The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr and the Making of the Cold War
By Luke A. Nichter
Yale University Press, 2020

Texas A&M professor Luke Nichter co-edited (with Douglas Brinkley) 2014’s memorably nauseating collection of The Nixon Tapes, and his new book, The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr and the Making of the Cold War tackles a 20th-century political figure who was a sometimes-ally of Nixon despite being in many ways his antithesis. Like Nixon, Lodge was secretive by nature; like Nixon, his strategic thinking tended to be appallingly inhuman; like Nixon, he received a bad political upset at the hands of John Kennedy; and like Nixon, he’s at once easy and nearly impossible to capture on the printed page. 

With Nixon, the easy way would be the single word “sordid.” With Lodge, as Nichter alludes many times, that single word would probably be “patrician.” “While many politicians have claimed to be uninterested in higher office, Lodge genuinely was,” he writes. “Higher office was irrelevant to the social status he already possessed. However, privilege led not to selfishness and decadence but to a willingness to serve his country.” 

There’s a tricky distinction to be made here, and it applies to all such benevolent aristocrats who consent to public service; yes, there can be an element of selflessness, but there’s also an element of unaccountability. The Duke of Fife may have the luxury of toiling in Parliament without a salary, but he also owns his borough. Henry Cabot Lodge was born in 1902 to an old Boston Brahmin family; by the time he joined his fellow Republicans in the Senate in 1937, he’d had plenty of conditioning to think of the United States as a private project rather than a sacred trust. Such people make excellent advisors, as many politicians of both parties found Lodge over the course of fifty years, but they make very slippery state operators.

Like all of his family, Lodge was publicly inscrutable and privately chirpy and garrulous. He had an infectious smile, a razor-sharp brain, and a tendency to situational ethics that’s common among those born to privilege. He was, in other words, tailor-made to be a power in US politics during the Cold War, and the main concentration of Nichter’s book falls rightly there. And this author is careful to ballast his book with colorful anecdotes; The Last Brahmin is unexpectedly entertaining reading throughout, as when Nichter relates a detail from the infamous visit Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made to America in September of 1959:

At the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where Khrushchev was given the palatial presidential suite on the thirty-fifth floor, at a cost of $150 per night, billed to the State Department, the elevator got stuck between the thirty-third and thirty-fourth floors. Khrushchev, Soviet security officer Nicolas Zukharov, and the elevator operator ended up having to crawl out. “This is the famous American technology,” Khrushchev commented. Lodge, who helped push Khrushchev’s large rear end up and out of the elevator, tried to see the humor of the situation. “It’s history. You can tell your grandchildren,” he told the elevator operator.

(Nichter notes that he draws this story from Peter Carlson’s terrific 2009 book K Blows Top, and although he did valuable original research the bowels of the Massachusetts Historical Society, he’s equally comfortable drawing extensively from William Miller’s 1967 book Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography; Miller is cited so often that the notes of Nichter’s book practically double as an extended recommendation of Miller’s).

But Khrushchev’s ample posterior notwithstanding, any account of Lodge, particularly one that stresses his involvement with the politics of the Cold War, will have one dark event at its center: the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in November of 1963. Nichter joins the majority of historians in drawing a straight line between that assassination and the first American troops landing in Vietnam in March of 1965. The perennial question will always be: How culpable was Lodge, who was ambassador to South Vietnam at the time and deep in the confidences of President Kennedy? 

Nichter is careful as always on the subject and puts things judiciously:

There is no evidence to suggest that Lodge knew they were going to be killed. However, he must have suspected it, given his warnings to Kennedy as far back as August 15. According to Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy was in the White House Cabinet Room when Mike Forestal brought in a cable saying that Diem and Nhu had been killed … there is no record that Lodge ever met with the coup planners or engaged in anything other than a passing conversation in a public place, such as the airport. Lodge preferred not to be involved in the sordid details, and if it had ever leaked out that he was involved, and it surely would have, it would have undermined the entire effort. 

But he also seems to take at face value the quartet of self-serving sentiments an older Lodge quite fancied, the last of which is the motto of the US Military Academy at West Point: “Duty, honor, courage.” Responding to this, Nichter writes without apparent irony, “These four simple phrases summed up Lodge.” Since no simple phrases summed up Lodge, this kind of faith on a biographer’s part can be a bit alarming.

Fortunately, the bulk of The Last Brahmin displays a reassuring willingness to examine the multiplicity that was always part of Lodge’s public character, and the portraits of all the other major players - particularly Nixon - ring true. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.