Dear TIME-Reader:

THE history-making men and women whose portraits appear on TIME'S cover often write to tell us how they like the cover stories. In the past fortnight I was happy to receive such letters from two recent cover subjects: Author Herman Wouk and Lieut. Colonel John Paul Stapp, the Air Force's Space Surgeon.

Wrote Author Wouk: "I don't know whether the subjects of your cover stories usually receive the compliment in pleased silence, or what the protocol is.

"Your article was the first serious general discussion of my novels that has appeared, to my best knowledge. It was fair, and it was penetrating.

"If my fiction turns out in the long run to have value, I hope it may reflect credit on TIME that you were the first in the field to take serious note of it."

COLONEL Stapp wrote one letter before the article appeared: "Let me thank you for one of the most educational experiences that has ever occurred to me. I have been visited by Correspondent Edwin Rees, who spent two weeks with me gathering the material for your Sept. 12 cover article, and by Contributing Editor Richard Seamon, who wrote the article. It was like combining a psychoanalysis with a fraternity initiation."

Eleven days later a second letter arrived: "Publication of the story could not have been more fortuitous; I was in Detroit at the time, consulting with the safety engineering staffs of the major automobile manufacturing concerns with regard to their engineering developments for crash safety in 1956 models.

"The TIME story was of incalculable help in promoting the application of research on human crash tolerance to automobile design . . . Now the manufacturers, in their advertising promotion, can play with beauty and horse around with horsepower, but they will be legally married to safety.

"I am astonished beyond expression by this demonstration of the power of TIME to influence a revolution in Detroit. Thank you for your part in the eventual benefit to the safety and health of all my fellow citizens."

FROM Russia last week came news of another TIME cover subject. When West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Moscow, TIME'S peripatetic Bonn Bureau Chief James Bell went along, stayed close enough to his subject (see cut) to dig up some important facts that had not been previously reported on the Moscow conference (see FOREIGN NEWS).

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