During the last three months two members of our Washington bureau have traveled 10,000 miles just keeping up with two of the U.S.'s leading politicians. Their journeying is a forerunner and a token of the thousands of miles TIME'S bureaumen and correspondents throughout the country will travel next year covering the national campaign to elect a 33d President of the U.S.

Most of you have already read TIME'S accounts of the recent tours of New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey and Ohio's Robert A. Taft. Our correspondents who accompanied them were Robert Elson, chief of Time Inc.'s Washington bureau, and Win Booth, who ordinarily covers the White House. By comparison with the usual grand tours of Presidential nominees after the Republican and Democratic conventions, these tours were in the nature of family excursions. Nevertheless, says Elson, who went along with the Taft party, "Booth and I got closer to the men, their families, and the politicians en route, than you ever do to a Presidential nominee."

The Taft party, for instance, as you have read in TIME, encountered picket lines along its route voicing labor's antipathy to the Taft-Hartley law. The correspondents accompanying the party adopted one of the pickets' ditties (You Can't Scare Me; I'm Sticking To The Union) as their unofficial marching song. The Senator heard it so often that, in an off-the-record party in his private car, he finally joined the reporters in singing it.

Aside from the problem of how to get your laundry done (usually solved by buying new haberdashery), Elson and Booth encountered others that will become standard when next year's campaign gets under way. One was how to keep up with the men they were covering and still find time to write good, readable daily copy for TIME'S editors. Booth got considerable practice writing his on a jouncing portable balanced on his knees in a chartered bus. Elson found that between midnight and dawn in the privacy of his Pullman bedroom was the best time for him.

In the small towns the arrival of such national personages as Taft and Dewey was usually the signal for the biggest local political jamboree in months--Western politicians thinking nothing of driving 500 miles or more to talk politics with one of the leaders of their party. Moreover, Elson and Booth found, they were as interested in interviewing the correspondents as the correspondents were in interviewing them. At a luncheon in Tacoma, Washington, Elson was approached by a delegation of local radiomen, on hand to welcome him. They were under the misapprehension that he was another Bob Elson (no relation), national network sportscaster. When they discovered that Elson not only was the wrong man but also had no inside dope on the forthcoming World Series, they graciously hid their disappointment.

By & large, how ever, much of the really important work of these trips was done, as usual, in casual coffee cup and barside conversations with the local politicians, many of whom, Booth and Elson found, were "most informative on the true state of local affairs and opinion and really well informed on the personalities and the larger issues of the day." One or two such interviews mean little, but, according to Elson, "a great many talks on this personal, confidential level help you to get an understanding of American political thinking that can be obtained in no other way."

These talks also illustrate one of TIME'S reasons--aside from the news involved--for sending two of its senior Washington bureaumen to cover the Taft and Dewey trips: a desire to broaden their perspective in preparation for the national campaign ahead. Says Elson: "A Washington corre spondent does tend to become Capital-centered, and anyone who stays too long in Washington gets to thinking of the country as an appendage to the Capital--an occupational disease that applies to reporters quite as much as to politicians."

Cordially,

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