When President Lyndon Johnson demanded a researcher to help him prepare speeches, his talent scouts knew where to look. L.B J. hired former TIME Magazine Researcher Cecilia Dempster Bellinger, who had once worked in our Maps and Charts department. One day after she was on board the White House staff, the President, working hard on a text, was heard to shout out in frustration, "But Mrs. Bellinger won't let me say that!"

TIME editors and writers, before and since, know exactly what L.B.J. was complaining about: the often excruciating precision of the TIME researcher, a quality of mind that requires meticulous, caring, even reverential, attention to fact. Every week a cadre of researchers puts every word of the projected issue of TIME through the most demanding wringer of verification. Estimates TIME Chief of Research Leah Shanks Gordon: "We check nearly 2.5 million words a year."

Leah Gordon has probably checked a few million or so herself in the course of her distinguished career with the magazine. A philosophy major at Bryn Mawr College, she joined TIME in 1960; during the next 20 years she worked in virtually every editorial department of the magazine. Today she is in charge of the magazine's more than 50 men and women who are reporter-researchers.

TIME always has attracted astonishingly gifted researchers. In the Religion section, the reporter-researcher, a title reflecting the considerable amount of personal interviewing and on-scene reporting the job can often entail, has a Ph.D. in classics and is a former Roman Catholic seminarian. In the World section, one researcher is a Soviet specialist who taught Russian at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

These kinds of qualifications are put to rigorous use. The magazine constructs a brutal obstacle course through which the simplest to the most complex fact must pass. Correspondents in the field find their stories subjected to a telexed barrage of researcher questions, called check points, to review for accuracy. And before a story is published, correspondents in the field who have contributed to the story must also review it, word for word. Errors, of course, still do occur, often brought to our attention by readers; in each case the cause is traced and discussed to ensure that that mistake--or that kind of mistake--will not be made again. Says Gordon: "Because we are a newsweekly, because we must provide more detail, more analysis and more background, research becomes an important arm to making a story successful." We can give that statement what we call a ringing red check.

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