From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

Much like a strong presidential ticket, covering the White House for TIME requires teamwork, indefatigable energy and more than a dollop of personal chemistry. Which brings us to Washington correspondents Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame -- the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of the presidential beat -- who have been covering the Bush Administration together since Inauguration Day 1989. At first glance, they are, well, different from each other: the voluble, wisecracking Duffy is the inside-the-Beltway political junkie, while Goodgame, a Mississippi native and Rhodes scholar, is the laid-back outsider, always searching for the Big Picture.

Duffy and Goodgame were not immune to the primary occupational hazard of the White House beat: frustration with the steady diet of manufactured events. Amid the tedium of 1989, Duffy recalls, "we discovered that Bush was popular not despite his lack of action but because of it -- and what's more, we learned it was largely by design." From this insight grew the ultimate Duffy- Goodgame collaboration, their book chronicling Bush's first term, Marching in Place, just published by Simon & Schuster and excerpted in this preconvention issue.

Collaborating on a book enhanced the week-to-week journalism of Duffy and Goodgame. Explains Goodgame: "It forced us to work far more closely together, sharing every detail, every interview, every hunch with each other." Working so closely also pointed up the odd-couple nature of the Duffy-Goodgame relationship. Duffy likes to write early and, when circumstances permit, quit early for a gourmet dinner like take-out pizza. In contrast, Goodgame does his best writing late at night, often after downing several bowls of his homemade seafood gumbo.

Fostering in-house book writers is a long TIME tradition. Assistant managing editor Walter Isaacson is the author of Kissinger: A Biography, which will be published by Simon & Schuster next month. Isaacson says, "Henry Kissinger was very generous in the time and access he gave me. But it's not an authorized biography, and indeed it's quite critical in places." This fall TIME reporter David Seideman will examine the spotted-owl environmental controversy in his | forthcoming book Showdown at Opal Creek. Not all TIME authors compose weighty public-policy tomes. On a lighter note, senior writer William A. Henry III recently published The Great One: The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason. And away we go.