By John A. Meyers

One morning last week, in a dining room atop the Time & Life Building in New York City, nine of TIME'S editors, correspondents and writers assembled for breakfast and a conversation with Mexico's Foreign Minister, Bernardo Sepulveda Amor. For more than an hour, Sepulveda answered questions about his country's relations with the U.S., and about the unrest in Central America. By the time the last coffees were finished, the TIME hosts had received yet another reminder that, as Chief of Correspondents Richard Duncan says, "Leaders and their informal conversations are usually much more interesting than their official statements."

Scores of U.S. and foreign officials are invited for similar informal encounters. At these small gatherings, the people who report the news at TIME get a wider picture of the people who make it. The receptions are held throughout the year, but take on an added bustle in the first weeks of autumn, when government leaders converge on New York City for the United Nations General Assembly. In the ten-day period prior to their breakfast with Sepulveda, TIME journalists met with the President of Argentina (in this case, at his New York City hotel), the Prime Minister of Lebanon, and the foreign ministers of Australia, Austria and Jordan.

In addition to government leaders, opposition figures are invited to dine. Shimon Peres visited 3 two years ago as leader of Israel's Labor opposition. This week he is scheduled to return as his country's Prime Minister. El Salvador's President Jose Napoleon Duarte has visited, and so has Salvadoran Rebel Spokesman Ruben Zamora.

TIME'S editors met last year with Daniel Ortega Saavedra, a leader of Nicaragua's Sandinista government, and also with his contra guerrilla opponent, Eden Pastora Gomez. The exchanges can be remarkably frank, as was the case with Nicaragua's Ortega. (In a gracious prelude to a hard-hitting conversation, he presented Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Henry Grunwald and TIME Managing Editor Ray Cave with a painting by a Nicaraguan artist.)

Often TIME'S staff members invite distinguished statesmen whom they have met as correspondents. Former Bonn Bureau Chief William Mader helped to bring in West Germany's then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Onetime Paris Bureau Chief Henry Muller invited French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson. As Senior Editor Muller puts it, "Hearing someone present a policy in person, regardless of what other information or analysis you have, helps you to understand that policy better."