Nation: A Kennedy Speaks to a Lodge

For months the Washington rumor mill has ground out gossip about who might replace U.S. Ambassador Frederick E. Nolting Jr. when he returns next fall from a two-year tour in the sensitive embassy at Saigon, South Viet Nam. But last week the President’s choice took nearly everybody by surprise. The ambassador-designate: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., 61, scion of Massachusetts Republicanism, former G.O.P. Senator who was defeated for reelection in 1952 by aspiring young Democrat John F. Kennedy, sometime Ambassador to the United Nations, 1960 Republican nominee for Vice President, and father of the candidate who lost to Teddy Kennedy in Massachusetts’ 1962 U.S. Senate race—in short, a fellow who might not be expected to look kindly on the Kennedys.

Yet the new arrangement made a sort of mutual logic. Last spring Lodge told the President that he wanted to return to public service, specifically that he wanted an ambassadorship.* Lodge, who saw World War II action as deputy chief of staff of the IV Army Corps in Italy, is keenly interested in the ticklish problems of guerrilla warfare against the Communist Viet Cong. In Lodge, the President gets a New Englander who speaks blunt English and fluent French, the language of the South Vietnamese leaders, and can be expected to use both effectively whether smoothing U.S. relations with President Ngo Dinh Diem or prodding Diem’s reluctant government into some political and financial reform. Along with a good man for the job, Kennedy gets a political bonus. Lodge’s assignment will remove him from the G.O.P. team in next year’s presidential campaign and will also make Republicans think twice before attacking Administration policy in troublesome South Viet Nam.

-Since 1961, Lodge has served as international affairs consultant to TIME Inc., and later as director-general of the Atlantic Institute, a private effort to promote cooperation among Western nations.