Around the globe, wherever and whenever politicians and pundits gather to talk, there is a good chance for agreement on at least one thing: the 1960 U.S. presidential election is quite likely to be the year's most important event. This week, in the first cover this year on presidential hopefuls, TIME examines the life and liberalism of the candidate who was the first to throw his hat officially into the ring: Minnesota's Democratic Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, who first appeared on TIME'S cover the month he arrived in Washington as a freshman Senator, in January 1949.

Keeping up with fast-moving, long-talking Hubert Humphrey is no small job--and the assignment of reporting on him for this week's cover went to Washington Correspondent Hugh Sidey. Almost a month ago, Iowa-born Reporter Sidey began traveling with Humphrey on his campaign swings around the U.S. On their first trip together, to Wenatchee, Wash., airplane engine trouble and bad weather held them up for nearly ten hours. "For Hubert, it was a bad break," says Sidey, "but for me, it was good: it gave me a lot of extra hours with him." In the days that followed, Sidey went with Humphrey to Seattle, Spokane, Salt Lake City, Alaska, Chicago, Milwaukee and New York. Last weekend, after Sidey watched Humphrey in action at a major Democratic shindig in Washington, Candidate Humphrey drew aside Sidey's wife Anne, confided: "Your husband has been probing me like a dentist's deep drill."

The Humphrey cover was written by Associate Editor Richard Oulahan Jr., grandson of the New York Times's Washington Bureau Chief Richard V. Oulahan (1912-31) and himself a one-time Washington correspondent for TIME. It was edited by Louis Banks, also a former Washington reporter for TIME and senior editor of the National Affairs section since early 1956.

Every week from now until election, TIME will carry the news of the campaign, describing and examining the candidates, appraising and analyzing the issues, and chronicling the thrust and counterthrust between the two great parties--missing neither the fun nor the significance of that fascinating show and key world event that comes every four years in the contest for the U.S. presidency.

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