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Authentic Brahmin. "Cabot Lodge," a fellow New Englander recently observed, "has always been sitting on top of the world. After all, he was born there." By birth, Lodge is an authentic Massachusetts Bay Brahmin, and he can count six U.S. Senators among his ancestors.* Through a paternal great-grandmother he is allied to the Cabots, a Bostonian clan perhaps only partially maligned by the old quatrain in which "the Lowells talk only to the Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God." The Lodge fortunes piled up in the clipper-ship days are now spread fairly thin among descendants, but when Cabot Lodge was a boy there was enough inherited money around to give life a serene comfort unmarred by any need to worry about making a living.
Lodge's father George, a poet† whom Theodore Roosevelt called a "genius" and Historian Henry Adams remembered as "the best and finest product of my time," died when Lodge was seven, and thereafter the boy was guided by his grandfather and namesake, the elegant and scholarly U.S. Senator (1893-1924) Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the elder Lodge was one of the most eminent and powerful Senators of his time. Growing up under his care, young Lodge absorbed his grandfather's fascination with politics—and his nationalist opinions.
Ironically, the grandfather of U.N. Delegate Lodge went down in simplified textbook history as the man who did more than any other to block U.S. entry into the League of Nations. What the elder Lodge actually did was work out a compromise between total acceptance of President Wilson's League Covenant and outright rejection of it. The compromise: ratify the Covenant with Reservations limiting U.S. acceptance of provisions that seemed to invade U.S. sovereignty. But ailing President Wilson stubbornly urged Senate Democrats to insist on all or nothing. On the showdown roll call, Lodge and most of his fellow Republicans voted for ratification of the Covenant (with 14 Lodge Reservations); 13 Republicans and 42 Democrats voted nay. As Grandson Lodge later pointed out, the U.N. Charter that the U.S. Senate ratified almost unanimously in 1945 included sovereignty safeguards similar to those his grandfather urged back in 1920, e.g., the Charter provision prohibiting the U.N. from intervening in matters "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction" of any member.
Like his younger brother John (sometime Governor of Connecticut, now Ambassador to Spain), "Cab" Lodge followed the beaten Brahmin path to Harvard. By taking extra courses, he finished up in three years. "I disliked the academic atmosphere," he says. "I wanted to get going." He graduated cum laude despite the speedup, explains that he did it the easy way, by majoring in Romance languages, taking advantage of the fluent French he learned at schools he attended in Paris.