REPUBLICANS: The Great Surprise

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As the tall, broad-shouldered candidate sped through the prosperous North Shore suburbs of Chicago one evening last week, waving from the back seat of a black convertible, clusters of people on the sidewalks cheered, shouted, waved flares and sparklers. The motorcade stretched three blocks as it rolled through Evanston's Fountain Square, on through Wilmette's main crossroads corner. Jammed into the parking lot at the Old Orchard shopping center in Skokie was a crowd of more than 20,000, gathered in caravans, some of which had come from neighboring southern Wisconsin. Scattered through the crowd were homemade signs proclaiming HE'S OUR MAN. or spelling out the candidate's name in separate letters, one per placard: LODGE.

When the black convertible pulled up to the speakers' platform erected for the occasion, there was an outburst of cheering and applause, almost drowning out a well-dressed woman's shout to her husband: "He's so handsome!" Youngsters set up a "We Want Lodge!" chant, and the grownups joined in. Somebody handed the candidate's smiling wife a massive bouquet of four dozen roses, and as the cheers continued Henry Cabot Lodge, the G.O.P.'s choice for vice president, raised his arms to form a V. "This was Nixon territory," Illinois' Congresswoman Marguerite Stitt Church boomed into the microphone. "Now it's also Lodge territory !"

The great American game of politics was taking on a mid-season look. The roars at Skokie toward the end of Lodge's first full week of campaigning, however, were the kind that a vice-presidential candidate rarely gets.

High Rating. The extent of Cabot Lodge's popularity with the U.S. public is the greatest surprise of the campaign so far. "Tremendous! Tremendous!" gloats Leonard Hall, sometime G.O.P. National Chairman, now co-manager of the Nixon-Lodge campaign. Says Michigan's Republican National Committeeman John B. Martin: "The reaction to Lodge is the most extraordinary thing in the whole campaign in Michigan. Republican groups, Negro organizations, women's clubs—they all want Lodge." A Gallup poll designed to measure the degree of voter enthusiasm for each candidate gave Lodge a higher rating than Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon. So many urgent requests for Lodge to speak have poured into G.O.P. headquarters in Washington that Lodge has had to abandon his hope of keeping his weekends free during the campaign to rest and relax at his home on Massachusetts Bay.

Chosen Issue. In part. Lodge's appeal derives from physical attributes. If Hollywood were casting Distinguished-Politician-as-Good-Guy, it could hardly find a likelier looking specimen than towering (6 ft. 2¼ in.), handsome Cabot Lodge. He is 58, has grey hair and eight grandchildren, but he still has a youthfully athletic air about him. His voice is throatily masculine, with a kind of standard, radio-announcer accent that shows only faint traces of Boston and Harvard.