Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [52]
Ken recognized Jack’s voter appeal long before he went to work for him. “He started getting our attention because he made statements and did things that weren’t the norm for politicians in Massachusetts. When he didn’t sign Curley’s pardon petition, it didn’t mean much in terms of the position, but it meant something to my generation. We quietly watched . . . and here was a guy who bore some watching. Frankly, his money had something to do with it. He was wealthy, so he could be independent of the political machine. They can’t crush him the way they can somebody else, because he has both the money to stand up to them and the guts to tell them to go to hell. He was one of us. He is a veteran. He has had enough. He can afford to take them on.”
“Them” was personified by the name Henry Cabot Lodge. And, to illustrate exactly the weight that name once carried in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, consider this famous bit of doggerel penned by a Holy Cross graduate:
In the land of the bean and the cod,
The Cabots speak only to the Lodges,
And the Lodges only to God.
The current Henry Cabot Lodge was the grandson of the first Henry Cabot Lodge, who’d beaten Jack Kennedy’s grandfather John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald for the U.S. Senate. He was the Republican who’d successfully crushed Woodrow Wilson’s struggle to establish the League of Nations following World War I.
In 1936 his grandson, at the age of thirty-four, assumed the ancestral Lodge seat. Then, in 1942, the younger Lodge joined the U.S. Army and served gallantly in North Africa while remaining a senator. His outfit won the distinction of being the first American unit in World War II to make ground contact with the German army. When President Roosevelt ordered that men serving in both the military and the Congress make a choice between the two roles, Lodge left the army in 1942. But after winning reelection that year, he chose to give up his seat to rejoin the army, the first senator to do so since the Civil War.
As a lieutenant colonel, Lodge distinguished himself in Europe by once single-handedly capturing a four-man German patrol. He was decorated with the French Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. At the end of the war, he served as liaison officer and interpreter in the surrender negotiations with German forces. In 1946, he ran for the Senate again, now a handsome war hero come back to serve the people. As such, he drew extraordinary respect, especially among the Irish, who usually voted Democratic. He was viewed by them as a man of the people, a man’s man, a strong-jawed Yankee who was a regular enough guy to come have a beer at the local bar. Though times were changing, such condescension still went over well. Lodge was the kind of high-standing Brahmin the Irish looked up to.
Ken O’Donnell understood that Senator Lodge was more than the well-born patrician, more than just his name or his family tree. He recognized the reality of Lodge’s very genuine accomplishment, returning from the war and in ’46 beating Senator David I. Walsh, a powerful Democratic fixture on the state’s political scene for nearly half a century. “Lodge, killing off Walsh, became the giant of Massachusetts politics. He had a good organization, excellent staff, and he was honest. Lodge was everything people wanted in a politician.”
By early 1952, Lodge was a major figure in national Republican politics. He would soon be an even greater pillar of the party. It was he who, sticking his neck out, asked General Dwight David Eisenhower, formerly supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and now supreme commander of NATO, to run for president. When Ike rebuffed his proposal, Lodge went on Meet the Press and promoted the idea publicly. With the general’s quiet support, he soon accepted the job of Eisenhower’s campaign manager, entering him in the New Hampshire primary. When his candidate beat the Ohio senator known as “Mr. Republican,” Robert A. Taft, in that momentous contest, Lodge had not only pulled off a considerable coup, but