Moderation and Courage: Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

Three of the four candidates on the 1960 presidential ballot present familiar images to us today.  John F. Kennedy’s blend of glamour, rhetorical idealism, and operational pragmatism was an obvious inspiration for Barack Obama.  Lyndon Johnson remains a cautionary figure for Democrats, although in last year’s primaries Hillary Clinton controversially claimed Johnson deserved more credit than Martin Luther King Jr. for making the dream of civil rights a reality.  Richard Nixon is a model for Republicans both to emulate – only Ronald Reagan matched Nixon’s record of victory in 49 of 50 states in the 1972 presidential election – and to avoid, for obvious reasons.

But who was Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Nixon’s 1960 Republican running-mate?  Few people nowadays can remember what he looked like or recall what he stood for. Historians mention him not for his political career but for his time as ambassador to South Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson, an example of the bipartisan responsibility for failure in that conflict.

Lodge’s obscurity reflects the fate meted out to failed vice-presidential candidates; someday even Sarah Palin will be little more than the answer to a trivia question.  But Lodge has also been forgotten because the tradition of New England Republicanism that he represented is extinct.  In that sense, his unfamiliarity paradoxically does more to illuminate the present political climate than the more familiar figures of the 1960 race.

The 1960 Republican convention was the last where the deals that mattered were cut between moderates and liberals, in sharp contrast to more recent GOP conventions where the conflicts are primarily between conservatives of economic and social persuasions.  The conservative candidacy of Barry Goldwater, contrary to later mythologizing, presented no threat to the moderate Nixon; the convention demonstration mounted by the Arizona senator’s supporters was a paltry affair compared to the thunderous eruption for Adlai Stevenson that had shaken the Democratic convention two weeks earlier. Nixon believed that the constituency he truly needed to shore up was the Eastern moderate-to-liberal wing of the GOP.  He secured its support by negotiating with New York governor Nelson Rockefeller for a stronger civil rights plank for the party platform – the so-called Compact of Fifth Avenue – and naming Eastern favorite Lodge as his running mate.

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. – known to friends as Cabot – was the descendant of one of Boston’s great quasi-aristocratic families. Among his family memorabilia was a parchment commission, signed by President John Adams, making his ancestor George Cabot the first secretary of the U.S. Navy. He could count half a dozen senators among his forebears, including his grandfather and namesake, Henry Cabot Lodge Senior, who had been President Theodore Roosevelt’s most trusted confidant.  His heritage also included many of the leading lights of New England culture, including William and Henry James, and his parents had been close friends of writers and thinkers such as Henry Adams and Edith Wharton. Like a noble Roman of old, Lodge impressed his friends as someone conscious of the need to live up to the example set by his ancestors.

After four years in the Massachusetts legislature, Lodge defeated the rascally Governor James Michael Curley in the 1936 election to become a U.S. Senator, the only Republican to displace a Democrat that year.  In 1942, when members of the Senate were prohibited from military service, he resigned to enter the Army, becoming the first U.S. Senator since the Civil War to leave the upper house to go to war. After combat duty in Italy, France, and Germany, he won reelection to the Senate in 1946.

Lodge described himself as a “practical progressive.”  Although he had been an isolationist in his first Senate term (when it was widely noted that his grandfather had been the leader in the fight against the U.S. joining the League of Nations), the war’s experience made him an internationalist and defender of the United Nations.  He pursued a generally moderate course, supporting tax cuts and the Taft-Hartley bill that was anathema to labor, but also upholding civil rights and health care for the indigent.  He became manager of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign in 1952, angering conservatives when he secured the Republican nomination for his candidate over right-wing favorite Robert Taft.  Conservative opposition combined with the demands of the presidential campaign led him to lose his Senate reelection bid that year to John F. Kennedy, who thereby revenged the defeat of his grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, for the same seat in 1916 by Henry Cabot Lodge Senior.  Ike named Lodge the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., where he became an early television star through his combative confrontations with the Soviets in what was called “the most public battleground of the Cold War.”

A September 1960 Gallup poll found that Lodge generated the highest voter enthusiasm of any of the candidates on the presidential ballot. He was popular with African-American audiences, partly because of their residual loyalty to the Party of Lincoln and partly because Lodge, unlike most politicians at that time, had experience negotiating with black leaders (from the newly emergent African states).  The six-foot-two, blue-eyed Lodge also produced shrieks of female approval comparable to the concurrent hysteria over Kennedy.

However, while commentators lauded Lodge’s intelligence, integrity, industry, and measured judgment, he was no better able than most moderates to define what Eisenhower’s “modern Republicanism” meant and how it differed from Kennedy’s moderate liberalism.  Lodge embodied the vagueness of moderation, coming across as a collection of fine qualities in search of a personality. He was old-fashioned in many ways – often addressing reporters as “My good man” or “My dear man” – at a time when much of the nation was looking to the future. And he was too much the gentleman to play a polarizing hatchet-man, a vice-presidential task Nixon later designated to Spiro Agnew. Indeed, Lodge could seem overly comfortable with the GOP in the role of what he called “a truly and completely patriotic opposition” that was not seeking “partisan advantage.”

Lodge’s variety of moderate Republicanism was the inherited creed of the Northeastern ruling class, carried down from the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and adapted to changing circumstances.  However, to many Americans in the early 1960s, both that class and credo seemed stuffy, paternalistic, and confining. In contrast to Lodge, Kennedy’s barrier-breaking push to become the first Irish-American and Catholic president inspired millions of Americans who resented the dominance of the WASP establishment.

This resentment was actually stronger on the right than on the left, and Lodge was second only to Nelson Rockefeller as a devil figure for right-wing, East-hating populists. As conservative thinker Peter Viereck observed of Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954, “He satisfies the resentments of his followers because his sincerest hatred is always against the oldest, most rooted, and most deeply educated patrician families – the Cabot Lodges, Achesons, Conants…”  One of the founders of the New York Conservative Party declared that the new conservatism was a revolt against the rule of “the good, the wellborn, and the able.”

Lodge represented not just moderation but the old tradition of American authority with which it was associated.  Dissidents of both the left and right agreed that the authority and conformity – and also the peace and prosperity – of the Eisenhower years would have to go.  They wanted the 1960s to be a decade of upheaval and liberation.  They would get their wish.

Lodge’s son George, who followed his father’s example by losing a Senate race to a Kennedy (Teddy) in 1962, denied that he was trading on his father’s reputation.  He told reporters, “If anything, I come from a dead dynasty.” Populism of both left and right helped kill the Lodge variety of moderate Republicanism.  Whether current conservative populists can tolerate a revival of Eastern moderation is one of the great unknown questions the GOP will have to face in the future.