A Man & His Country

HENRY CABOT LODGE by William J. Miller. 450 pages. He/neman. $8.50.

Few men have been so to the man ner of public service born as Henry Cabot Lodge. Here is an authorized biography--an admiring one--of Lodge's distinguished career, including 13 years as a liberal Republican Senator and eleven as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and Viet Nam. The virtue and the defect of the book is that Lodge is largely seen through contemporary journalistic accounts of his activities, plus his own speeches and writings. The feel of history is well caught, but Lodge the private man is elusive, and critical assessments are all too few.

Born to a family heritage of civic involvement going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Lodge early knew the ambiance of power. His namesake and grandfather was the scholarly, fiercely principled Senator from Massachusetts, who took over as young Cabot's father and tutor after his own father, a poet, died when the boy was seven. After zipping through Harvard in three years cum laude, Lodge, on his grandfather's advice, shunned law as the natural route into politics and entered journalism as a reporter for the old Boston Evening Transcript. He proved an able one and moved on to the Washington Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune, where his skills won him a moonlighting job as TIME'S first Washington stringer in 1927.

Senate Sacrifice. When Lodge ran for the Senate in 1936, he was the only Republican to displace an incumbent Democrat in that F.D.R. landslide year. In 1944, he became the first Senator since the Civil War to resign his seat for active combat, joining an armored corps in Europe as a major. Lodge returned to the Senate after the war more internationalist than ever, led the fight in pushing through the Marshall plan and NATO over the opposition of conservative Republicans.

As much as anyone, Lodge was responsible for persuading Eisenhower to seek the presidency in 1952, and for outwitting the rival Taft forces at the Republican Convention. In the resulting Ike landslide, he then ironically lost his own seat to John F. Kennedy, partly because vengeful Taftites voted en masse for J.F.K. But no matter: for the next eight years Lodge earned international fame as Ike's U.N. ambassador, slugging it out verbally with the Russians in a manner that made him a TV hero.

As one result, U.S. public support for the U.N. rose sharply: from 50% of the people in 1953, according to one poll, to 74% in 1955. Lodge was a master dramatist. After the U-2 flap in 1960, for example, he memorably countered holier-than-thou Soviet rhetoric by revealing that the Russians had bugged the U.S. embassy in Moscow--and displaying the Great Seal that had contained the bug.

Old-Fashioned Virtue. As Nixon's running mate in 1960, Lodge was accused by party pros of not going all out in campaigning. His version is that he was properly pacing himself to sooth an ulcer and avoid the fatigue that too often produces reckless campaign statements. Again, no matter: another political defeat afforded Lodge the chance for even more disinterested public service--his two separate stints as U.S. Ambassador to Viet Nam, first for Kennedy, then for Johnson.

Though Ellsworth Bunker replaced him last April, it is still far too early to fully assess Lodge's performance in that difficult job. Author Miller does fairly note that in Viet Nam, as elsewhere, Lodge's occasional patrician arrogance often rubbed people the wrong way. But equally manifest are his common sense, his capacity for concentration and unremitting hard work, his decisiveness and clarity of thought. A difficult man. A rare one too. For unlike many others now in public life, Lodge still believes in an old-fashioned virtue: putting his country far above himself.

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