Autumn is a season of bonfires, pep rallies, red-dogs and touchdowns--as well as the time for presidential candidates to make their climactic quadrennial sprint toward Election Day. "Both football and press-the-flesh politics are peculiarly American institutions," says Associate Editor James Atwater, the writer of this week's cover story who has observed those peculiarities at close hand for three decades.

Atwater began his journalistic career on a festive note at age 16, when he put in a summer stint for the Springfield (Mass.) Union. The only staffer on hand at the paper's two-man Westfield bureau on V-J day, he recalls, "I took my typewriter, set it on a windowsill, and wrote about what I could see before me: a grand, impromptu celebration in the town square. It was a great moment for a kid raised on The Front Page."

After graduating from Yale in 1950, Atwater had his first look at national politics as a trainee in TIME'S Washington bureau. Sports were blended into his career six years later when he covered Big Ten games as a correspondent in TIME'S Detroit bureau and wrote the SPORT section before ending up as a NATION writer in time for the Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960. "The debates that year were the most gripping TV of the period," he says. "We all used to organize our week around those nights." Atwater expects to spend some fascinating nights this year when Carter and Ford debate.

Of course, the 1976 campaign began a long time ago, for politicians and journalists alike. Reporter-Researchers Eileen Chiu and Anne Hopkins have been busy with the rush of political events since early spring. For Washington Correspondent Dean Fischer, who has switched back and forth over G.O.P. turf this year, the campaign has been a mixed affair. "Can a refugee from the Reagan campaign find a haven in the White House?" he asks. That may not be too difficult, since Fischer covered the President for two years, including the early primaries. Says he: "It's like coming home again."

Washington Correspondent Stanley Cloud, who has been on the road or in Plains, Ga., with Carter for nearly a year, finds the assignment unexpectedly rewarding. Says he: "Cynics complain that within the confines of a presidential campaign--with all its jet planes and buses and motorcades--one learns nothing at all about America. I disagree. I've learned more about America, about the astounding diversity of this country, than I ever knew before."

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