REPUBLICANS: The Great Surprise

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He fought the Russians with a zestful combativeness, always holding that the fight was essential to keep the kind of peace to which the U.N. was dedicated. It was this intricate combination that at once upheld U.S. interest as the Eisenhower Administration saw it, and persuaded traditional doubters that the U.N. was a proper place for the U.S. to try to settle the world's problems.

Poetry & Politics. Through most of his U.N. years Lodge was reminded constantly that he was the grandson and namesake of Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., who in simplified versions of history is often blamed for blocking U.S. entry into the U.N.'s predecessor, the League of Nations. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the elder Lodge advocated ratification of President Wilson's League of Nations Covenant, but only with a batch of reservations designed to safeguard U.S. sovereignty. Wilson was adamant against any reservations, and the Covenant (with Lodge's reservations attached) was defeated in the Senate in November 1919. As Grandson Lodge is fond of pointing out, the U.N. Charter ratified by the Senate in 1945 included several sovereignty safeguards similar to those that the elder Lodge insisted upon in 1919.

Scion of one of Massachusetts Bay's great Brahmin families (see Family Tree), Lodge numbers half a dozen U.S. Senators among his ancestors. Lodge's father, George Cabot Lodge, died when son Henry was seven, and the boy grew up under the tutelage of Grandfather Lodge, confidant and adviser to Theodore Roosevelt, and author of several scholarly biographies. Inevitably, young Lodge went to Middlesex School and Harvard. Despite a fondness for dances, songfests (he still sings at parties, with no help from alcohol) and long, impassioned discussions of politics, Lodge finished up at Harvard in three years by taking extra courses, was graduated cum laude despite the speedup.

Lodge inherited his grandfather's fascination with politics, but first spent nearly a decade as a journalist, starting out as a cub reporter on the Boston Evening Transcript and winding up as an editorial writer on the Herald Tribune.* In between he interviewed Mussolini, went along on the U.S. Marines' expedition to Nicaragua in 1928, covered the political conventions of 1924, 1928, 1932. New York Timesman Arthur Krock recalled last week that, at the 1928 Democratic Convention in Houston, he and Reporter Lodge found their way into a hotel elevator blocked by a stubborn guard, posted by politicians who had commandeered the elevator for their own use. News was breaking on an upper floor, and no other elevator was in sight; Lodge cleared a path for himself, and for Krock, by knocking the guard down.

When Lodge turned to politics during the Depression, it was an unpromising time for Republican newcomers. In 1936, after four years in the Massachusetts state legislature, he ran for the U.S. Senate against formidable Democratic Governor James Michael Curley, longtime machine mayor of Boston, and trounced him by 135,000 votes, though Franklin Roosevelt carried Massachusetts that year by 174,000. In that Democratic landslide year, Lodge was the only Republican to capture a Democratic-held Senate seat.