Harnessing a Wave

(See Cover)

Last summer, a Republican Congressman sat across a desk from General Dwight Eisenhower and spoke some unsentimental facts. Said he: "I believe you have the qualities that can hold the Republican Party and the country together. But if you think there's going to be an Eisenhower draft at the convention coming from the grass roots, you're very much mistaken. The men who make up the delegations are professional politicians, and the one thing they dislike is to be made ridiculous. If you're willing to accept the nomination, you've got to say so in advance so an organization can be set up."

Alphonse & Gaston. The Congressman explained that he did not expect a direct reply, and the general made none. But both were aware that they faced a double problem: Eisenhower had to be convinced that the Republicans really wanted him, and Republican politicians had to be convinced that Ike wanted their support. In the old comic strip, Alphonse & Gaston often bumped heads as they tried to bow each other through a door. The Eisenhower campaign is in danger of a similar impasse. To get Ike and the Republican politicians through the door together will be a difficult, tricky job of organization. The man charged with this job is a personable, shrewd aristocrat from Massachusetts, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

He is off to a slow start. While Ike partisans sweated out the summer (on a thin gruel of hints, hopes and predictions, Taft workers swarmed through the nation, buttonholing politicians, signing up state managers, and thumping urgent drums. The Taft bandwagon, they now tell the hesitant, is already at the finish line, but they are willing to wait another ten seconds for latecomers to get aboard. The Taft followers do not win votes by direct promises of jobs. "We just tell prospective delegates that when it comes time to distribute the patronage, of course we'll want advice from our real friends," explains a top Taft organizer.

The Taft strategy has met with a large measure of success. But Cabot Lodge is elaborately calm. "There's plenty of time," he says. "To me, it isn't late at all."

Names Are Important. Some confident Ikemen recall that Charles Evans Hughes was nominated in 1916 although he was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and never admitted that he was a candidate until he was officially notified that the convention had nominated him. But there is a major difference between then and now. In 1916, no other leading candidate was in the field, gobbling up delegates.

In the face of the Taft campaign's progress and the attendant propaganda, Lodge has to convince waverers that they can afford to wait, that the nomination is not already tucked in Bob Taft's pocket. Taftmen have already corralled 51 of the 103 members of the Republican National Committee. In a recent poll, G.O.P. Congressmen picked Taft 71 to 54 over Eisenhower. A majority of the Senate's Republicans are Taftmen. As matters stand today, Taft seems to have 400 first-ballot votes out of the expected 1,200 delegate votes (601 will be needed to nominate). In 1940, he started with 189 and in 1948 with 224.

The Ikemen must also face the fact that the Taft forces' enthusiasm for their candidate is genuine and determined. Many of the Taft followers have done the party's drudgery in the unrewarding years of opposition. They resent late arrivals who tell them they have to nominate an outsider. They know Bob Taft and he knows them. Ike is a nice guy, but he doesn't even know their names. And for a politician, it is crucially important that the head man knows his name.

To this, Ikemen have two retorts: 1) "Ike is the man sure to win," 2) foreign policy.

The back-a-winner argument is based largely on public-opinion polls. Although the polls were ridiculed after the 1948 election, they are still the best method of measuring public sentiment. The Gallup poll indicates that, though others might beat Truman, only Eisenhower can surely do it. Taftmen have very little basis for arguing that their man would have as good a chance to win the election as Eisenhower.

With the professional politicians who make up convention delegations, the back-a-winner argument is the most effective one in Ike's favor. But one peculiarity of this peculiar campaign is that this argument is not more effective than it is. Professional politicians out of power for 19 years, facing as able a campaigner as Harry Truman, might be expected to back the popular choice. That many Republican leaders are not that hungry for victory is explained by the nature of many of the present-day Republican politicians. Most are not old-style party bosses. Political power is not their bread & butter. They would love to win, but they don't have to win. They have their businesses and their law practices, which will continue whether or not a Republican is elected President.

Wanted: A Crusade. Curiously, Taft is helped by this unprofessionalism of the professionals. Many feel that they would rather be right with Taft than victorious with Eisenhower. Republican politicians are influenced by Republican businessmen, many of whom are highly emotional in their opposition to the Truman Administration and turn to the candidate who expresses their resentment rather than to the candidate with the best chance of winning. They want a Republican crusade, and they can afford to buy one. The Eisenhower men not only have to persuade many G.O.P. leaders that Ike can win, but that he will campaign on an anti-Fair Deal white horse. In the absence of any crusading words from Ike, this is hard to do.

The people's attitude toward the Truman-Taft-Eisenhower choice is not the same as that of Republican businessmen and professional politicians. Millions of voters who distrust the Truman Fair Deal policies are keenly aware of their own rising living standards. This "we-never-had-it-so-good" line will not yield easily to the standard Republican attack on Truman's domestic policies. The voters, however, have one concern that dwarfs prosperity: the world conflict with Communism, the issue of war & peace. Eisenhower appears to millions as the man who can lead the country through the international crisis. Foreign policy is responsible for at least half of Ike's strength. Says Lodge: "The overriding issue is the organization of a durable peace. The average citizen is not for Ike because of his warm handshake or ingratiating smile. He is for him because of the cold-blooded judgment that Ike knows more about war & peace than anybody else. They believe he's the doctor that can fix what's wrong."

If the people feel that way, Lodge argues, so will the delegates--sooner or later--that go to Chicago..His problem is harnessing that wave of popular sentiment. "Conventions are not perversions of the democratic process," says Lodge. "Delegates are not immune to reason."

The Directors. To bring delegates to reason, Lodge has certain starting assets. More than half the nation's 25 Republican governors are openly announced or privately pledged Eisenhower men, and a governor's control over state patronage gives him great persuasive powers with his fellow delegates.

The heartland of Taft's strength is the Midwest. Taftmen are counting on solid Ohio, Illinois and Indiana delegations. Eisenhower's heartland is the Northeast--New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut. In the South, Taft has a big lead. Ironically, Taft would probably carry no Southern state in the November election, while Ike might carry three or four. But that fact, so far, has not cut much ice with Southern G.O.P. leaders.

To overtake the Taft lead, Lodge's immediate job is to pull the latent Eisenhower support into the open. He needs declarations of support for Eisenhower--and he needs them before Ike is in a position to make a formal announcement of his candidacy.

As campaign manager, Lodge works for a board of directors. His colleagues are New York's Governor Tom Dewey, Pennsylvania's Senator James Duff, and Harry Darby, former Senator from Kansas. Darby was the man who first got Dewey and Duff, old political enemies, together in a New York hotel room and established a working coalition. Since then, Darby has spent most of his time "visitin' around" in the Mid-West, and still serves to give the Ike movement an aura of being Kansas-bred. Dewey works invisibly, recognizing that his open activity outside New York might be the kiss of death in many Republican circles. If money is needed (it has not been, as yet), Dewey can raise it in Manhattan. Duff is the traveling salesman of the team.

Working under the D.D.D. & L. combine is a second echelon comprising, among others, Pennsylvania's Congressman Hugh Scott, who watches the Eisenhower-for-President clubs, and keeps an eye on the South; Roy Roberts, president of the Kansas City Star, who will try to deliver Missouri's votes to Ike; Russel Sprague, who beat the bushes for Dewey in 1948, and is doing the same for Ike where Dewey strength is still solid. Another is ex-ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman, who thinks that his job as Ford Foundation president confines him to the role of well-wisher and behind-the-scenes adviser.

A second group of Eisenhower workers has coalesced into an organization called the National Eisenhower for President Headquarters. Its offices are on the eighth floor of the Jayhawk Hotel in Topeka, and its chairman is Harry Darby. Kansas' Senator Frank Carlson and Representative Clifford Hope are co-chairmen of its national advisory committee, which will have representatives from each state. There is also a growing network of Ike-for-President clubs. There are now 147 in 25 states, a number expected to grow by mid-January to 600 in 40 states.

Lodge admits that there is little coordination between the two groups, and is closemouthed about other workers in his own organization. One reason for his reticence, which he is loth to admit, is that the whole movement is still so embryonic that it would be difficult to describe its anatomy. Only next week will he get around to officially opening a national campaign headquarters, a five-room hotel suite in Washington's Shoreham Hotel.

The real headquarters last week was a handsome seaside house fringed with lawns outside Beverly, an hour's drive up the North Shore from Boston. Just before Prides Crossing, a dirt lane leads off the state highway and a small sign reads: H. C. Lodge. There, in a basement office with book-lined walls, Cabot Lodge stretches out his lanky, 6 ft. 3 inches and talks into the phone. He keeps in close touch with Dewey; Duff sometimes calls several times a day.

At Beverly, Cabot Lodge is in a town whose main street is named Cabot Street after his ancester George Cabot, a town whose city hall was once a Cabot home. His grandfather was Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., the distinguished and opinionated Senator who was President Theodore Roosevelt's closest friend and Woodrow Wilson's bitterest enemy.

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was born (in 1902) in his grandfather's house at Nahant, and grew up under his grandfather's watchful eye. His father, George Lodge, an unhappy man who bitterly lamented "my crying inability to adapt myself to my time and to become a moneymaker" and wrote passable poetry which no one read, died when the boy was only seven. His mother was, in Historian Henry Adams' description, "another survival of rare American stock: Davis of Plymouth, Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, Griswold of Connecticut, with the usual leash of Senators, Cabinet officers, and other such ornaments in her ancestry." Inevitably, from her and his grandfather, young Cabot acquired a sense of membership in a class which assumed that public service was a duty. Grandfather Lodge was the scholar in politics, arrogant, cultivated and intelligent. Henry Adams, a lifelong, sometimes malicious friend of Grandfather Lodge, once wrote of him: "He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it."

At Harvard, in young Lodge's day, raccoon coats were the proper uniform, and he was embarrassed at wearing a mink-lined coat. He proposed to his grandfather that the mink-lined coat be sold so that he could buy two raccoon coats for himself and his brother John (now governor of Connecticut). Cabot Lodge rowed on class crews, belonged to literary clubs and the Cercle Franc,ais. He worked hard, and got his degree in three years. "I wanted to get going," he explains. "I wanted to be a newspaperman."

It was on his grandfather's advice. He felt, wrote Lodge later, "that it [journalism] was at least the equal of the law as training for political life." And young Lodge was definitely headed for the political life. "The discussion of political topics is one of the first things I can remember," he wrote. "An important maxim to remember is 'don't be an amateur.' The job of being a professional politician, in spite of the odium which some persons have falsely attached to it, is a high and difficult one."

Ready for Politics. In 1926, Lodge married Emily Sears, daughter of a wealthy Beacon Street physician, and settled down to a newspaper apprenticeship. He covered the Coolidge Commission's "restoration of orderly government" in Nicaragua for the New York Herald Tribune, attended the London Naval Conference, and rounded out his experience with a swing around the world "to observe the different methods of government" in colonial areas. Then, at 30, he was ready for politics. In 1932, he ran for the Massachusetts state legislature and won. Four years later after putting through 20 labor bills (mostly on workmen's compensation), the youthful Lodge had a reputation. He was ready for a try at the U.S. Senate.

To get the nomination, Lodge spent 13 months touring the state. "The reason I won was that I went into farmhouse kitchens and sat and talked with the men who were going to be delegates," he explains.

In the election, his Democratic opponent was James Michael Curley, who sneered at "Little Boy Blue." But Cabot Lodge won by 135,000 votes, although Franklin Roosevelt carried the state by 174,000. Lodge was the only Republican in the nation in 1936 to win a Senate seat from a Democrat.

Protege. In the Senate, 34-year-old Cabot Lodge was "the boy wonder." Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg took him under his wing (Vandenberg had known his grandfather, and admired the elder Lodge's biography of Alexander Hamilton as the best, up to the time Vandenberg wrote his own). Like Vandenberg, Lodge was labeled an isolationist, but he favored military preparedness, and called for conscription before President Roosevelt did. Domestically, his record was liberal, with a shrewd eye on his constituents. He was one of two Republicans to vote for the Wages and Hours Bill, and he defended the Wagner Act. He got a bill passed, relieving Irish immigrants from the necessity of forswearing allegiance to the British king (they refuse to admit they ever owed any such allegiance), and thus made himself a hero to Boston's Irish.

The Lost Mantle. A reserve officer, Lodge was called back to active duty briefly in 1942, and was sent to Libya with three tank crews for battle training with the British--the first Senator to see combat since the Civil War. Re-elected later the same year, he became restive. Early in 1944, he resigned from the Senate and went on active duty. He served in Italy and Southern France, doing staff work and using his linguistic abilities for liaison with the U.S.'s allies. He returned home with six battle stars and the Bronze Star (for bravery). In 1946, he was re-elected by 330,000 votes.

In recent years, Lodge has been recognized as one of the ablest men in the Senate. In two important areas of policy --military affairs and foreign affairs--his grasp is especially firm. When Vandenberg fell ill and retired from active leadership, most observers thought the mantle of Republican leadership in foreign policy would fall on Cabot Lodge. But somehow, the mantle never fitted.

In 1949, Lodge led 14 liberal Republicans in an attempt to win the Senate G.O.P. leadership, but went down before the Taft regulars. Lodge has never quite succeeded in holding together that band of 14, or in serving as their spokesman. He makes up his mind only after listening to all the evidence, "when I know the most." Such last-minute decisions may make a fine voting record, but they do not make for clear or timely leadership. He remains an internationalist who has on several occasions effectively fought Eisenhower's battles for him in the Senate. He was a prime mover in getting approval for the six U.S. divisions Ike had asked for in Europe, and was the first to charge publicly that Ike's North Atlantic Treaty Organization was getting only one-fifth of the arms promised by the U.S.

At 49, the onetime boy wonder is still trim as a college oarsman, and the father of two grown sons--one a senior at Harvard, the other a reporter on the Boston Herald with two daughters of his own. They are an affectionate, companionable family, and father & sons love to get together on weekends to construct, amidst fierce debates, intricate and massive dams across the stream that flows through the Lodge property. Lodge seldom takes a drink, and quit smoking in 1946 so as "to be in the best possible condition." A man of relaxed charm, he works hard at being modest, and never refers in public to his ancestry. "That sort of thing is so un-American," he protests, adding with disarming candor--"what is worse for me, it's bad politically."

An Organizer? Lodge is a highly successful professional politician. In his office file, he keeps the names of 40,000 Massachusetts constituents. He knows what will please the voters of his state and what will annoy them. But he has never built a political organization in Massachusetts, nor does he work closely with the Republican machine there. In Massachusetts, as in the Senate, he is a bit of a lone operator, popular but not a team type.

If the Eisenhower campaign had an organization, Cabot Lodge would be an ideal spokesman for it. But the Eisenhower movement has no organization as yet, and Cabot Lodge has still to prove that he is the man who can build one. Millions of Americans are strongly, even fervently, for Taft. But Eisenhower is clearly the man whom more Americans admire most. That is why the Taft strength is still conditional. A roundup of the Taft-Eisenhowerrace (see box) has brought from many a state the answer that Taft will get this or that delegate--"unless there is a dramatic Eisenhower movement." It is up to Lodge to make such a movement a political reality.

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