| Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. | |
.jpg) | |
United States Ambassador to
the former West Germany | |
| In office May 27, 1968 – January 14, 1969 | |
| President | Lyndon B. Johnson |
|---|---|
| Preceded by | George C. McGhee |
| Succeeded by | Kenneth Rush |
United States Ambassador to
the former South Vietnam | |
| In office August 25, 1965 – April 25, 1967 | |
| President | Lyndon B. Johnson |
| Preceded by | Maxwell D. Taylor |
| Succeeded by | Ellsworth Bunker |
United States Ambassador to
the United Nations | |
| In office January 26, 1953 – September 3, 1960 | |
| President | Dwight D. Eisenhower |
| Preceded by | Warren Austin |
| Succeeded by | James Jeremiah Wadsworth |
| In office January 3, 1937 – February 3, 1944 | |
| Preceded by | Marcus A. Coolidge |
| Succeeded by | Sinclair Weeks |
| In office January 3, 1947 – January 3, 1953 | |
| Preceded by | David I. Walsh |
| Succeeded by | John F. Kennedy |
Massachusetts State Representative
for District 15 (Essex County) | |
| In office 1932–1936 | |
| Preceded by | Herbert Wilson Porter |
| Succeeded by | Russell P. Brown |
| Born | July 5, 1902 Nahant, Essex County, Massachusetts |
| Died | February 27, 1985 (aged 82) Beverly, Essex County, Massachusetts |
| Resting place | Mount Auburn Cemetery in Middlesex County, Massachusetts |
| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse(s) | Emily Esther Sears Lodge (married 1926–1985, his death) |
| Children | George Cabot Lodge, Jr. (born 1927) Henry Sears Lodge |
| Alma mater | St. Albans School (Washington, D.C.) |
| Occupation | Newspaperman Politician, diplomat |
| Religion | Episcopalian |
Military Service
| |
| Allegiance | United States |
| Service/branch | United States Army |
| Rank | Lieutenant Colonel |
| Battles/wars | World War II |
Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (July 5, 1902 – February 27, 1985), was a Republican United States Senator from Massachusetts and an Ambassador to the Vatican, the United Nations, and the former South Vietnam and West Germany. A Moderate Republican, Lodge is perhaps best remembered for his vice-presidential candidacy with Richard M. Nixon, when the ticket lost to the Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Lodge was unable to carry his own Massachusetts, which voted for its other native son, Kennedy.
Background
Born in Nahant in Essex County, Massachusetts, Lodge was the son of George Cabot Lodge, Sr. (1873–1909), who died at the age of thirty-five when his son was only seven years of age. His mother was the former Mathilda Elizabeth Frelinghuysen Davis (1876–1960). He was the grandson of the first Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., the nemesis of Woodrow Wilson's efforts in 1919 to place the United States into the League of Nations. His maternal great-grandfather was United States Secretary of State Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen.
Political career
After graduating from the exclusive St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he worked for a time in the newspaper business and served from 1932 to 1936 as a state representative for Essex County.[1] In 1936, he defeated Democratic Governor James Michael Curley for the United States Senate and served from 1937 to 1944, when he resigned from the body for World War II service in Italy and France during World War II. Thereafter he became a major general in the United States Army Reserve. In the 1946 election cycle, Lodge defeated incumbent Democratic Senator David I. Walsh to return to the upper house of Congress.[2] In 1952, he was an early supporter of Dwight Eisenhower, a Moderate Republican, for his party's presidential nomination; Eisenhower was ultimately picked over the more conservative Robert A. Taft, a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the son of former President William Howard Taft. Eisenhower then defeated in the first of their two contests for President, the Democrat Adlai Stevenson, former governor of Illinois. In that same election, Lodge lost his Senate seat to the Democrat U.S. Representative John F. Kennedy.
On the Tydings Committee, Lodge and the strongly conservative Republican Bourke B. Hickenlooper refused to sign a report which cleared the State Department of wrongdoing.[3]
The next year Eisenhower appointed Lodge as Ambassador to the United Nations, a Cabinet-level post that he retained until the 1960 presidential election.[1] After the defeat in 1960, Kennedy appointed his former rival Lodge to be the Ambassador to South Vietnam, in which capacity Lodge supported the 1963 South Vietnamese coup that led to the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem and Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu.[1][4] While in Vietnam, he won the New Hampshire presidential primary of 1964 in a write-in contest without campaigning. Richard Nixon also received write-in-vote in the 1964 primary. The eventual nominee, Barry Goldwater of Arizona, was handily defeated by Lyndon Johnson. He held other positions under presidents of both parties and was part of the U.S. delegation to the prolonged Paris Peace Accords, which first convened in of 1968. That same year, Richard Nixon was again the Republican presidential nominee; he tapped Spiro T. Agnew, the governor of Maryland for the second slot, rather than Lodge, and went on to defeat Democrat Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota.
Lodge voted with the right only 62% of the time throughout his political career, in contrast to his grandfather who was strongly conservative.[5]
Death and legacy
Lodge died at the age of eighty-two in Beverly, Massachusetts, and is interred at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Middlesex County, some four miles west of Boston. His younger brother, John Davis Lodge (1903–1985), a former governor of Connecticut and ambassador to Spain, Argentina, and Switzerland, died eight months after his brother's passing.[6] Lodge's older son, George Cabot Lodge, Jr., professor-emeritus at the Harvard Business School, was the unsuccessful Republican nominee in 1962 for the Senate seat that Kennedy had vacated to become president. Like his father, a Moderate Republican, he lost to Kennedy's younger brother, Ted Kennedy, who then held the seat with little opposition until his death in 2010.
The website FascinatingPolitics.com recalled Lodge's legacy in a 2020 article entitled "Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.: The Modern Republican Who Helped Make Two Presidents,"[7] referring to Lodge's key role in the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and that same year in his defeat for senator by John F. Kennedy, a campaign which the "Boston Brahmin" Lodge neglected and paid the price. Lodge appeared on the Republican ticket for vice president in 1960, but was unable to pry away Massachusetts from Kennedy, whereas his vice-presidential opponent, Senator Lyndon Johnson, worked to narrowly win his own Texas. Lodge accepted appointments in the three consecutive presidencies of Eisenhower, Kenney, and Johnson.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Pace, Eric (February 28, 1985). HENRY CABOT LODGE, 82, IS DEAD. The New York Times. Retrieved May 28, 2021.
- ↑ MA US Senate Race - Nov 05, 1946. Our Campaigns. Retrieved May 28, 2021.
- ↑ Hickenlooper, Bourke Blakemore. The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa. Retrieved May 28, 2021.
- ↑ Lodge, Henry Cabot. encyclopedia.com. Retrieved May 28, 2021.
- ↑ FascinatingPolitics (April 15, 2020). MC-Index Scores of People I Have Profiled. Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History. Retrieved August 12, 2021.
- ↑ John Davis Lodge. Findagrave.com. Retrieved on April 27, 2020.
- ↑ Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.: The Modern Republican Who Helped Make Two Presidents. Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History (April 1, 2020). Retrieved on May 9, 2020.
External links
- Profile at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
- Profile at United States Senate
- Biography at Britannica
- Profile at Find a Grave
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