TO OUR READERS

By BILL HALLETT PRESIDENT

FOR CORRESPONDENT Karen Tumulty, the voyage to this year's Man of the Year cover began 14 months ago in an eight-seat commuter plane flying from Oklahoma City to Rochester, Minnesota, with a colorful but still relatively obscure U.S. Congressman named Newt Gingrich. Tumulty had just joined TIME's Washington bureau from the Los Angeles Times and was assigned to follow the Representative from Georgia who had suddenly grabbed the national spotlight by leading a conservative charge that took even his Republican Party compatriots by surprise. As one of just a few reporters on the road with Gingrich, Tumulty watched as he conducted strategy sessions and laid his plans to implement the Contract with America. She even spent 10 hours with Gingrich and his brain trust one drizzly Saturday as they put together his now infamous college course. "I'm incredibly grateful we did that reporting," says the Texas-born newswoman, who has been covering Congress for 13 years. "I got to see how he was planning for all of this back when no one would have believed it could have happened."

"Tumulty got her Ph.D. in Gingrich," says senior editor Nancy Gibbs, who wrote the profile of the Speaker of the House that appears in this issue. "I'd ask her about some obscure detail about the appropriations process, or about some event that occurred 20 years ago that shaped his thinking. And within hours--sometimes minutes--she would call back with a rich, lucid account pulled from her notebooks." This she did, Tumulty notes ruefully, while closing on a new house, turning 40 and coping with being five months pregnant with her second child (she and husband Paul Richter have a son, Nicholas, 3).

Once Gingrich was selected as a Man of the Year candidate, we also drew on the work of a team of TIME correspondents to help paint the Speaker in all his brilliant, strange plumage. Doug Waller gathered childhood stories from "Newtie's" hometown of Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. Elaine Shannon and Adam Cohen looked into Gingrich's Southern ties. Wendy Cole hung out with "Kit" Gingrich, the Speaker's outspoken mother. Jeff Birnbaum followed Newt's money trail. In the meantime, Gingrich's heady first 100 days were documented close-up by TIME's prizewinning photographer P.F. Bentley. "P.F.'s passion is recording history as it happens," says picture editor Michele Stephenson. "He has great instincts, and he gets rare access because his subjects trust him." A collection of Bentley's Gingrich photos has just been published as Newt, Inside the Revolution (Rutledge Hill Press; $19.95).

In a year that saw the Oklahoma bombing, the denouement of the O.J. Simpson trial, the Million Man March, the death of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Bosnian peace agreement, there were other men and women who shaped our world. But in the end, Gingrich is our 1995 Man of the Year because his rise and partial fall were emblematic of a historic shift in Washington that will be felt for generations to come. "For better or worse," says managing editor James R. Gaines, "he has changed the language and substance of American politics like no other politician in recent history."

By last week, when Gingrich sat down for a final interview with Tumulty; editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine; Walter Isaacson, who will become TIME's managing editor in January; executive editor Jim Kelly; chief of correspondents Joelle Attinger; and Washington bureau chief Dan Goodgame, the Speaker was a chastened man coping with the fact that he has become a liability to the party he helped transform. He arrived with his hair still wet from his morning swim, and his mood during the hour-and-a-half session was cautious; he remembered to rein himself in. In fact, he joked about how careful he has to be these days, quickly and comically correcting himself (changing "grotesque" to "sad," for instance, to describe his recent media coverage, and calling psychologist turned politician Lenora Fulani first a "nut candidate," then the more euphemistic "candidate of limited public appeal").

Though Gingrich is the first Speaker to be Man of the Year, he is by no means the only one to grace TIME's cover. Our very first issue, dated March 3, 1923, showcased Speaker of the House Joseph Gurney Cannon, a 23-term Republican who had just announced his retirement. "To Uncle Joe the Speakership was a gift from heaven," TIME declared. "And he followed the divine call with a resolute evangelism that was no mere voice crying in the wilderness, but a voice that forbade anybody else to cry out--out of turn." Nearly three-quarters of a century later, much the same could be said of Newt Gingrich.