When Associate Editor Roger Rosenblatt was asked to write this week's story on the nation's capital city, he had no trouble at all identifying a central question: Why does America hate Washington? "It has become a byword for the country's problems," says Rosenblatt. "People abuse it, make fun of it, and presidential candidates campaign against it. You ask almost anyone in this country to tell you what's wrong, and he'll say Washington."

The subject was a natural one for Rosenblatt, a onetime Washingtonian who admits to ambivalent feelings about the capital. Before coming to TIME in July, he lived in Washington for seven years, working as director of education for the National Endowment for the Humanities and, more recently, as literary editor of the New Republic and as a columnist for the Washington Post. In the summer of 1979, Washingtonian magazine named Rosenblatt the city's "best columnist." "I didn't always write about Washington," says Rosenblatt, "but you can't work as a journalist there without automatically becoming interested in the whole scene." His essays for TIME have continued to embrace the "whole scene," from an examination of the growing acceptance of government-sponsored terrorism as a diplomatic option, to a piece of advice on how important people should deal with public scandal to last week's treatise on the hair-raising choices that faced the nation this Halloween.

A native of New York, Rosenblatt wrote a profile of that city for TIME just before the Democratic National Convention there in August. But he found Washington "much harder to pin down." The main reason, says Rosenblatt, is that "unlike most American cities, Washington did not grow naturally -- it was invented. It is the symbolic center of the country, a gathering point for politicians and powerbrokers and a place where people live."

For this week's story, which was illustrated by the well-known painter Paul Hogarth, Rosenblatt returned to his old D.C. haunts. For two full days he visited museums, monuments and neighborhoods in an effort "to get the city back in my eyes." Rosenblatt found our nation's capital as perplexing and contradictory as many Presidents have found it. Says he: "How can a city be at once so gracious and so ruthless?"

Next week's issue of TIME, with full coverage of the 1980 election, appears early. It will be out on Thursday, Nov. 6, and reach subscribers shortly thereafter. We will resume our normal publishing schedule for the following issue.

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