BACK in 1963, before going on to our Tokyo and Moscow bureaus, Jerrold Schecter enrolled in seminars on Sino-Soviet Relations and Defense Policy at Har vard, where he was spending a year as a Nieman fellow. His teacher: a brilliant 40-year-old professor of government from Germany named Henry Kissinger.

Last winter Schecter started seeing Kis singer again. By this time he was our White House correspondent and Kissinger the President's adviser. "I'm told Kissinger con ucts National Security Council meetings the same way he used to run our seminars at Harvard," says Schecter. "He has a wonder ful way of summing up and synthesizing is sues, but now he saves his own point of view for private talks with the President."

Schecter has his own private talks with his old professor onoccasion, but he naturally had no hint in advance of Kis singer's dramatic trip to China. Like the other correspondents in the pressroom of the San Clemente Inn, he could only speculate about what the President would say when the speech was announced. Schecter flew by helicopter to the Burbank television studio where the President spoke, and was waiting outside when Nixon posed briefly for photographers. The talk turned to dinner, and Schecter suggested a Chinese restaurant. "That's an idea," said the President. Perino's, like Chinese food." Instead, however, they had dinner at Perino's, an Italian restaurant, where the correspondents ate at a nearby table. The festivities finished, Schecter interviewed White House aides at San Clemente and then started sending a 30-page file for our cover story.

At the same time, our bureaus filed their assessments of the startling news, to from Hong Kong, Bruce Nelan described the events that led to the apparent softening of Peking's foreign policy. sb Every music critic dreams of picking up a baton and conducting an orchestra. For Music Critic William Bender, fantasy became reality last week when he went to hear the American Wind Symphony Orchestra per form on a barge anchored in the Ohio River off the sleepy Appalachian town of to W. Va. Accepting what he mistakenly perceived to be a tongue-in-cheek invitation from Symphony Director Robert Boudreau, Bender found himself walking the gangplank to the floating sym phony and conducting a rousing rendition of Stars and Stripes Forever.

"It was a dandy performance, if I do say so myself," says Bender, whose Emmy extracurricular achievements include writing last year's Emmy Award-winning television documentary, Leopold Stokowski. "I am still not sure whether the good folk of Ravenswood were applauding my baton work care. A fireworks display that accompanied it, and I don't care. A good hand is a good hand."

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