A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

If travel bags could talk, Laurence Barrett's two-wheeler would have quite a tale to tell. As TIME's White House correspondent from 1981 to 1985, Barrett -- and his luggage -- accompanied Ronald Reagan to Asia once, Europe four times and California constantly. But when Barrett, now the magazine's national political correspondent, plucked his suitcase off a plane last month, he found its sides broken and its locks sprung. "It perished pitifully," he says.

Barrett, on the other hand, is no worse for wear. After crisscrossing the < South to report on the Super Tuesday races in both parties, Barrett wrote this week's main story on the Republicans. His energy and longevity leave campaign newcomers slack-jawed. When recalling Barry Goldwater's 1964 nomination drive for a young television interviewer last month, Barrett saw that the man was startled: "He looked at me as if I were a survivor of the Spanish-American War."

A glance at his photograph is reassuring. Barrett is not exactly a veteran of San Juan Hill. But he has been around politics long enough to know that punditry and polls are no substitute for old-fashioned reporting. A native New Yorker who began as a city hall reporter for the now defunct Herald Tribune, Barrett covered the Johnson Administration before joining TIME as a writer in 1965. After a stint as an editor, Barrett covered the White House during the Carter and Reagan years. He drew on his work for a 1983 book, Gambling with History, that described the dawn of the Reagan Administration. Says he: "Being able to relate the bright hopes of the campaign to the sober realities of incumbency is the finest graduate political-science course that one can take."

Barrett has learned other lessons as well. Though TV coverage of primaries has vastly increased, he notes that "voter turnout has diminished steadily. So a publication like ours must relate the campaign carnival to the electorate's real concerns: what these candidates stand for, what's behind the arcane nomination process and what issues are going unaddressed." Barrett deals with those concerns every week, but he still relishes the carnival. Since his trusty suitcase let him down, Barrett has made do with a bedraggled garment bag "that doesn't quite fit into either the overhead bin or the space beneath the seat." It should at least see him through this week's Illinois primary.