Dear TIME-Reader:

IN Beirut not long ago, John Scott of the publisher's office asked Lebanon's President Camille Chamoun what were the prerequisites for Arab-Israeli peace. The President frowned and said that Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov had somewhat absently asked the same question that very morning before he began to talk of trade in dried fruits. Sometimes he wondered, Chamoun added with a touch of bitterness, if the East or West really wanted stability in the Middle East. Later, at Amritsar in the Punjab, Scott faced an audience of bearded Sikhs and smooth-jowled Indian businessmen who bombarded him with questions about U.S. foreign policy, morals and politics. And soon afterwards, a Calcutta editor challenged him to defend discrimination in the U.S., demanding: "Would you be comfortable sitting down to dinner with a black Indian--not a brown Indian like myself, but a really black one?"

Most of his life John Scott has been a sort of intellectual Johnny Appleseed, gathering seeds of discussion and understanding in one place, planting them in another. In 1931 he left the University of Wisconsin to study Russian Communism firsthand. Since, he has been a newsman in Moscow, Tokyo and other world capitals, a war correspondent, our first postwar Berlin bureau chief and a writer in New York, before joining my staff as a lecturer. The harvest of these years has been four books: the first, Behind the Urals, was published in 1942, and the fourth,

Political Warfare, came out in 1955.

Still an incessant traveler, Scott spends four months a year abroad, talking to political, military, educational and religious leaders and just plain men in the streets of such places as Tegucigalpa, Vienna, Algiers, Kandy and Vizagapatnam. Last year he toured Latin America ; now he is just returned from 100 days in the Middle East and India. His purpose is to see, hear and feel the sights, sounds and attitudes of lands currently in the news, the better to sound-track TIME'S unique journalism for discussion groups and organizational meetings in the U.S.

During much of fall, winter and spring, Scott is TIME'S delegate-at-large to conventions and regular meetings of many of the thousands of organizations and associations that have, over the years, stemmed from that early American precedent -- the New England town meeting. We have long had a particular interest in these groups, which millions of men and women have joined voluntarily for fraternal companionship, to effect some form of civic betterment or for simple self-improvement. Through John Scott, we have a sense of participation and membership, while we contribute what we are best qualified to give: information and food for thought, collected by a gourmet around the world.

Cordially yours,

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