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Lodge's name is anathema in the South, where Republicans this year hope to pick up some electoral votes even against Lyndon Johnson. Texas' National Committeeman Albert Fay bitterly remembers how Vice Presidential Candidate Lodge, without consulting anyone, made a Harlem speech pledging the Nixon Administration to appoint a Negro as a Cabinet member. Nixon publicly disavowed the promise, but the damage was done. "That murdered us in Texas," says Fay, who also canceled a Lodge appearance in Houston when Lodge refused to stay at a segregated hotel. Says Florida State Chairman Tom Fairfield Brown: "You know, when he came to Miami, he wanted to play Yankee Doodle at the rally. Now, that's a fine song, but it's not the sort of thing you play down here. We had a hard time persuading him to drop it."
The Other Side. Other Republican professionals note that Lodge is a two-time loser who has not won an election in 18 years. True enough, but that is only part of the story. Lodge has nothing to be ashamed of in his record at the polling places. He won his first five times out: twice for terms in the Massachusetts legislature, three times for the U.S. Senate. He did lose to Jack Kennedy in 1952, which is no disgrace in Massachusetts, and it is hardly fair to blame Lodge for the Nixon-Lodge ticket's squeaky 1960 defeat. Rather, Nixon might have been better off if he had listened to Lodge's advice.
For one thing, Lodge strongly argued against Nixon's debating Kennedy on television; after all, Lodge had had some experience with Kennedy, and knew he was a fast fellow on his feet. Lodge also considered it poor tactics for the well-known Nixon to debate the lesser-known Kennedy. For another thing, Lodge urged Nixon to concentrate less on the South, more on the big industrial centers of the North and Midwest. Lodge also wanted to imprint some of his foreign policy ideas on the Nixon campaign, but he had trouble even passing them along, much less seeing the presidential candidate and talking things over. "Much of the time," recalls a Lodge aide, "we had almost no liaison with the Nixon camp."
The charge that he was lazy in his 1960 campaign enrages Lodge. He concedes that even under the pressures of a national campaign, he was relaxed enough to settle back on a sofa and snooze for 20 minutes or so. But he sees nothing whatever wrong about that. Instead, he often told his aides: "Two things are vital in any campaign. You have to stay well, and you have to stay in character."
Lodge makes no apology for the cutback in his campaign schedule. He simply saw no sense in trying to hit every hamlet and crossroad in the U.S. "I'm not running for alderman," he once exploded. "I'm running for Vice President." Thus, after one trip to Plattsburg, N.Y., where only a handful of people showed up, Lodge complained: "What a waste of time. I was shaking hands with myself."