During the first 18 months of Ronald Reagan's Administration, Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott spent much of his time covering the activities of Secretary of State Alexander Haig. It was, says Talbott, a first-rate assignment. "Haig is an exciting, often controversial personality," Talbott notes, "with an embattled view of the world and the press. He was one of Washington's best stories." Now, 21 months after Haig's resignation from the Cabinet, Talbott can look back upon a unique opportunity to re-explore the events he once reported. He has spent most of the past six weeks excerpting Haig's memoirs, Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy, for the two-part series that begins in this week's issue of TIME.

Talbott went over the excerpts line by line with Haig in the former Secretary's Washington office. Recalls Talbott: "I was impressed by Haig's care and conscientiousness in helping preserve the essence of his story. I was also struck by his sensitivity to the inevitable difficulty of compressing a complicated, important story that Haig tells in 384 book pages."

Haig's memoirs, to be published by Macmillan early next month, defend his record as Secretary of State and attack some officials in the White House inner circle whom he blames for his downfall. One interesting aspect of Haig's story from a journalist's point of view, says Talbott, is "the impact of journalism on people who make the news. Haig sees the press as having a key part in his biggest losing fight, against White House insiders for access to, and influence on, the President. We of the press were well aware of the struggle, but were assured by Administration spokesmen that we were exaggerating or even imagining it. After reading the book, I believe that, if anything, we underplayed the story."

Reporter-Researcher Brigid O'Hara-Forster checked the manuscript's independently verifiable data. Executive Editor Ronald Kriss, who has had a major role in preparing nearly all the recent book excerpts that have appeared in TIME, including those from the memoirs of Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter, supervised the Haig project. Says Kriss: "It is practically unprecedented for a former major member of an Administration to publish a controversial book about his experiences while that Administration is still in power. That adds an additional level of newsworthiness to the contents of the book."