"I am Not..."

In introducing his visitor, Lieut. General Ned Almond only said what he thought a lot of people believed. "Governor Dewey has been a candidate for the Presidency and, for all we know out here, he may be a candidate again next year," the general said as he presented Governor Dewey to his X Corps staff officers in Korea. Thereupon, Tom Dewey rose and said it more flatly than he had ever said it at home: "I am not a candidate and will definitely oppose any attempt to make me a candidate next year...I have no plans to ever run for public office again."

Then what was the governor of New York doing way out there in the Far East, on a 45-day, 29,000-mile private tour? * "My chief aim in life now," the governor told the assembled officers, "is to keep my party on the straight road to internationalism...I feel that some of the leaders of my party are thinking along the lines of the isolationists. That thinking must be discarded if the Republican Party is ever to rise to power."

That brought up a different question. Could it be that Dewey, first of the big Republicans to come out for Ike (TIME, Oct. 23), hopes to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower cabinet? He wasn't saying. But Dewey's Asiatic tour is taking him to Japan, Korea, Formosa, Indo-China, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. It was a journey designed to inform him further on a part of the world that is not too familiar to NATO's Eisenhower. And New York State's 97 convention delegates, in Tom Dewey's pocket, make a nice talking point.

* Financed by Collier's, for which Dewey will write some articles.

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