AS the antiwar protests grew and spread last week, they became a more important story with every day that passed. It was on Saturday, after the melee at the Pentagon, that the editors of TIME decided they should use cover treatment to fully point up and analyze the complex issues involved. So, only hours before our regular press time, the previously scheduled cover was taken off the presses and that story deferred, in the latest cover change we have ever made.

The main action of the story, Saturday in Washington, was covered by a staff of 18. Among the marchers went Washington Correspondents Kenneth Danforth and Jerry Hannifin, as well as a group of specially recruited reporters and photographers. Some wore Levi's and suede boots, to meld more easily with the crowd, and many equipped themselves with goggles when they heard that police might employ Mace spray to check unruly demonstrators. Pentagon Correspondent John Mulliken took up his position there, later to be joined by correspondents who had been at the head of the march. Reporters Richard Saltonstall and Donn Downing stood by, respectively, in the White House and at the Department of Justice. Coordinating the activities of all our forces on the scene were Washington Bureau News Editor Ed Goodpaster and Acting Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey.

The Washington task force's reports moved to New York, where Editor Michael Demarest and Writer Robert Jones (who had been an on-foot reporter in last spring's Peace March) studied them along with information that other correspondents had sent in from across the nation and around the world. Altogether, they produced a troubling story of a many-faceted movement often at odds with itself.

OUR mail indicates that last week's cover of the poll-leading Republican dream ticket--Nelson Rockefeller for President and Ronald Reagan for Vice President--was read with exceptional interest wherever politicians gather. At no place was it studied more raptly than aboard the S.S. Independence, where the nation's Governors were holding their 59th annual conference.

While Washington Bureau Chief John Steele watched the Governors for this week's story in The Nation, the state executives read TIME with interest, pleasure or irritation, depending on their own points of view. Republicans and Democrats alike pondered the implications. Potential candidates who did not appear on the cover looked hard at the collection of imaginary campaign buttons that appeared inside. But attention kept returning to the cover team. Was this an endorsement of a Rockefeller-Reagan ticket? No, the story made clear that it wasn't. Who was up and who was down? That question sent a joke running through the Independence. Reagan, it was said, had taken to looking at the cover upside down so that he would be top man on the ticket.

Before the week was out, the Chicago American's cartoonist Wayne Stayskal, far from the balmy waters that the Independence was skimming through, got somewhat the same idea and showed Reagan making the switch in a more graphic way.

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