, and he watches you watching him watching you. There is nothing like a TIME cover. It is a classic. Depending on how it comes out, it's either like Boswell and Johnson or Strachey and Queen Victoria."

We are not sure whether our subject will judge this week's cover story in the Boswell or Strachey tradition --or possibly in some other category. At any rate, it was TIME'S Boston Bureau Chief Chris Cory who began watching Moynihan several weeks ago. Keeping him under surveillance was not easy because he moved around so much. Cory accompanied him as he flew to a Ford Foundation consultation in New York, drove with him to Providence College, where he picked up an honorary degree, and hiked through brambles, streams and pastures on Moynihan's farm in upstate New York. Reports Cory: "I am, one might say, muddy but unbowed."

Meanwhile the Boston Bureau's William Marmon Jr. covered the slum and nonslum areas of the city, and Washington's Wallace Terry reported on urban problems across the U.S. Even as Writers Gerald Clarke and Robert Jones were at work with Editor Ron Kriss on the article, Mrs. Moynihan remained skeptical that it would really appear. She bet Cory and his wife a dinner that it wouldn't. Mr. and Mrs. Cory are dining chez Moynihan some time this week.

TIME has not had a fulltime cor respondent in Moscow since our last bureau chief, Israel Shenker, was expelled in 1964. Covering this week's story on tourism in Russia therefore presented some problems, but nothing insuperable. Alan Walker, a writer for our Canadian edition had been touring Russia on vacation, and on his return provided a detailed report. Researcher Jill McManus debriefed recent travelers. Says Modern Living Writer Marshall Burchard: "People came right out of the woodwork once we got started." Jim Langley, a freelance photographer, took the pictures for our eight-page color spread. For a month, he traveled across the Soviet Union, from Irkutsk to Samarkand, shooting about 9,000 frames of film along the way. Not only that, but he spoke his impressions into a tape recorder, adding up to five hours or about 33,000 words. "At first I felt silly talking into it, but once 1 was on the road, I couldn't keep quiet. During the lonely spots, I would play it back and listen to myself and figure out how my attitudes had changed as I went along." The tape contains his complaint that from a photographer's point of view, the cities lack color ("except for those Red flags"), but, as his pictures show, he managed to find some. Once he had trouble getting to the right window to photograph an early morning parade in Red Square, finally woke up several guests in the Russia Hotel before he found his shooting perch. His one real problem: "I am not a vodka man."

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