SOME people reach the cover of TIME on the spur of a sudden event; others are chosen at the capstoning moment of a long career. Still others belong to a category of "cover-worthy" candidates whose familiar names are continually under consideration, but for one reason or another in the random play of the news, never make our cover.

Senator Harry Byrd's case is an unusual one. It has been 27 years since he last appeared on TIME'S cover, and yet in the intervening years he has been continually in the news and rarely out of consideration as a cover possibility. It may well be that no other man has had such intervals between appearances.

In TIME'S earlier days, before the cover story became a thoroughly researched documentary, the man out front was often someone with a timely but transient surfacing in the news, and the story inside was only a column or two long. Those earlier stories read like period pieces now-but have a carefree and pleasing chattiness about them. The first Byrd cover, Oct. 25, 1928, is mostly about a Governor's Ball in Richmond, and talks almost as much about Lady Astor's homecoming to Virginia as it does about the hero. ("Governor Byrd's widest claim to fame is his brotherhood with Richard Evelyn Byrd, famed flyer over far poles.") The May 13, 1935, Byrd cover story is devoted to the New Deal farm program, with some references to Senator Byrd's attack on it-and is illustrated by eight snapshots of Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and his aides, but no picture of Byrd.

Much of the reporting for this week's cover story was done by Loye Miller Jr., 32, who came back huffing and puffing from a brisk, 75-minute early morning walk with the 75-year-old Senator Byrd. They got along fine: Miller comes from the South (his father is editor of the Knoxville News-Sentinel and he himself broke in on the Charlotte Observer). Reporter Miller, one of TIME'S two congressional correspondents, got well adjusted to the ways of Senators in the months he spent whistle-stopping across the U.S. with Lyndon Johnson, and tagging along with him to such outposts as India and Berlin.

BACK in February, TIME was the first U.S. lay publication, and ahead of most of the professional journals, in reporting on the dangers of thalidomide. We learn now that our story had a special impact on Japan. The foreign news editor of the Japan Times, Tomisumi Harada, likes to read TIME aloud to his wife, Sayo. Hearing the "Sleeping Pill Nightmare" (TIME, Feb. 23), Mrs. Harada, the mother of two, "had to do something. So for the first time in my life I composed a letter to a newspaper." Japan's largest newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, working from TIME'S story, spent three months making its own investigation in Europe, and checking with Japanese manufacturers. Result: all five manufacturers of thalidomide in Japan voluntarily stopped making the pills.

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