'The Last Brahmin' Review: Why Was He in Vietnam? - WSJ

Luke A. Nichter’s comprehensive biography sets Lodge’s story amid the twilight of the WASP elite—the “Brahmins,” meaning primarily that set of interrelated families in and around Boston—and of an America it’s almost impossible to believe existed, where yacht clubs and boarding schools led naturally to public service. The Vietnam episode helped bring about the dissolution of their political class.

In “The Last Brahmin” Mr. Nichter, a professor of history at Texas A&M University-Central Texas, presents Lodge as a man who believed he owed much to the nation, and so believed the nation should use him as it saw fit. Lodge (1902-1985) descended from multiple old American families; there had been a Lodge in federal public service almost continuously since the Revolution. Lodge’s father died when his son was 7, and his grandfather, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), became a strong influence on the grandson. The elder Lodge was a confidant of Theodore Roosevelt and a well-known center of opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, which he considered a threat to American sovereignty.

Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an engaging public speaker, politically savvy and hardworking, the younger Lodge was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1932, arguing that “the economic system should be changed to provide a better distribution of wealth,” one that rewarded initiative but not greed, and one that protected those harmed by economic dislocation. Lodge championed improved worker conditions and civil liberties. He later called this combination “practical progressivism,” but it was more a form of secularized Christianity applied to politics. His affability and wide network of contacts (recorded meticulously on index cards) represented that ease with other social classes possessed by the American ruling class at its best: His social status had not been achieved via meritocracy or mere chance, and he felt no need to guard it with snobbery. Lodge won a Senate seat in 1936, and meanwhile became a captain in the Army Reserve. In 1944 he resigned from the Senate to serve full time in the military, the first senator to do so since the Civil War.
Lodge would become a colonel, and Mr. Nichter depicts his experience in World War II as a turning point: He moved politically from the isolationism of the older elite to the internationalism of the postwar period. Lodge had campaigned for Wendell Willkie in 1940 on a program emphasizing “Americanism, preparedness and peace,” and called proposals for internationalism “suicidal.” By early 1941, however, after taking advice from his friend Army chief of staff George C. Marshall, he split with the Republicans—and his grandfather’s principles—in voting for the Lend-Lease policy.

What Mr. Nichter does not quite explain is what led Lodge to continue this shift after the war. By 1947 he was advocating for the U.S. to take on the role of guarantor of world peace, and he thought it imperative that the country maintain armed forces abroad. Returning to the Senate after the war, Lodge formed part of the bipartisan “vital center” expanding America’s superpower role. His positions alienated him from Sen. Robert Taft and others in the old-guard Republican leadership. In 1952, Lodge led the movement to draft Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in order to steer the party “in an internationalist direction,” as Mr. Nichter terms it, and to take the Republican presidential nomination from Taft. This sealed the fate of the nationalist wing of the party.

The dramatic centerpiece of Mr. Nichter’s account is the fall of the Diem government in Vietnam in 1963. In a conversation secretly recorded by Kennedy but not previously known to have been recorded by the president, Kennedy seems to give approval for Lodge to support a coup attempt against Diem. At the time, Diem was considered insufficiently strong against the communists and was becoming difficult to deal with. Elements within the State Department and the CIA thought that a group of generals would be more favorable to the American policy of resistance to North Vietnam.
Lodge was thrust into a volatile situation and did as well as he could to further what he understood as the national interest. He was careful to keep informed of what was happening but stayed at arm’s length. He knew he was exposed both personally (armed staffers slept outside his room in Saigon) and professionally, since U.S. support for a coup was not public knowledge. And he knew that he was “expendable” if the plan went awry: Robert Kennedy and others later laid considerable blame for the coup and the worsening war at Lodge’s feet. But Lodge never explained his actions in Vietnam, or indeed throughout his career. “Never tell them how you did it” is how he phrased his life in public service.

The Vietnam episode is emblematic of Lodge’s life, and the dilemma of the American ruling class. Lodge comes across in this account as dedicated to American traditions and institutions, but those were irrevocably changed because of the internationalist shift he led. A nation organized around WASP dominance and a generic Christianity was transformed into a universalizing democracy facing off against the communists. Mr. Nichter makes a good case for the Brahmins, and laments that the U.S. has “lost more than it gained through the exit of these families from politics and public service.” Perhaps; they did have strong virtues. But the country is bigger than Newport, R.I., Long Island, N.Y., and Boston. While Mr. Nichter chronicles Lodge’s active role in the era, the reader still is left to wonder about the man’s ultimate motivations, and what he made of it all. “Never tell them how you did it,” indeed.

Mr. Russello is the editor of the University Bookman.