Stones, Spit & Soroche

On the eve of the Caracas riot, Vice President Nixon was chatting casually with TIME-LIFE Correspondent Don Wilson about the rumors of an assassination. "You look a little bit like me," joked Nixon. "Tell you what -you ride in my place in the limousine, and I'll put on a press badge and go with the press.

What do you say?" As it turned out, the U.S. newsmen ac companying Nixon faced dangers of their own when the Caracas mobs started to swarm the next day. At the Maiquetia Airport, the newsmen got their share of the mob's spittle from 200 shoving high school students waiting for Nixon. Knowing that more trouble was coming, Wilson and six other newsmen scorned the closed cars assigned them, chose instead to ride with the photographers in an open-topped truck that directly preceded Nixon's car.

Open Targets.

Biggest Beat. An ordeal less dangerous than stoning but more exhausting came at La Paz, Bolivia, where the 11,900-ft. altitude gave the newsmen soroche -high-altitude sickness. Forced to run through crowds to keep up with Nixon, most came down with splitting headaches and failing memories. Hardest hit was Associated Press Photographer Henry Griffin, 46, who had to take deep draughts from a heavy oxygen tank he toted on his back. Cracked Griffin: "Let's get off this hill -I want to die breathing."

Down from the hill, Photographer Griffin set up the biggest beat of the tour after recording the Caracas attack from the photographers' truck. Unable to charter a private plane, he got his film aboard a Pan American flight to Port of Spain. Trinidad. By fortunate happenstance, a Radidphoto transmitter had been installed there only last month for Princess Margaret's visit. Griffin's pictures were moving out from New York by 2 a.m. the following day, a good nine hours ahead of rival United Press.

But as a group, the U.S. photographers had one major failure. In all the time spent moving through showers of spittle, apparently none got a picture of a man spitting.

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