The Great Surprise

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As the tall, broad-shouldered candidate sped through the prosperous North Shore suburbs of Chicago one evening last week, waving from the back seat of a black convertible, clusters of people on the sidewalks cheered, shouted, waved flares and sparklers. The motorcade stretched three blocks as it rolled through Evanston's Fountain Square, on through Wilmette's main crossroads corner. Jammed into the parking lot at the Old Orchard shopping center in Skokie was a crowd of more than 20,000, gathered in caravans, some of which had come from neighboring southern Wisconsin. Scattered through the crowd were homemade signs proclaiming HE'S OUR MAN. or spelling out the candidate's name in separate letters, one per placard: LODGE.

When the black convertible pulled up to the speakers' platform erected for the occasion, there was an outburst of cheering and applause, almost drowning out a well-dressed woman's shout to her husband: "He's so handsome!" Youngsters set up a "We Want Lodge!" chant, and the grownups joined in. Somebody handed the candidate's smiling wife a massive bouquet of four dozen roses, and as the cheers continued Henry Cabot Lodge, the G.O.P.'s choice for vice president, raised his arms to form a V. "This was Nixon territory," Illinois' Congresswoman Marguerite Stitt Church boomed into the microphone. "Now it's also Lodge territory !"

The great American game of politics was taking on a mid-season look. The roars at Skokie toward the end of Lodge's first full week of campaigning, however, were the kind that a vice-presidential candidate rarely gets.

High Rating. The extent of Cabot Lodge's popularity with the U.S. public is the greatest surprise of the campaign so far. "Tremendous! Tremendous!" gloats Leonard Hall, sometime G.O.P. National Chairman, now co-manager of the Nixon-Lodge campaign. Says Michigan's Republican National Committeeman John B. Martin: "The reaction to Lodge is the most extraordinary thing in the whole campaign in Michigan. Republican groups, Negro organizations, women's clubs--they all want Lodge." A Gallup poll designed to measure the degree of voter enthusiasm for each candidate gave Lodge a higher rating than Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon. So many urgent requests for Lodge to speak have poured into G.O.P. headquarters in Washington that Lodge has had to abandon his hope of keeping his weekends free during the campaign to rest and relax at his home on Massachusetts Bay.

Chosen Issue. In part. Lodge's appeal derives from physical attributes. If Hollywood were casting Distinguished-Politician-as-Good-Guy, it could hardly find a likelier looking specimen than towering (6 ft. 2 1/4 in.), handsome Cabot Lodge. He is 58, has grey hair and eight grandchildren, but he still has a youthfully athletic air about him. His voice is throatily masculine, with a kind of standard, radio-announcer accent that shows only faint traces of Boston and Harvard.

Far more important is the TV reputation Lodge made as head of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. The campaign's "great, overriding issue," said Candidate Richard Nixon last week, is foreign policy, the question of which ticket is better equipped to "keep the peace for America and extend freedom throughout the world." On that theme and the advertising slogan "Experience Counts," the Republicans have pitched their whole campaign.

If foreign policy proves to be the decisive issue, Nixon could hardly have picked a better running mate than Henry Cabot Lodge. For 7 1/2 years, from January 1953 until he stepped down three weeks ago to plan his campaign, Lodge was the U.S. spokesman in the greatest forum of world opinion, the most public battleground of the cold war. And the U.S. public, watching on millions of TV screens, saw Lodge at work in that forum-battleground. At every stop along the trail, people swarm around him to clasp his hand and tell him that they admired his work at the U.N. During a Lodge speech at Butler, Pa. (where the old Nixon Hotel was recently renamed the Nixon Lodge), newsmen ran a spot check of the crowd, found that 35 out of 48 men and 21 out of 40 women polled had seen Lodge's U.N. performance on TV. All approved.

By one of the political ironies of Campaign Year 1960, Lodge reached his biggest and most receptive TV audience during the Democratic Convention. In the lulls between delegate polling and routine oratory at Los Angeles, the networks switched to the U.N., which was debating Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba's appeal for U.N. troops to restore order. By contrast with the convention's gassy meanderings and tiresome rigmarole, Lodge's arguments in favor of sending U.N. troops, and his telling retorts to Soviet rumblings about a "colonialist conspiracy" seemed the real world.

Double Appeal. Cabot Lodge's U.N.-born political popularity attests to a pretty clear U.S. consensus on the nation's role in the modern world. Down to the eve of World War II, the traditional U.S. wish in foreign relations was to have, as George Washington counseled in his Farewell Address, "as little political connection as possible" with foreign nations. That outlook came to be called "isolationism," though what Washington advised, and what most Americans wanted, was not isolation but avoidance of permanent entanglements that might drag the U.S. into alien quarrels or impair its sovereignty. Cabot Lodge, before World War II, outspokenly shared that viewpoint. He fought most of F.D.R.'s attempts to commit the U.S. to the allied side, though he backed Roosevelt's big defense budgets. .

Isolationism is a word not heard much any more in the U.S. What has replaced it, after the first enthusiasm of one-worldism, is a blend of internationalism and nationalism, a viewpoint that accepts the permanent entanglements with other nations as necessary and even desirable, but insists on upholding the sovereignty and interests of the U.S. In his performance at the U.N., Cabot Lodge filled that bill well. While unmistakably dedicated to the U.N. idea, he never left any doubt that he was there as the spokesman for the U.S. and the guardian of its interests.

He fought the Russians with a zestful combativeness, always holding that the fight was essential to keep the kind of peace to which the U.N. was dedicated. It was this intricate combination that at once upheld U.S. interest as the Eisenhower Administration saw it, and persuaded traditional doubters that the U.N. was a proper place for the U.S. to try to settle the world's problems.

Poetry & Politics. Through most of his U.N. years Lodge was reminded constantly that he was the grandson and namesake of Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., who in simplified versions of history is often blamed for blocking U.S. entry into the U.N.'s predecessor, the League of Nations. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the elder Lodge advocated ratification of President Wilson's League of Nations Covenant, but only with a batch of reservations designed to safeguard U.S. sovereignty. Wilson was adamant against any reservations, and the Covenant (with Lodge's reservations attached) was defeated in the Senate in November 1919. As Grandson Lodge is fond of pointing out, the U.N. Charter ratified by the Senate in 1945 included several sovereignty safeguards similar to those that the elder Lodge insisted upon in 1919.

Scion of one of Massachusetts Bay's great Brahmin families (see Family Tree), Lodge numbers half a dozen U.S. Senators among his ancestors. Lodge's father, George Cabot Lodge, died when son Henry was seven, and the boy grew up under the tutelage of Grandfather Lodge, confidant and adviser to Theodore Roosevelt, and author of several scholarly biographies. Inevitably, young Lodge went to Middlesex School and Harvard. Despite a fondness for dances, songfests (he still sings at parties, with no help from alcohol) and long, impassioned discussions of politics, Lodge finished up at Harvard in three years by taking extra courses, was graduated cum laude despite the speedup.

Lodge inherited his grandfather's fascination with politics, but first spent nearly a decade as a journalist, starting out as a cub reporter on the Boston Evening Transcript and winding up as an editorial writer on the Herald Tribune.* In between he interviewed Mussolini, went along on the U.S. Marines' expedition to Nicaragua in 1928, covered the political conventions of 1924, 1928, 1932. New York Timesman Arthur Krock recalled last week that, at the 1928 Democratic Convention in Houston, he and Reporter Lodge found their way into a hotel elevator blocked by a stubborn guard, posted by politicians who had commandeered the elevator for their own use. News was breaking on an upper floor, and no other elevator was in sight; Lodge cleared a path for himself, and for Krock, by knocking the guard down.

When Lodge turned to politics during the Depression, it was an unpromising time for Republican newcomers. In 1936, after four years in the Massachusetts state legislature, he ran for the U.S. Senate against formidable Democratic Governor James Michael Curley, longtime machine mayor of Boston, and trounced him by 135,000 votes, though Franklin Roosevelt carried Massachusetts that year by 174,000. In that Democratic landslide year, Lodge was the only Republican to capture a Democratic-held Senate seat.

Like John F. Kennedy after him, Lodge was not conspicuous for legislative achievements and never gained entry into the inner club that rules the Senate. Many of his fellow Senators considered him arrogant, a trait he has since done much to subdue. On domestic affairs he voted the more or less liberal line that is expected of a Massachusetts Senator (he was one of two Republican Senators to vote for the 1937 minimum-wage bill). Lodge's only book, a now-forgotten tract entitled The Cult of Weakness (1932), was an attack on pacifism, a plea for military preparedness. In the Senate, he argued for more warships in 1938, more planes in 1939, and in 1940 called for a compulsory selective service law before the Roosevelt Administration did.

A longtime Army Reserve officer, Lodge volunteered for active service soon after Pearl Harbor. After the Roosevelt Administration ruled that a member of the Senate could not serve in the Armed Forces, Lodge resigned from the Senate, becoming the first U.S. Senator since the Civil War to resign to go to war. He saw action as a tank officer in North Africa and as a liaison officer in Europe, reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, won a Bronze Star and a Legion of Merit. In 1947 he returned to the Senate to join with Michigan's Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, a prewar isolationist, as a champion of foreign aid, the U.N. and NATO. Vandenberg, enormously impressed with the war-matured Lodge, predicted that he would some day be elected President.

A longtime admirer of Dwight Eisenhower, Lodge in 1952 helped persuade Ike to run, managed his pre-Chicago campaign to wrestle the G.O.P. nomination away from Ohio's Senator Robert A. Taft. Lodge was also the man in charge of working out the list of vice-presidential prospects from among whom Eisenhower finally tapped Richard Nixon. In working to get Ike nominated and elected, Lodge overconfidently neglected his home fences, and lost his Senate seat to Jack Kennedy, whose maternal grandfather John F. Fitzgerald had lost a Senate race to Lodge's grandfather back in 1916.

Delicate Art. Lodge seemed politically dead. And when President Eisenhower appointed him to head the nation's U.N. delegation, that scarcely seemed the road to political comeback. Lodge's predecessor, Warren R. Austin, had been a stately expounder of State Department instructions. reciting speeches written in Washington. But Dwight Eisenhower, determined to upgrade the U.N. in U.S. foreign policy and to strengthen the U.S. voice in the world forum, made Lodge a "personal member" of the Cabinet (Lodge's predecessor had no Cabinet status), and gave him responsibility in the making of U.S. foreign policy.

"I have reason to be grateful to Kennedy,'' Lodge has often said. "It's because of him that I went to the U.N." At the U.N., Lodge proved effective in a way he had never been in the Senate. Growing in stature and skill from one crisis to the next, he proved to be a tough battler in oratorical jousts with the Russians, insisting on the value of immediate reply, rather than waiting for Washington to draft something official and late. He also became surprisingly adept at rounding up Asian and African votes on important showdowns. The U.S. never lost in either the Security Council or the General Assembly in a head-on clash with the Russians. Last year Lodge fell heir to a special test of diplomacy when he was assigned to be Khrushchev's official host on the celebrated tour of the U.S.

Upset Calculations. Few G.O.P. politicians realized, until after he was nominated, how widespread was the U.S. awareness and approval of Lodge's U.N. performance. In polls showing presidential preferences among Republican voters during 1959 and the early months of 1960, Lodge consistently ran third, after Nixon and Rockefeller, though he had done nothing at all to stir up political interest in himself. One G.O.P. politician who did grasp the meaning of those polls was Richard Nixon who long before the conventions decided to make his stand on foreign policy. That made Lodge an obvious vice-presidential prospect, and Lodge was plainly receptive.

At Chicago--and in the famous Treaty of Fifth Avenue huddle--Nixon went all out to make New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller his running mate, aware of his crowd-pleasing talents, his appeal to independents, and the need for his help to swing New York's 45 electoral votes. Rockefeller refused to join the ticket, but agreed to support Nixon. The Midwestern Republicans, still resentful of Lodge's role in derailing Ohio's Taft in 1952, wanted Nixon to pick Kentucky's Senator Thruston B. Morton, G.O.P. National Chairman, for his Vice President. Everybody agreed he would add to Republican appeal in the South. But after Kennedy's surprise choice of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate, dismayed Nixonmen shared Kennedy's feelings that the South was lost to the Republicans. That made it all the more necessary to push the foreign-policy issue, in an effort to swing votes outside the South. His own mind made up, Nixon got the unanimous ratification of Lodge (who was Eisenhower's favorite choice even during the Rockefeller boom) in a two-hour session with party leaders after the presidential nomination. "This is the first time." says a top Nixon staffer, "that a vice-presidential nominee was chosen without any hope of his carrying his own state."*

Better than Nixon? Soon after the conventions, both parties discovered that they had miscalculated the political appeal of both vice-presidential nominees. Lyndon Johnson may have avoided a defection of Southern leaders, but far from rallying to him, many Southerners--and many Southern editorialists--denounced Johnson as a traitor to the South. In sharp contrast, when G.O.P. politicians got home, they discovered that Lodge was highly popular among the voters--and possibly even a better candidate for their needs than Rockefeller. Says North Dakota Lawyer Robert Chesrown, a local Republican leader: "Until I came back from the convention I never realized how much Lodge meant to the party. People here were really talking about him. It began to dawn on me that Lodge is just as well as, maybe even better liked in this area than Nixon."

Nixon, making the most of Lodge's popularity, proclaimed that if elected, he would give Lodge more powers than any Vice President in history. He promised to make him the director of all nonmilitary aspects of the cold war--political, diplomatic, economic and propagandistic.

Matinee Show. G.O.P. soundings indicate that Lodge has a special appeal to the nation's housewives, who made up a large part of his afternoon U.N. audience. Result: campaign planners expect to put Lodge on at least one nationwide TV broadcast at a novel afternoon time. Lodge also seems to appeal to Negroes. Explains Detroit's Dr. Junius Taylor, a Negro physician who considers himself a political independent but this year is heading an outfit called Greater Detroit Volunteers for Nixon and Lodge: "Lodge had to deal with all the peoples of the world, and though they are not all Negroes, he understands what it means. His fairness in dealing with these peoples greatly impresses us."

Another campaign plus is Lodge's wife Emily. Emily Sears, the daughter of another prosperous upper-class Boston family, met Cabot Lodge at her coming-out party in 1924, accepted his proposal two years later. Over the years she is credited with smoothing down his tendency to be snappish or haughty.* U.N. delegates found her a charming hostess in the Lodges' Waldorf Towers apartment; politicos and crowds alike have found her a relaxed, warmhearted campaigner who, as one reporter put it, "accepts every bunch of roses as though it were the first she ever got." "People respect Lodge," says Nixon Strategist Len Hall, "but they love Mrs. Lodge."

"Unless You're a Saint." As Lodge put together a staff and hit the campaign trail, he was perhaps the most relaxed candidate in the business. "There are really two essential things in campaigning," he says. "First, you must be in good humor. If you're going to be irascible, you ought to stay home. Second, you ought to make sense in your speeches. These are the two things you must do. Unless you're a saint, you can't be in good humor when you're exhausted."

Appropriately relaxed, in an unfamiliar setting. Lodge rolled up his sleeves and began his work with the Labor Day crowds at Coney Island and back in the New York Catskill resort country. Last week he hit the trail, starting with joint ceremonies with Eisenhower and Nixon at Baltimore's Friendship Airport, then moving swiftly on to Columbus, Huntington, W. Va., half a dozen towns in western Pennsylvania, then on to Chicago and Miami, flying back to Washington at week's end.

At every stop, Lodge repeated his stock campaign speech. "We Americans live in a world of dangers," it goes. "It would be folly to underestimate the shrewdness and the ruthlessness of the Russians. Chairman Khrushchev undoubtedly means it when he says he hopes to live to see the whole world under the red flag of Communism." To keep that from happening, the U.S. must keep up its military strength and, in addition, "win men's minds in three ways: first, through the power of our example at home; second, through joining with underdeveloped countries in a war on poverty and disease; third, through our diplomacy, to keep the diplomatic initiative."

Inside Pages. Lodge campaigns, not against Kennedy or Johnson, but against Khrushchev. He never mentions Kennedy or Johnson by name. Only rarely did he refer to the Democratic ticket even in directly. At a press conference in Columbus, he said that it was "most improper" to raise the religion issue. "I absolutely refuse to admit that my three Roman Catholic grandsons will be debarred from the presidency on those grounds, or, for that matter, my two Episcopalian grandsons."*

Lodge does not expect to proclaim any bold new directions during the campaign. That, as he sees it, is Nixon's province. "If I have any bright ideas," says Lodge, "I expect I will pass them on to Dick Nixon." He will be content, he says, to make the inside pages of the newspapers, leaving it up to Nixon to stir up the headlines (a decision that already shows its effect in the evident boredom of reporters assigned to cover him). Under his campaign franchise, Lodge sticks to foreign policy, though as the campaign proceeds he expects to broaden out, by relating domestic issues such as farm surpluses and civil rights to foreign policy.

In carrying out his campaign tasks, Lodge will be referring frequently to a carefully guarded loose-leaf notebook that he calls his "nugget book." A reader of many books, especially histories, biographies and works on current national or international problems, Lodge has made a practice over the years of filing notes on his reading on two-by-three cards. After the convention, he selected some 200 items, had them photostated, and arranged them into his nugget book. Included in it are quotations from men as varied as Churchill, De Gaulle, Lincoln, Asoka (early apostle of Buddhism), Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Milton, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Will Rogers, as well as some stray doggerel that happens to appeal.

Sense of Unreality. When he was beaten by Jack Kennedy in 1952, Cabot Lodge thought his political career over for good. He still has a slight sense of unreality about suddenly being very much back in politics, running for Vice President of the U.S. "It's a very strange feeling," he said at the start of his campaign tour. "I haven't gotten used to it."

By last week, as he met with cheers, applause and eager handshakes at one campaign stop after another, Candidate Lodge was obviously getting used to running for Vice President, and was plainly an asset to the Republican ticket. It may be that he will help it enough to get even with the man who defeated him in 1952.

* While in the Trib's Washington bureau, he worked as a stringer-correspondent for the young magazine TIME.

* Many a vice-presidential nominee has failed to swing his home state to his ticket. Examples: Illinois' Adlai E. Stevenson (grandfather of the sometime presidential candidate) in 1900, New York's Franklin Roosevelt in 1920, Iowa's Henry Wallace in 1940, California's Earl Warren in 1948, Tennessee's Estes Kefauver in 1956.

* Lodge still occasionally antagonizes a newsman by addressing him as "my good man" or "my dear man," but he is fighting the habit. At a press conference in Chicago last week, he used "my dear man" in speaking to a reporter, then smilingly corrected himself: "I was criticized for using that phrase, so strike it."

* Episcopalian Lodge's Roman Catholic grandsons are the children of his son Henry, an electronics sales executive, whose wife is a Roman Catholic. The Episcopalian grandsons are children of Assistant Secretary of Labor George Lodge.

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