Lodge to the Field

Massachusetts' slick, handsome Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. failed to answer roll call in the Senate one day last week. Colleagues soon learned why. The reading clerk droned out a letter from the Senator: he was resigning to go back into the Army. Reporters hotfooted it around to the Senator's office, learned from a secretary that Lodge was already in his major's uniform, already off somewhere on duty.

For young (41) Senator Lodge this was a second appearance in uniform. His first was before the gates of Cairo, when General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck's Britons were falling back. Major Lodge accompanied the first U.S. tanks in Africa--but he was not in one of the three tanks which fought their first battle there. On his return to the U.S., he and other Congressmen went on inactive status. Lodge got himself re-elected to the Senate for another six years. After 18 months of "grave thought," he had decided that "given my age and military training, I must . . . serve my country as a combat soldier in the Army overseas."

Governor Leverett Saltonstall wasn't ready with a successor. For a few days he took evasive action, sawing wood and saying little, on his Dover, Mass. farm.

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