WEEK in and week out, our correspondents see a lot of history being made; and having filed their stories to TIME, they are apt to continue thinking about their subject. Many of their choicest anecdotes, their best quotes and their ideas on the subject will have appeared in the magazine, but they also know that a cumulative survey of the events they have lived with and reflected upon will have its own special appeal. And so these trained observers, on their own time or on leave of absence, sit down to write correspondents' books, those valuable first steps into history.

Two such works appear this week, from the typewriters of TIME correspondents. Hugh Sidey has closely covered the President since senatorial days, and tells about it in John F. Kennedy, President--A Reporter's Inside Story (Atheneum, $6.95). Sidey is one of that "haughty elite," the regular White House correspondents: "When they move around the country in the wake of the President, they are ogled by girls, envied by local bank clerks, respected by college journalism students--in short, they are somebodies by association.'' But at other times, dashing across fields to catch up with a presidential party, Sidey wonders whether "strong legs are more of a requirement than big brains."

In his book, he is now able to describe the times, usually after some shattering public event, when the President, trusting Sidey's confidence, would talk alone with him at day's end. Under the ground rules, the substance of the President's candid feelings about men and problems were often expressed in TIME without any reference to these conversations. Sidey's book is sympathetic to his subject, but not uncritical. He prefers to call it keeping the necessary middle distance of the journalist, "an outsider's view of inside the White House."

Robert Blair Kaiser studied ten years for the priesthood before becoming a journalist. Fluent in Latin, he was assigned by TIME to cover the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican in the fall of 1962, and his knowledgeable reporting won for him the 1963 Overseas Press Club award for the best magazine reporting on foreign affairs. Recently he took time off to write Pope, Council and World (Macmillan; $4.95). So that he could get the solitude he wanted, he checked in at the Roman College of an international missionary order, and there for six weeks wrote from 8 in the morning until 1 the next, taking time out to go home to lunch with his wife Susan and daughter Polly. His book has already appeared in England and been highly praised. In the London Sunday Times, Critic John Raymond asserts: "Mr. Kaiser writes in TIME style at its best--which is to say that his book is contemporary history recorded at a high level."

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