Four years ago, Washington Correspondent Hays Gorey, who wrote most of this week's major report on significant local elections, was covering the Republican National Committee and C.R.P. (the Committee for the Re-Election of the President). John Dean, recently remarried, was staying silently behind the scenes at the White House as counsel to Richard Nixon. Watergate was still best known as an expensive apartment-office complex on the Potomac River.

This election year, John Dean, who helped make Watergate part of American speech and history, is a journalist himself, having revealed in a Rolling Stone article the scatological indiscretion that forced Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz to resign. Gorey, who had yet to cultivate Dean as a news source in 1972, has since come to know him and his second wife better. He interviewed Dean extensively from the time of his firing by Nixon in April 1973 to his release from prison in January 1975 and collaborated with Mrs. Dean on a book, "Mo": A Woman's View of Watergate. "It will take more than rhetoric to restore the faith of the people in our political system," says Gorey. "But I think something like Watergate may never happen again. It forced those who gain public office to examine what they do."

Gorey has reported on Capitol Hill, presidential candidates and the Justice, Labor and Treasury departments since coming to TIME's Washington bureau from the Salt Lake City Tribune eleven years ago.

For the 1976 campaign, he has switched roles and helped to interpret the rush of each week's events as a writer in New York for the NATION section. In his spare time, he is writing a volume about the political growth of Robert Kennedy, whom he covered in the Senate and during R.F.K.'s brief, tragic 1968 presidential campaign.

Also contributing to this week's local election survey were New York Bureau Chief Laurence Barrett, who reported and wrote the articles on the lively New York and Pennsylvania Senate races, and Nation Writer Stephen Schlesinger, who focused on some of the new faces stumping for statehouse and congressional seats. Schlesinger found that most of these races have a common theme. "Watergate has definitely affected the elections this year," he says. "Almost everyone has made integrity in government an issue."

Barrett covered the Gold water and Johnson camps in 1964 but reports that he has a special affection for a state-level contest. "You see both the candidates and the citizenry in something approaching a natural state," says Barrett. "You hear the voters' concerns and you find out whether a politician talks to ordinary folks, or simply processes them through the handshaking-and-grin machine."

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