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It is the image of the handsome fellow who went to the U.S. Senate at 34, only to resign and go off to fight World War II as a tank officer, emerging as a lieutenant colonel with six battle stars and the Bronze Star. It is the image of the man who returned to the Senate but sacrificed his chances for 1952 re-election by devoting himself to Dwight Eisenhower's drive for the presidency. It is the image of the expert U.S. representative to the U.N., where he fought and bested the Russians, often before nationwide TV audiences. It is the image of the man, beaten for the vice-presidency in 1960, who told the President he wanted to serve his country—and took the hot spot in Saigon.
And it is an image that has made Lodge, 10,000 miles from home, the people's choice for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination.
Just Popular. Polls and primaries alike attest to Lodge's popularity. The latest Gallup poll shows him leading the Republican field with 37%, followed by Nixon with 28%, Goldwater with 14% and Rockefeller with 9%. A canvass of New York World's Fair visitors last week gave Lodge 8,800 votes to 3,239 for Goldwater, 2,771 for Nixon and 1,930 for Rockefeller.
Last March, without ever lifting a finger in his own behalf, Lodge easily won the nation's first presidential primary, rolling up 33,007 New Hampshire write-in votes to 20,692 for Goldwater and 19,504 for Rocky, both of whom had been slogging through the state's snow and slush for weeks. In Illinois, a bastion of Goldwater sentiment, Lodge received 52,322 write-in votes, while Goldwater, whose name was on the ballot, won with 512,616. In his native Massachusetts, Lodge got 71,000 write-ins to Goldwater's feeble 9,500. In Scranton's Pennsylvania, Lodge racked up an impressive 80,000 write-ins, behind Scranton's 225,000. Even in Texas, where G.O.P. leaders recognize no name but Goldwater's, Lodge landed a tidy 11,803 write-ins.
This week comes Oregon, the first and only primary in which Lodge's name appears on the ballot. Polls consistently have shown him leading and, win or lose, he seems certain to run strongly.
Some of Lodge's strength stems from public disenchantment with Goldwater and Rockefeller. But there is plenty of the positive in Lodge's appeal—a fact amply demonstrated in the almost evangelistic enthusiasm with which his rank-and-file admirers speak of him. Declares Thomas C. Nolan, a Gloucester, Mass., purchasing agent: "If God ever put anybody on this earth who belonged in the White House, it's Henry Cabot Lodge." Says suburban San Francisco's David Winslow, a former Marin County G.O.P. chairman: "In an era when American lives are being lost against a Communist cause on the other side of the world, there's a gentleman named Henry Cabot Lodge in the forefront. We're in an era where the traditional virtues—the honor, duty, country that General MacArthur emphasized—are not supposed to be loudly proclaimed. But I believe people have a thirst in their hearts for these things, and perhaps Lodge embodies them. He is, perhaps, the heir of a tradition which we covertly admire in our hearts, and are too bashful to talk about."