A Letter From The Publisher: Apr. 25, 1969

THE last thing Washington Correspondent Hays Gorey wanted was to play tennis in the rain. But one damp day last month, he accepted Ethel Kennedy's invitation with little hesitation. After many a campaign trip with Senator Robert Kennedy, Gorey knew that a reporter anxious for an interview with Ethel had to take it on the run. Gorey not only posed his questions for this week's cover story on a soggy tennis court, but also spent one noontime driving Mrs. Kennedy to school to pick up her son Christopher, and another at Georgetown University Hospital, where Courtney Kennedy was having stitches removed from a wound suffered while skiing. A Washington Post columnist reported that Gorey was even spotted, notebook in hand, recording every splash one morning while Ethel bathed her eleventh child, Rory. Not so, says Gorey. He never carried a notebook into the bathroom.

Freelance Photographer Tim Page, 24, figured it was time to get out of Viet Nam. He was sure that he was pushing his luck. His body was a mass of scars from combat wounds. He was hit in the hip while with the Marines near Chu Lai in 1965. During the Buddhist revolt in Danang in the spring of 1966, a 40-mm. grenade exploded near by, wounding him in eight places. He was riding a Coast Guard cutter a few months later when the ship was strafed by mistake by U.S. planes and he was riddled with shrapnel. Afterward, British-born Tim Page would tell his friends that the most frightening sight in the world is an F-4C Phantom screaming out of the sky, blinking death.

But as much as Page wanted to leave Viet Nam, there were always other jobs he wanted to do—most of them for TIME and LIFE. Last week he went out on one more assignment, one that had been chosen carefully to keep him far from trouble. He was on his way to take aerial shots of the Cambodian border when his helicopter picked up an emergency message. Some G.I.s had triggered a booby trap and there were wounded to be evacuated. The chopper landed, and Page ran out to help. Another booby trap exploded, blowing the legs off an Army sergeant, wounding Page in the chest, arm, abdomen and head. Less than three hours later, he was undergoing emergency surgery. At week's end his chances for survival seemed to be increasing.