A Letter From the Publisher

By John A. Meyers

Covering seven heads of state and gov-

ernment, in competition with 2,300 other reporters, photographers, broadcast technicians and producers, requires special abilities, and some agility as well. The TIME correspondents and photographers who reported on last week's economic summit in Bonn are veterans of several of these mammoth affairs. They came prepared to encounter, and counter, almost every sort of logistical or substantive emergency.

White House Correspondents Laurence I. Barrett, attending his fifth summit, and Barrett Seaman, whose experience goes back to the 1978 meeting in Bonn, had to contend with what Seaman calls "the bane of all reporters covering presidential trips": pools, the often tedious arrangements in which publications rotate coverage where access is limited. "They are necessary, but they add enormously to already grueling schedules," Seaman says. "Oppressive security arrangements in Bonn also made coverage of the ceremonies quite difficult."

TIME Photographers Dirck Halstead, David Burnett, Dennis Brack, Arthur Grace, Diana Walker and Sahm Doherty were deployed in Bonn and at the sites President Reagan was to visit. They also had to meet precise scheduling, especially at week's end. Within hours, film had to be shot, processed and transmitted to the U.S. as TIME held its presses.

European Correspondent Lawrence Malkin has learned, from five previous summits, the complications of official press briefings. "Each government holds its own, at widely scattered locations, in five different languages," notes Malkin. "They are also usually simultaneous, so each country's view dominates its own press." Senior Correspondent Frederick Ungeheuer, who has traveled to three summits, found that his first obstacle this time was technical: adapting the portable computer he brought from New York to the West German telephone system. A mini-summit of his own with telephone engineers and a computer service representative finally worked out the bugs.

For TIME Bonn Bureau, which played host to the visiting colleagues, the economic summit turned out to be an interlude in reporting on the Bitburg controversy. Bureau Chief William McWhirter interviewed government officials about the contretemps, as Correspondent John Kohan reported on a commemoration by U.S. Jews at the Dachau concentration camp and the official observances at Bergen-Belsen. The bureau's planning, together with that of dozens of staff members in New York, enabled TIME to have one of its latest closings ever, and to bring readers, only hours later, the dramatic events of the summit and Bitburg.