HENRY CABOT LODGE: MADE IN THE UNITED NATIONS
Williams, David C.
Henry Cabot Lodge Made in the United Nations by DAVID C. WILLIAMS Henry Cabot Lodge is a living testimonial to the growing potency of the United Nations—a prize exhibit in the "before and after"...
...In foreign policy he was out-gunned by the redoubtable Dulles, who was not disposed to share his responsibilities...
...There are men in public life who have suffered from the same handicap, but have made up for it by surrounding themselves with able staff members and welcoming new ideas from the many research agencies and non-governmental organizations which take a serious interest in public affairs...
...They have also contributed substantially to his own education...
...In 1950, two months after Senator Joseph McCarthy launched his attack upon "Communists in the State Department," Lodge said: ". . . the sole purpose of all loyalty investigations must be to ferret out disloyal persons...
...Lodge continues to answer the Russians, using short sentences, simple words, and, where possible, visual aids, all tailor-made for the television audience...
...Hearst wrote last year: "He [Lodge] was kind enough to say that, in his opinion, the editorial support of the Hearst newspapers had played a decisive role in changing the attitude of the American public toward the United Nations, from a sparse forty per cent who thought it was doing a good job a few years ago to a solid ninety per cent in support of it at the present time...
...It was Hammarskjold who inspired action this year to prevent the Congo crisis from spiraling into a world conflict...
...In the pre-war years he was a moderate liberal in domestic affairs, a strong advocate of military preparedness, and (as befitted the grandson of the Senator Lodge who prevented the United States from joining the League of Nations) a confirmed isolationist...
...In his acceptance speech at Chicago, Vice President Nixon spoke of Lodge as "a man who shares my views on the great issues...
...If such a purpose exists, it merits unreserved condemnation...
...Joseph P. Lash, the capable United Nations correspondent of the New York Post, accused the Eisenhower Administration of seeking to put the Hungarian issue "under the United Nations' rug until after election day...
...Like many another man, he wavered...
...More often, interminable exchanges of the "your slums are worse than ours" variety bored and irritated the delegates of other nations...
...If he looms somewhat larger than real life, it is because he has had the privilege and the opportunity to work for seven and a half years in a great and growing world organization, and to associate with men of a stature not equaled or even approached by those who have dominated the Eisenhower Administration...
...Indeed, he played William Randolph Hearst, Jr., so skilfully that the publisher never realized that he had been hooked...
...While his willingness to be photographed with the Russians has varied with the international and political climate (this August, as a photographer approached while he was chatting with Russia's deputy foreign minister, Vasily Kuz-netsov, he unostentatiously turned his back to the camera), his private contacts with them have been much more cordial...
...He first appeared in Washington in 1937 as a thirty-four-year-old Senator and "the handsomest thing on two legs...
...He has been criticized for the appearance of the wives of the RB-47 crew at the Security Council session on this subject...
...And the first post-convention Gallup Poll seemed to confirm this calculation: it showed Vice Presidential candidate Lodge edging out both Nixon and Kennedy in "E.Q...
...When photographers sought to take a picture of him with the Soviet delegate, he brusquely refused, saying: "Don't you know there's a new Administration in Washington...
...Later that same year, Lodge was one of two dissenters from the report of the Tydings subcommittee declaring that McCarthy's charges were entirely false...
...Judged by the ADA record for the two years (1951-2) that they sat together in the Senate, one or the other must have changed...
...and, of course, no one can be positive that the presence of United Nations observers would have deterred the Russians...
...Spoiled brat" was the kindest of many epithets they applied to him...
...In domestic affairs, Lodge, like other "Eisenhower Republicans," suffered from the dominance of Secretary of the Treasury Humphrey and the desertion from their ranks of the President himself...
...The next day Lodge presented a resolution, but failed to press it to a vote...
...Now he is the hand-picked running-mate for Republican Presidential candidate Richard Nixon— chosen, from among many aspirants, on the hard-headed calculation that he would add most strength to the ticket...
...Lodge tended for a long while to surround himself with "yes-men," and while he has more recently begun to appreciate the importance of a skilled staff, he tends to treat his aides as subordinates carrying out orders rather than sources of intellectual inspiration...
...He was mentioned from time to time for top Washington posts, and his own hopes ran as high as the Presidential nomination in 1956, in case Eisenhower did not run...
...Except for civil rights, his position on domestic affairs was rather more conservative than before the war, although with a strong enough streak of liberalism to put him squarely in the progressive wing of the GOP...
...It must never allow itself to be used to carry out some hidden purpose of creating a political result here at home...
...Privately he maintains that it was not his doing but that of Air Force Intelligence—and that he was furious when he heard of it...
...He wrote that, while "many charges have been made which have not been proven," the Tydings investigation was "superficial and inconclusive...
...They seemed to him wonderful ideas, which some malevolent saboteur had been keeping from him...
...But nothing materialized, nor was his impact upon the Administration substantial, in spite of his close personal friendship with the President...
...His reactions were compounded of ecstasy and anger...
...His egotism, arrogance, and aloofness—qualities which had made him a rather lonely member of that normally chummy club, the United States Senate—had the same initial impact upon the representatives and personnel of the United Nations...
...Great things have been done in the United Nations during the past few years, but they have not been done through the leadership of the United States or its Ambassador...
...Returning to the Senate in 1946 with a distinguished war record, he became a disciple of the late Senator Vandenberg and a strong internationalist...
...Nixon is recorded as wrong on eighteen out of twenty-five votes, while Lodge is listed as right on fifteen out of twenty-five...
...Last year he said: "It is not enough simply to react against something bad...
...Yet Lodge's tactics of baiting the Russians were rather successful in terms of one of his primary initial objectives—that of winning over such perfervid critics of the United Nations as the Hearst newspapers and the American Legion...
...Henry Cabot Lodge Made in the United Nations by DAVID C. WILLIAMS Henry Cabot Lodge is a living testimonial to the growing potency of the United Nations—a prize exhibit in the "before and after" tradition of advertising...
...But no other bold initiatives followed it, and the International Atomic Energy agency itself has failed to live up to the early and high expectations...
...Relations between him and Dag Hammarskjold did not start out amiably, but they developed a genuine respect for each other during the Suez crisis, and he has since become one of the Secretary-General's most ardent supporters...
...When these proposals involved making use of the United Nations, they went to the office of the Secretary of State for U.N...
...At the Council meeting that afternoon Ambassador Lodge was not ready to propose action, saying: "We must now get all the facts...
...Fine words, but the United States has only once risen to this height in the past seven years of the United Nations, with President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" address to the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1953...
...Lodge endorsed McCarthy for reelection in 1952...
...It was Pearson and Hammarskjold who improvised the United Nations Emergency Force to deal with the Suez crisis...
...That speech is still remembered for the thrill of excitement it sent through the halls of the United Nations...
...Lodge bitterly resents any criticism on this score...
...It was the Secretary-General who, in the Lebanon-Jordan crisis of 1958 and the Laos crisis of 1959, rescued the United States from the unhappy consequences of its own blunders...
...In John R. Beal's John Foster Dulles, so largely shaped by its subject that it is virtually an autobiography, Lodge is mentioned only once, and then incidentally...
...Seven and a half years as American ambassador to the United Nations have done a lot for Lodge politically...
...Within the Administration, he sided at first with those advising the President to go easy on McCarthy, then switched as he realized the harm he was doing to America's reputation at the United Nations...
...Predatory" is the adjective one official uses...
...But he has come to realize that this is far from sufficient...
...These are strong words, but the timetable of November, 1956, tends to bear them out...
...Although Lodge still has a weakness for propaganda gimmicks, he is more discriminating than he used to be...
...But they ensured that, in the American press at least, each Soviet thrust put Lodge into the headlines the same day...
...The pattern of too little and too late has been a persistent one in American policy at the United Nations, as elsewhere...
...At four o'clock in the morning of Friday, November 2, during an all-night meeting of the General Assembly on the Suez crisis, the Italian delegate urged immediate consideration of the plea which had been received from Budapest for United Nations protection of Hungary's independence...
...Sometimes this was appropriate and necessary...
...affairs, they made life miserable...
...Affairs, where most of them wound up in the wastebasket...
...Even with the State Department his attitude is less frosty than it was, although its officials still complain of his tendency to push too hard, often with the purpose of thrusting himself into the limelight...
...A passage from an article written by Lodge in 1954 illustrates his early attitude: "Serious harm has been done the United Nations by extreme enthusiasts who expect it to produce steak dinners and college educations and free elections [everywhere] . . . These optimists do not stop to worry about how this is to be done, except possibly through some combination of Uncle Sam's bankroll and elocutionary abacadabra, in unspecified amounts...
...He took it almost as a personal affront that policy directives came to him—a member of the Cabinet and a personal friend of the President— from the office of the Assistant Secretary of State for U.N...
...As United Nations Ambassador, his first official act was to take out insurance against the Wisconsin Senator by requiring a complete FBI check of all Americans employed at the United Nations and in his own mission...
...Certainly Lodge never beat the anti-Communist drum with Nixon's vigor...
...Leadership came first from Canada's Lester Pearson and Dag Hammerskjold, and, since Pearson's removal from the scene, from Hammarskjold alone...
...When Lodge first came to the United Nations, he seemed to regard its permanent staff as a collection of time-serving "do-gooders," who owed their "excessive" salaries largely to the American taxpayer...
...To this was added a paranoiac suspicion that State Department officials, as holdovers from the Truman Administration, were out to do him in...
...Nor is it enough merely to be physically strong, vital though that is...
...Their frustrated authors, however, soon realized that they had a more appreciative audience in Lodge, and began sending them direct to him...
...In 1952 he was the only prominent Republican defeated for re-election, losing his Senate seat to John F. Kennedy...
...He himself attached much more importance to his status as a "personal member" of the Eisenhower Cabinet than to his United Nations post...
...Lodge is well-known and a sympathetic speaker, those who have worked with him at the United Nations have doubts about his fundamental ability...
...In a speech early this year, typical of many he has delivered recently, he listed nine advantages of the multilateral approach, refuted the most common arguments against it, and declared: "It is in the United States' interests to use the multilateral aid of the United Nations to the maximum, and I believe this will be done increasingly in the future...
...On the Marshall Plan, Point Four, and immigration legislation, his record, as measured by the liberal scorecard of Americans for Democratic Action, was almost perfect...
...As late as six p.m., six hours before the Russian attack on Budapest, he rejected pleas by France, Britain, Australia, and other nations for immediate action...
...That "unreserved condemnation" was not forthcoming...
...So Lodge stayed on at his United Nations post and tried to make the best of it, to his own great benefit...
...Lodge has been so closely identified with the United Nations that many people forget how long he has been on the national stage...
...Yet, when Lodge was appointed, it seemed little more than a consolation prize — he had badly wanted to be Secretary of State—and a genteel form of exile...
...secondarily as an assembly in which to roll up topheavy majorities for candidates or resolutions backed by the United States...
...Lodge made it no secret that he regarded the United Nations as only a way-station to higher office...
...An old newspaperman and incurable headline-hunter, he proclaimed his determination to hit back immediately at any Soviet attack on the United States...
...Speaking for the United States, Secretary of State Dulles declared that the Hungarian question was on the agenda of the Security Council...
...Last December, for example, he gave a carefully unpublicized party for the Soviet delegates and their wives, at which he danced with the latter and raised his baritone voice in duet with Kuznetsov...
...Knowing that the directives, though sent over Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' name, were actually drafted by some subordinate official, he would seek at the slightest provocation to identify the culprit, even when the directive was intended to save Lodge from making a fool of himself by shooting from the hip, as he too often did...
...Lodge is now a whole-hearted convert to technical and economic aid through the United Nations...
...Nevertheless, it is significant that Khrushchev himself has since acknowledged that there had been a sharp division of opinion within the Kremlin about what to do with regard to Hungary...
...It is a rather endearing fact about a man not otherwise notably lovable that, while he has acknowledged that his own pre-war isolationism was "one hundred per cent wrong," he has loyally maintained that his grandfather's position on the League was correct...
...The correspondent of the London Economist wrote recently: "Although Mr...
...For his staff, and for the State Department officials dealing with United Nations DAVID C. WILLIAMS writes from Washington and the United Nations for a number of European and Asian publications and has appeared in several American magazines...
...On record and on character, if not on ability and intelligence, Lodge is better qualified to be President than Nixon...
...Washington was then, as it is now, full of ardent cold warriers in the various intelligence agencies dreaming up new ways to bait the Russians...
...Even with regard to Hungary, Lodge's performance was less than impressive...
...After the expected Soviet veto in the Council, the Assembly finally got a chance to act on Sunday afternoon...
...He regarded the United Nations primarily as a forum for waging verbal war against the Russians...
...The Australian delegate, appalled by the delay, succeeded in having the meeting set at three a.m...
...And Lodge was growing with it...
...It was Pearson who negotiated the "package deal" of December 14, 1955, admitting sixteen Communist and non-Communist nations and taking the first giant step toward converting the United Nations from an exclusive club of World War II victors into a global forum...
...Affairs...
...Over the years, his relations with the other delegates, even India's prickly V. K. Krishna Menon, have measurably improved...
...Lodge conferred with the President of the Security Council and agreed to have it meet at ten a.m...
...Even with the handicap of a somnolent Administration in Washington, a United Nations Ambassador with gifts which Lodge does not possess—deep intelligence, creative imagination, forward-looking statesmanship — could have done more...
...You have to be for something good and your strength has to be at the service of that good cause...
...He gives little serious attention to expert studies or the recommendations of non-governmental organizations, viewing them as impractical rather than appreciating their essential function of the pioneering exploration of new lines of policy...
...At the beginning, he was hardly aware of the constructive work of the United Nations' specialized agencies and did not much like what little he knew of them...
...At midnight the first news of the Russian thrust was received...
...For, as time went by, he became identified less with the drifting, lackluster Administration and more with the growing, developing United Nations...
...Two precious days were lost during which United Nations representatives might have reached Budapest at the invitation of the last independent Hungarian government...
...enthusiasm quotient), and running a country mile ahead of his Democratic opposite number, Senator Lyndon Johnson...
Vol. 24 • October 1960 • No. 10
