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- <text id=93TT0632>
- <title>
- Nov. 22, 1993: To Our Readers
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Nov. 22, 1993 Where is The Great American Job?
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- To Our Readers, Page 4
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> When George Bush was President and Jim Baker was his foreign
- policy czar, nobody logged more frequent-flyer miles for TIME
- than J.F.O. ("Jef") McAllister, our State Department correspondent.
- Accompanying the peripatetic Secretary of State on his shuttle-diplomacy
- marathons, McAllister quickly mastered the technological rigors
- of modern journalism--banging out dispatches on his Toshiba
- laptop in airplanes, airports, briefing rooms and run-down hotels.
- He once typed a file while stuck in a broken elevator in Kislovodsk,
- a spa town in the heartland of Russia.
- </p>
- <p> McAllister is flying less these days (mostly because Warren
- Christopher doesn't travel as much as his predecessor did) but
- working just as hard. "Jef has the busiest beat in the Washington
- bureau," says senior editor Johanna McGeary, who covered State
- for TIME for seven years. "Besides the big pieces he's called
- upon to do [like this week's analysis of the shortcomings of
- Bill Clinton's foreign policy team], we rely on him for every
- crisis around the world that needs a Washington angle." The
- queries pour in from the New York office all week long: What
- is the Administration's point of view on Peru? How much foreign
- aid do we give El Salvador? Did Italy pressure the U.S. to curtail
- prosecution of the B.N.L. banking scandal? "I seldom know the
- answer immediately," says McAllister. "But I know whom to call.
- My computer Rolodex has...let me see...857 entries."
- </p>
- <p> In addition to his well-stuffed Rolodex, McAllister brings to
- his job considerable expertise. A summa cum laude graduate of
- Yale (where he specialized in American diplomatic history),
- he went to Manila as a Luce scholar and to London as a Marshall
- scholar, earning a Ph.D. in history and writing the memoirs
- of U. Alexis Johnson, a former Under Secretary of State. He
- returned to Yale for a law degree, clerked for a federal judge
- in San Francisco and worked as a corporate lawyer in New York
- City--but kept being drawn back to journalism, reporting on
- and off as a TIME stringer before signing on full time four
- years ago.
- </p>
- <p> Around the office, he is known as one of the most dependable
- and unflappable correspondents in the bureau. Like Clinton,
- he is married to a successful lawyer--Ann Olivarius, now president
- of the Sarnoff Endowment for Cardiovascular Science--whom
- he met at Yale. Balancing the demands of his beat and the needs
- of his growing family (a third child is due in January) may
- be the real test of his diplomatic skills.
- </p>
- <p> Elizabeth Valk Long
- </p>
- <p> President
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
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