Few other Western journalists know Egypt more intimately than Cairo Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn, who provided much of the reporting for this week's cover story. Wynn's firsthand experience in the country goes back to 1945, when he began a two-year stint teaching journalism at the American University in Cairo. As a reporter in the Middle East since then, he came to know the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, the subject of Wynn's 1959 biography, Nasser of Egypt: The Search for Dignity, and many of the ambitious young colonels and politicians who have risen to power since his death. Among them was Anwar Sadat, who was editor in chief of Egypt's government-owned newspaper al Gumhuriya when Wynn first met him in 1953. For this week's story, Wynn assessed Sadat's role as the orchestrator of Arab moderation in foreign policy and sketched the problems he faces at home: exploding population, a palsied economy and an unwieldy government bureaucracy. The Egyptian President's low-key but apparently serious efforts to bring about Middle East peace and domestic reform struck a chord of admiration in Wynn. "Nasser sought dignity," he says, "Sadat found it."

Associate Editor Spencer Davidson, who wrote the story, and Reporter-Researcher Susan Reed, who researched it, have both specialized in the Middle East since the late 1960s. Among Davidson's credits are eleven cover stories on the area, including one on the death of Nasser in 1970 and our first cover on Sadat in 1971.

"I must say" quipped Maine Democrat Edmund Muskie, "that this is the largest audience of Senators that I have been privileged to address in many years." The occasion was a recent dinner in Washington for more than 100 Congressmen, journalists and academics who had taken part in a day-long series of seminars sponsored by Time Inc. on the role of Congress today. From the sessions emerged a guardedly optimistic consensus reported in this week's Nation section. Participants seemed to agree that the Legislative Branch has gone far toward reversing its long decline in power and is even beginning to savor what Maryland Republican Senator Charles Mathias called "a feeling of institutional success."

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