To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

When George Bush was President and Jim Baker was his foreign policy czar, nobody logged more frequent-flyer miles for TIME than J.F.O. ("Jef") McAllister, our State Department correspondent. Accompanying the peripatetic Secretary of State on his shuttle-diplomacy marathons, McAllister quickly mastered the technological rigors of modern journalism -- banging out dispatches on his Toshiba laptop in airplanes, airports, briefing rooms and run-down hotels. He once typed a file while stuck in a broken elevator in Kislovodsk, a spa town in the heartland of Russia.

McAllister is flying less these days (mostly because Warren Christopher doesn't travel as much as his predecessor did) but working just as hard. "Jef has the busiest beat in the Washington bureau," says senior editor Johanna McGeary, who covered State for TIME for seven years. "Besides the big pieces he's called upon to do ((like this week's analysis of the shortcomings of Bill Clinton's foreign policy team)), we rely on him for every crisis around the world that needs a Washington angle." The queries pour in from the New York office all week long: What is the Administration's point of view on Peru? How much foreign aid do we give El Salvador? Did Italy pressure the U.S. to curtail prosecution of the B.N.L. banking scandal? "I seldom know the answer immediately," says McAllister. "But I know whom to call. My computer Rolodex has . . . let me see . . . 857 entries."

In addition to his well-stuffed Rolodex, McAllister brings to his job considerable expertise. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale (where he specialized in American diplomatic history), he went to Manila as a Luce scholar and to London as a Marshall scholar, earning a Ph.D. in history and writing the memoirs of U. Alexis Johnson, a former Under Secretary of State. He returned to Yale for a law degree, clerked for a federal judge in San Francisco and worked as a corporate lawyer in New York City -- but kept being drawn back to journalism, reporting on and off as a TIME stringer before signing on full time four years ago.

Around the office, he is known as one of the most dependable and unflappable correspondents in the bureau. Like Clinton, he is married to a successful lawyer -- Ann Olivarius, now president of the Sarnoff Endowment for Cardiovascular Science -- whom he met at Yale. Balancing the demands of his beat and the needs of his growing family (a third child is due in January) may be the real test of his diplomatic skills.