I’ve read my fair share (and other people’s fair shares, as
well) of John Grisham novels. When I was in middle school/high school I wanted
to be a writer…of some sort. Novels, sports, non-fiction. I have 500 pages of
notes on a book about Andrew Jackson’s 1833 tour of New England that at some
point I’ll get around to writing. But one novel I read that stood out to me was
The Pelican Brief. It was a book about a young legal assistant who wrote a
theory about who was behind the assassination of two Supreme Court justices and
ended up being right and getting targeted by killers. Denzel came to help her.
The book is way better than the movie, as most John Grisham novels and most
books, to be honest, are.
What follows is a simple theory based on some reading I did
for my AP US History class on JFK’s assassination and the Conspiracy Day we had
last week in which my students were presented with six different theories as to
who killed JFK. They had to evaluate the evidence presented for what supported
the theory, and what undermined it. It was great fun. There was one theory that
was not presented in the evidence, which I would like to present now. Again
(are you listening, CIA?) this is simply a thought exercise and please don’t
kill me.
-
We need to start in 1919.
When Democratic president Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to
negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, the Pause button between The War To End All
Wars and World War II, he did not take anyone with him. This was a slap in the
face to his own party and to the Republican Party, who expected a bone to be
thrown their way in a matter of such worldwide importance.
Chief among those upset was Henry Cabot Lodge, the heir to a
shipping fortune, descendant of two Boston institutions: the Cabots and the
Lodges.
Wait. When I say “institutions,” we need to back up. Way up.
There’s context, I promise.
The Cabots were a Massachusetts institution and, as such,
were an American institution. Joseph Cabot was born in Salem in 1720 and
ran
opium, rum, and slaves, becoming exceedingly wealthy through shipping, as
most prominent Massachusetts families did. His son, George (born in 1752),
attended Harvard for two years before dropping out to go to sea. George was the
captain of his own ship by age 21. The Cabots soon became synonymous with
American politics. George, the Harvard dropout, was a member of the
Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775 at Age 23. Two years later he was a
delegate to the state constitutional convention. In 1787 he was a delegate to
the state convention that ratified the Constitution. He was a senator from
Massachusetts from 1791 to 1796, supported Alexander Hamilton and became a director
of Hamilton’s 1
st Bank of the United States.
In a rare political misstep, Cabot – an opponent of the
Democratic-Republican Jefferson and Madison administrations – was the
president of the
Hartford Convention, an 1814 meeting of Federalists that didn’t like how
the War of 1812 was going and openly discussed reforming the Constitution but
stopped just short of suggesting that New England secede from the Union. During
the convention Andrew Jackson led a group of rednecks, slaves, and Native
Americans into a stunning upset of Great Britain at New Orleans. England pursued
peace and the Hartford Convention looked like a bunch of traitors. It
essentially
ended
the Federalist Party.
The Lodges were a Boston Brahmin family, a first family of
Boston: Harvard-educated with a Beacon Hill address. According to Boston
Brahmin code, you should only be mentioned in the newspaper when you’re
born,
married, and dead. To qualify as a First Family,
according
to Oliver Wendell Holmes, you needed “four or more generations of gentlemen
and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty’s Council for the
Provinces, a Governor or so, one of two Doctors of Divinity, or a member of
Congress not later than the time of long boots with tassels.” Both the Cabots
and the Lodges fit the criteria.
Here’s to
dear old Boston/
The home of
the bean and the cod/
Where
Lowells speak only to Cabots/
And Cabots
speak only to God
Here comes Henry Cabot Lodge, the
son
of John Ellerton Lodge and Anna Cabot and 1871 graduate of Harvard – the
same year he married Anna Cabot Mills Davis, 14 years his junior and a union of
two of Boston’s most illustrious families. He earned Harvard’s first Ph.D.
degree in
political
science in 1876, edited the
North
American Review with Henry Adams, and joined the faculty at Harvard. Lodge
served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1880-1881 and the
United States House of Representatives from 1887-1893. In 1893 Lodge won the
election to become one of Massachusetts’ senators, a position he would hold
until his death in 1924.
As
WGBH described him, Lodge was a hardcore Republican who supported “the gold
standard, high protective tariffs, an aggressive approach to global politics,
and a Navy large enough to back it up.”
Lodge didn’t like immigrants, especially the Irish. The
Immigration Restriction League was founded by Brahmins in 1894 at the height of
the Nativism trend in the United States.
Lodge
sponsored a bill in Congress that would require immigrants to pass a
literacy test before gaining entry to the United States. Lodge showed his hand when (bear with me) thanks to a storm that
bought the colonists enough time to reinforce their positions, the British
voluntarily evacuated Boston
on
March 17, 1776. Of course this is the day St. Patrick died and many
Bostonians didn’t see this as a coincidence. Lodge – not exactly anxious to
honor an Irishman – helped rebrand March 17
as
Evacuation Day.
Theodore Roosevelt’s
best
friend and chief political adviser was Henry Cabot Lodge. They had met Harvard’s
Porcellian Club – the oldest, founded in 1791, and most prestigious “final
club.” That the Porcellian Club refused admission to Franklin Delano Roosevelt
caused FDR to later declare the rejection as “
the
greatest disappointment” of his life. A former member said of the
Porcellian Club, “If you don’t make your first million by 30, they give it to
you.” Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss – the Facebook twins – were members. Lodge,
who had won a Massachusetts Senate seat in 1891, worked to get Teddy Roosevelt
a job in the government after William McKinley won the election of 1896. Lodge
got Teddy a post as assistant secretary of the navy in 1897. They were both
imperialists, agitating for intervention in Cuba prior to the Spanish-American
War.
Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election, mainly
thanks to Lodge’s BFF Roosevelt running as a (very successful) third-party
candidate, representing the Bull Moose party – a reference to an “incident” in Milwaukee
when John Flammang Schrank
shot
Roosevelt in the chest before a campaign speech. Roosevelt explained that
he had just been shot, begged his supporters’ pardon, pulled the bloody
manuscript of his speech out of his pocket, said “it takes more than that to
kill a bull moose,” gave an hour-long speech and
then went to the hospital. Roosevelt split the Republican vote with
incumbent William Howard Taft.
Wilson dominated the
1912 electoral vote 435 to 88, but was actually outgained in the popular
vote by Roosevelt and Taft.
In 1916 Wilson was re-elected in 1916 under the slogan “
He
kept us out of war,” maintaining U.S. isolationism in the early stages of
World War I. That same election season saw a major threat to the Lodge dynasty.
John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald made a serious legitimate run at Lodge’s seat.
Honey
Fitz was born to poor Irish immigrants in the North End of Boston in 1863,
the middle of the Civil War. But he rose to attend Harvard Medical School for a
year until his father died in 1885. Honey Fitz worked his way to the House of
Representatives in 1894 and sponsored legislation that funded the T and the
Cape Cod Canal, and also tried to overcome the predominant anti-immigrant
stance. He convinced President Grover Cleveland to veto an anti-immigration
bill introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge. Honey Fitz threw out the inaugural first
pitch at the new Fenway Park. According to Gerard O’Neill’s “Rogues and
Redeemers: When Politics was King in Irish Boston,”
Lodge (to Honey Fitz):
You are an impudent young man. Do you think the Jews and Italians have any
right in this country?
Honey Fitz (to Lodge):
As much as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.
Honey Fitz – it’s just such a wonderful nickname – took on
Henry Cabot Lodge’s Senate seat in 1916. Honey Fitz won just one county: Suffolk
County, whose seat is Boston.
Lodge
won the popular vote by about 33,000 votes, 51-45.
John F. Fitzgerald married his second cousin Mary Josephine
Hannon. Their oldest child, Rose, would marry Joseph P. Kennedy. Honey Fitz was
upset that their firstborn son, Joe Kennedy, Jr., wasn’t named after him. Yet,
according to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
The
Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Honey Fitz told the press that his
grandson would become the first Irish-Catholic president of the United States.
Fitzgerald won a tight 1918 election for the House of Representatives but an
investigation uncovered voter fraud – a Kennedy tradition – by Honey Fitz’s
allies and overturned the election.
Wilson’s isolationism didn’t last. Wilson asked for, and
received, a congressional declaration of war in 1917. In 1918 he went before
Congress and gave the famous Fourteen Points speech, the last of which would
establish “a general association of nations…affording mutual guarantees of
political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states
alike.” The League of Nations was proposed, and it
won Wilson
the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Arguably already famous, Lodge is taught in US History/AP US
History courses as the guy who defeated the League of Nations. Lodge – a war
hawk – wanted Germany crushed by the Treaty of Versailles (as did France and
Great Britain). There were three camps who reacted to the Treaty of Versailles:
those who were all in favor, those who were 100% opposed,
known
as the Irreconcilables; and then there were the Reservationists, led by
Lodge, who were opposed unless certain reservations they had were addressed.
Lodge felt like the U.S. would give up too much power under the League of
Nations, so Lodge wrote fourteen reservations to match Wilson’s fourteen
points.
While Wilson was campaigning across the country to win
approval for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, he had a
severe stroke. It paralyzed his left side and “
caused
significant brain damage.” He refused to resign and it “likely contributed
to Wilson’s uncharacteristic failure to reach a compromise” with the
Reservationists and Irreconcilables.
Peace treaties have to be approved by the Senate with a
two-thirds majority. In 1919 this meant 56 of 84 senators had to be in favor.
Lodge was not only the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he
was the Senate Majority Leader. Wilson needed Lodge. The first version of the
Treaty upon which the Senate voted included the 14 Lodge reservations. Wilson
ordered his supporters to vote against it. Of course the Irreconcilables voted
against it, too, and it failed by one vote. A second vote without Lodge’s
reservations fell short by three votes because the “Cabot Republicans” and the
Irreconcilables voted against it. A third version was voted upon in 1920 and
included some of the Lodge Reservations. It, too, failed. That was it.
The Treaty of Versailles was not ratified by the United States
and it took
the
Knox-Porter Resolution in 1921 to formally end World War I. Mississippi
Representative Ross Collins said that “with the exception of the United States
of America, all the nations that were at war with the Central Powers are now at
peace with them. This country alone remains in a state of war…the people in all
parts of our Nation are hungry for actual peace.”
Wilson died
in Washington, D.C. in February 1924. Henry Cabot Lodge died of a stroke – the
same culprit that got Wilson – in
Cambridge, Massachusetts nine months later.
Which brings
us, finally, to the subject of the theory. Ten and a half months after the end
of the Spanish-American War, Henry Cabot Lodge II was born to George Cabot –
Henry Cabot Lodge’s son – and Mathilda Elizabeth Frelinghuysen (granddaughter
of Senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen).
Where Henry
Cabot Lodge was a member of the Porcellian Club at Harvard, Lodge II
–
or “Cabot” or “Cab,” to distinguish himself from his titan grandfather -
was a member of the Hasty Pudding and the Fox Club. Cab’s father George died of
heart failure at 35 years old, when Cab was seven years old. George also served
in the Spanish-American War and was also close to Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote a
nice little introduction to George’s posthumous collection
Poems
and Dramas of George Cabot Lodge, published in 1911. That year Henry
Adams – who worked with Henry Cabot Lodge on the
North American Review –
published
George’s biography. Cab’s grandfather,
The
Henry Cabot Lodge, raised him and oversaw Cab’s education. Cab graduated in
just three years
Cum Laude from
Harvard in 1924.
Having
written for the
Boston
Transcript and the New York Herald Tribune for the previous
seven years, Cab published “
The
Cult of Weakness” in 1932, a collection of essays that echoed the tenets of
Social Darwinism and called for “a return of government principles which will
recognize the rights and welfare of the strong against the weak.” He was
opposed to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and, despite this, won
Massachusetts’ Senate seat over the extremely popular Democratic governor James
M. Curley. He was the only Republican in the United States
to steal a Democratic
seat in 1936. The new junior senator was escorted down the aisle to take
the oath of office by the senior senator, David I. Walsh, “the most successful
Irish Catholic politician” in Massachusetts, who hated Curley. Cab was the
seventh Lodge to serve in the Senate.
Re-elected
in 1942, Cab became the first senator to resign his
seat in
order to go on active duty in the military since the Civil War after
Eisenhower told Congress to choose between Congress and the war. He served in
the Mediterranean and Europe, eventually becoming a Lieutenant Colonel before
regaining his Senate seat over Walsh, whose “
appeal had been
diminished” when he was named as the senator who had frequented a male
brothel in New York City which also happened to be a meeting-spot for German
spies.” Cab won the election to become the junior senator from Massachusetts,
since he had resigned his seat during World War II.
That was cool and all, but Cab gained national attention for
the first time when he helped convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for the
Republican nomination in 1952. Eisenhower would be tough on communism, having
been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and having
overseen the D-Day invasion. Eisenhower muscled out Robert A. Taft, eldest son
of William Howard Taft (former rival of family friend Teddy Roosevelt), for the
Republican nomination. Cab neglected his own re-election campaign to focus on
Eisenhower’s presidential bid.
Lodge was Massachusetts through and through,
a
personality that was described as cold and aloof. Lodge’s campaign aide in
1952, James Sullivan, said of Lodge, “He had a gracious manner, a certain
remoteness…He wouldn’t put his arm around you and say, ‘Let’s go out for a
beer,’ or something like that. No way.” Kennedy, however, “had that marvelous
quality of making you feel that you were his special friend.”
Fletcher Knebel observed, “The Kennedys might be of Boston
society; The Lodges were Boston society.”
There was at least one instance in which the campaign got
personal, and it revolved around future Speaker of the House of Representatives
Tip O’Neill. The way O’Neill told it in his book (and
excerpted
in the Chicago Tribune), the Kennedys had asked O’Neill – then running for
national office for the first time himself – to deliver a speech that the
Kennedy campaign had written. The speech showed up so late that Cab offered to
switch places and speak first, then stayed to hear O’Neill. The speech “kicked
the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge. I didn’t have time to edit it or make
any changes…I was humiliated.” Lodge left halfway through the speech and told
O’Neill’s wife, “You know, the Kennedys would never give a speech like that for
him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he’s saying about
me.”
When the election results came in, JFK had won by less than
71,000 votes out of over 2.3 million cast.
Suddenly out of a job, Eisenhower appointed Cab as
the
head of his transition team and then as the U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations, securing Cab a spot in Eisenhower’s cabinet. While Ambassador to the
U.N., Cab maintained a high profile. He worked behind (and in front of) the
scenes during the Suez Canal crisis, and the revolt in Hungary in 1956. Lodge
was Nikita Khruschev’s escort during his 1959 tour of the United States.
In March 1960, eight months before the presidential
election, the U.S. government
made a
formal decision (in secret) to overthrow Castro. Preparations were underway
for an invasion of Cuba at Castro’s favorite fishing spot – the Bay of Pigs.
Castro had appealed to the United Nations for help, providing detailed evidence
to the U.N. Security Council of pilots. Ambassador Lodge assured Castro and the
Security Council “the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba.”
Eisenhower’s
national security policy focused on building the American economy to
support the Cold War, relying on nuclear weapons to deter communist aggression
(supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ “
Brinksmanship”
policy of showing that you’re just wheels-off enough to take your nukes out for
a spin in an effort to get the other side to back down), and carrying out
secret/covert operations against governments who made eyes at the Soviet Union.
Lodge would have been privy to all of this and, given his relationship with
Eisenhower, tacitly approved.
Nixon chose Cab as his vice presidential candidate for a few
reasons: His foreign policy experience in working under Eisenhower would be
well-received, and that Nixon thought the Lodge name could check Kennedy’s
popularity in New England. Cab made a Republican misstep,
telling
a Harlem crowd that a Nixon Presidency would name an African-American to
its Cabinet. Plot twist: he walked it back. It
probably
lost Nixon the South. The Nixon/Lodge ticket lost the popular vote to the
Kennedy/Johnson ticket by 113,000 votes out of 68 million cast. There were
likely Shenanigans.
President Kennedy needed bipartisan support. As a liberal
Northern Democrat, Kennedy had to face not only the Republicans but the
Southern Democrats, who didn’t like anybody, and certainly didn’t support
Kennedy’s progressive agenda which built on Eisenhower’s actions and the Warren
Court of the mid-1950s.
Lodge’s promise that the United States had no aggressive
purpose against Cuba, as the disaster of the Bay of Pigs “invasion” – three months
after JFK’s inauguration – showed. And, hold on a second,
JFK
was seeking to normalize relations with Cuba and Castro? Reporter
Jean Daniel was in Cuba with Fidel Castro when JFK was assassinated. Castro had told
reporter Daniel, regarding Kennedy, that he (Castro) was not afraid of
getting assassinated, and that assassination at the hands of the United States
would only raise his own standing in Latin America. But Castro understood that
Kennedy was in a unique position to make everything okay in the Western
Hemisphere. As he told Jean Daniel on November 19, 1963, three days before
Kennedy’s assassination:
Kennedy could still be
this man. He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the
greatest President of the United States, the leaders who may at last understand
that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the
Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for
example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with.
Well, that would have flown in the face of everything Lodge
stood for, politically.
A quick aside: JFK had resigned his Senate seat to run for
president in 1960. His brother, Ted, wanted the Senate seat to match the
accomplishments of his brothers (Robert was John’s Attorney General), but he
wouldn’t be the required 30 years old until 1962. JFK asked Massachusetts
Governor Foster Furcolo to name Ben Smith – a friend of the Kennedy family – as
the interim senator to serve out JFK’s term, keeping the Senate seat open for
Ted. He faced George Cabot Lodge, Cab’s son, in the 1962 election. Ted Kennedy
beat George Cabot Lodge by just under 300,000 votes. It was the third time the
Lodges and Kennedys had squared off in an election. Kennedys were up 2-1.
Kennedy
asked Cab to become the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. He accepted, and
arrived in August 1963, ostensibly to corral Ngo Dinh Diem, who was living The
Life thanks to American money, and squashing opposition. Notably, Diem had
authorized raids on Buddhist pagodas where upwards of hundreds of Buddhists
were killed by Diem’s forces, orchestrated by Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu
. Cable 243
authorized Cab to pressure Diem to remove Nhu. If he didn’t, the United States
would look for other leadership in South Vietnam. Lodge interpreted it as an
opportunity to send the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to remove Diem if he
didn’t take his brother out. Diem was assassinated, along with his brother, on
November 2, 1963, the day after Diem’s government was overthrown by the South
Vietnamese military. Kennedy,
according
to historian Arthur Schlesinger, “accepted the coup but did not order or
contemplate the assassination of Diem.” Cable 243 is seen as a turning point in
the Vietnam War, as the U.S.
became
more heavily involved in Vietnam in an effort to stabilize the country.
Kennedy
blamed himself for not handling Lodge more appropriately. Less than three
weeks later, Kennedy was dead.
By now it’s generally accepted that
JFK
was planning on withdrawing troops from Vietnam. One thousand troops were
slated to return to the United States by the end of 1963. Maxwell Taylor,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a memo on October 4, 1963
explaining that JFK had already approved recommendations for a full withdrawal
of “
special
assistance units and personnel by the end of 1965.” This decision was
decidedly not the stance of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, who ardently believed in the
Domino Theory that if Vietnam fell to communism, other Southeast Asian
countries would soon follow. Feel free to draw your own psychological
conclusions that Cab was such a strident internationalist given the hardline
isolationist stance taken by his grandfather, the man who raised him.
I knew that JFK had
planned to fire ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge upon his return from Texas on
November 24, 1963. I also know that Lodge knew why he had been summoned to see
the President. I couldn’t resist asking John Lodge about his brother.
“Did you ever ask your
brother who really killed Kennedy?”
His lips spread into a
tight grin. “Cabot said it was the Agency boys, some Mafiosi.” He looked me in
the eye. “And Lyndon.”
“Did your brother know
in advance?” I asked.
Lodge took a sip of
his Manhattan. “He knew Kennedy wouldn’t be around to fire him. LBJ kept him at
his post so he could serve his country.”
“The individual who
forced out position at the time of Vietnam was Henry Cabot Lodge. In fact,
Henry Cabot Lodge was being brought back – and the President discussed with me
in detail how he could be fired – because he wouldn’t communicate in any way
with us…The President would send out messages, and he would never really answer
them…[Lodge] wouldn’t communicate….We were trying to figure out how to get rid
of Henry Cabot Lodge.”
“In Hawaii on November
21, 1963…shortly after lunch Honolulu time, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam
Henry Cabot Lodge made a long distance call from the lobby of the Royal
Hawaiian Hotel…This distinguished diplomat had access to phones in privacy from
his room or the military circuits at no cost…yet he was seen, according to the
Star Bulletin, with a stack of quarters in his hand putting coin after coin
into a pay phone…Lodge as the only person of the seven member policy-making
body to stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…the others stayed in the military
quarters.”
JFK wouldn’t hold that meeting with Lodge on November 24.
LBJ would.
In the wake of JFK’s assassination, Republicans were
assessing their chances of defeating LBJ in the 1964 election
.
Eisenhower called Cab to see if he would return from Vietnam to run for the
Republican nomination. Cab declined.
Cab and Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ’s Secretary of Defense,
went
on a tour of South Vietnam. McNamara recommended to LBJ to “furnish
assistance and support to South Vietnam for as long as it takes to bring the
insurgency under control.” The next day National Security Adviser McGeorge
Bundy, on LBJ’s behalf, enacted McNamara’s recommendations in NSA Memorandum
288. The Vietnam War was escalating.
Two Boston political families: the Kennedys – who were of Boston society, and the Lodges – who were Boston society. Two political
dynasties intersecting as they each fell and rose, respectively. Anti-immigrant
(and, thus, anti-Catholic) Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who almost single-handedly
kept the United States out of the League of Nations, a titan of American
politics, kept the Lodge dynasty alive, besting a Kennedy in the process. The
Kennedys seemingly derailed the Lodge political dynasty with the 1952 election,
but was kept alive by Eisenhower and later by JFK himself. If JFK was
undermining Lodge’s foreign policy goals, and embarrassing him in the process, of
what could Lodge be capable?
