GETTING away," Richard Nixon said last week, "gives a sense of perspective which is very, very useful." The experience was less than bucolic for the 77 reporters and cameramen who traipsed to Camp David to cover the presidential Cabinet shuffles. Camp David's grounds are off limits to the press, who were herded by Marine guards and concertina wire into a sapling-fenced enclosure called "the duckblind" or farther away in an overcrowded press trailer. After newspapers published pictures similar to this one of reporters shivering under a plastic sheet in a chilly rain to phone in their stories, a press aide had more telephones installed in the trailer. Still, there were no chairs, no coffee or doughnuts or cigarettes to be purchased on Nixon's mountain, no Western Union lines for filing stories. As the Wall Street Journal remarked: "There must be a better way for the President and his people to keep an eye on each other than through the perspective of a duckblind."

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