THE job of journalists is to go where the news and the newsmakers are, and a phalanx of TIME correspondents last week spread out to catch the news and views--in Washington, in Wall Street, Pittsburgh. Chicago and among economists and businessmen through the land--of the titanic struggle between the White House and the biggest company in the nation's basic industry. There hadn't been a business story like it in years. For White House Correspondent Hugh Sidey, the job meant covering a President capable of presiding genially over a soiree for the Shah of Iran after issuing blistering directives to his lieutenants about the steel crisis. Having followed the President to sea, Sidey's final file came from the nuclear-powered U.S.S. Enterprise. Among businessmen in steel towns and elsewhere, our correspondents found a violence of opinion on the subject of both Blough and Kennedy, coupled with a reluctance to be identified in public on their views.

For Washington Correspondent Lansing Lamont. the assignment was to follow the preparations for the forthcoming nuclear tests on Christmas Island. On learning that his quarry. William Ogle, scientific director of the tests, was about to leave for Hawaii. Lamont booked a seat on the same plane, interviewed Ogle extensively during the flight. The result is a fascinating look into the mind, analytic and apprehensive, of a man who has watched 100 nuclear explosions.

And to cover a story as old as Easter, TIME'S Religion Editor John T. Elson flew to Basel, Switzerland, to talk to the man on this week's cover. Theologian Karl Earth. They talked, among other things, of Calvin, Mozart and Reinhold Niebuhr ("a great man. but if only he had an inner ear, through which he could hear what Mozart is saying, he wouldn't be so serious all the time"). Barth cheerfully remarked that a Barthian usually smokes a pipe; an orthodox theologian, cigars; and liberals, cigarettes. He offered Religion Editor Elson--a cigar.

Elson. 30, is a graduate of St. Anselm's Priory School in Washington, D.C., and Notre Dame. He took his Master's as a Woodrow Wilson fellow at Columbia, writing his thesis on Graham Greene. After two years in the Air Force in Japan, he joined TIME. His father, Robert T. Elson, is chief of TIME'S London Bureau.

As often happens, our first contacts on stories lead to others. Correspondent Andrew Kopkind found himself chasing out to a North Hollywood "dance therapy'' studio to interview Dr. Tina Keller, a soft and grey woman who was once a psychoanalyst and Zurich friend of both Karl Earth and Carl Jung. "I hated Karl Earth for a while," she said, but in the end came to believe that "Karl Earth said 'no' to many things because he wanted to say a precise 'yes.' " Out of many such interviews come the odd, valued sentence that helps illume a cover subject. In Chicago, Correspondent Miriam Rumwell last week picked up the trail of Earth on his first visit to the U.S. and ended up by taking him and his son Markus to an evening more satirical than theological, at Chicago's Second City night club. Barth has never held that it is untheological to laugh.

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