REPUBLICANS: The Great Surprise

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Far more important is the TV reputation Lodge made as head of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. The campaign's "great, overriding issue," said Candidate Richard Nixon last week, is foreign policy, the question of which ticket is better equipped to "keep the peace for America and extend freedom throughout the world." On that theme and the advertising slogan "Experience Counts," the Republicans have pitched their whole campaign.

If foreign policy proves to be the decisive issue, Nixon could hardly have picked a better running mate than Henry Cabot Lodge. For 7½ years, from January 1953 until he stepped down three weeks ago to plan his campaign, Lodge was the U.S. spokesman in the greatest forum of world opinion, the most public battleground of the cold war. And the U.S. public, watching on millions of TV screens, saw Lodge at work in that forum-battleground. At every stop along the trail, people swarm around him to clasp his hand and tell him that they admired his work at the U.N. During a Lodge speech at Butler, Pa. (where the old Nixon Hotel was recently renamed the Nixon Lodge), newsmen ran a spot check of the crowd, found that 35 out of 48 men and 21 out of 40 women polled had seen Lodge's U.N. performance on TV. All approved.

By one of the political ironies of Campaign Year 1960, Lodge reached his biggest and most receptive TV audience during the Democratic Convention. In the lulls between delegate polling and routine oratory at Los Angeles, the networks switched to the U.N., which was debating Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba's appeal for U.N. troops to restore order. By contrast with the convention's gassy meanderings and tiresome rigmarole, Lodge's arguments in favor of sending U.N. troops, and his telling retorts to Soviet rumblings about a "colonialist conspiracy" seemed the real world.

Double Appeal. Cabot Lodge's U.N.-born political popularity attests to a pretty clear U.S. consensus on the nation's role in the modern world. Down to the eve of World War II, the traditional U.S. wish in foreign relations was to have, as George Washington counseled in his Farewell Address, "as little political connection as possible" with foreign nations. That outlook came to be called "isolationism," though what Washington advised, and what most Americans wanted, was not isolation but avoidance of permanent entanglements that might drag the U.S. into alien quarrels or impair its sovereignty. Cabot Lodge, before World War II, outspokenly shared that viewpoint. He fought most of F.D.R.'s attempts to commit the U.S. to the allied side, though he backed Roosevelt's big defense budgets. .

Isolationism is a word not heard much any more in the U.S. What has replaced it, after the first enthusiasm of one-worldism, is a blend of internationalism and nationalism, a viewpoint that accepts the permanent entanglements with other nations as necessary and even desirable, but insists on upholding the sovereignty and interests of the U.S. In his performance at the U.N., Cabot Lodge filled that bill well. While unmistakably dedicated to the U.N. idea, he never left any doubt that he was there as the spokesman for the U.S. and the guardian of its interests.