THERE is a kaleidoscopic quality about the events and the trip," White House Correspondent Jerrold Schecter cabled from Peking last week. "Each moment fixed, then whirling on to a new sensation. This has been a week of sights and sounds."

For Schecter, Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey and TIME-LIFE Photographer John Dominis, capturing the sights and sounds of President Nixon's visit to China last week meant exhausting 18-hour days of reporting. Each day Sidey and Schecter followed the President and Mrs. Nixon through their busy official schedule. When the First Family paused occasionally to catch its breath, our reporters traveled to Chinese schools, factories and army training fields to capture the quality of life in a country few U.S. journalists have seen in more than two decades.

Tracking their every move from over 6,000 miles away was Picture Editor John Durniak. Since the day the Nixon trip was announced, Durniak had been laying plans to get photographs out of China and into this week's issue.

After equipping Schecter and Sidey with cameras, he instigated a special airlift to get pictures of the trip off the mainland, and by Thursday night the first 150 rolls of film had been flown into Chicago. There Durniak, Color Director Arnold Drapkin, Artist Anthony Libardi and a crew of photolab technicians worked nonstop for the next 38 hours. Meanwhile TIME writers and editors in New York were poring over the Sidey-Schecter files for this week's cover story and articles in THE NATION and THE PRESS. The result: a hard-won look into a long-hidden China.

The road to this year's Democratic Convention in Miami could prove to be a bewildering one for voters, with 13 presidential candidates, 24 separate primaries and a variety of electoral reforms along the way. To serve as a campaign trail guide, a special twelve-page supplement, "Primaries '72," is bound in the center of this week's TIME.

It is the product of many weeks' work by our correspondents round the country and the staff of the Nation section working under the direction of Senior Editor Jason McManus and Head Researcher Raissa Silverman. The supplement describes the candidates' styles, strategies and chances of success. It also explains the effect of electoral reforms made in the past four years. With its convenient tally sheet for keeping track of each candidate's progress, the supplement is designed to be taken out and saved for reference.

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