AS a correspondent who regularly covers the Justice Department, TIME'S Dean Fischer is thoroughly accustomed to taking down the measured words of pipe-smoking Attorney General John Mitchell. Interviewing Martha Mitchell is something else entirely, as Fischer found out a year ago during his first reporting session with her. When he arrived at the Mitchells' Watergate apartment, he was armed, as usual, only with pad and pen. "It was a mistake," Fischer recalls ruefully. "I asked her only a few questions, but her words tumbled out faster than I could write them down. At one point, watching me hastily scribble notes, she asked why didn't I learn speed writing. I wished I had."

When Fischer visited Watergate for this week's cover story on Mrs. Mitchell and the other women of official Washington, he took care to arrive fully prepared with a tape recorder. "It was a good thing I did," says Fischer. "Although Mrs. Mitchell was suffering from a cold, we talked for 41 hours." Another recorder was on hand two days later when Fischer, Correspondent Bonnie Angelo, Researcher Amanda Macintosh and Writer Douglas Auchincloss met Republican Martha Mitchell and Democrat Barbara Howar for a discussion on women and power in Washington. Characteristically candid, Martha fired off some observations about TIME'S cover team. Researcher Macintosh, who lives in Manhattan, was obviously "too sweet to come from New York." As for leonine Writer Auchincloss, Martha thought he could well pass for "an ambassador or a curator of a museum." No museum piece, Auchincloss has written cover stories on persons as varied as St. Paul, Architect Buckminster Fuller and Astrologer Carroll Righter. He found Martha Mitchell, subject of his 23rd TIME cover, "touching and full of verve." sb TIME's much deals with the whole distaff side of official life, and much of that An came from TIME'S own woman in Washington, Bonnie Angelo. power petite brunette with an admitted fascination for "politics, power and personalities," Bonnie has covered them all for TIME for the past 41 years. Reportorial talent -- and her stamina -- has earned her some grueling assignments, including trips down the Rio Grande with Lady Bird Johnson, to Asia with Lyndon, to Peru with Pat Nixon and, just before she started work on this week's cover, to France with the President for the funeral of Charles de Gaulle.

Most After Bonnie's -ups have been scored right in Washington. After Richard Nixon rallied me upper stratum of his Administration in the Cabinet Room of the White House to hear his upbeat post-mortem on the mid term exclusive Bonnie managed to ferret out the details for an exclusive story in our Nov. 16 issue.

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