REPUBLICANS: The Men Who

The poor boy from California got into politics almost by accident, and the suave aristocrat from Boston absorbed his political heritage with mother’s milk. Yet, despite their differences, the two 1960 Republican nominees have an uncommon lot in common, and on the G.O.P.’s presidential medallion their two profiles fit the times and the issues with minted precision.

Richard Milhous Nixon, 47, the presidential choice, is the second of five sons* of Francis Nixon, an unsuccessful Southern California citrus farmer, and his wife Hannah, a pious Quaker. When Frank Nixon’s lemon grove failed, he moved his family to Quaker-led Whittier, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and opened a small grocery. Dick spent his after school hours and his summers helping out in the store and with the chores in his meager home. “Richard always pulled the shades down when he washed the dishes,” his mother recalls, “so that people wouldn’t see him with his hands in the dishpan.” Up from the dishpans, Dick worked doggedly through Whittier College and then went on to Duke University Law School on a scholarship (he eked out his scholarship by rooming in a ramshackle farmhouse). Back in Whittier, he met and married Pat Ryan, a pretty red-headed schoolteacher who, if anything, had come along an even more hardscrabble road (TIME cover, Feb. 29). After naval service in the Pacific during World War II, Lieut. Commander Nixon found himself in Baltimore, wondering, like many another young veteran, what to do with himself. He caught wind of a Whittier newspaper ad, paid for by a group of 100 leading Republicans:

WANTED: Congressman candidate with no previous political experience to defeat a man who has represented the district House for ten years. Any young man, resident of district, preferably a veteran, fair education, no political strings or obligations, and possessed of a few ideas for betterment of country at large, may apply.

Dick Nixon applied for the job, got the nod from the committee of 100, and plunged into the campaign with pile-driving energy, $5,000 in savings—and an all-out assist from Pat. He won in a breeze over the New Dealing Democratic incumbent. Congressman Jerry Voorhis. Nixon’s headline-making investigations of the Communist conspiracy in Government and his unmasking of Alger Hiss catapulted him to national fame and a Senate seat in 1950. Two years later, as one of the earliest and most enthusiastic ad mirers of Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon became Ike’s running mate. In six crammed years, Dick Nixon rose from complete obscurity to become, at 40, the youngest Vice President since John Breckinridge (of the Buchanan Administration) and Ike’s able right-hand man.

Henry Cabot Lodge, 58, the vice-presidential nominee, was born a princeling of one of Boston’s great Brahmin families. His poet father died when young Henry was seven, and his grandfather, the ferocious, archisolationist old Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., took over his education and training. Part of his boyhood was spent in France, and Lodge became completely bilingual. At Harvard he graduated with honors in three years, and his classmates found him a rather stuffy, condescending young man with the good looks of an Apollo† and an undoubted charm—when he chose to turn it on.

After graduation, Cabot Lodge married Emily Sears, the daughter of another socially impeccable Boston family, and became a reporter for the Boston Transcript, the New York Herald Tribune (and a stringer correspondent for TIME). Among his assignments: covering the conventions of 1924, 1928 and 1932, accompanying Calvin Coolidge’s pacification expedition to Nicaragua, interviewing Mussolini. After a four-year warmup in the state legislature, Cabot Lodge was ready in 1936 to try for a national political career, and although his Democratic opponent for the Senate, the late James Michael Curley, belittled his youth and called him “Little Boy Blue,” Lodge, at 34, won an easy victory. In his grandfather’s old Senate seat, Lodge stuck to the family’s rock-bound traditions, followed an isolationist course —although he advocated military preparedness. But with U.S. entry into World War II, he immediately volunteered for military service (the first Senator to see combat since the Civil War). After action with an armored force detachment in North Africa and as a liaison officer with French forces in Europe, Lieut. Colonel

Lodge came home full of honors and decorations, and convinced that the U.S. should never again hold aloof from world events. (“He commenced as a conservative and thawed into a progressive,” says his old friend and Harvard roommate, John Mason Brown.)

Recapturing his Senate seat in 1946, Lodge was a disciple of the late Arthur Vandenberg and an authority on foreign affairs. When Dwight Eisenhower’s political star began to rise, Lodge, like Nixon, was one of the first to spot it. He journeyed to Paris in 1951 and tried to persuade his friend (they first met in the Louisiana maneuvers in 1941) to run for the G.O.P. nomination. After Ike agreed to run, Lodge worked hard managing the difficult, pre-convention campaign until, because of his incautious arrogance, he was replaced by Sherman Adams. This same snootiness, plus a neglect of his home ground, caused him that same year to lose his Senate seat to a persuasive upstart named Jack Kennedy. Eisenhower appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (says Lodge: “I have reason to be grateful to Kennedy. It’s because of him that I went to the U.N.”).

Responsible Lieutenants. In their roles as Vice President and U.N. ambassador, Nixon and Lodge might easily have slipped into the ceremonial obscurity that traditionally surrounded both posts. But Ike had other ideas about the jobs—and the men. As Vice President, Dick Nixon was privy to the top secrets of the National Security Council, a regular at Cabinet meetings and a frequent globe-trotting representative of the presidency in the far corners of the earth. As the U.S. cotter pin in the United Nations, Lodge was given Cabinet status and a large voice in U.S. policy—and grew in stature to measure up to both. President Eisenhower was determined that neither of his lieutenants should fade away.

A good deal depended, of course, on the men themselves, and both Lodge and Nixon seized their opportunities. While Nixon traveled through 52 countries. Lodge battled endlessly with a series of Soviet adversaries (“I’ve heard them all,” he once remarked. “I can only conclude that the man who writes the speeches is still the same”). While Nixon took on special presidential commissions and presided over the Cabinet in the days of Ike’s illnesses. Lodge carefully steered the U.S. and the West through U.N. world tempests from Indo-China to Budapest to Suez. Nixon’s tough, unflinching “kitchen conference” with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow last summer was matched by Lodge’s assignment as Khrushchev’s official companion during his U.S. tour. (Khrushchev’s favorite cry: “Where’s my capitalist?”) Both men have learned by first hand experience how to deal with Communists (drawing on his journalistic experience. Lodge always tries for a “prompt refutation” of every Red challenge for the next editions). Both have had to act, on occasion, on their own initiative and judgment. Says Lodge: “”When I am in doubt about what to do, I write out my own instructions and tell the State Department: ‘This is what I’d like to be instructed to do.”

The wives of both men have been im measurably helpful: as a constant companion on Dick Nixon’s campaigns and world tours, Pat has been well informed, indefatigable and courageous (“She was braver than any man I ever saw,” said a military aide after Caracas). Emily Lodge, receiving high-ranking guests with her mellowed husband in her cerise and white drawing room of their Waldorf Towers apartment, is a portrait of manner-born grace and warmth.

Together and separately, Nixon and Lodge have earned reputations as foreign policy experts second only to the Secretary of State and the President himself. The Eisenhower years have matured them and fitted them uniquely to face the big issue of U.S. policy in the tense world—the issue on which they will wage the Republican campaign of 1960.

*His older brother Harold died at 23 of tuberculosis; Arthur died at seven of tuberculous meningitis; Donald is a California dairyman, and Navyman Edward a military science instructor at the University of Washington. *Standing from left: A brother-in-law of Nixon’s mother, Russell Harrison; sister-in-law, Mrs. Edward Nixon; brother, Navy Lieut. Edward Nixon; uncle, Dr. Ernest Nixon; aunt, Mrs. Oscar Marshburn; uncle, Oscar Marshburn; sister-in-law, Mrs. Donald Nixon; brother, Donald Nixon; Pat Nixon’s sister-in-law, Mrs. William Ryan; brother-in-law, Matthew Bender; brother-in-law, William Ryan. Seated from left: Mother Hannah Nixon, Daughters Julie and Patricia, Wife Pat. † His equally handsome younger brother, John Davis Lodge, now Ambassador to Spain, was for a brief time a leading man in films. His sister, the Baroness Edouard de Streel, lives in Brussels.