Andrei Gromyko first appeared on the cover of TIME in 1947, when he was Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister. He was featured most recently last June, when the magazine reported that his influence in the Kremlin had reached an unprecedented level. Gromyko's arrival in the U.S. to meet with President Reagan and Democratic Candidate Mondale this week gave TIME'S editors a valuable opportunity to assess the state of the superpower relationship and its impact on the domestic political scene.

Associate Editor William Doerner, who wrote the cover story, has visited the Soviet Union twice, in 1969 and 1979. He has devoted eight of his 17 years at TIME, including a two-year stint in Paris, to writing and editing on foreign affairs. "What struck me vividly about Gromyko's visit," says Doerner, "is that just about this time last year I was writing about the destruction of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, as a result of which the Soviet Foreign Minister was barred from landing at the New York area's civilian airports. Now there is a completely different atmosphere."

White House Correspondent Laurence Barrett found that the visit had a more immediate impact. "While the Administration has been attempting to be relatively cool," he reports, "there has been a lot of boning up for what can be some quite heavyweight diplomacy. It is an interesting reminder that policy and politics are never very far apart." Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, an arms-control expert --and author of the forthcoming Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control, contributed an analysis of prospects for the resumption of negotiations.

On the other side of the world, attitudes about the Gromyko-Reagan meeting were less upbeat. Moscow Bureau Chief Erik Amfitheatrof was startled by a question put to him as he went about his reporting last week. "A middle-aged Muscovite asked me if it was true that Reagan 'is like Hitler.' When I told her that this image was completely erroneous, she replied, 'But that is what our television commentators tell us.' " For the cover image, Photographer Brian Alpert took a rare picture of Gromyko inside the Soviet mission in New York City, a building that few outsiders penetrate.

"I glimpsed the Minister under a stained-glass window," recalls Alpert, "and was lucky enough to catch him in a rainbow of color. Maybe it's a sign of hope." Why did the mission let down its guard and allow an American photographer inside? Theorizes Alpert: "I've been taking pictures at the United Nations for ten years. They're used to me. Combine experience with TIME'S name and persistence, and you have an irresistible force."