To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

It would be easy to be overwhelmed by the world's biggest government building, housing the country's largest bureaucracy. But TIME's new defense correspondent, Mark Thompson, has found a way to tame the beast. "I don't view the Pentagon as some monolithic hulk," he says. "Once you add in family members and defense-industry workers, it is more like a city the size of New York. It has nice and not-so-nice neighborhoods, cozy bars, gangs and fiefdoms. Thinking of it in that way makes it less intimidating and almost friendly."

Thompson's stories, on the other hand, have not always been so friendly. In 1985, while covering defense for the Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram, he won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering helicopter design flaws that had been ignored for more than a decade, resulting in the death of some 250 soldiers. His picture ran in TIME: "It was a high point for my parents."

Thompson, 41, showed a penchant for investigative reporting from the start of his journalistic career. At the Pendulum, his hometown paper in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, he alternated coverage of bake sales with exposes of the local police department that led to an FBI probe and the firing of the town's police chief. After more local reporting, in Pontiac, Michigan, he shifted to the nation's capital 15 years ago, and quickly mastered the balancing act required of any Washington correspondent. As TIME's Washington bureau chief Dan Goodgame puts it, "He manages to ask tough questions and write critical stories while maintaining the respect of the top sources on his beat."

Since joining TIME four months ago, Thompson has interviewed cadets at West Point, traveled with Defense Secretary William Perry on a weeklong tour through four of the republics of the former Soviet Union and interviewed dozens of military families for an investigative report on the epidemic of domestic violence in the services. The story, which ran three weeks ago, prompted Maine Senator William Cohen to request that the Pentagon report back to the Senate on its efforts to combat such abuse.

Thompson has spent the past several weeks grilling Pentagon officials and outside experts about the chances of war on the Korean peninsula. "The major and sobering consensus on that score," Thompson says, "is that any conflict there would be fierce and bloody and would leave Seoul in ruins." That frightening scenario is the subject of this week's cover package, and could keep Thompson busy for months to come.