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On his law-schooled grandfather's advice that journalism was "at least the equal of the law as training for politics," Lodge went from Harvard to the Boston Evening Transcript as a reporter, then on to the Washington staff of the New York Herald Tribune (where he also worked as a stringer-correspondent for the new magazine TIME), wound up his newspaper career in the early 1930s as a Trib editorial writer before turning to his inevitable vocation of politics. In 1936, after four years in the Massachusetts state legislature, he ran for the U.S. Senate against Democratic Governor (and longtime mayor of Boston) James Michael Curley, Last Hurrah hero of the Boston Irish and wielder of a mean campaign-speech shillelagh. Curley jeered at Candidate Lodge, a boyish-looking 34, as "Little Boy Blue," plastered Massachusetts with signs reading: "Don't send a boy on a man's errand." That was a tactical mistake, assured Lodge a big bit of the undergo vote. Though Franklin Roosevelt carried Massachusetts by 174,000 votes, Lodge beat Curley by 135,000. In the Democratic landslide of 1936, he was the only Republican in the U.S. to capture a Democratic-held Senate seat.
The Inner Club. Cabot Lodge was a highly promising Senator. He showed an agile, well-stocked mind, a flair for speechmaking. He worked hard, authored some worthwhile legislation, notably the measure creating the Hoover Commission on government reorganization. Michigan's late Senator Vandenberg often referred to Lodge as "a future President."
But somehow, during three terms in the Senate, Cabot Lodge never quite lived up to his promise. To the gallery onlooker or newspaper reader, he may have seemed the very model of senatorial distinction, but among his fellow Senators he was never popular enough to win admission to the informal but exclusive inner club that is the only entryway to real power in the Senate. Senators disliked his aloofness, and the evasiveness he sometimes displayed while slowly and cautiously making up his mind. The Midwesterners who dominated the Republican side of the aisle jeered at his Eastern-gentleman manners and colored button-down shirts. Indiana's coarse-grained William Jenner used to send Republicans into gleeful roars with burlesque imitations of Lodge.
Casualty of War. On domestic issues, Lodge was a sort of premature Eisenhower Republican; he was one of two Senate Republicans who, in 1937, voted for the Fair Labor Standards bill (the other: Pennsylvania's James J. Davis). In foreign affairs, Lodge was often called an isolationist; he insists the tag never fitted. "I was always strong for preparedness, which the true isolationists weren't."
The record bears him out: Lodge consistently urged and voted for strengthening national defenses. Example: in 1940 he called for a compulsory selective service act before Franklin Roosevelt did. But Nationalist Lodge had one foot in the isolationist camp. In 1935, warning his countrymen to stay out of the World Court, he wrote: "Let us not substitute an international rag for the American flag." In the Senate, he opposed reciprocal-trade bills and repeal of the Neutrality Act, voted in favor of Robert Taft's rearguard proposal to substitute $2 billion in grants for lend-lease.