A Letter From The Publisher: may 31, 1968

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CURT PRENDERGAST, TIME'S Paris bureau chief for the past eight years, has been a professional De Gaulle watcher for even longer. He has been covering the general's troubles and triumphs ever since 1953—and from Algeria to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, the job was never tougher than it was last week.

For days on end, TIME'S office was manned round the clock. As Paris shut down and communications came to a halt, press packets had to be driven to Brussels, four hours away, for relay to New York. But when gasoline reserves dwindled, even that link with the outside world became tenuous. Office supplies began to run short, and just getting to work became something of an adventure. The red-rimmed eyes of the reporters filing for this week's cover story suggested sleepless nights, long hours spent crisscrossing a barricaded city, and the irritating effects of tear gas. Sooner or later, everyone got a whiff of the stuff.

As the student revolt spread out of the Latin Quarter and gathered supporters across the country, Prendergast called for reinforcements. London Correspondent Keith Johnson made it to Paris as fast as he could—via Brussels and a poky rented Volkswagen. He began his new beat with a ten-mile hike with worker demonstrators. His day's outing ended in the Latin Quarter, where, along with Paris Correspondent Roger Stone, he dodged police clubs and flying cobblestones. "I always said Paris was a great city to walk in," said Johnson, "but this is ridiculous."

Judson Gooding, an old Paris hand, left his San Francisco bureau post on three hours' notice. Getting to Paris, he recalls, was the smoothest part of the assignment. Airline schedules were so fouled up and so many potential travelers had given up in disgust that he found himself the only passenger on an Air France 707 to London. After catching a rare flight to Le Bourget airport, his luck held and he managed to get the last Hertz car available. Then, like his colleagues fanning out from Paris to Lyon to Marseille, Gooding went out to get his first taste of tear gas and to learn that a press brassard on a coat sleeve would be an open invitation to a mauling from the police.

With Prendergast coordinating their efforts in all the confusion, the reporters boosted their normal output of 50,000 words a day to 100,000. By week's end, Cover Writers Dave Tinnin and Howard Muson and Editor Jason McManus were working from thorough and voluminous files.