The Homecoming

"All I've done since I came home," said Henry Cabot Lodge, "is to talk." And when he wasn't talking Republican politics, he was talking foreign policy --in a way that made fellow Republicans, who intend to use the Vietnamese war as a campaign issue, wince.

"On the Right Track." In his defense of Administration policy in South Viet Nam, Lodge told reporters: "If we persist, there isn't any question that this pacification effort can succeed, and I think we will persist. I think the thing is well organized now. I think the doctrines are very clear. The means are at hand to do it. There is a very fine understanding between the Vietnamese and the Americans, and I believe that the whole thing is on the right track."

There are, said Lodge, "a whole range of things, a range of many things, that can be done in the future, which I think we're going to do and which can be quite effective." Among other things, Lodge said, he had recommended that "very politically mature" Americans be sent with their families into each of the four Army corps areas of South Viet Nam to advise the Vietnamese on how to build a viable political system. If such measures are taken, Lodge said, "I think you can clean up the provinces around Saigon maybe in two years, and if you did that you would have gone a long way toward breaking the back of the snake."

Lodge scoffed at Barry Goldwater's suggestion that low-yield atomic weapons might be used to defoliate jungle supply trails. Said he: "We defoliate every day. Using an atomic bomb to defoliate is like using an atomic bomb to light a cigarette. We use weed killer." Lodge also clashed head on with the report of a committee of 13 Republican Congressmen, led by Michigan's Gerald Ford, which scored the Kennedy Administration for actively aiding the overthrow of the Diem regime. Lodge angrily denied that the Administration had been involved in any way. Ford advised that American officers now be given direct command of Vietnamese troops, instead of remaining merely as advisers. To that, Lodge retorted: "If we do that, we become a colonial power. I think it is pretty well established that colonialism is over."

One Trouble. His round of press conferences over, Lodge and his wife Emily headed for a long weekend at their home in Beverly, Mass., with their two sons and ten grandchildren. With them went two Tibetan pups named Buster Brown and Rover Boy, gifts to Mrs.

Lodge from an orphanage she aided in Saigon. The Lodges couldn't spell the breed name of the pups--Lhasa Apso. But a quick look at their genealogy showed they had the makings of ideal companions in such uncertain spots as Saigon. The intelligent, sharp-eared dogs were bred in the lamaseries around the sacred city of Lhasa, teamed with the fierce Tibetan mastiff as watch dogs. The mastiffs were chained outside while the small dogs were indoor sentinels. Only trouble is, neither Buster Brown nor Rover Boy is housebroken.

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