I had read TIME Magazine for as long as I could remember, even signed up for my own subscription when I was in college. So when I went to work here more than 15 years ago, I thought I had an appreciation for the power of that red border. But as it turned out, Newt Gingrich was the one who first impressed upon me what it really meant to be working for this extraordinary magazine.

It was October, 1994, the month that I joined TIME from the Los Angeles Times to cover Congress. It was also only a few weeks before what was looking like a potential earthquake of a midterm election. My new editors told me they wanted a story on the firebrand Republican Congressman who was the face of the voter anger that suddenly seemed to be coming from everywhere.

There was a problem, though. Gingrich was barnstorming every convservative corner of America in an eight-seater airplane. Keeping up with him was impossible, as pretty much every political reporter in the country was discovering. At one point, I even went so far as to charter my own plane with a reporter from the Washington Post to get to a rally in Tullahoma, Tennessee. (Yes, younger colleagues, there was a time when when a reporter could put a plane on the expense account…)

But it still wasn’t working. The logistics were killing me. I couldn’t get the kind of close-up view of the guy that I needed to tell this story right. Until I mentioned to someone on his staff that a TIME cover might be in the works. Suddenly, one of those eight seats belonged to me.