REPUBLICANS: The Great Surprise

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"I have reason to be grateful to Kennedy,'' Lodge has often said. "It's because of him that I went to the U.N." At the U.N., Lodge proved effective in a way he had never been in the Senate. Growing in stature and skill from one crisis to the next, he proved to be a tough battler in oratorical jousts with the Russians, insisting on the value of immediate reply, rather than waiting for Washington to draft something official and late. He also became surprisingly adept at rounding up Asian and African votes on important showdowns. The U.S. never lost in either the Security Council or the General Assembly in a head-on clash with the Russians. Last year Lodge fell heir to a special test of diplomacy when he was assigned to be Khrushchev's official host on the celebrated tour of the U.S.

Upset Calculations. Few G.O.P. politicians realized, until after he was nominated, how widespread was the U.S. awareness and approval of Lodge's U.N. performance. In polls showing presidential preferences among Republican voters during 1959 and the early months of 1960, Lodge consistently ran third, after Nixon and Rockefeller, though he had done nothing at all to stir up political interest in himself. One G.O.P. politician who did grasp the meaning of those polls was Richard Nixon who long before the conventions decided to make his stand on foreign policy. That made Lodge an obvious vice-presidential prospect, and Lodge was plainly receptive.

At Chicago—and in the famous Treaty of Fifth Avenue huddle—Nixon went all out to make New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller his running mate, aware of his crowd-pleasing talents, his appeal to independents, and the need for his help to swing New York's 45 electoral votes. Rockefeller refused to join the ticket, but agreed to support Nixon. The Midwestern Republicans, still resentful of Lodge's role in derailing Ohio's Taft in 1952, wanted Nixon to pick Kentucky's Senator Thruston B. Morton, G.O.P. National Chairman, for his Vice President. Everybody agreed he would add to Republican appeal in the South. But after Kennedy's surprise choice of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate, dismayed Nixonmen shared Kennedy's feelings that the South was lost to the Republicans. That made it all the more necessary to push the foreign-policy issue, in an effort to swing votes outside the South. His own mind made up, Nixon got the unanimous ratification of Lodge (who was Eisenhower's favorite choice even during the Rockefeller boom) in a two-hour session with party leaders after the presidential nomination. "This is the first time." says a top Nixon staffer, "that a vice-presidential nominee was chosen without any hope of his carrying his own state."*