A Letter From The Publisher: Aug. 4, 1961

AUSTRALIAN artist William Dobell, 61, a man of gentle manner but with an incisive painter's eye—as his April 4, 1960 cover of Australia's Prime Minister Menzies showed—likes to capture his subject's character in a way that a photograph cannot. He feared that South Viet Nam President Ngo Dinh Diem would be a "mandarin-like subject, whose face might not reveal his feelings.'' Instead, sketching his subject in the palace drawing room in Saigon, while Hong Kong Bureau Chief Stanley Karnow conducted his interview, Dobell found President Diem an animated, "rather pleasant and intense person,'' perhaps lacking in humor, with "a Father of...