AT the White House last week to report on this week's cover story, Correspondent Simmons Fentress was struck by an unusual degree of camaraderie between newsmen and the normally businesslike presidential aides. "The reporters," says Fentress, "were all talking about their internal time clocks being out of phase, and the sources were discussing, their stomach troubles." No wonder Everyone had just returned from twelve days of traveling 24,500 miles and traversing 24 time zones during President Nixon's whirlwind tour of Asia plus Rumania.

Nor, from TIME'S standpoint, was there much rest for the weary. Fentress had hardly touched down in Washington when he was plunging into new interviews about the many issues confronting the President in the summer of 1969. His file provided the bulk of the research for the story written by Keith Johnson and edited by Laurence Barrett. And as the magazine went to press, where was Fentress? In a jet once more, flying west to San Clemente and the West Coast White House, where the President will spend the next month. All of which led Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey to wonder if perhaps "the White House Press Room really shouldn't be a surplus Boeing 707 fuselage, where reporters can stay all day, writing stories, pinching stewardesses and drinking Bloody Marys." That, at least, is what they recently seem to think of as home.

The Cover. Cartoon by Patrick Bruce Oliphant, whose work has often appeared in TIME but never before as a cover. In the tracing above, the first figure from the left (1) is Defense Secretary Melvin Laird clutching his hard-won ABM, while a general (2) expresses the Pentagon's pleasure. The cigarette-puffing baker (3) is Congress, serving up half a loaf of surtax. Above and to the right stands a G.I. (4) in the process of dropping his equipment into the arms of South Viet Nam's President Thieu (5). Below, Rumania's President Ceausescu (6) listens apprehensively while Soviet Party Boss Brezhnev (7) tells him to cool it. The street sign and elephant symbolize the Republican Party, with Senator Strom Thurmond (8) and a liberal (9) representing its two wings. Finally, a poor man (10) gets his first look at the new welfare package to see what it contains. Overall, surfboard in hand, stands a smiling President. Says Oliphant: "I'd be smiling too, if I were going to San Clemente."

An Australian who left the Adelaide Advertiser for the Denver Post in 1964, Oliphant, 34, won a 1967 Pulitzer Prize for the excellence of his cartoons. One he likes best is a prophetic drawing done in 1958, which shows a crew of Russian cosmonauts marching out of a spaceship that has just landed on the moon. There to greet them stands a moon man--already brainwashed and thoroughly Americanized, as anyone can tell by his loud clothing, empty Coke bottle and breezy "Hi!"

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