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In the early-morning gloom of Saigon's muggy pre-monsoon season, an alarm clock shrills in the stillness of a second-floor bedroom at 38 Phung Khac Khoan Street. The Brahmin from Boston arises, breakfasts on mango or papaya, sticks a snub-nosed .38-cal. Smith & Wesson revolver into a shoulder holster, and leaves for the office.
Outside, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., 61, winces at the blast of heat that is already approaching 90° with 90% humidity. With a Vietnamese plainclothes bodyguard, he climbs into the back seat of a Checker Marathon sedan. The car rolls past barbed-wire stanchions, stops 15 minutes later in front of the ugly U.S. Embassy building at 39 Ham Nghi Boulevard. There, barricades block sidewalk passersby, while barbed wire funnels visitors past South Vietnamese soldiers into a lobby guarded by U.S. Marines.
Lodge takes a rear elevator to his sparsely furnished fifth-floor office, unstraps his revolver, puts it into a desk drawer alongside a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum. The Magnum has been there since last October, when Lodge received his umpteenth warning of a plot against his life. The ambassador regards the lethal little gat rather wryly. Says he: "I guess it wouldn't discourage a real mob for very long, but it packs all the authority you can put in a desk drawer."
Image to Spare. The personal weaponry, the guards and the barbed wire are no mere theatrical props. Last August, on his very first evening in Saigon, a top embassy officer insisted that the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem planned to invite him on a field trip, stage a fake Communist Viet Cong attack and kill Lodge in the confusion.
More realistic are the tips received almost every day on Communist assassination plots. Last week Lodge narrowly missed possible death when he visited the Saigon waterfront to observe damage to the U.S. aircraft ferry Card, which had been dynamited by Communist saboteurs. A terrorist on a bicycle tossed a grenade into the street, injuring eight U.S. soldiers, just ten minutes after Lodge had left the site. For an aging, home-loving, peace-minded politician, Lodge takes a singularly calm view of these goings-on. Says he: "There's really not much point in worrying about such reports because there's no way of knowing which is the real thing. But you never know for sure what life's going to hold anyway."
If all this seems like something out of Ian Fleming, or at least Eric Ambler, it is not far removed. But drama has always marked the life of Cabot Lodge. In an era when "image" is the politician's most priceless commodity, Lodge has image to spare.