This week's cover stories on the newly unified and confident Republican Party are only the first half of a journalistic doubleheader. Senior Editor Otto Friedrich had barely sent to press the main story, written by Associate Editor Edwin Warner, when he, Warner and the Nation section's 15 other editors, writers and reporter-researchers left Manhattan to be in Detroit for the opening gavel of the G.O.P. Convention. After several days of observing the political action within and beyond the new Joe Louis Arena, they would return to their offices to prepare a second G.O.P. cover, this one on the party's ticket and its prospects in November. Says Friedrich: "It is a great advantage to see an event firsthand, and then to be able to evaluate it from a distance." With 4,500 members of the working press attending, the convention, as always, promised to be almost as much a gathering of journalists as of politicians. TIME'S 13 correspondents on hand include several who have spent months scrutinizing the 1980 race, among them Laurence Barrett, who has covered Reagan since January, Walter Isaacson, who reported on last week's G.O.P. platform hearings, and Douglas Brew, who had followed the George Bush campaign. TIME also fielded a team of ten photographers, led by Picture Editor Arnold Drapkin.

Our planning for Detroit began almost a year ago. Deputy Chief of Correspondents Rudolph Rauch assembled a group to arrange the complex logistics that convention coverage demands. The swift movement of staffers, information and film required the hiring of 22 messengers and a fleet of 21 cars, as well as the installation in TIME'S pressroom in Cobo Hall of 50 telephones, two telex machines and a link to our computer in Manhattan. Other newsroom amenities: 24 desks, 38 typewriters, six pairs of binoculars and--for the fortunate--a pair of sofas.

The toughest problem was to find sufficient housing. After one of the twelve hotels in which TIME was allocated space turned out to be 43 miles from Detroit in Chatham, Ont., TIME Housing Coordinator Pamela Thompson had to scramble to rent apartments and rooms in a private club closer to the action. At one hotel being considered, a vigilant watch dog named Fifi bit Rauch's assistant, Emily Friedrich. "After covering an acceptance speech or interviewing dozens of delegates, no one should have to cope with Fifi," Friedrich decided, and she struck the establishment from her list.

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