MORE than most men in public life, President Kennedy had an affinity for the press that was widely reciprocated. As a Congressman and as Senator (which he was when he first appeared on TIME'S cover back in 1957), he liked the company of journalists, and found many of his friends among them. When he entered the White House, the relationship became more formal, discreet and professional, as it had to. But it continued. As a superb politician, John Kennedy understood the value of sympathetic press coverage, as a President he wanted to influence opinion, but most of all he seemed to find stimulation in the afterhours give-and-take of candid, informed, sharp shoptalk of events and people. Correspondents and editors, a little awed as all men are by the White House setting, were encouraged by the President to talk freely, and so did he.

The President had a special feeling about TIME. In the study of his penthouse suite in the Hotel Carlyle, an alert New York Times reporter recently noted a white White House phone, a box of Havana cigars and that week's issue of TIME. In Washington, the President got his copy early, and sometimes within an hour was on the phone to our White House correspondent with comments--wry, appreciative or angry --on what had been written about him. He said on several occasions that he regarded TIME as the most important magazine in America, for it reached the kind of people in both parties that he most wanted to influence. And when surprised, in talking to leaders abroad, by their close knowledge of some domestic U.S. event, he said that he had asked where they had learned about it, and was invariably told, "In TIME."

On the occasion of TIME's 40th anniversary last spring, he delegated Vice President Johnson to represent him, and sent a telegram to be read at the dinner, saluting TIME as a "great magazine," and adding a few characteristically phrased remarks:

"Like most Americans, I do not always agree with TIME, but I nearly always read it. And, though I am bound to think that TIME sometimes seems to do its best to contract the political horizons of its audience, I am especially glad that it has worked so steadfastly to enlarge their intellectual and cultural horizons. This has contributed materially, I think, to the raising of standards in our nation in recent years.

"I hope I am not wrong in occasionally detecting these days in TIME those more mature qualities appropriate to an institution entering its forties--a certain mellowing of tone, a greater tolerance of human frailty and, most astonishing of all, an occasional hint of fallibility."

It might be taken as evidence of frailty or fallibility, but TIME and its staff greatly valued the relationships--both professional and personal --with its No. 1 subscriber.

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