The war in Korea has focused the news spotlight on some faces that have long been familiar to TIME readers -- especially in times of trouble. This week General Bradley makes his fourth appearance on TIME'S cover. Last week Joseph Stalin was there for the eighth time. A fortnight ago General MacArthur turned up for his seventh cover. Each of their cover portraits is reproduced below with a characteristic quotation from the stories about them -- a partial record of what TIME has been saying about these news figures over the last two decades.

Cordially yours,

MAY 1, 1944, a month before Dday. Said TIME: "Just before he left [the ground troops divisional bivouac area in the south of England],he [General Bradley] made a short speech to all the officers of the division .. . He did not tell these officers that their task would be easy. He did tell them that their country was giving them the best of weapons, planning, air and naval support. But he told them that life and victory would lie in their own hands. They must be fit, know their weapons, use their skill and wits. They must have confidence in themselves; then their men would have confidence in them. Omar Bradley, who is no orator, ended with a plain promise that had the ring of more than oratory: 'I will see you on the beaches.'"

Dec. 4, 1944, during the Cologne Offensive. Said TIME: "Nothing in the immediate prospect before Omar Bradley directly suggested the end of a war, or even the end of a campaign. But in the eye of his keen, analytical mind General Bradley could see beyond the belching, jerking guns, the wallowing tanks, the struggling infantrymen. The armies on the south flank of the Allied Line were moving faster than he, because they were exploiting a weakness which already existed. Bradley was busy creating a weakness--one which may be fatal to Germany."

April 1, 1946, when Bradley was head of the Veterans Administration. Said TIME: "There is a quality of greatness about 53-year-old Omar Bradley--in his plain face and sense of humanity. Once, musing on a soldier's life, he observed that he had spent 30 years training himself to make decisions which would cost human lives. 'You don't sleep any too well from it,' he said quietly. Now the General's job is patching up shattered lives . . . The hazards and responsibilities of this peacetime assignment, in some respects, are greater than any he ever had in wartime. But the General sleeps better --and millions of U.S. veterans could sleep better because he is on the job."

MARCH 25, 1935, just after Congress had passed an increased appropriations bill for the War Department. Said TIME: "Every year since he became Chief of Staff in 1930, General Douglas MacArthur had vainly pleaded for funds to build the military establishment up to what he considered minimum requirements . . . [Said he]: 'Unless we move quickly we'll be a beaten nation paying huge indemnities after the next war.' "

Dec. 29, 1941, when MacArthur commanded U.S. Army forces in the Far East. Said TIME: "Lieut. Douglas MacArthur was fresh out of West Point in 1903, on assignment in the Philippines, and the first hostile bullets of his life scared him badly. Last week, 38 years later, General Douglas MacArthur was back in the Philippines fighting the toughest battle of his life ... To Douglas MacArthur, it seemed scarcely strange that his life should have come full circle."

March 30, 1942, after MacArthur had arrived in Australia from Bataan to assume supreme command of all Allied forces in the far Pacific. Said TIME: "On Corregidor, where the great guns leered at the Japs across Manila Bay, it was night when MacArthur left. It was night in Bataan, where the soldiers slept or watched and the P-40s rested under the trees. It was the time for General MacArthur to leave the Philippines, his men, his second home, his assured place in history."

Oct. 30, 1944, when MacArthur returned to the Philippines. Said TIME: "The Douglas MacArthur who landed at Leyte last week had written an extraordinary chapter in personal experience as well as in public service. Past 60, with a crack record behind him, he had had to prove himself all over again. He had done it."

Aug. 27, 1945, after the Japanese had capitulated. Said TIME : "Forces directly under MacArthur's command must take the surrender of Japan's home armies, occupy the four 'home islands,' and perhaps Korea. Upon these forces (which would include token groups from other Allies) would fall the burden of implementing plans to secure the peace of the world, and of Asia in particular."

May 9, 1949, as Chinese Communist armies crossed the Yangtze and drove south across prostrate China. Said TIME: "Most Americans still do not realize the scope of MacArthur's task in Japan. But one fact is driving itself home: while the U.S. labors on the dam that contains Communism in Europe, the Red tide has risen mightily in Asia and now threatens to engulf half the world's people. In all Asia, tiny, beaten Japan is the one place where the U.S. still has a firm foothold, where it still has a chance to redeem the West's sorry record of failure and confusion in the East."

July 10, 1950, the second week of the Korean war. Said TIME: "Last week, after five years of division and bloody dissension in the Land of the Morning Calm, what remained of Korean freedom was staggering under the savage attack of a tyranny far more complete than that of the Japanese. Douglas MacArthur had said (and the U.S. people had forgotten): 'There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity.'"

JUNE 9, 1930, a story which discussed Russia's economic rise and its dealings with U.S. businessmen. Said TIME: "Exactly where Stalin stands on the question of overthrowing the U.S. Government appears from what he said last year in an address to the American Section of the Third International. 'I consider that the Communist Party of the U.S.A. is one of the few Communist Parties to which history has confided decisive tasks from the viewpoint of the world revolutionary movement. The revolutionary crisis ... in the United States . . . is near . . . The American Communist Party must be ready to meet the crisis fully armed to take over the direction of the future class war . . .' Notice that Stalin was addressing U.S. citizens, exhorting the U.S. Communist Party."

Feb. 24, 1936, Stalin shared this cover with China's Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, Japan's Emperor Hirohito and Henry Pu-Yi, the puppet Emperor of Manchukuo. The Japanese-led Manchurian army had clashed with Soviet-backed Mongol forces. Said TIME: "In the deep fastness of Western Asia, along nebulous frontiers supposed to divide Soviet power from the forces of Empire, battle was joined as a thousand Mongol rifles cracked and light Japanese tanks whirled into action. The fighting last week came as a grim climax. Preludes have been more than 100 frontier 'incidents' as the Japanese Empire and its vassals steadily encroached toward the Soviet Union."

Dec. 20, 1937, as the Russians voted their first "free" election. Said TIME: "Since the death of Lenin in 1924 and the expulsion of Trotsky, Stalin has driven and scolded 166,000,000 Russians to equip the Soviet Union with fairly adequate heavy industry, to collectivize Russian farms, to build an army, to fulfill successive Five Year Plans. The cost of these successes has been measured in the execution of thousands, and the exile to Siberia and the Polar North of hundreds of thousands who resisted his driving and scolding."

Jan. 1, 1940, when Stalin was TIME'S Man of the Year for 1939. Said TIME: "The signing in Moscow's Kremlin on the night of August 23-24 of the Nazi-Communist 'NonAggression' Pact was a diplomatic demarche literally world-shattering ... Comrade Stalin was there in person to give it his smiling benediction, and no one doubted that it was primarily his doing. By it Germany broke through British-French 'encirclement,' freed herself from the necessity of fighting on two fronts at the same time. .Without the Russian pact, German generals would certainly have been loath to go into military action. With it, World War II began."

Oct. 27, 1941, when Hitler's Wehrmacht was on the threshold of Moscow. Said TIME : "He [Stalin] had lived the Revolution. While the Lenins, the Trotskys, the Bukharins had hidden in foreign exiles, he had fought inside Russia. He came down through the years, to feel that he knew what Russia needed, and he would go neither too fast nor too slowly to achieve it, though it meant the ruthless execution of hundreds of his friends and the inhuman, starvation of millions of peasants."

Jan. 4, 1943, after the Russians had stopped the Germans and mounted their counteroffensive. Said TIME : "The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression 'tough guy,' was the man of 1942. Only Joseph Stalin knew how close Russia stood to defeat in 1942, and only Joseph Stalin fully knew how he brought Russia through. But the whole world knew what the alternative would have been . . ."

Feb. 5, 1945, one week before the Yalta Conference. Said TIME: "But instinctively Americans and Britons sensed that this was more than the usual political crisis, that the hands of the clock of history had suddenly bumped ahead to a later hour, that that crisis in Western civilization of which World War II had been the organic symptom had reached a new stage. Before the impending Big Three conference lay the alternatives: peace--as lasting a peace as men could contrive through the adjustment of differences between the only three great powers which after World War II would be capable of waging effective war; or the alternative which most Americans preferred not to think of, even in the privacy of their minds--World War III."

July 17, 1950, the third week of war in Korea. Said TIME: "Where is the Korean war leading the world?... Will it spread . . .? The answer was buried in the mind of a grey, catlike old man behind the walls of the Kremlin. Would the cat in the Kremlin jump again? If he did, where and how would he strike? Or could he again be made to purr benignly in the role that had persuaded a lot of Americans [who would now like to bite their tongues off] to call him, fondly, Uncle Joe?"

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