The Last Brahmin · Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. And the Making of the Cold War

For three decades, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was at the center of American foreign policy, serving as adviser to five presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, and West Germany. He hailed from a distinguished American family with a record of public service that began in the Washington administration. The experience of World War II—when Lodge became the first sitting senator since the 1860s to resign his seat for military service—dramatically transformed him from isolationist to internationalist, and the Cold War tested his faith in democracy and its ability to project its system of values abroad. Lodge was among the last of his kind: the well-heeled Eastern Establishment Republicans who put duty over partisanship and saw themselves as the hereditary captains of the American state. Using previously unexamined material, historian Luke A. Nichter recounts, for the first time, Lodge’s extraordinary and consequential life.