O CURSED spite, that I was born this wrong to write." Paraphrasing Hamlet with bitter humor. TIME'S Common Market correspondent Jason McManus cabled that message to New York last week in the heat of reporting his part of the cover story on Charles de Gaulle's veto of Great Britain's application to the Common Market. For Correspondent McManus, 28. the week's events had a special impact.

A native of Kansas City, Kans.. McManus trained to write of politico-economics at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C.. where he graduated cum laude and as a Phi Beta Kappa in 1956, at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he took his master's degree in 1958, and during a year as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He joined TIME'S staff in 1959 and wrote the first story of Britain's desire to join the Common Market in 1961 (Aug. 11). From then on, as the Common Market began to grow, he wrote most of our stories on the subject, up to and including the cover story on Jean Monnet (Oct. 6. 1961).

Since last July, McManus has been based in Paris, and from there has ranged through the Common Market area to report on the developing community. In recent weeks, covering the negotiations on Britain's entry application, he admits that "it was impossible not to begin to root for the British." After he left Brussels last week, during the wake for Britain's hopes, he admitted to a slight feeling of apology at telling a watchful clerk at the British European Airways counter in London that because of more convenient flight times he would have to fly Air France. But then, after thinking through the whole story of De Gaulle's act and its consequences as he wrote his report, he cama to a second-wave conclusion shared by other TIME correspondents working on the story.

"I came out with more respect for De Gaulle's motives than I had ever had before," he wrote. "I'm not so sure that in the long run De Gaulle will prove to be finally wrong."

The task force working on the cover story in France was mobilized by Paris Bureau Chief Curtis Prendergast ("It was a week of sweat, sandwiches and Coca-Cola"), who handled the broad assessment of the situation himself, while assigning Correspondents Judson Gooding to report on the French political temper, Jeremy Main on the effects in NATO, James Wilde on the French business reaction, Godfrey Blunden on an analysis of the Soviet view. Their files, along with reports from TIME bureaus in Washington, Bonn, London and Rome, poured into New York, where Writer Robert McLaughlin, with the aid of Researcher Vera Kovarsky, wrote the story for Senior Editor Edward Hughes. For the cover, Artist Boris Chaliapin reached back to two other men who had visions of French grandeur, and placed Napoleon's hat on Louis XIV.

Near the end of a troubled and bewildering week in Europe, one of the key Eurocrats approached Jason McManus and said that he hoped that TIME this week would tell him what was happening, because nobody there really seemed to know. This we have tried to do.

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