The Man On The Other End Of The Line

By James Kelly, Managing Editor

Whenever my phone at home rings at odd hours, the person on the other end is almost always Howard Chua-Eoan, one of our assistant managing editors and the person responsible for overseeing TIME's correspondents in the U.S. and around the world. He is the bearer of late-breaking news, telling me about the latest crisis and whom he dispatched to cover it. I always give a groggy O.K. since Howard's judgment on how to handle a story is impeccable.

Howard began his career here as the Saturday secretary, while still a student at Columbia University's journalism school. Born and raised in Manila, Howard got hooked on news watching Ruther Batuigas, a police reporter for the city's Daily Star, a tabloid published by his uncle, Andrew Go. "He was forever solving some crime: interviewing the murderous leader of a jailhouse riot, bringing some fugitive in to face justice, surviving a shootout with a gunslinging gangster. One of the most exciting things I was ever allowed to do was hitch a ride with Ruther on his way to a story. Who knew what might have happened? His life was like a movie."

When Howard graduated from Columbia, we hired him full-time as a reporter, and his gift for the stylish phrase won him the chance to write foreign news. Howard happened to be the Saturday night duty writer when the Chinese army stormed Tiananmen Square in 1989, and by daybreak Sunday he wrote our cover on the massacre. Since then, he has written or edited more than 50 covers, giving rise to the rumor that he never leaves the building. Trust me: he does, though his elaborately decorated office (which includes not one but two plastic blowups of the figure from Edvard Munch's The Scream) suggests someone very much at home in his work.

"On the wall outside my office is a gallery of portraits of the correspondents who helped make TIME what it is. There they are, interviewing Presidents, traveling with guerrillas, crossing wild rivers in dugout canoes; talking to champions and losers who won't quit; trying to figure out how to send in their reporting from areas torn apart by war. And every week, as I look over their shoulders, I feel as if I am in that car with Ruther Batuigas, granted the extraordinary privilege of tagging along to go where the action is. At those moments, as deadline approaches and stories come due, when the talents and resources of TIME come rushing together to a weekly close, I feel my life has borrowed something like the energy and fun and enormity of a movie." See why I like getting Howard's calls, no matter what the hour?

James Kelly, Managing Editor