Happy Birthday, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., American Ambassador to Vietnam

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was born on July 5, 1902, in Nahant, Mass. He came from a long line of noteworthy Americans, including Sen. George Cabot, and his namesake and grandfather, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge.

After graduating from Middlesex School in Concord, he advanced on to Harvard University. He initially pursued journalism until he was elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature, and then to the Senate in 1936, reported the Biography Directory of the United States Conference.

Lodge officially resigned his senatorial seat in 1944 to fight in World War II. Even prior to his resignation he was active in the war effort. In a photograph on the official site of the U.S. Senate, he is seen in New Guinea awarding a soldier the Purple Heart.

Lodge was known throughout his career for drawing a sharp line when it came to Cold War policy. As a senator, he helped to pass the Lodge Act in 1951. The Cold War Museum’s Web site explains that the purpose of the legislation was “primarily to create teams that could be dropped into Eastern Europe to organize, train and lead partisan resistance and sabotage of Soviet supply lines.”

Lodge’s long tenure as a Massachusetts senator was ultimately brought to a close in 1952 by John F. Kennedy Jr. Sadly, as the Boston History and Architecture Web site reported, Lodge had neglected his own senatorial race to serve as manager for Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign.

Eisenhower displayed his gratitude for Lodge’s work on his campaign by appointing the former senator as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Time magazine reported in 1957, during Cold War negotiations, Lodge offered a plan for safe and tempered disarmament. He took his typically moderate stance, stating, “It is not possible to turn backward the clock of nuclear discovery and development, nor to repeal the nuclear age.” His suggestions reflected both a universal commitment to disarmament and a desire to protect America. Essential to his proposal was the idea of “foolproof inspection,” but the Soviets would not agree to it.

Lodge grew popular as an ambassador and left his position to run for vice president alongside Richard Nixon in 1960. After his first week of campaigning, Lodge had drawn a kind of enthusiasm and highly vocal support from crowds “that a vice-presidential candidate rarely gets.” In a Gallup poll, cited by Time, Lodge ranked higher than his running mate, Nixon, and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Time wrote, “If Hollywood were casting Distinguished-Politician-as-Good-Guy, it could hardly find a likelier looking specimen than towering (6 ft. 2¼ in.), handsome Cabot Lodge.”

However, the article speculated that Lodge had several things going for him beyond simple charisma. His role in the U.N. had made him a well-known television figure, and his behavior made people trust him. He retained a few old principles of isolationism, while forging a relationship with the modern world, especially in the face of the Cold War.

After he and Nixon lost, Lodge moved away from politics until Kennedy made him the U.S ambassador to South Vietnam. When Lodge was U.S. ambassador, he helped to initiate the U.S. military coup in South Vietnam. In August 1963, after South Vietnamese leaders Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were killed, Lodge declared, “We are now launched on a course … there is no turning back because there is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration,” as quoted by the UCLA Asia Institute.

Lodge was so popular in New England that while he was in Saigon, he won the New Hampshire Republican primary as a write-in, without campaigning for president. "The surprising win by Lodge was a clear indication that [Barry] Goldwater, the eventual nominee, lacked sufficient support within his own party," wrote the Union Leader, a New Hampshire newspaper. This fact was ultimately borne out by President Lyndon Johnson's win over Goldwater by nearly 16 million votes.

Although Lodge was instrumental in the U.S. occupation of Vietnam, as the war dragged on he shifted sides and favored troop withdrawal. He was named U.S. negotiator to the Paris peace talks in 1969, but retired almost a year later when the talks continued to prove fruitless. According to Time, Lodge claimed he wanted to return to his 10 grandchildren, saying, "I am not a diplomat. I am a family man, and I miss my family," but it was assumed that if talks had been going well, he would have stayed on.

From 1970–1977, Lodge served as a special U.S. envoy to the Vatican. During that time, he wrote about his Cold War experiences in “The Storm Has Many Eyes: A Personal Narrative.” Lodge died on Feb. 27, 1985, and was buried at the historic Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass.