Norman Alastair Duncan Macrae is the second half of a writer-exchange project worked out between TIME Editor T. S. Matthews and Editor Geoffrey Crowther of the London Economist. I wrote you about the first half when we sent TIME Writer Bill McHale to work for the Economist for three months (TIME, March 19).

When Macrae came here on Oct. 5 to bring the project full circle, I asked him to keep a diary of his impressions of the U.S. and of writing for TIME. He has just given me the diary, which he says "was done at odd moments and may sound disjointed." Disjointed or no, I thought I would pass along to you the parts I enjoyed most.

Wrote Macrae: "Anybody who comes to TIME from an English paper spends the voyage over mentally trying to turn 500-word newspaper stories into 500-word TIME stories--and goes crazy as a result. He invariably finds himself putting too many adjectives into bed with each noun. But the real test comes when you try to translate a 1,500-word newspaper story into a 200-word TIME story."

After he started working here, Macrae discovered that "the vast mass of research that goes into a TIME story, especially a cover story, simply staggers anybody coming into the organization from outside. For a cover story, as much material is gathered as some biographers in England would collect for a full-length biography.

"But the sort of story that is really enthralling to see unfold is that which starts with two opposite statements of opinion from two different informants. The spider's web of interviews checking these opinions from sources across the country--converging into a mass of evidence that leads to a conclusion which is usually somewhere between the two--is always apt testimony to TIME'S very wide coverage. The research behind such stories has very much the same appeal as a detective story, with the story itself serving as the final chapter."

During two days in Washington Macrae was easily able to see all the Government officials he had hoped to meet, and observed: "Washington is the only capital city that I know of where Congressmen and Senators fall over themselves to be able to call newsmen by their first names, instead of the other way round."

TIME'S Thursday-to-Monday editorial work week led to this analysis: "At Friday lunch, when everybody has been immersed for 24 hours reading the research for each story, conversation imperceptibly tends toward discussion of high issues. By Saturday lunch, everybody is busy writing the stories; conversation then tends to be scattered with suggestions for pithy statements. By Sunday lunch, the conversation centers round the impossibility of fitting several gallons of material into a pint pot. By Monday the atmosphere is much more cheerful. On Thursday everyone is saying that last week's magazine was an exceptionally good one after all--especially in other people's sections."

Macrae listed some overall impressions. "Main joy from America: overwhelming hospitality, and the feeling of being a customer instead of a worm when looking round your well-stocked shops. Main disappointment: Broadway. Main surprise: the way veterans of the war are being called back to the colors. This is certainly a fact that should be plugged by your information services over in Europe, where news of this sort of step would silence the anti-Americans much more effectively than figures about dollar expenditures on arms."

Macrae was terrified by Manhattan cab drivers, who "always seemed to be leaning back and talking to you, amiably and volubly, from the moment they heard your accent. It seems they'd all served in England during the war."

No stranger to travel, Macrae was born in 1923 in East Prussia, where his father was a vice consul, spent his first eight years in Koenigsberg, Dunkirk and Porto Alegre, Brazil. After returning to England to go to boarding school, he spent his summers rejoining his parents in such places as Zagreb and Moscow. As an R.A.F. navigator during the war, he trained in Canada and England, then spent the rest of the war in the Far East, "dropping corned beef into the army in Burma and leaflets on the Japanese."

Cordially yours,

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