From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

EVERY JOURNALIST DREAMS OF WORKING ON THE BIG STOry. Here at TIME that means reporting or writing a cover story. By that measure, veteran writers George Church and Ed Magnuson have had enough dreams realized to last a lifetime -- even if they live long enough to receive birthday greetings from Willard Scott. For Church and Magnuson are the only men in the magazine's history to have written more than 100 cover stories each.

From the agony of the Vietnam War to the exhilarating fall of the Berlin Wall, a scrapbook of their work could serve as a comprehensive index to the most momentous events of the past quarter-century. Says editor-in-chief Jason McManus: "Church and Magnuson excel at the most demanding newsmagazine art: writing fast news covers. Masses of information must be quickly absorbed, mentally structured, and the relevant facts, anecdotes and quotes smoothly mortised into place while writing on the run."

Church, 60, joined TIME in 1969 after spending 14 years at the Wall Street Journal. He wrote his first cover, on the inefficiency of American business, just one year later. Since then, George has efficiently produced 104 more covers, hitting the 100 mark last summer with an elegant analysis of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But his personal favorite is the 1986 cover on the secret sale of arms to Iran. "That's the one in which I was really challenged to the max," says George. "I was writing while the files were coming in and then rewriting to incorporate the new things the correspondents had found out. I like that kind of pressure. It's kind of suicidal really. But I love it."

No one understands that better than Magnuson, whose first cover was a crash effort on nuclear testing that ran in 1962. He has specialized in late- breaking stories ever since. "There is a real pleasure in putting them together under pressure," he says, "where you just stay up all night and get the job done." Ed has got 118 of them done, including 21 covers on Watergate, four of them written in consecutive weeks in May 1973. This summer Magnuson, 66, will retire after 32 years at the magazine. Looking back over his distinguished career here, Ed recalls handling our coverage of the My Lai massacre, the Pentagon papers, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island and "a lot of plane crashes. I guess you could say I was a bad-news guy." For us and our readers, though, it has always been good news when he and Church handled the bad news.