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Robert K Brigham, Luke A. Nichter. The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 753–754, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae058
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Luke A. Nichter has written an insightful and ambitious political biography of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. He suggests that scholars have generally overlooked Lodge and the important role he played in the making of modern American foreign relations. Lodge, who served twice in the US Senate, was also Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign manager. Lodge was one of the first to recognize the general as a potential president. As a moderate Republican, Lodge ultimately rejected his famous grandfather’s isolationist views to become one of the leading American internationalists of the Cold War. He was instrumental in breaking Robert Taft’s stranglehold on the Republican Party in the 1950s, moving the party more into the mainstream on key domestic and foreign policy issues. Lodge was a progressive on labor issues and supported civil rights legislation repeatedly while in the Senate. Lodge’s internationalists views were on full display while he was Eisenhower’s US ambassador to the United Nations. According to Nichter, Lodge’s term at the United Nations was transformative—it “gave real legitimacy to the international body that served as a multilateral vehicle for US engagement with the world” (130).
