REPUBLICANS: The Great Surprise

• Share

(7 of 8)

Appropriately relaxed, in an unfamiliar setting. Lodge rolled up his sleeves and began his work with the Labor Day crowds at Coney Island and back in the New York Catskill resort country. Last week he hit the trail, starting with joint ceremonies with Eisenhower and Nixon at Baltimore's Friendship Airport, then moving swiftly on to Columbus, Huntington, W. Va., half a dozen towns in western Pennsylvania, then on to Chicago and Miami, flying back to Washington at week's end.

At every stop, Lodge repeated his stock campaign speech. "We Americans live in a world of dangers," it goes. "It would be folly to underestimate the shrewdness and the ruthlessness of the Russians. Chairman Khrushchev undoubtedly means it when he says he hopes to live to see the whole world under the red flag of Communism." To keep that from happening, the U.S. must keep up its military strength and, in addition, "win men's minds in three ways: first, through the power of our example at home; second, through joining with underdeveloped countries in a war on poverty and disease; third, through our diplomacy, to keep the diplomatic initiative."

Inside Pages. Lodge campaigns, not against Kennedy or Johnson, but against Khrushchev. He never mentions Kennedy or Johnson by name. Only rarely did he refer to the Democratic ticket even in directly. At a press conference in Columbus, he said that it was "most improper" to raise the religion issue. "I absolutely refuse to admit that my three Roman Catholic grandsons will be debarred from the presidency on those grounds, or, for that matter, my two Episcopalian grandsons."*

Lodge does not expect to proclaim any bold new directions during the campaign. That, as he sees it, is Nixon's province. "If I have any bright ideas," says Lodge, "I expect I will pass them on to Dick Nixon." He will be content, he says, to make the inside pages of the newspapers, leaving it up to Nixon to stir up the headlines (a decision that already shows its effect in the evident boredom of reporters assigned to cover him). Under his campaign franchise, Lodge sticks to foreign policy, though as the campaign proceeds he expects to broaden out, by relating domestic issues such as farm surpluses and civil rights to foreign policy.

In carrying out his campaign tasks, Lodge will be referring frequently to a carefully guarded loose-leaf notebook that he calls his "nugget book." A reader of many books, especially histories, biographies and works on current national or international problems, Lodge has made a practice over the years of filing notes on his reading on two-by-three cards. After the convention, he selected some 200 items, had them photostated, and arranged them into his nugget book. Included in it are quotations from men as varied as Churchill, De Gaulle, Lincoln, Asoka (early apostle of Buddhism), Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Milton, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Will Rogers, as well as some stray doggerel that happens to appeal.