Big events are routine to TIME, but the past seven days were so full of shocks and surprises that editors had a hard time remembering a week like it. The U.S. and the world were trying to pick up the pieces after Henry Kissinger's failed Middle East mission. Saudi Arabia's King Faisal was assassinated. In Indochina, the Cambodian government seemed helpless, while President Nguyen Van Thieu's panicking army yielded province by province to North Vietnamese troops. Portugal, a member of NATO, was continuing its slide leftward. All of this presented serious problems for a U.S. recently too preoccupied with the recession to pay a great deal of attention to world events. President Ford ordered a review of all aspects of the nation's foreign policy. To TIME editors, the week's events seemed to require special attention. To report the developments thoroughly and in an orderly fashion, as well as analyze their meaning, TIME presents a 25-page special section, The U.S. & the World.

The special report was supervised by three TIME senior editors:

John Elson, Marshall Loeb and Ronald Kriss. They worked with 18 writers and reporter-researchers from the Nation and World sections, four picture researchers and dozens of correspondents round the world. From Danang, where U.S. Marines first waded ashore into Viet Nam, Correspondent William McWhirter witnessed hysteria as Communist forces surrounded the city. At midweek, McWhirter was ordered out on an emergency evacuation flight to Saigon.

Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff pressed Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin for his interpretation of the stalled Middle East negotiations, while Correspondents Wilton Wynn in Cairo and Karsten Prager in Beirut reported Arab views and reaction to Faisal's death. From Washington, Diplomatic Editor Jerrold Schecter and State Department Correspondent Strobe Talbott contributed to an analysis of how setbacks in Indochina and the Middle East may affect the future of the Secretary of State. The special section is illustrated by four pages of color photographs, including a remarkable picture of Faisal's simple sand-and-stone grave by TIME'S Eddie Adams.

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