BECAUSE of the extraordinary impact of recent U.S. economic developments, we are publishing our third cover story on the subject in four weeks. In the current issue, the NATION section focuses on "Labor's Freeze on Nixon." While that story assesses organized labor's reaction to the Administration's initiatives, the effects of the revised game plan on worldwide trade and the international money market are reported in BUSINESS.

To analyze American public reaction fully, we followed two tracks. Correspondents in TIME'S nine domestic bureaus interviewed both union leaders and private citizens across the country. In addition, we called on the services of the Albert Sindlinger organization; the results of the Sindlinger poll appear on page 12.

Much of the reporting for the main story was done by our Washington-based labor correspondent Mark Sullivan. A second-generation journalist whose father covered labor affairs for the Seattle Times, Sullivan began his career with TIME as a copy boy in 1948 and was assigned to our Detroit bureau four years later. As soon as he arrived in the Motor City, Sullivan was greeted by his first big labor assignment: interviewing the late Walter Reuther. In Detroit, and later in our Houston and Washington bureaus, he reported on many major labor-management rifts, including a nationwide U.A.W. walkout against General Motors, three railroad strikes, a newspaper strike and last year's postal walkout.

Sullivan's beat in Washington puts him in touch with a veritable Who's Who of business and labor including, of course, this week's cover subject, George Meany. Last week Sullivan interviewed Meany about the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s reaction to the Nixon program. Between interviews, the correspondent easily kept up with the labor leader's comings and goings; Sullivan's office window offers an excellent view of A.F.L.-C.I.O. national headquarters.

Files from Washington and the other bureaus came to Associate Editor William Doerner, who wrote the cover story, and Reporter-Researcher Kathleen Cooil, who assisted him. Kathleen has just completed seven years in our BUSINESS section, and had worked on the two economics cover articles published earlier this summer; she was anticipating a complete change of pace in her first week as a NATION staffer. "All I could think of when I got the Meany assignment," she says, "was whatever possessed me to major in economics?"

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