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After graduation, Cabot Lodge married Emily Sears, the daughter of another socially impeccable Boston family, and became a reporter for the Boston Transcript, the New York Herald Tribune (and a stringer correspondent for TIME). Among his assignments: covering the conventions of 1924, 1928 and 1932, accompanying Calvin Coolidge's pacification expedition to Nicaragua, interviewing Mussolini. After a four-year warmup in the state legislature, Cabot Lodge was ready in 1936 to try for a national political career, and although his Democratic opponent for the Senate, the late James Michael Curley, belittled his youth and called him "Little Boy Blue," Lodge, at 34, won an easy victory. In his grandfather's old Senate seat, Lodge stuck to the family's rock-bound traditions, followed an isolationist course —although he advocated military preparedness. But with U.S. entry into World War II, he immediately volunteered for military service (the first Senator to see combat since the Civil War). After action with an armored force detachment in North Africa and as a liaison officer with French forces in Europe, Lieut. Colonel
Lodge came home full of honors and decorations, and convinced that the U.S. should never again hold aloof from world events. ("He commenced as a conservative and thawed into a progressive," says his old friend and Harvard roommate, John Mason Brown.)
Recapturing his Senate seat in 1946, Lodge was a disciple of the late Arthur Vandenberg and an authority on foreign affairs. When Dwight Eisenhower's political star began to rise, Lodge, like Nixon, was one of the first to spot it. He journeyed to Paris in 1951 and tried to persuade his friend (they first met in the Louisiana maneuvers in 1941) to run for the G.O.P. nomination. After Ike agreed to run, Lodge worked hard managing the difficult, pre-convention campaign until, because of his incautious arrogance, he was replaced by Sherman Adams. This same snootiness, plus a neglect of his home ground, caused him that same year to lose his Senate seat to a persuasive upstart named Jack Kennedy. Eisenhower appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (says Lodge: "I have reason to be grateful to Kennedy. It's because of him that I went to the U.N.").
Responsible Lieutenants. In their roles as Vice President and U.N. ambassador, Nixon and Lodge might easily have slipped into the ceremonial obscurity that traditionally surrounded both posts. But Ike had other ideas about the jobs—and the men. As Vice President, Dick Nixon was privy to the top secrets of the National Security Council, a regular at Cabinet meetings and a frequent globe-trotting representative of the presidency in the far corners of the earth. As the U.S. cotter pin in the United Nations, Lodge was given Cabinet status and a large voice in U.S. policy—and grew in stature to measure up to both. President Eisenhower was determined that neither of his lieutenants should fade away.