The news spotlight is on Congress again, and your letters to us about the doings of the U.S.'s chief governing body are more numerous and quizzical than ever. You must have noticed that Congress' Week, Work Done, is back in its customary place in TIME'S National Affairs section--after five years of only spasmodic appearances while war coverage had first call on our space. What does this reinstatement mean to our hard-working Washington bureau?

To a journalist, the U.S. Congress is a heterogeneous conglomeration of 96 Senators, 435 Representatives, 81 regular committees (20 of which may be in session in a single morning), a dozen special committees --whose collective aim seems to be to keep him in a continuous state of busy befuddlement. (Item: the present [79th] Congress has introduced, so far, 8,no bills [6,056 of them in the House], submitted 3,090 reports by committees.)

To help TIME'S editors make sense out of this overwhelming amount of legislative business is the primary responsibility of Frank McNaughton, one of our Washington bureau's twelve staff correspondents, who has covered Congress longer than most Congressmen have been there. (His assistant is Reg Ingraham, lately returned from covering the war in Europe for us.) Mc-Naughton's job demands that he 1) know all of the majority & minority leaders of the House & Senate and see them frequently. 2) know the chairmen and leading members of the important committees (Foreign Relations, Military Affairs, Ways and Means, Finance, etc.), 3) spend most of every working day attending the important debates, talking with Congressmen, learning how they will vote on leading issues, getting their views after important White House or State Department conferences, etc.

This is a man-sized job, and it takes a lot of doing if TIME is going to fulfill its obligation to keep you posted on Congress. It produces brickbats as well as bouquets. Most members of Congress read TIME regularly and that gives them an added personal interest in what we write about them. But they can be exasperatingly evasive when they want to. Senator Tom Connally, who x calls McNaughton "Mc-Snortin," stood him off as long as he could on a significant line of questioning, then barked: "You ask a question and if you don't get the answer you start coming at it from a dozen different directions. If

I'm ever President, you'll be head of the FBI."

And so it goes. Congress is people, and getting the news from them is often a highly personal business involving even such small matters as staying out of the line of fire of the cuspidor in Representative Carter Manasco's office, or not trying to interview cigaret-hating Hatton Sumners with a cigaret in your mouth. To gather information for our cover story of Speaker Sam Rayburn, McNaughton lived with him and his family for a week on their Texas ranch, pitched hay, punched cattle, played dominoes. The secret of his relationship with responsible Congressmen like Rayburn is that they know he is trying to get at the truth of their work, and they are anxious to be helpful.

The U.S. Congress is the source of the most important news in the U.S., and it rates the best men and the best brains the press can put there.

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