Comprehensive, . . . dramatic.--Gerald J. Russello, Wall Street Journal

Few have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. did--in the postwar era, perhaps only George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. Lodge, however, had the distinction of wielding that influence under presidents of both parties. For three decades, he was at the center of American foreign policy, serving as advisor to five presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and as ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, West Germany, and the Vatican.

Lodge's political influence was immense. He was the first person, in 1943, to see Eisenhower as a potential president; he entered Eisenhower in the 1952 New Hampshire primary without the candidate's knowledge, crafted his political positions, and managed his campaign. As UN ambassador in the 1950s, Lodge was effectively a second secretary of state. In the 1960s, he was called twice, by John F. Kennedy and by Lyndon Johnson, to serve in the toughest position in the State Department's portfolio, as ambassador to Vietnam. In the 1970s, he paved the way for permanent American ties with the Holy See. Over his career, beginning with his arrival in the U.S. Senate at age thirty-four in 1937, when there were just seventeen Republican senators, he did more than anyone else to transform the Republican Party from a regional, isolationist party into the nation's dominant force in foreign policy, a position it held from Eisenhower's time until the twenty-first century.

In this book, historian Luke A. Nichter gives us a compelling narrative of Lodge's extraordinary and consequential life. Lodge was among the last of the well-heeled Eastern Establishment Republicans who put duty over partisanship and saw themselves as the hereditary captains of the American state. Unlike many who reach his position, Lodge took his secrets to the grave--including some that, revealed here for the first time, will force historians to rethink their understanding of America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

Luke A. Nichter is a Professor of History, Book Review Editor for Presidential Studies Quarterly, and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. He has held fellowships at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and the London School of Economics. 

He is a New York Times bestselling author or editor of six books, including 

Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press), 

and, with Douglas Brinkley, The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). His books on the Nixon tapes won the 2017 Arthur S. Link – Warren F. Kuehl Prize for Documentary Editing by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and were named among the five best books on the 1970s in the Wall Street Journal by Jane Kamensky, Professor of History at Harvard University. 

Luke’s current book project is Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and the Decline of the Eastern Establishment, to be published by Yale University Press. 

Luke has been endorsed by the American Historical Association for his work on government openness. He is a former founding Executive Producer of C-SPAN's American History TV, launched during January 2011 in 41 million homes. 

Luke’s website, nixontapes.org, offers free access to all publicly released Nixon tapes as a public service – featured on CBS Sunday Morning in 2014. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Bowling Green State University.

Source:  Texas A&M University - Central Texas