Dear TIME-Reader:

WHEN Russia's NiKITA KHRUSHCHEV stepped off a plane at Belgrade's Zemun Airport and spouted his slavering apology for the 1948 ouster of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, TIME'S editors pulled a quick switch and scheduled Marshal TITO for this week's cover. At hand was Cover Artist Ernest Hamlin Baker's latest portrait of Tito. Prophetically, the portrait shows the great stone face that Tito turned on the Russian delegation as Khrushchev made his abject recital. Bonn Bureau Chief James Bell, who watched the incredible scene on the newly asphalted apron of the Zemun Airport, reported: "It was the face of a stubborn, impassive Slav, determined that no man should read the thoughts which must have raced behind it."

Bell was in Belgrade on what turned out to be a prolonged tour of European capitals. Three weeks ago he left Bonn for what he expected to be a brief trip to Paris. He cabled me: "Just before this road show started, I bought a nice gray suit. In Bonn, it got rained on as Chancellor Adenauer raised the West Germans' new flag of sovereignty for the first time. In Paris, where Dulles, Britain's Macmillan, France's Pinay and eleven other NATO foreign ministers received der Alte in their midst, I sat on a wad of gum. In Vienna, the suit got soaked again in the rain that fell while Molotov was signing the Austrian State Treaty. And here in Belgrade, it got covered with dust on the ride from the airport behind Tito and Khrushchev. Poor suit. It's a mess."

THE story on the St. Lawrence Seaway, which accompanies four pages of scenic river views in color in this week's issue, was written by Edwin Copps, senior writer in the CANADA section, who was born in Eganville, near Ottawa. Researcher for the story is another Canadian, Harriet Ben Ezra, who was born in Winnipeg. Working on the story of the actual start of the seaway was a pleasing assignment for Copps. "It made Harriet and me feel sort of patriotic," he said.

WHILE Schoolteacher Aileen Holtje in Udall, Kan. worried about the weather and what dress to wear to her wedding shower (see Big Twister in NATIONAL AFFAIRS), tornado-wise Murray Gart of the Wichita Eagle shared her uneasiness. Gart, 30, a displaced Bostonian who is news editor of the Eagle, and TIME'S Wichita correspondent, knew it was impossible to outguess nature when the tails of twisters flap in the sky like shreds of a tattered flag. He could only wait.

When the tornado hit nearby Udall. Gart went into action. During the next 50-odd hours, he directed the activities of five of his reporters, contacted some 20 Kansas photographers for picturesand coordinated the storm coverage of two TIME staff correspondents, Don Connery of the Chicago Bureau on the ground, and Frank McCulloch overhead in a chartered plane from Dallas. Gart was still feeding copy to TIME in the small hours Saturday as a new storm lashed Wichita, hail rattled on the Eagle windows and the radio blared new tornado warnings.

Cordially yours,

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