There are only 79 short, hectic days between the euphoria of Election Night and the solemn Capitol Hill ceremony in which James Earl Carter Jr. will be inaugurated as the 39th President of the United States. They are crucial days for the new Chief Executive, as he selects the official and unofficial brain trust that will work with him in transforming campaign rhetoric into political reality.

For the reporters assigned to cover the slowly emerging Carter Administration, "there is the excitement of witnessing the first entries on a clean new page of history," says Washington Correspondent Bonnie Angelo. But there is also a good deal of waiting. Before the election the Carter beat was a fairly freewheeling affair, reports Stanley Cloud, who has followed the Georgian for more than a year. "Suddenly," says Correspondent Cloud, who will be assigned to the White House on Jan. 20, "the man the press saw and talked with day after day is virtually no longer visible, let alone accessible." Reporters trying to get a lead on the Cabinet appointments are reduced to watching for "a hint, a clue, a casual word from one of the interviewees or a wink from a Carter aide."

Adds Cloud: "I imagine it is not unlike covering the election of a new Pope, waiting for the puffs of smoke that rise from the Vatican chimney when a decision has been made."

Other TIME Washington bureau members have been bird-dogging the transition story as well. John Stacks, who kept track of the Carter and Mondale staff operations during the campaign, was first to disclose a rift between key advisers on Carter's postelection team. Sometimes a crumb of information is dropped between the soup and nuts at a Georgetown dinner party. At one such soiree, Diplomatic Editor Jerrold L. Schecter learned that former L B J Staffer Joseph Califano had been asked to go secretly to Plains to talk with the President-elect. The tipoff: Califano was tracked down at the same party by a White House telephone operator.

If rare insights occasionally come through serendipity, they also result from initiative and melting into Carter's inner circle. National Political Correspondent Robert Ajemian has just spent a week traveling with Carter's chief political adviser, Hamilton Jordan, as he masterminded the preparation of background material and interviews for his boss. "He makes endless calls--to the low and the mighty," says Ajemian. "But any call from Jordan these days is a call from the bull's-eye of power." What Ajemian learned in the bull's-eye--as well as the latest gleanings of other TIME transition watchers--appears in this week's Nation section.

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