COVER Subject Sam Ervin is unlike most of the politicians that Correspondent Neil MacNeil has covered during his 24 years in Washington. "He has never been a publicity hound," says MacNeil; "he has never run a mimeograph to shoot off a daily barrage of press releases, hoping to get his name in print. Yet as a raconteur and one of Washington's hardest workers, he has always been well known to anyone dealing regularly with the Senate." Now, as chairman of the select Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair, Ervin is becoming equally familiar to the public. For this week's cover story on Ervin, written by Associate Editor Ed Magnuson, MacNeil met with the Senator in his Senate offices, at his hideaway in the Capitol and on his home territory in North Carolina. Fellow correspondents, meanwhile, retraced Ervin's early years in Morganton, N.C., and pored over 30 volumes of testimony from his Senate com mittee hearings.

MacNeil first began considering a cover story on Ervin last fall. "It was plain then that a constitutional crisis was brewing," he says. "As one of the constitutional experts in Congress, Ervin seemed the man most likely to do battle with the Administration's attempts to expand its authority." As our story points out, Ervin, with his customary vigor, is doing just that.

When TIME began 50 years ago, it was intended to be a magazine that emphasized words, not pictures. In fact, according to our prospectus, the illustrations were to be "chiefly portraits." They have evolved into much more than that. Last month, for example, TIME photographers and picture editors received some high honors for their work during 1972:

-- From the New York Press Photographers Association, two awards to Eddie Adams for pictures in TIME: first prize in the portrait and personality category (for Alone, a picture of George Wallace at the 1972 Democratic Convention), and first prize in color news photography (Viet Vet).

-- From the National Press Photographers Association, first prize in news-documentary magazine photography to Dirck Halstead for his picture Victims, taken in a hospital in Hue, South Viet Nam, while on assignment for TIME.

-- From the White House Press Photographers Association, first prize to Steve Northup for his TIME coverage of last November's demonstrations at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C.

> From the 30th Annual Photo Competition, sponsored by the National Press Photographers Association, the University of Missouri School of Journalism and Nikon, Inc., special commendation to TIME'S picture department, under Picture Editor John Durniak, for "editing and use of pictures."

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