TIME's cover story this week tells of an insider at work--a man whose essential bartering, bantering mediation between the White House and Congress was never anticipated by the constitutional forefathers. The reporter who dug up most of the material, Neil MacNeil of TIME's Washington bureau, is another insider at work.

MacNeil, whose father was assistant managing editor of the New York Times, majored in American political history at Harvard and at the Columbia School of Graduate Faculties. He has been getting quite a political education outside--and beyond--the textbooks since moving to Washington, D.C., in 1949. First for the United Press and then for TIME, he has spent the intervening years covering the Senate, the White House and the House of Representatives. An amateur falconer, something of a chef (filet of sole bonne femme) and with "a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a wine connoisseur," MacNeil gets his professional kicks in watching the congressional drama in the closed committee rooms, the cloakrooms and the lobbies where, long before the voting, the real decisions are made. He first watched cover subject Larry O'Brien in action in the West Virginia primary, but did not really get interested in him, he confesses, until last April. MacNeil's own count of the House told him that the Kennedy program couldn't get through; this judgment was confirmed by friends and fellow kibitzers on both sides of the aisle. But a good share of the program was getting through. "An examination of the power centers quickly turned up O'Brien's footprints and those of his aides and allies," says MacNeil. "Thus the cover."

A special feature this week is six pages of color photographs, the first ever assembled in print, of the many houses of the Kennedy family. It took some doing. Photographers had to spread out from Santa Monica, Calif, (the Peter Lawfords), to Cap d'Antibes, France (the Joseph Kennedy Srs.). In a family renowned for its collective responses, the reception among the brothers and sisters ranged from happy collaboration in family poses, to complete reticence. In some cases, the motive was privacy; in others, a sensitivity to appearing too wealthy. There was a reluctance to talk number of rooms and size of staff. In the end, TIME got the pictures and the story and a parting request from Rose Kennedy: "Please don't talk about money in the article. Quite enough has been said already on this subject."

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