The action never let up." So said TIME'S White House correspondent Christopher Ogden last week, describing both Jimmy Carter's drive to strengthen his Administration and our Washington bureau's efforts to cover and interpret the fast-breaking developments. While that task occupied the entire bureau, as well as TIME correspondents around the world, no one was more deeply engaged in the process than Ogden. It was 1:30 Monday morning last week when TIME completed its coverage of the President's dramatic Sunday night address (copies of the magazine were in the hands of readers only nine hours later). Ogden, who had not finished his reporting until 1 a.m., was on the move again at 5 a.m. to join Carter aboard Air Force One as the President flew off for his appearances in Kansas City and Detroit.

Ogden is familiar with covering fast-paced stories. After Yale ('66) and three years with the Army in Asia, he was a Moscow correspondent in the early 1970s for United Press International, and later for TIME. Before taking over the White House assignment last February, he had been TIME'S State Department correspondent, a beat that involved travel to four continents with Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance. But last week's events constituted, he said, "the most fascinating few days I've spent as a journalist."

One problem, cited by Washington Correspondent George Taber, was that many news sources "suddenly went underground when their bosses' jobs went on the line." Taber resorted to an old journalistic gambit: calling high officials directly late at night. He found they "would usually talk -if only to tell you how little they knew."

Correspondents Eileen Shields and Douglas Brew helped to piece the story together with interviews of some of the incoming and outgoing members of the Carter Cabinet. Ogden spoke with Hamilton Jordan, the new White House Chief of Staff, and other top aides. The whole experience reminded him oddly of the Kremlin shake-ups he had reported from the Soviet Union. Observed Ogden: "In Moscow, when we would analyze changes in the Politburo membership, it invariably appeared that dissidents had been dropped and team players installed. That's exactly how it looked in Washington last week."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.