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There is no doubt that Lyndon Johnson is, for the Democrats, exactly the right man in the right place at the right time.

THE place was the minority leader's chair in the U.S. Senate and the TIME was June 22, 1953. The judgment, about the man who was emerging as the key figure in putting together the pieces of a badly beaten and divided Democratic Party, was made at the end of our first cover story on Lyndon Johnson. This week he makes his tenth appearance on the cover, a victorious and powerful President, as Man of the Year.

The painting of the President for this cover is a first for TIME in that it was done in collaboration by two artists: Peter Kurd, who has painted a number of covers for us, and his wife, Henriette Wyeth Hurd, whose portrait of her brother, famed Artist Andrew Wyeth, was our Christmas cover in 1963. The Hurds, who usually paint in separate studios on their ranch at San Patricio, N. Mex., saw the President at the White House, along with Washington Bureau Chief John L. Steele and White House Correspondent Hugh Sidey. For 2 1/2 hours, while the President and Steele and Sidey talked about the issues of the world, the Hurds sketched and made notes. Henriette worked on drawing paper, Peter on the back of White House stationery.

It was not the first time Peter Hurd had met Lyndon Johnson or studied his face, and the artist had long before decided, possibly with a touch of regional patriotism, that the President has a "Southwest face." There is, says Hurd, "an overall regional cast of countenance. It has something to do with the eyes. Our sun is very bright, you know. But it's more in the formation of the mouth and jaw."

While the painter had clear ideas about his subject's countenance, the President already had his own judgment of the artist's work. There are two of Peter Kurd's paintings in the White House. One, called Rancheria, on loan from Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, hangs opposite the President's bed-where it is "the first thing I see in the morning." President Johnson likes to think of it as a view of his own west-central Texas hill country, although it is a scene from Kurd's New Mexico.

On a tour through the White House living quarters with the Johnsons, the Hurds saw a little painting of the small house where Lyndon Johnson was born. Hurd returned later and made a watercolor copy of it, having decided to use it in the background of the cover design. Then, working together, the Hurds produced a painting that, in many respects, presents the same picture that Writer Ronald Kriss's cover story paints of President Lyndon Johnson: a tall man under a very tall sky.

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