For a year now, our correspondents have been traveling with the various presidential candidates and hopefuls. This week about finishes up the primaries, and we shall be watching preconvention developments.

Several members of our Washington bureau have spent most of 1976 on the road. Strobe Talbott has been with Ford and Reagan. "The Ford campaign," he says, "is a permanent floating piece of the U.S. Government. The Reagan road show is like an old-fashioned but professional vaudeville act." Dean Fischer was at Reagan's highly emotional victory celebration in Los Angeles. Said Fischer: "Neither of the other candidates I covered--Ford and Carter--has Reagan's star quality. The President can impress crowds with his office. Carter can hold an audience, particularly a black audience, spellbound. But as a showman, Reagan is unparalleled."

Bonnie Angelo's final week with Idaho Senator Frank Church was no kind of show at all. He was haunted by the tragic flood in his home state. "Even his plane was wrecked by a runaway airport-maintenance cart in Cleveland," says Angelo, "and a telephone strike prevented him from learning the bad voting results."

For Stanley Cloud, Tuesday's primaries ended nine months of almost constant travel with Jimmy Carter. Looking back, he finds that two episodes stand out. There was a night last September when Carter was stranded at a deserted airstrip in rural New Hampshire. The man who was to become his party's nominee waited in the silent dark 30 minutes for someone--anyone--to give him a lift. The other episode also occurred in that crucial early primary. Says Cloud: "A status test for reporters in the Carter campaign is whether or not you were on the 'white-knuckle' flight to Berlin, N.H.--pronounced BER-lin." A blizzard began as Carter was flying to speak there, and passengers on the pitching, yawing plane watched the slopes of the White Mountains rushing past and sometimes toward their little craft.

It has been an exciting time, but people were glad to gather again in Washington this week.

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