Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. lost two elections to John F. Kennedy and was then handed by him the assignment that ended a government. He was born in 1902 into the closest thing Massachusetts had to a governing family, and was named for the grandfather who had led the Senate fight that kept the United States out of the League of Nations. He worked as a journalist, entered the state legislature, and was elected to the Senate in 1936. In 1944 he resigned his seat to serve in the army in Europe, the first senator to give up a seat for active duty since the Civil War, and was returned to it in 1946. In 1952 he ran the campaign that won Eisenhower the Republican nomination against the party's own front-runner, and paid for the distraction by losing his own seat to a thirty-five-year-old congressman named Kennedy. Eisenhower made him ambassador to the United Nations for the next seven years, and in 1960 Nixon put him on the ticket as the running mate whose foreign-policy standing was meant to offset Kennedy's inexperience. He lost to Kennedy again. In 1963 Kennedy sent him to Saigon, a Republican given custody of the administration's least promising problem and, not incidentally, removed from domestic politics before an election year. He arrived the day after the government's special forces had raided the country's pagodas, and within forty-eight hours received the cable telling him that the United States would no longer oppose a coup if the president would not part with his brother. Washington spent the following weeks half-retracting it. Lodge did not: he refused to see the president except on his own terms, kept the generals informed that American aid would continue after a change, and declined to pass on what he knew. When the president telephoned him on the afternoon of 1 November to ask where the United States stood, Lodge offered him safe passage out and no help staying. He served a second tour in Saigon from 1965 to 1967, by which point the war was American, and in 1969 led the delegation to the Paris talks, where he spent a year on procedural deadlock and resigned. He was later ambassador to West Germany and the president's envoy to the Vatican, and died in 1985.
- Lived: 1902 CE – 1985 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: diplomat, politician
