George Cabot Lodge, who unlike four of his ancestors lost in his attempt to gain a Massachusetts seat in the U.S. Senate, but who did all right at another family institution, Harvard University, where he became a surprisingly anticapitalist business professor, died on Jan. 4. He was 98.
His death was announced by Campbell Funeral Home, which is, appropriately enough, on Cabot Street in Beverly, Mass., where Mr. Lodge lived and which has been home to his family for generations.
That Senate race, a 1962 contest against Edward (Ted) M. Kennedy, was significant in several respects.
First, it made Mr. Kennedy a senator just months after turning 30, the minimum age required by the Constitution. He stayed in the job until his death 47 years later, amassing one of the longest careers in the Senate’s history.
Second, the ’62 race represented the fourth time since 1916 when a member of the Cabot Lodge family, an old and distinguished clan of Boston Protestant Republicans, had run for office against the Kennedy-Fitzgeralds, two rising, conjoined families of Boston Catholic Democrats.
The first race — a Senate election in which Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., the incumbent, faced John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Boston’s former mayor and the maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy — was a dominant Cabot Lodge victory.
The next two races pitted Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., George’s father, against John F. Kennedy. In 1952, Mr. Lodge Jr. lost his Senate seat to Mr. Kennedy, and in 1960, Mr. Lodge lost to Mr. Kennedy again, as Richard Nixon’s running mate on the Republican presidential ticket.
Round Four, in 1962, signified the end of not only the families’ rivalry but also, it seemed, the Cabot Lodge political dynasty itself and, with it, their style of liberal Republicanism.
No member of the family held electoral office after Gov. John Davis Lodge, George’s uncle, lost to Abraham A. Ribicoff, the Democratic nominee, in Connecticut’s 1954 race, according to “The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War,” a 2020 book by Luke A. Nichter.
Despite his loss, George Cabot Lodge spoke warmly about the Kennedys.
“I don’t suppose that there had ever been public servants whom I have admired more than President Kennedy and Bobby,” Mr. Lodge said in a 2005 oral history with the Miller Center, a University of Virginia institute for study of the U.S. presidency.
“When we confronted one another,” Mr. Lodge said about Ted Kennedy, “I can’t remember anything on which we disagreed.”
Mr. Lodge supported civil rights, foreign aid and combating unemployment. He began to feel alienated from the Republican Party with the presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and he officially became a Democrat in the early 2000s.
Mr. Lodge faced obstacles in the ’62 race worse than agreement with the other side. On the night of the race’s big debate, held over a clubhouse dinner, his opponent’s big brother, the president, announced on TV that there were Soviet missiles in Cuba.
“That was over the fruit cup,” Mr. Lodge recalled. “Over the dessert, Ted and I were supposed to be debating. So, needless to say, I was at a slight disadvantage.”
Ted Kennedy won with 1,162,611 votes to Mr. Lodge’s 877,669.
George Cabot Lodge was born on July 7, 1927, in Boston. His mother, Emily (Sears) Lodge, aided his father’s political career.
Stephen Hess, a former staff assistant in the Eisenhower administration, estimated that George had eight congressional ancestors. He was directly descended from George Cabot, a Massachusetts senator in the 1790s, and Elijah H. Mills, a Massachusetts senator in the 1820s.
“We tease him about his 19th century concept of public service,” George said about his father, “but it’s his whole life.”
After two years in the Navy, George graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in American history and literature. While a student, he met and married Nancy Kunhardt. After her death, in 1997, he married Susan Powers, who died in 2024.
He is survived by six children from his first marriage, Nancy Lodge, Emily Lodge, Dorothy Peabody, Cabot, George and David; 13 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
Early in his career, Mr. Lodge worked as a reporter and columnist at the Boston Herald and as a labor official in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. In Washington, he met and befriended Bobby Kennedy.
He left his White House job to run for the Senate before realizing his friend’s brother would be his opponent.
In later years, he became a professor at Harvard Business School, where he railed against values of American capitalism such as “individualism, competition, private enterprise and private property,” The New York Times reported in 1972.
His research into economic development in Latin America helped inspire Congress in 1970 to form the Inter-American Foundation, which has funded thousands of small-scale civic endeavors. Mr. Lodge resigned from his role as an adviser in 1983, in protest of the policies of Ronald Reagan. The group has been a part of legal battles surrounding funding and foreign aid during the second administration of President Trump.
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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