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And so it goes. "He's an All-American boy out in the paddyfields blasting away at the Commies," says William Parker, a Los Angeles industrial relations consultant. Says Mrs. Adelia C. Shanks of Little Rock: "Lodge has not been one of those Lawd, Lawd, candidates. What he's done, he's done silently and from the heart." Even a Goldwater fan, San Francisco's Republican Alliance Leader Ned Turkington, concedes: "The gentleman has grooming. He represents generation upon generation of a family devoted to public service.".
The Blithe Spirits. The Lodge following is decidedly amateur. Closest to being professional politicians are Lodge's son George, 36, a former Assistant Secretary of Labor, who shares with his father the distinction of having been defeated for the U.S. Senate by a Kennedy, and New York Lawyer Maxwell Rabb, 53, an Eisenhower man who served as Ike's Cabinet secretary and White House adviser on minority affairs. Rabb accepted the job of national director of the Draft Lodge Committee after former Republican National Committee Chairman Leonard Hall turned it down. His strategy is simple in concept, but difficult to execute. "There is a connection," he says, "between popular approval and delegate approval, and our job is to prove it. We've got a candidate who can win not only a primary, but the election itself."
Rabb, for one, believes that Lodge should stay right on in Saigon, waging war against Communism and declining to come home and get mixed up in the political battle. On this point, there is disagreement within the loose Lodge organization. Robert Mullen, a Washington public relations man now working as national coordinator of the Draft Lodge Committee, argues that the ambassador ought to come home right after Oregon.
The fact is that the Lodge people simply do not know what their man intends to do—and among those who are most interested but too busy to fret about it are Lodge's top field workers, a frolicking Massachusetts foursome who are having a barrelful of fun spending buckets of money they haven't got. Still owing $7,500 of the $25,000 cost of their New Hampshire campaign, they remain intoxicated with that triumph and have committed themselves to pouring $75,000 into Oregon. Explains the group's leader, Paul Grindie, 43, a bouncy scientific instruments importer: "Everyone says we can't contract for things without having the money. Then they give you some money because they don't want you to go to jail. This is as good a technique of raising it as any. Tell me a better one."
Grindle and Aides David Goldberg, 34, Sally Saltonstall, 23, niece of the Massachusetts Senator, and Caroline Williams, 23, work out of a barnlike two-story building in Portland, embellished with huge portraits of Lodge as a combat officer, at the U.N., with Ike, and with a wounded G.I. in Viet Nam. The Lodge organizers throw fancy titles around to volunteer workers with abandon, which inspires pride and makes for impressive letterheads. Explains Goldberg: "We don't care what they call themselves. Anyone who wants a title can have one."