LAST fall, on a trip around the world that took him to Viet Nam, Thailand, Eastern and Western Europe, Managing Editor Otto Fuerbringer stopped off for a week of fact-finding in Spain. As this week's issue will attest, it proved to be a productive visit. General Francisco Franco, who makes his sixth appearance on TIME'S cover (the last was March 18, 1946) in the 30 years since the Spanish Civil War, is not a man given to long talks with visiting American newsmen. But things in Spain have changed--as has Franco himself--and that is the point of the story.

Surprisingly, Madrid Bureau Chief Piero Saporiti had little trouble setting up an interview between the Generalissimo and the managing editor, but there were rigid conditions. The talks would be off the record, cover only generalities, and last exactly ten minutes. That was the word from protocol. But Franco himself prolonged the spirited session to 54 minutes, discussed freely and in detail such subjects as Viet Nam, NATO and the Soviet Union.

Once the cover story was scheduled, Saporiti and Gavin Scott, who is joining the Madrid staff after a three-year stint as Buenos Aires bureau chief, went to work. Over the next several weeks, together with the bureau's Jean Bratton, they covered the countryside, interviewed scores of Spaniards, high and low, to get a wide-angle look at the new Spain. For two weeks they were joined by Writer John Blashill, who was TIME'S correspondent in Madrid for four years (1956-60). To catch the visual aspects, Senior Editor Peter Bird Martin, who handles color projects, flew to Madrid and clocked 1,250 miles in a rented car, ranging from Malaga and Cadiz in the south to Bilbao and Barcelona in the north.

In eight days, he had his shooting script for the three photographers who caught the color of Spain.*

This is Baltimore-born Louis Glanzman's first cover for TIME. A self-taught artist and World War II veteran (Air Force) who now lives on Long Island, he is equally known as a magazine illustrator (LIFE, Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic) and a portraitist. His likeness of Lincoln hangs in Washington's Ford Theater, where the President was fatally shot.

* This issue marks another first in our use of editorial color. Four stories are illustrated with color pages, two of them (see WORLD and EDUCATION) covering events that took place last week.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.