To Our Readers

By NORMAN PEARLSTINE/EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

For the past 75 years, TIME has engaged readers by presenting the news of the week, and by offering a look ahead. This week, though, the magazine has broadened its purview to present the story of the century. It's an amazing tale, and like the very best literature, it grabs readers not only with its twists of plot and its resonant themes but also with a collection of characters that dance in our minds, the great men and women who with their lives wrote the history of our times.

This issue--which names and profiles the 20 most influential Leaders and Revolutionaries of the past 100 years--is the first of six special issues TIME will produce over the next two years. Future issues will list the most influential Artists and Entertainers, Builders and Titans, Scientists and Thinkers, and Heroes and Inspirations. In late 1999, TIME will select its Person of the Century. CBS News, our partner in this project, will be airing six prime-time specials on our choices over the next two years.

It has been a fascinating process. When TIME managing editor Walter Isaacson dreamed up this project two years ago, he promised that the debate about these 100 people would make for some of the liveliest dinner-party conversations imaginable. This list certainly did that. In meetings, hallway chats and, yes, even over dinner, TIME's staff wrestled with some wonderful historical dilemmas: Lenin or Stalin? Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping? The answers were closely reasoned and thoroughly researched. The editors also solicited the opinions of readers, who let us know what they thought by letter, E-mail and fax. Our Website time.com alone collected nearly 7 million votes. (Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, drew several million.) In the end the editors balanced popularity with legacy and influence with impact to produce a collection that both engages and surprises. And if there is someone you thought for sure should be included, stay tuned--he or she may appear in one of our later issues.

To make the case for the great names on the list, TIME sought out a hall-of-fame collection of writers and thinkers. The logic was simple: Who better to profile Winston Churchill than British writer John Keegan, perhaps the greatest living military historian. William F. Buckley Jr. was so taken with his subject--Pope John Paul II--that he awakened senior editor Joshua Cooper Ramo early on a Sunday morning to chat about how best to end his piece. The pairings--which also include Elie Wiesel on Hitler, Doris Kearns Goodwin on Eleanor Roosevelt and Salman Rushdie on Gandhi--led to a set of portraits that are at once authoritative and impressionistic, pieces that we think add invaluable personal insight to the historical record.

The task of capturing all this energy on a cover was passed to Robert Rauschenberg. The American artist, whose imagistic collages are chock-full of cultural and historical allusions, created the special cover over four intense days and nights in his studio on Florida's Captiva Island. "There's no such thing as power and politics without personalities," says Rauschenberg, "and power and revolution do not exist with hands in pockets. I hoped to get that across in my cover."

In the end, this issue is--like Rauschenberg's work and like the best history--a collage of names, dates and emotions that produce not only a sense of the times but also a visceral reminder of all that is most terrifying in people and all that is most wonderful in humankind. In that important sense, the story TIME tells this week isn't so different from the one the magazine has been telling for 75 years.