REPUBLICANS: The Great Surprise

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Like John F. Kennedy after him, Lodge was not conspicuous for legislative achievements and never gained entry into the inner club that rules the Senate. Many of his fellow Senators considered him arrogant, a trait he has since done much to subdue. On domestic affairs he voted the more or less liberal line that is expected of a Massachusetts Senator (he was one of two Republican Senators to vote for the 1937 minimum-wage bill). Lodge's only book, a now-forgotten tract entitled The Cult of Weakness (1932), was an attack on pacifism, a plea for military preparedness. In the Senate, he argued for more warships in 1938, more planes in 1939, and in 1940 called for a compulsory selective service law before the Roosevelt Administration did.

A longtime Army Reserve officer, Lodge volunteered for active service soon after Pearl Harbor. After the Roosevelt Administration ruled that a member of the Senate could not serve in the Armed Forces, Lodge resigned from the Senate, becoming the first U.S. Senator since the Civil War to resign to go to war. He saw action as a tank officer in North Africa and as a liaison officer in Europe, reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, won a Bronze Star and a Legion of Merit. In 1947 he returned to the Senate to join with Michigan's Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, a prewar isolationist, as a champion of foreign aid, the U.N. and NATO. Vandenberg, enormously impressed with the war-matured Lodge, predicted that he would some day be elected President.

A longtime admirer of Dwight Eisenhower, Lodge in 1952 helped persuade Ike to run, managed his pre-Chicago campaign to wrestle the G.O.P. nomination away from Ohio's Senator Robert A. Taft. Lodge was also the man in charge of working out the list of vice-presidential prospects from among whom Eisenhower finally tapped Richard Nixon. In working to get Ike nominated and elected, Lodge overconfidently neglected his home fences, and lost his Senate seat to Jack Kennedy, whose maternal grandfather John F. Fitzgerald had lost a Senate race to Lodge's grandfather back in 1916.

Delicate Art. Lodge seemed politically dead. And when President Eisenhower appointed him to head the nation's U.N. delegation, that scarcely seemed the road to political comeback. Lodge's predecessor, Warren R. Austin, had been a stately expounder of State Department instructions. reciting speeches written in Washington. But Dwight Eisenhower, determined to upgrade the U.N. in U.S. foreign policy and to strengthen the U.S. voice in the world forum, made Lodge a "personal member" of the Cabinet (Lodge's predecessor had no Cabinet status), and gave him responsibility in the making of U.S. foreign policy.