A letter from the Publisher

CAN you ever get on the cover a second time?" asked Shirley MacLaine.

Shirley, understandably, was thinking about her career and what a TIME cover story would do for it. "It's still so early," said she, speaking the truth. For it is precisely because it is early in a career of great promise that Shirley is on TIME'S cover. She is one of the "New Girls of Hollywood" (more are pictured with the story) who are setting a new style in movie personalities.

There are many reasons for being on the cover of TIME, but, in essence, they all come down to one word --NEWS. Last week's cover on Commerce Secretary Lewis Strauss came in the midst of the noisily newsy controversy over his confirmation. The story was eagerly awaited in Washington -- partly for the effect it could have on the Senate vote. That vote has not yet been taken, but the story's principals -- Secretary Strauss and New Mexico's Senator Clinton Anderson -- agree, from their widely differing points of view, the story was fair, and squared with the issues.

Being on the cover of TIME can, in its way, be a recognition of position or fine achievement--but not necessarily. TIME'S gallery of cover subjects, as varied as life itself, is composed of men and women well remembered and long forgotten. The criterion for being on the cover was, and has always been, that they were news. After the Willy Brandt cover (May 25), the Berliner Zeitung in East Berlin said sarcastically that to be on TIME'S cover is "a high honor generally reserved only for faithful servants of American bank and stock-market barons." Quicker than anyone could say verdammte Luege, the USIS put up a window display in West Berlin (see cut) that told the Germans, including the thousands of East Berliners who shop there, what all except Communists have known for a long time.

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