Long before he began work on this week's cover story on G. William Miller, George Taber, our Washington economic correspondent, had collected some intriguing gossip and opinion about the unbankerly new Federal Reserve Board chief. Most of it squared with the impression that Taber had got during his first meeting with Miller, just after he took office in March. "It was disarming," he recalls. "He was running around the solemn corridors of the Fed with his coat off, tossing out ideas on fighting inflation and otherwise behaving unlike the typical wary central banker."

That impression was reinforced during Taber's reporting for this week's story, which was written by George Church and edited by Marshall Loeb. The interview with Miller lasted four hours. "We'd planned on two," says Taber, "but we drifted onto everything from his wife's photography to his Coast Guard days in Shanghai. He was totally relaxed, and I understood better why Fed staffers are talking about a breath of fresh air." Like Miller, Taber picked up his economics on the fly. In college (Georgetown, '64) he majored in international relations, but delved more deeply into economics during graduate work at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. Between tours as a TIME correspondent in West Germany and France, he served two years as a press aide for the Common Market. Out of his experiences came two books: John F. Kennedy and a Uniting Europe (1969) and Patterns and Prospects of Common Market Trade (1974). Another result: his conviction that most of the crises of the postwar era have been and will continue to be economic ones. Says Taber: "I missed many Friday dinners in Europe because of a currency crisis. It always seemed to happen at the end of the week."

Taber has also developed a wariness of that governmental staple--statistics. "Numbers are the bricks and mortar of economics," he concedes, "but they can always be jiggered to support a case. The only statistic I still trust is my Social Security number." To those who question his fondness for his subject, Taber offers an observation from Economist Robert Heilbroner: "A man who thinks that economics is only a matter for professors forgets that this is the science that has sent men to the barricades."

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