Henry Cabot Lodge: 1902-1985: A Brahmin’s Life of Service

His family counted among its number six U.S. Senators, a Governor and a Secretary of State, and his heritage bestowed upon him both a sense of entitlement and an obligation to public service. After Harvard College, he worked as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune on the theory that journalism was the shortest road to politics. In 1936, at the age of 34, after serving two terms in the Massachusetts state legislature, he made a run for the U.S. Senate against crusty Democratic Governor James Michael Curley, 27 years his senior. Curley ridiculed him as “Little Boy Blue,” but Lodge won the race anyway, by 135,000 votes. By the time he died at 82 last week, from congestive heart failure following a long illness, Henry Cabot Lodge had dedicated a patrician lifetime to politics and diplomacy.

His father died when he was seven, and the boy was dedicated to his grandfather, the Senator who helped keep the U.S. out of the League of Nations after World War I and for whom young Cabot was named. In his early years serving in the Senate, Lodge was an isolationist like his forebear, but during World War II, he quit his Senate post to fight in the European theater. By the time he was re-elected to the Senate in 1946, he was an internationalist, convinced that the war had taught “the value of collective security.” In the early 1950s, as a leader of the moderate Republican wing, Lodge helped in the drafting of General Dwight Eisenhower for the presidential nomination. But partly because he spent so much time on Ike’s campaign, he lost his seat to a newcomer, Congressman John F. Kennedy.

Lodge became President Eisenhower’s United Nations Ambassador, serving longer in that post (7 1/2 years) than anyone before or since. At the U.N., the dashing diplomat is best remembered for his caustic oratory against the Soviet Union. In 1960, during the debate over the downing of an American U-2 intelligence plane over the Soviet Union, Lodge displayed in the Security Council a wooden plaque bearing the seal of the U.S. The plaque, which had hung for 15 years in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, turned out to be bugged. Later that year Lodge became Richard Nixon’s running mate on the presidential ticket that lost to Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Lodge was a sound campaigner, though he often reserved time for an afternoon nap.

In 1963 President Kennedy shrewdly appointed him Ambassador to South Viet Nam, in part to maintain Republican support for U.S. policy there. Only 13 weeks later, Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown and subsequently slain. Though various accounts linked the U.S. to the coup against the recalcitrant Diem, Lodge always maintained that he had done nothing either to “stimulate or thwart” the overthrow. Lodge resigned in 1964, took part in the presidential election campaign and then returned to Saigon, becoming involved in a peace effort that ultimately failed. He continued to field diplomatic assignments for many more years.

Graceful adjustment–from isolationist to internationalist or from partisanship to diplomacy–did not seem difficult for him. He was driven less by raw ambition than by the responsibilities of privilege. As such, Lodge may have been one of the last of his breed, part of a strain of moderate, blue- blooded Republicanism that now appears to be fading out. It was a mark of his usefulness that despite the decline of his kind, throughout his life he never quite seemed an anachronism.