No one was more surprised than TIME Correspondent Jack E. White when he was tapped as a panelist for last week's debate between Vice-Presidential Candidates George Bush and Geraldine Ferraro. White was at his parents' home in Washington when he was informed by TIME'S news desk that League of Women Voters' President Dorothy Ridings was phoning to try to enlist him. White accepted the invitation with alacrity.

In a sense, he has spent the entire year preparing for the event. During the primeries, White helped cover all three of the major candidates for the Democratic nomination. He has contributed to five political cover stories since August 1983, including two on the campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Since the Democratic Convention, he has traveled with both Ferraro and Mondale and interviewed them for TIME.

Never having met Bush previously, White conferred with TIME colleagues who had covered the Vice President. They included Washington Bureau Chief Robert Ajemian, White House Correspondent Douglas Brew and Los Angeles Correspondent Melissa Ludtke, who has been traveling with Bush since early September.

White met with his three fellow panelists before the debate. "We wanted to be sure that, given the rigid format, we would strike a balance," he says. "There was a need to cover as many subjects as possible, but we also hoped to dig deep, to get the debaters to be specific or maybe to say something unpredictable. Because I have been covering racial affairs since 1967, I insisted on including questions on civil rights, particularly as the issue had not been raised in the presidential debate the week before. And of course the questions to the two candidates could not be identical; you couldn't ask Bush his reaction as a mother to the possibility of war in Central America."

White found the panelist's perspective to be a novel one. "I was surprised to find how different things looked to me than they did to the television audience. I was struck by Bush's apparent nervousness and by the seeming staginess of some of Ferraro's responses. But after it was over, I was told they did not come across that way at all on TV."

White is not the only TIME correspondent on television this month. On Oct. 24, William McWhirter, who was Caribbean bureau chief until his move to Bonn in July, will be the focus of a one-hour PBS documentary on the difficulties encountered by journalists who covered the U.S. invasion of Grenada one year ago. Says McWhirter: "The issue of the press's role was second only to that of the controversy surrounding the invasion itself."