He was the ultimate Nepo Baby.
In 1960 4 veterans were on the ballot, JFK and Nixon, and their veep candidates.
Nixon was a respected Navy Lt. Commander in the Pacific.
LBJ as a Navy Lt. Commander was awarded a silver Star.
Henry Cabot Lodge was a big-time hero and Nixon’s running mate.
“Lodge was a major in the 1st Armored Division. That tour ended in July 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered congressmen serving in the military to resign one of the two positions, and Lodge, who chose to remain in the Senate, was ordered by Secretary of War Henry Stimson to return to Washington.
After returning to Washington and winning re-election in November 1942, Lodge went to observe allied troops serving in Egypt and Libya, and in that position was on hand for the British retreat from Tobruk.
Lodge served the first year of his new Senate term, but then resigned his Senate seat on February 3, 1944 in order to return to active duty, the first U.S. Senator to do so since the Civil War. He saw action in Italy and France.
Promoted to lieutenant colonel, in the fall of 1944 Lodge single-handedly captured a four-man German patrol. By March 1945 he was decorated with the French Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre with palm. His American decorations included the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star Medal. At the end of the war in 1945 he served as a liaison and interpreter to U.S. Sixth Army Group commander General Jacob Devers in Devers’ surrender negotiations with the German forces in western Austria.
After the war Lodge returned to Massachusetts and resumed his political career. He continued his status as an Army Reserve officer and rose to the rank of major general.”