CONTRIBUTORS

GARRY TRUDEAU is so successful as a cartoonist--Doonesbury, his definitive evocation of the baby-boomer zeitgeist, appears in 1,200 U.S. newspapers and has won a Pulitzer Prize--that he may be neglected as a writer. This week we welcome him to Time as a contributor of a hybrid Essay form that proves he's as amusing in words as in images. Trudeau has never been afraid to aim at the powerful; just ask any recent resident of the White House. But for his first Essay, he tackles the merely pesky--"Those goofy apostles of gracious living whose catalogs turn up in my mail," as he calls them. "My assignment, as I understand it," says Trudeau, "is to provide balance to the erudite, elegantly reasoned commentary that traditionally appears on the Essay page."

PAT COLE, a Los Angeles-based correspondent who has followed the Oklahoma City story from its awful beginning, had a rare 2 1/2-hour interview with accused bomber Timothy McVeigh last week. "Part of his lawyer Stephen Jones' strategy is to counter the negative rumors that have been spread about Tim and to get another view in print," says Cole. "McVeigh wanted to talk to TIME because it reaches a world audience." Cole found him upbeat and cordial but frustrated by the way he's treated in prison. "The petty harassment seems to be affecting his whole outlook," says Cole, aware that he wasn't seeing a full picture. "The real Timothy McVeigh will be revealed at the trial."

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, another Pulitzer-prizewinning contributor, strayed from his role as an Essayist seven weeks ago to write a beguiling piece for us about a chess match between Garry Kasparov and a computer. This week, in his Viewpoint column, Krauthammer, who has a medical degree and is a board-certified psychiatrist, addresses a subject on which he's even more qualified: judicial rulings on the right to die. "Medical ethics is the one area of medicine I still follow," says Krauthammer, who warns against allowing doctors to kill terminally ill patients. "Once these lines are crossed, the other side is the abyss. Judges don't understand what they're doing in these kinds of cases."

JACK E. WHITE, a TIME national correspondent and columnist, first met Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown about 20 years ago, when Brown was working for the National Urban League. "He was very smooth and very, very savvy," says White. "You knew even then he was going to end up someplace important." The two stayed in touch. "I last saw him at a Christmas party," he says. "He talked to my wife, and he gave her the impression that we were a lot tighter than we were. He made people feel he valued their friendship." White had the sad task of writing Brown's obituary this week. The most difficult thing was remaining "hard-nosed," he says. "I had to try hard to stay within the bounds of objectivity."