Slightly more than a. year ago, I was in Washington to present a special leather-bound copy of our first Bicentennial issue, Independence!, to President Ford. It was warmly received and read in the White House, and in about 6 million other households--more than any issue of TIME ever published. It seemed appropriate, then, that as soon as TIME'S second Bicentennial issue, The New Nation, was completed, a special edition be given to the country's second highest ranking reader, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. As it turned out, the Vice President had just finished serving as a bicentenary tour guide, having escorted French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing through the Revolutionary War battle site at Yorktown. Mr. Rockefeller did not say whether President Giscard seemed unusually well informed about that era, but Paris Correspondent Gregory Wierzynski reports that Giscard packed a copy of The New Nation in his briefcase before departing for the U.S. He said he would use it as a "document de base."

Just how deep the strains of the military run in America--and in their own lives--registered sharply with the correspondents who reported this week's cover story. Joseph Kane, a former field artillery lieutenant whose beat is the Pentagon, observed how important it was to be "of the military but not in the military, to appreciate the quest for the ideal the officers.seek while at the same time assessing an illness growing from rigidity." Said Washington Correspondent Arthur White of his visit to the Naval Academy: "There was all the brass again, spit and polished in blinding white uniforms, yes-sirring and no-sirring and stirring old memories." Added W.W. II Army Sergeant White: "They get more than their share of raps in our antimartial society, and I thought of Kipling's lines: 'For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"/ But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.' "

New York Correspondents John Tompkins and Roland Flamini spent the week at West Point, where they were given carte blanche to ask questions. "I had forgotten how carefully scrubbed and polite cadets are," said Tompkins, an Army staff sergeant in the South Pacific in W.W. II. Concluded Flamini: "Some may find it hard to accept West Point's honor code as anything more than elitist mumbo jumbo --but there is something to the place." That "something" and the scandal's scope are the story: edited by Ronald Kriss, an ex-Army specialist third class; written by James Atwater, ex-Korean War lieutenant; and researched by Anne Hopkins, granddaughter of Admiral William S. Sims (Annapolis '80), and Eileen Chiu, daughter of an Air Force colonel.

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