THE VICE PRESIDENCY: One More for the Road

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The retirement of wide-traveling Secretary of State Dulles was almost certain to focus more attention on the Administration's other veteran of the diplomatic travelers' society: Vice President Richard Nixon, who has served as the President's effective personal ambassador in Asia (1956), Africa (1957), Latin America (1958) and Britain (1958). Last week President Eisenhower sharpened the focus by announcing that Nixon and wife Pat will go to Russia for three or four days in July to officiate at the opening of the $5,000,000 American National Exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park (TIME, Mar. 16).

Though the trip is labeled "unofficial," Nixon—highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the U.S.S.R. since Franklin Roosevelt went to Yalta in 1945—will probably be accorded a typical Khrushchev welcome at the Kremlin, particularly if a summit conference is imminent. But chances are that Nixon would not attend the summit conference, since the President is reluctant to have both himself and the Vice President out of the country at the same time.

The pundits who had been hailing the rising presidential prospects of New York's Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller suddenly saw Vice President Nixon's future with new clarity. Wrote the Christian Science Monitor's Richard L. Strout: "It is hard to imagine a better springboard for a presidential candidacy."