The Lodge Phenomenon

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In the early-morning gloom of Saigon's muggy pre-monsoon season, an alarm clock shrills in the stillness of a second-floor bedroom at 38 Phung Khac Khoan Street. The Brahmin from Boston arises, breakfasts on mango or papaya, sticks a snub-nosed .38-cal. Smith & Wesson revolver into a shoulder holster, and leaves for the office.

Outside, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., 61, winces at the blast of heat that is already approaching 90DEG with 90% humidity. With a Vietnamese plainclothes bodyguard, he climbs into the back seat of a Checker Marathon sedan. The car rolls past barbed-wire stanchions, stops 15 minutes later in front of the ugly U.S. Embassy building at 39 Ham Nghi Boulevard. There, barricades block sidewalk passersby, while barbed wire funnels visitors past South Vietnamese soldiers into a lobby guarded by U.S. Marines.

Lodge takes a rear elevator to his sparsely furnished fifth-floor office, unstraps his revolver, puts it into a desk drawer alongside a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum. The Magnum has been there since last October, when Lodge received his umpteenth warning of a plot against his life. The ambassador regards the lethal little gat rather wryly. Says he: "I guess it wouldn't discourage a real mob for very long, but it packs all the authority you can put in a desk drawer."

Image to Spare. The personal weaponry, the guards and the barbed wire are no mere theatrical props. Last August, on his very first evening in Saigon, a top embassy officer insisted that the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem planned to invite him on a field trip, stage a fake Communist Viet Cong attack and kill Lodge in the confusion.

More realistic are the tips received almost every day on Communist assassination plots. Last week Lodge narrowly missed possible death when he visited the Saigon waterfront to observe damage to the U.S. aircraft ferry Card, which had been dynamited by Communist saboteurs. A terrorist on a bicycle tossed a grenade into the street, injuring eight U.S. soldiers, just ten minutes after Lodge had left the site. For an aging, home-loving, peace-minded politician, Lodge takes a singularly calm view of these goings-on. Says he: "There's really not much point in worrying about such reports because there's no way of knowing which is the real thing. But you never know for sure what life's going to hold anyway."

If all this seems like something out of Ian Fleming, or at least Eric Ambler, it is not far removed. But drama has always marked the life of Cabot Lodge. In an era when "image" is the politician's most priceless commodity, Lodge has image to spare.

It is the image of the handsome fellow who went to the U.S. Senate at 34, only to resign and go off to fight World War II as a tank officer, emerging as a lieutenant colonel with six battle stars and the Bronze Star. It is the image of the man who returned to the Senate but sacrificed his chances for 1952 re-election by devoting himself to Dwight Eisenhower's drive for the presidency. It is the image of the expert U.S. representative to the U.N., where he fought and bested the Russians, often before nationwide TV audiences. It is the image of the man, beaten for the vice-presidency in 1960, who told the President he wanted to serve his country--and took the hot spot in Saigon.

And it is an image that has made Lodge, 10,000 miles from home, the people's choice for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination.

Just Popular. Polls and primaries alike attest to Lodge's popularity. The latest Gallup poll shows him leading the Republican field with 37%, followed by Nixon with 28%, Goldwater with 14% and Rockefeller with 9%. A canvass of New York World's Fair visitors last week gave Lodge 8,800 votes to 3,239 for Goldwater, 2,771 for Nixon and 1,930 for Rockefeller.

Last March, without ever lifting a finger in his own behalf, Lodge easily won the nation's first presidential primary, rolling up 33,007 New Hampshire write-in votes to 20,692 for Goldwater and 19,504 for Rocky, both of whom had been slogging through the state's snow and slush for weeks. In Illinois, a bastion of Goldwater sentiment, Lodge received 52,322 write-in votes, while Goldwater, whose name was on the ballot, won with 512,616. In his native Massachusetts, Lodge got 71,000 write-ins to Goldwater's feeble 9,500. In Scranton's Pennsylvania, Lodge racked up an impressive 80,000 write-ins, behind Scranton's 225,000. Even in Texas, where G.O.P. leaders recognize no name but Goldwater's, Lodge landed a tidy 11,803 write-ins.

This week comes Oregon, the first and only primary in which Lodge's name appears on the ballot. Polls consistently have shown him leading and, win or lose, he seems certain to run strongly.

Some of Lodge's strength stems from public disenchantment with Goldwater and Rockefeller. But there is plenty of the positive in Lodge's appeal--a fact amply demonstrated in the almost evangelistic enthusiasm with which his rank-and-file admirers speak of him. Declares Thomas C. Nolan, a Gloucester, Mass., purchasing agent: "If God ever put anybody on this earth who belonged in the White House, it's Henry Cabot Lodge." Says suburban San Francisco's David Winslow, a former Marin County G.O.P. chairman: "In an era when American lives are being lost against a Communist cause on the other side of the world, there's a gentleman named Henry Cabot Lodge in the forefront. We're in an era where the traditional virtues--the honor, duty, country that General MacArthur emphasized--are not supposed to be loudly proclaimed. But I believe people have a thirst in their hearts for these things, and perhaps Lodge embodies them. He is, perhaps, the heir of a tradition which we covertly admire in our hearts, and are too bashful to talk about."

And so it goes. "He's an All-American boy out in the paddyfields blasting away at the Commies," says William Parker, a Los Angeles industrial relations consultant. Says Mrs. Adelia C. Shanks of Little Rock: "Lodge has not been one of those Lawd, Lawd, candidates. What he's done, he's done silently and from the heart." Even a Goldwater fan, San Francisco's Republican Alliance Leader Ned Turkington, concedes: "The gentleman has grooming. He represents generation upon generation of a family devoted to public service.".

The Blithe Spirits. The Lodge following is decidedly amateur. Closest to being professional politicians are Lodge's son George, 36, a former Assistant Secretary of Labor, who shares with his father the distinction of having been defeated for the U.S. Senate by a Kennedy, and New York Lawyer Maxwell Rabb, 53, an Eisenhower man who served as Ike's Cabinet secretary and White House adviser on minority affairs. Rabb accepted the job of national director of the Draft Lodge Committee after former Republican National Committee Chairman Leonard Hall turned it down. His strategy is simple in concept, but difficult to execute. "There is a connection," he says, "between popular approval and delegate approval, and our job is to prove it. We've got a candidate who can win not only a primary, but the election itself."

Rabb, for one, believes that Lodge should stay right on in Saigon, waging war against Communism and declining to come home and get mixed up in the political battle. On this point, there is disagreement within the loose Lodge organization. Robert Mullen, a Washington public relations man now working as national coordinator of the Draft Lodge Committee, argues that the ambassador ought to come home right after Oregon.

The fact is that the Lodge people simply do not know what their man intends to do--and among those who are most interested but too busy to fret about it are Lodge's top field workers, a frolicking Massachusetts foursome who are having a barrelful of fun spending buckets of money they haven't got. Still owing $7,500 of the $25,000 cost of their New Hampshire campaign, they remain intoxicated with that triumph and have committed themselves to pouring $75,000 into Oregon. Explains the group's leader, Paul Grindie, 43, a bouncy scientific instruments importer: "Everyone says we can't contract for things without having the money. Then they give you some money because they don't want you to go to jail. This is as good a technique of raising it as any. Tell me a better one."

Grindle and Aides David Goldberg, 34, Sally Saltonstall, 23, niece of the Massachusetts Senator, and Caroline Williams, 23, work out of a barnlike two-story building in Portland, embellished with huge portraits of Lodge as a combat officer, at the U.N., with Ike, and with a wounded G.I. in Viet Nam. The Lodge organizers throw fancy titles around to volunteer workers with abandon, which inspires pride and makes for impressive letterheads. Explains Goldberg: "We don't care what they call themselves. Anyone who wants a title can have one."

About a third of the Lodge campaign budget goes into mail solicitation of voting pledges, another third into a TV campaign showing a 1960 film with Eisenhower extolling Lodge; the last is spent for miscellaneous items--and with a miscellaneous organization, there are plenty of these. Money is so scarce that when the girls forget to stuff an envelope, they carefully pry it open, insert the literature quickly, sit on the envelope to make it stick again. Yet the whole thing is done in a blithe-spirit fashion. Among Grindle's instructions to volunteer helpers: "It is a happy campaign. Smile and be pleasant. We think that's terribly important--that we not be grim."

Considering such dedicated workers, such widespread popularity, such pollster and primary election evidences of strength, why is there so much doubt that Henry Cabot Lodge will be the Republican presidential nominee? One reason is that Lodge's popularity with the Republican rank and file--which is the political phenomenon of 1964--is matched by his unpopularity with G.O.P. professionals, the people who go to conventions.

The Air. Among regular Republicans, Lodge has never been one of the boys. There is about him a sort of above-it-all air that for years made him an object of suspicion in many party circles. This feeling came to a climax during the 1960 campaign, when Lodge was Nixon's running mate. Even while conceding that Nixon did almost everything possible to bollix it up, many Republicans still believe that Lodge added the last losing touches.

They recall his reluctance to make more than one big speech a day, insist that he spent too much of his time napping in hotel suites. They contend that national Republican campaign managers had to cut his appearance schedule in half, that he often refused to share either cocktails or dinner with local hosts, whisking onto the scene only to deliver his speech and then disappearing. They say he even declined to ride in cars with lesser candidates, declaring: "I ride only with my wife."

Most of the complaints come, of course, from Republican leaders already committed to other 1964 possibilities. But they are a significant factor in the campaign.

Says Arizona's Governor Paul Fannin, a true-blue Goldwater man for obvious reasons: "If Lodge had bestirred himself even one-half as hard as Goldwater did, or even one-half as hard as Rockefeller did, Nixon would be in the White House today." Declares Nevada's Lieutenant Governor Paul Laxalt: "We don't want a guy who is going to sit on his big fat duff like he did in 1960." Says one of Nixon's top 1960 aides, a Californian: "I don't know any politician anywhere who worked in the 1960 campaign who isn't bitter about Lodge."

In Virginia, Richmond Republican Leader Richard Poage charges that Lodge "was lazy as hell during the campaign--he helped defeat the ticket." Recalls a Western manager for the 1960 ticket: "We had a big event scheduled for Lodge in Albuquerque. He got as far as St. Louis, then had to turn back home as his nerves were frazzled and he was worn out physically." New York State Chairman Fred Young calls Lodge "a tea-and-crumpets candidate."

Lodge's name is anathema in the South, where Republicans this year hope to pick up some electoral votes even against Lyndon Johnson. Texas' National Committeeman Albert Fay bitterly remembers how Vice Presidential Candidate Lodge, without consulting anyone, made a Harlem speech pledging the Nixon Administration to appoint a Negro as a Cabinet member. Nixon publicly disavowed the promise, but the damage was done. "That murdered us in Texas," says Fay, who also canceled a Lodge appearance in Houston when Lodge refused to stay at a segregated hotel. Says Florida State Chairman Tom Fairfield Brown: "You know, when he came to Miami, he wanted to play Yankee Doodle at the rally. Now, that's a fine song, but it's not the sort of thing you play down here. We had a hard time persuading him to drop it."

The Other Side. Other Republican professionals note that Lodge is a two-time loser who has not won an election in 18 years. True enough, but that is only part of the story. Lodge has nothing to be ashamed of in his record at the polling places. He won his first five times out: twice for terms in the Massachusetts legislature, three times for the U.S. Senate. He did lose to Jack Kennedy in 1952, which is no disgrace in Massachusetts, and it is hardly fair to blame Lodge for the Nixon-Lodge ticket's squeaky 1960 defeat. Rather, Nixon might have been better off if he had listened to Lodge's advice.

For one thing, Lodge strongly argued against Nixon's debating Kennedy on television; after all, Lodge had had some experience with Kennedy, and knew he was a fast fellow on his feet. Lodge also considered it poor tactics for the well-known Nixon to debate the lesser-known Kennedy. For another thing, Lodge urged Nixon to concentrate less on the South, more on the big industrial centers of the North and Midwest. Lodge also wanted to imprint some of his foreign policy ideas on the Nixon campaign, but he had trouble even passing them along, much less seeing the presidential candidate and talking things over. "Much of the time," recalls a Lodge aide, "we had almost no liaison with the Nixon camp."

The charge that he was lazy in his 1960 campaign enrages Lodge. He concedes that even under the pressures of a national campaign, he was relaxed enough to settle back on a sofa and snooze for 20 minutes or so. But he sees nothing whatever wrong about that. Instead, he often told his aides: "Two things are vital in any campaign. You have to stay well, and you have to stay in character."

Lodge makes no apology for the cutback in his campaign schedule. He simply saw no sense in trying to hit every hamlet and crossroad in the U.S. "I'm not running for alderman," he once exploded. "I'm running for Vice President." Thus, after one trip to Plattsburg, N.Y., where only a handful of people showed up, Lodge complained: "What a waste of time. I was shaking hands with myself."

Even the most loyal of Lodge's 1960 aides do admit that the promise of a Negro Cabinet member was a mistake--but they exonerate Lodge of the blame. Lodge, they say, had been booked suddenly for a Harlem speech. But during that day, he had several conferences on, plus work to be done on a foreign policy address to be delivered later at a major rally. He therefore instructed a couple of speechwriters to work up a talk that contained some positive proposals, not mere pious platitudes. The Negro Cabinet-member proposal was the result, and Lodge was dismayed when he saw it. But advance copies of the speech had already been delivered to the press, so Lodge decided to go ahead with it. As a final irony, it turned out that the appearance was in Spanish Harlem, where the voters cared very little about having a Negro Cabinet member.

Policy Line. After the election Lodge joined Time Inc. as a foreign affairs consultant, later became the first director-general of the newly formed Atlantic Institute, a private organization that promotes Atlantic unity.

Lodge had long since put in for an overseas post under the Kennedy Administration. In the spring of 1961, he volunteered his services to Secretary of State Dean Rusk "in any meaningful capacity." Nothing came of it for two years, until Lodge met Kennedy at a dinner honoring Lauris Norstad, retiring Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. The two got to talking, and Kennedy was impressed by Lodge's continuing desire to work in the national interest. Two weeks later the President sent his military aide, Major General Ted Clifton, to ask Lodge if he wanted to return to public life. Replied Lodge crisply: "Sure, if the assignment is tough enough."

It was all of that.

Lodge got to Saigon just as the Diem regime was afflicted with what Mme. Nhu rather indelicately referred to as the "Buddhist barbecues." There are those today who argue that Lodge, as the chief instrument for carrying out the policies of a Democratic Administration in South Viet Nam, cannot reasonably be the Republican presidential nominee. If that is the case, Lodge does not want the nomination, for he fully associates himself with the Kennedy and Johnson policies. Says he: "My attitude was and is exactly the same as that articulated by President Kennedy, which is to say that, as of last summer, changes in both personnel and policy were badly needed in South Viet Nam. That was a policy line I was expected to implement, and it was a policy with which I thoroughly concurred. If I had not, I would not have taken the job."

Lodge insists that neither he nor the Kennedy Administration wanted Diem overthrown by a military coup, although he was aware that one was highly possible. "After all," he explains, "when a government makes a practice of such things as yanking young girls out of their homes at 3 o'clock in the morning and sending them off to some camp for some real or fancied offense, it is setting in force some awfully basic and powerful emotions." The U.S., he says, wanted "oppressive and inhuman" practices stopped, urged religious freedom and wanted Diem's malevolent brother Ngo Dinh Nhu sent into exile. But "absolutely nothing" was done "either to stimulate or thwart a coup."

Lodge says he desperately tried to save Diem and Nhu from death. "I was with Diem the morning of the coup and had gone home to lunch. I was eating when the firing began in the streets. Later in the afternoon I talked with Diem on the telephone and offered him safe-conduct out of the country. Even at that late date, I'm sure we could have delivered on that promise, and I'm reasonably sure the generals would later have accepted Diem's return as head of state. But Diem rejected the offer, and their deaths followed. It was needless and it was tragic."

For a While, Daylight. At first Lodge had hopes for the success of the junta's top general, Duong Van Minh. "Minh actually had been doing pretty well. We had a couple of good days out in the provinces, and people were beginning to respond to him. I actually thought I could see daylight ahead."

Then came another coup, which Lodge prefers to call "a shaking out of the knots and kinks" rather than a second coup. Lodge's reaction: "My first thought was, dammit, why did this have to happen?" But when Lodge met the new Vietnamese leader, General Nguyen Khanh, he was impressed. "He was obviously intelligent, obviously patriotic and obviously tough. Moreover, he seemed willing to listen to what we had to suggest, and if a change had to be made, well, then we couldn't ask for anything better than that."

Just as he always did at the U.N., Lodge considers his role as ambassador much more than a mere administrative function, explains: "In a job such as this I'm expected to give advice. I'm here to execute foreign policy, of course, but I'm also here to contribute to its formulation. In a place as active as South Viet Nam, the President of the U.S. must depend on his top man to help formulate policy on the spot."

To most Vietnamese, the 6-ft. 3-in. Lodge, towering over them as he mops his brow in the hot sun and exchanges light banter in excellent French, is a much-revered figure. His wife, Emily, who loves to shop for vegetables in Saigon's sidewalk stalls and is learning Vietnamese from a tutor ("I don't do much more than make sounds, but it's fascinating"), is popular too. Lodge delights the local folk by spreading foul-smelling Nuoc Mam, a sauce made from sun-rotted fish, on Vietnamese dishes and acting as though it were edible. General Khanh regards Lodge almost as a father figure, recently told an American newsman: "If his people call him, then he has no choice, he must go back to the U.S. If he does that, I ask only one thing: that you send us another Lodge--another straightforward man whose word can be trusted."

Will Lodge actually return to the U.S. to run for the nomination? No one knows but Lodge himself. He feels deeply that he still has a vital duty to perform in Viet Nam. He is also most reluctant to plunge back into the hurly-burly of American politics.

Excitement & Responsibility. Yet Cabot Lodge is a man with a strong sense of mission. Said he in a recent moment of reflection about his present job: "Sometimes I wonder how I ever got here. Then I remember that I'm no youngster any more, that I'm a grandfather many times over, and I've been a very fortunate man. I've had a life full of great excitement and great responsibility, and it's the combination of those two that makes life worth living, gives it its flavor. You take those things into account, and you understand that I felt that if there were any way in which I could invest what's left of my life in doing something my country needed, then that's what I should do, whatever the price.

"If you can do something that's worthwhile, that contributes, however little, to your country, and if you can have some fun while you're doing it--why, only a fool would choose to play it safe."

The Dream. This feeling presumably extends to Lodge's sentiments about actively seeking the Republican nomination. He is known to believe that Barry Goldwater would be a disaster to the G.O.P. if nominated, and to the U.S. if elected. Those closest to him say that the only thing that would get him back to the U.S. before the July 13 San Francisco convention would be an effort to stop Goldwater.

For that, it may already be too late. By most counts, Goldwater already has at least 550 of the 655 delegates needed for a first ballot nomination, could sew up the rest by convention time. The dynamics--or lack of them--of the Republican Party so far this year have favored the man who is out collecting delegates, not the man who is winning the polls and primaries. One reason is that many Republicans feel that nobody, not even a vote getter like Lodge, can beat Democrat Johnson in November.

But this defeatist attitude is pretty silly. Sure as his political moves have been, Johnson could still stumble politically. And healthy as the President may seem, there is always that dread possibility of disablement or worse. The Republican nomination is therefore nothing to give away for the mere asking.

Lodge's backers hope for a big Oregon win, are moving to stop Goldwater by backing Rockefeller in the June 2 winner-take-all primary in California, where Lodge is not on the ballot, write-ins are not allowed, and 86 delegates are at stake.

But most of all, the Lodgemen have a dream, and it goes something like this:

It is only a few weeks before the Republican National Convention. A trans-Pacific jet lands at Los Angeles International Airport. Henry Cabot Lodge gets out, speeds away to the Palm Desert cottage of his old boss and friend, Dwight Eisenhower. There, before hundreds of newsmen and a battery of television cameras, Ike throws an arm around Lodge, extols his virtues and, without naming Goldwater, declares that what the Republican Party needs is a candidate after his own ideal of "progressive Republicanism." Despite that sendoff, Lodge still insists that he is not seeking the nomination. Rather, he says, he is in the U.S. because "I am Ambassador to Viet Nam, here to try to alert the American people to the situation in the Far East, to its well-known dangers, and also to the chances for victory." On this basis, he appears on scores of television programs, addresses a joint session of the Congress. Meanwhile, the war is stepped up in Viet Nam, and reports of battles won are on the front pages. Delegates begin wavering, then turning to Lodge. The stampede is on--and there can be no doubt about the name of the G.O.P. standardbearer.

A foolish fantasy? Perhaps. But that is one of the most enchanting things about U.S. politics: dreams can and do come true.

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