UNITED NATIONS: The Organized Hope

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As naturally as if it were digging along an old, familiar path instead of pioneering a new trail, the U.S., with astute help from Great Britain, channeled Nikita Khrushchev’s demand for a summit conference into the United Nations. In doing so, the U.S. was not merely using the U.N. as a handy device for countering Khrushchev without stomping on its allies’ desires for a big-power meeting. In insisting on keeping the Lebanon crisis within the U.N., the U.S. had a positive purpose: getting the U.N. to take responsibility for protecting Lebanon—and any other country similarly menaced—from subversion fomented from abroad.

Trying to accomplish U.S. purposes through the U.N. entails complexities and limitations. Before fixing the U.S. position on such questions as where the proposed U.N. summit conference should be held, what nations should take part, and what the procedures should be, the U.S. has to heed any U.N. member with strong opinions on these points—and opinions abound in the U.N. Example: Prime Minister Nehru, as India’s Delegate Arthur Lall reminded the U.S.’s U.N. delegation last week, wants to be invited to the conference, and to take part as a great power in any separate meetings of a Big Four, Five or Six. But, as Secretary Dulles pointed out in his press conference, inviting India might make it necessary to “invite so many countries that the conference would become practically unmanageable.”

Perspective of History. The entangling necessity of having to take into account the desires, pride, prejudices and whims of U.N. members has become a permanent complication of U.S. foreign policy. But it is by its own choice that the U.S. meets the complication. During the years since the U.N.’s birth, the U.S., in a momentous shift of national outlook and policy, has committed itself to trying to achieve some of its national objectives through the forum that President Eisenhower called “man’s best organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield.”

In the perspective of history, involvement in the affairs of 81 other nations runs counter to a profound current in the nation’s past. Over most of its history, the U.S. has seen overpowering wisdom in George Washington’s farewell advice to take advantage of “our detached and distant situation” and “have as little political connection as possible” with foreign nations. Right down to World War II, many a U.S. citizen still believed that the nation’s “distant situation,” guarded from the Old World by two mighty oceans, made isolation the best policy.

Yet the U.N., like the born-lame League of Nations before it, was pretty much a U.S. dream, a product of U.S. idealism and desire for peace. During World War II, President Roosevelt rejected Stalin’s concept of a postwar world-dominating league made up of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Britain. The U.S. insisted that the international peace-keeping body must include all peaceable nations, big and small. Against Stalin’s cynicism and Churchill’s skepticism, Roosevelt made the U.N. idea the cornerstone of postwar allied cooperation. Roosevelt himself thought up the name United Nations.* On Capitol Hill in 1945, only two Republican Senators (North Dakota’s Bill Langer and Minnesota’s Henrik Shipstead) voted against U.S. membership. Even though postwar allied cooperation has turned into cold war, the U.N.’s popularity has grown steadily with the U.S. public over the years. Today, public opinion polls indicate, nearly 90% of the American people approve of the U.N. and U.S. membership in it.

Sturdy Champion. One big reason for the public’s increasing acceptance of the U.N. is to be found in the demeanor, manner and style of the man who is the U.S.’s chief delegate to the U.N., Henry Cabot Lodge. Watching him in action on TV screens or from gallery seats, U.S. viewers are unmistakably reassured that the U.S. has in the U.N. a sturdy champion who presents the U.S. case with force and eloquence, answers every Russian thrust with a hard-hitting counterthrust (“Here is the arsonist, trying his best to start another fire, and demanding the right to lead the fire brigade”). Lodge is dedicated to the U.N. idea, calls the U.N. “the world’s greatest adventure in building collective strength,” but the most skeptical U.N. doubter can tell from seeing and hearing Lodge at work that the U.S. is not being pushed around in the U.N., and is not likely to be.

Ambassador Lodge, onetime newsman, makes a point of replying to Russian attacks promptly so as to get the U.S. answer into the same wire-service story that carries the Russian charge around the world. As he strides along Manhattan streets, shopkeepers or passers-by who have seen him retorting on TV greet him with such cries of encouragement as “Good work, Mr. Lodge!” or “Keep giving it back to them, Ambassador!”

With his strapping frame (6 ft. 2¾ in.) and cinematically handsome face, Lodge even looks the part of the good guy of stage or screen who triumphs over the bad guys. At 56, Lodge has two grown sons and six grandchildren, but he looks about as much like a grandfather as Marlene Dietrich looks like a grandmother. He glows with a pink sheen of health (he never smokes, rarely drinks) and with an unmistakable aura of success.

Authentic Brahmin. “Cabot Lodge,” a fellow New Englander recently observed, “has always been sitting on top of the world. After all, he was born there.” By birth, Lodge is an authentic Massachusetts Bay Brahmin, and he can count six U.S. Senators among his ancestors.* Through a paternal great-grandmother he is allied to the Cabots, a Bostonian clan perhaps only partially maligned by the old quatrain in which “the Lowells talk only to the Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God.” The Lodge fortunes piled up in the clipper-ship days are now spread fairly thin among descendants, but when Cabot Lodge was a boy there was enough inherited money around to give life a serene comfort unmarred by any need to worry about making a living.

Lodge’s father George, a poet† whom Theodore Roosevelt called a “genius” and Historian Henry Adams remembered as “the best and finest product of my time,” died when Lodge was seven, and thereafter the boy was guided by his grandfather and namesake, the elegant and scholarly U.S. Senator (1893-1924) Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the elder Lodge was one of the most eminent and powerful Senators of his time. Growing up under his care, young Lodge absorbed his grandfather’s fascination with politics—and his nationalist opinions.

Ironically, the grandfather of U.N. Delegate Lodge went down in simplified textbook history as the man who did more than any other to block U.S. entry into the League of Nations. What the elder Lodge actually did was work out a compromise between total acceptance of President Wilson’s League Covenant and outright rejection of it. The compromise: ratify the Covenant with Reservations limiting U.S. acceptance of provisions that seemed to invade U.S. sovereignty. But ailing President Wilson stubbornly urged Senate Democrats to insist on all or nothing. On the showdown roll call, Lodge and most of his fellow Republicans voted for ratification of the Covenant (with 14 Lodge Reservations); 13 Republicans and 42 Democrats voted nay. As Grandson Lodge later pointed out, the U.N. Charter that the U.S. Senate ratified almost unanimously in 1945 included sovereignty safeguards similar to those his grandfather urged back in 1920, e.g., the Charter provision prohibiting the U.N. from intervening in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction” of any member.

Like his younger brother John (sometime Governor of Connecticut, now Ambassador to Spain), “Cab” Lodge followed the beaten Brahmin path to Harvard. By taking extra courses, he finished up in three years. “I disliked the academic atmosphere,” he says. “I wanted to get going.” He graduated cum laude despite the speedup, explains that he did it the easy way, by majoring in Romance languages, taking advantage of the fluent French he learned at schools he attended in Paris.

On his law-schooled grandfather’s advice that journalism was “at least the equal of the law as training for politics,” Lodge went from Harvard to the Boston Evening Transcript as a reporter, then on to the Washington staff of the New York Herald Tribune (where he also worked as a stringer-correspondent for the new magazine TIME), wound up his newspaper career in the early 1930s as a Trib editorial writer before turning to his inevitable vocation of politics. In 1936, after four years in the Massachusetts state legislature, he ran for the U.S. Senate against Democratic Governor (and longtime mayor of Boston) James Michael Curley, Last Hurrah hero of the Boston Irish and wielder of a mean campaign-speech shillelagh. Curley jeered at Candidate Lodge, a boyish-looking 34, as “Little Boy Blue,” plastered Massachusetts with signs reading: “Don’t send a boy on a man’s errand.” That was a tactical mistake, assured Lodge a big bit of the undergo vote. Though Franklin Roosevelt carried Massachusetts by 174,000 votes, Lodge beat Curley by 135,000. In the Democratic landslide of 1936, he was the only Republican in the U.S. to capture a Democratic-held Senate seat.

The Inner Club. Cabot Lodge was a highly promising Senator. He showed an agile, well-stocked mind, a flair for speechmaking. He worked hard, authored some worthwhile legislation, notably the measure creating the Hoover Commission on government reorganization. Michigan’s late Senator Vandenberg often referred to Lodge as “a future President.”

But somehow, during three terms in the Senate, Cabot Lodge never quite lived up to his promise. To the gallery onlooker or newspaper reader, he may have seemed the very model of senatorial distinction, but among his fellow Senators he was never popular enough to win admission to the informal but exclusive inner club that is the only entryway to real power in the Senate. Senators disliked his aloofness, and the evasiveness he sometimes displayed while slowly and cautiously making up his mind. The Midwesterners who dominated the Republican side of the aisle jeered at his Eastern-gentleman manners and colored button-down shirts. Indiana’s coarse-grained William Jenner used to send Republicans into gleeful roars with burlesque imitations of Lodge.

Casualty of War. On domestic issues, Lodge was a sort of premature Eisenhower Republican; he was one of two Senate Republicans who, in 1937, voted for the Fair Labor Standards bill (the other: Pennsylvania’s James J. Davis). In foreign affairs, Lodge was often called an isolationist; he insists the tag never fitted. “I was always strong for preparedness, which the true isolationists weren’t.”

The record bears him out: Lodge consistently urged and voted for strengthening national defenses. Example: in 1940 he called for a compulsory selective service act before Franklin Roosevelt did. But Nationalist Lodge had one foot in the isolationist camp. In 1935, warning his countrymen to stay out of the World Court, he wrote: “Let us not substitute an international rag for the American flag.” In the Senate, he opposed reciprocal-trade bills and repeal of the Neutrality Act, voted in favor of Robert Taft’s rearguard proposal to substitute $2 billion in grants for lend-lease.

Lodge’s attitude, like the nation’s, was a casualty of World War II. He saw action in North Africa and Italy as an Armored Force officer, wound up the war as a combat liaison officer (lieutenant colonel) between U.S. and French forces in Germany. He came back with six battle stars, the Legion of Merit, a Bronze Star for performance under enemy fire in Italy, and a permanently changed mind about the U.S.’s role in the world. Back in the Senate after the war, he supported reciprocal trade, foreign aid, the U.N., was one of NATO’s staunchest friends.

Worse than Defeat. On maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941, Reserve Captain Lodge had heard a lot about up-and-coming Colonel Dwight David Eisenhower, was impressed to hear Major General George Patton offer a $50 reward to anybody who took prisoner “a certain s.o.b. named Eisenhower.” (Colonel Eisenhower was chief of staff of General Walter Krueger’s Third Army; Patton was a division commander in the rival Second Army.) Lodge met Eisenhower, was an admirer from then on; he started publicly plugging Ike for President as far back as 1950. In November 1951, before General Eisenhower agreed to run, the three-D Ikemen (New York’s Governor Tom Dewey, Pennsylvania’s Governor Jim Duff, Kansas’ ex-Senator Harry Darby) tabbed Lodge to manage the Ike campaign for the nomination.

Lodge worked so hard to get Dwight Eisenhower nominated and elected that he neglected the defense of his own Senate seat against the Democratic assault of Massachusetts’ moneyed, boyish John Fitzgerald Kennedy. With angry and vengeful Taftmen sitting on their hands in Massachusetts, Lodge could see, as November neared, that he was in trouble. He was. And so a Republican who spectacularly won a place in the Senate in the Democratic landslide of 1936 lost it in the Republican landslide of 1952.

Into the Cabinet. President-elect Eisenhower, bent on upgrading the U.N. in U.S. foreign policy and strengthening the U.S. voice in the U.N., looked around for an international-minded Republican who could do what a U.S. chief delegate to the U.N. has to do: think fast, speak fluently, argue persuasively, and be charming. Cabot Lodge seemed just the man. To (give Lodge extra prestige and a voice in the policymaking, Ike made him a “personal member” of his Cabinet (Lodge’s predecessor, Vermont’s ex-Senator Warren Austin, had no Cabinet status). As a favor to Lodge, Ike let him name the deputy U.N. delegate. Lodge unhesitatingly picked shrewd, amiable James J. Wadsworth, then acting Civil Defense administrator. A boyhood friend of Cabot Lodge, Wadsworth, 53, is still his deputy, has proved to be a first-rate U.N. diplomat.

Whether measured by rewards, difficulty or importance to the nation, the post of chief U.N. delegate is one of the top jobs in the Federal Government. Pay and perquisites: $27,500 a year salary; an eight-room, $30,000-a-year apartment on the top floor of Park Avenue’s Waldorf Towers; a chauffeured Cadillac; up to $17,000 a year for entertainment expenses; and the title of ambassador.

Position Papers. The Senate made it very clear, in the U.N. Participation Act of 1945, that the nation’s U.N. delegate is not supposed to decide questions of policy. The U.S. delegation, says the law, “shall, at all times, act in accordance with the instructions of the President, transmitted by the Secretary of State.”

Lodge’s instructions flow from the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, headed by Assistant Secretary Francis O. Wilcox. For any U.N. question that can be foreseen, the Wilcox Bureau prepares “position papers,” checks them out with other federal agencies concerned—Defense Department, Atomic Energy Commission, etc. After approval by Dulles and Eisenhower, a position paper becomes a statement of U.S. policy. In keeping with this written policy, Wilcox & Co. draft explicit instructions; if they call for introduction of a U.S. resolution, a draft is included.

But Lodge is no mere technician carrying out instructions. As a member of the Cabinet and a respected adviser of both the President and the Secretary of State, Lodge has a big hand in the shaping of policy. Furthermore, he can, and frequently does, get his instructions changed. He often tells Dulles—or in Dulles’ absence, Wilcox—that the course decided upon in Washington is likely to stir reactions or encounter obstacles that the State Department had failed to take into account. Usually Lodge wins his point. Sometimes the “instructions”. he gets from Washington are verbatim playbacks of what he wrote out himself. And there are also times when “things happen too fast to rely on specific instructions.”

Separate’Tables. In carrying out his instructions,’Lodge does an effective job of arguing the U.S. case,’both in open debate and in the incessant lobbying that goes on at the U.N. between debates. He proved his mettle as a tactician early in his U.N. career when he had to defend the unpopular U.S. proposal for a “two-sided” (no neutrals) Korean peace conference instead of the “roundtable” (neutrals present) conference urged by Britain, backed by the Soviet bloc. A round-table conference, said Lodge, would resemble an old-fashioned Mother Hubbard dress, “covering everything and touching nothing.” At the Political Committee showdown on the British resolution, Lodge lost 21 to 27, but the voting made clear that the British could not scrape up the two-thirds majority needed in the General Assembly, and the round-table plan got no farther. Once Lodge won that defensive battle, the rest was easy: the Assembly passed the U.S. two-sides plan 43 to 5.

Lodge has a perfect record of winning the big ones in the U.N. He won overwhelming U.N. endorsement of U.S. disarmament proposals despite fierce Soviet opposition. In 1954 he got a lopsided majority for a U.S. resolution to 1) condemn Red China for refusing to free 15 captured U.S. airmen, and 2) send Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold to China on a mission that eventually secured the air men’s freedom. After the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian revolt in 1956, Lodge mustered 55 votes for condemnation, even though the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt had badly blurred the issue.

One night in October 1956, still in white tie and tails, Lodge hurried to the U.N. from the Metropolitan Opera House to call for an immediate Security Council meeting to deal with the Israeli invasion of Egypt. When Russia’s Arkady Sobolev strode into the Security Council waving a wire-service report that Britain and France were threatening to invade Egypt, Lodge promptly added to his Israel-must-withdraw resolution a provision calling upon all U.N. members (i.e., Britain and France) to withhold assistance from Israel “as long as it has not complied with this resolution.” Britain vetoed. During the painful weeks that followed, Lodge found himself voting with Sobolev against historic U.S. allies, had the task of working out the details of the British, French and Israeli withdrawals. “I forgot what sleep was like,” he recalls.

Logic & Flattery. The debates and vote counts that make up the televisable drama of the U.N. add up to only a small part of Delegate Lodge’s job. As in the U.S. Senate, most of the real persuading is done in private talks. More important than a flair for public speaking, the U.S.’s delegate to the U.N. must have a flair for private persuasion, whether through logic, browbeating, charm, force of personality, flattery, or any combination of these. Since he has to keep in mind not only tomorrow’s vote but the possibly more important votes to be counted next week, next month, next year, he has to work incessantly at building up good will and avoiding hurt feelings. Says Lodge: “I walk on eggs some of the time.”

Accordingly, much of Lodge’s U.N. diplomacy is carried on through parties. He has to attend other delegations’ parties, sometimes two or three a day, holds frequent gatherings of his own. Famous among U.N. delegations are Lodge’s “sing fests,” at which he lets go in a sonorous baritone in any of several languages, urges guests to let go, too. Even shy, reserved Secretary-General Hammarskjold has been known to join in a chorus. Lodge’s favorite solo: a faintly bawdy ditty called She’s a Personal Friend of Mine.

The Precious Asset. When Lodge first went to the U.N., the occasional lapses into aloofness that damaged his Senate career annoyed some of his fellow delegates. He was distant with his staffers, sometimes plunged ahead without advising them or seeking their advice. But Lodge has grown impressively during his five years at the U.N. Despite his early success, Cabot Lodge counts among the late bloomers, those who keep on growing at ages when many men’s characters and opinions freeze into rigidity. Today, a mellowed, warmer, more tactful and more patient Cabot Lodge is a superlative operator in the U.N. mazes.

But the U.S.’s most valuable asset in the U.N. is not any individual; it is the fact that, in the struggle with the Soviet Union, the U.S. has a basic majority. The U.S. has never lost a vote in either the Security Council or the veto-free General Assembly in a head-on political contest with the Soviet Union. In the Security Council, the Russians have cast 85 vetoes; the U.S. has never cast any (other vetoes by permanent council members: France, four; Britain, two; China, one).

What explains the U.S.’s basic majority? Answers Henry Cabot Lodge: “Not our material power alone, but that spiritual bond between us and other nations because of the ideals we share. The leaders of most of the countries of the world firmly believe that we stand for the right things and that we deeply want peace. They do not rejoice when we have misfortunes. At heart they want us to be successful. This is a precious asset.”

* Although it was left to Michigan’s Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg to insist that the Charter contain a reference to law and justice as the basis for peace. * On his father’s side: Massachusetts’ George Cabot, Elijah Hunt Mills, Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. On his mother’s side: Massachusetts’ John Davis, New Jersey’s Frederick Frelinghuysen and Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen.

† His poems, mostly melancholy in mood, sound forced to present-day ears. Better-than-average sample:

Life fares and feasts, and Memory counts

the cost

With unrelenting lips that dare confess Life’s secret failures, sins and loneliness, And life’s exalted hopes, defiled and crossed.