Walter Lippmann and the American Century

...We need another book that will place Lippmann in the gathering stream of anti-democratic theory and consider the democratic defense mounted explicitly against him by John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems and other authors...

...But Steel rightly judges him in the end not just by his philosophy, but by his actions, which frequently rose above opportunism...

...I don't love any idea sufficiently to worry ten minutes if someone compelled me to abandon it," he wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr...

...It spanned nearly six decades, including active participation as a propagandist in the war effort between 1915-1918 and the anti-war effort between 1965-1968...

...But it is worth noting that the task remains for another author to write Lippmann's intellectual biography...

...Woodrow Wilson, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson all came in time to discover...

...He was a committed climber who early learned to cultivate the wellbred and powerful...

...The book treats Lippmann's public and private lives in such detail and for the most part with such probing discrimination, that it is hardly fair to criticize it for not providing a full analysis of his intellectual contribution...

...Steel may be right that Lippmann was not at his best as a "theorist," yet his writings were extremely important in the emergence of an anti-democratic consensus among political observers and thinkers in the middle third of the twentieth century...

...Just after the Nazi bookburnings of May, 1933, he stressed in his column that it would be unfair to judge the Germans by1 the Nazis—just as it would be wrong to judge "the Jews by . their parvenus...

...The account of Lippmann's early years is especially vivid...

...At age sixteen he entered Harvard, where distinguished faculty including William James, George Santayana, and Graham Wallas took turns praising his precociousness...

...Khrushchev quickly found a way to accommodate him...

...far from amounting to a moral failing, it was an uncontrollable eruption of the private, submerged Lippmann...

...The president, he wrote in 1966, was suffering from a "Messianic megalomania," struggling to "kill mosquitoes with tanks and build a Great Society with B-52s...

...are the very soul of the philosopher projected," if "the man's philosophy is his autobiography"—as Lippmann wrote in a passage that Steel places at the start of the book—then Lippmann was the consummate opportunist, tailoring his convictions to suit the times...

...Recovering from his stupefaction, and quick, as always, to seize upon an opportunity, Lippmann suggested that they take a little walk together through the Yard . . . The philosopher, impressed by Lippmann's charm and intellectual curiosity, suggested he come to tea...

...Private tea with James turned into a regular ritual...

...He was also uncomfortable about being Jewish...

...Steel rightly takes Lippmann to task for his occasional anti-Semitic remarks, which he considers to be not just an error of judgment or a psychological blindspot, but a moral failure...

...In the late forties he registered a strong dissent from the Cold War consensus, and in the sixties he became one of the earliest and most persuasive critics of Johnson's war...

...His career was astonishingly long...

...LBJ summoned up in him the kind of invective to which he had rarely resorted since his youth...

...His answer was to become an editorialist—during the twenties for Pulitzer's New York World, and starting in the thirties for the Herald Tribune...

...His total devotion to a public career among the men of the political and economic elites was a way of both submerging his private life and transcending his Jewish roots...

...After the war, still short of his thirtieth birthday, Lippmann stopped to ask himself how he could best exert influence in an era of deep public disillusionment...

...During the war he ingratiated himself with Colonel House and Newton Baker, respectively Woodrow Wilson's closest aide and Secretary of War, and played a leading part in deCommonweal: 632 signing the Fourteen Points...

...in 1915...

...It was a role to which, with his remarkable critical and journalistic abilities, he was well suited...

...After graduating in 1910 Lippmann worked as secretary to the Socialist mayor of Schenectady, did research and writing for Lincoln Steffens, published two important books on politics, and joined the New Republic as one of its three founding editors in 1915—when he was all of twenty-five...

...After a lifetime of striving to be an insider, Lippmann embraced the role of outsider with consuming passion...

...As Steel notes, Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) was in John Dewey's words "perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned...

...Lippmann was a pampered but unloved only child who early developed a steely emotional reserve as a defense against other people...

...No other columnist in American newspaper history has remotely approached Lippmann's influence...

...But while he would commonly surrender his journalistic detachment when a friendly leader first catered to him, men in power could not count indefinitely upon his loyalty—as...

...If "philosophies...

...When Khrushchev informed him that their interview in Moscow would have to be delayed a few days because of a political crisis, Lippmann replied that it would be quite impossible to change the schedule...

...That might be construed as intellectual humility—except that throughout his career Lippmann renounced one idea after another, even one book after another, with no explanation, no intellectual defense...

...But in discussing his affair with Helen Byrne Armstrong he tends to adopt Lippmann's own self-justifying posture...

...Like his first book/1 Preface to Politics (1913), it provided valuable support for the rising group of social scientists committed to the view that since "political belief and action, and indeed human nature itself, were essentially irrational, decision-making had to be increasingly restricted to professional elites...

...In the remaining thirty-five years of his editorship, as Steel points out, he refused to permit any references to Lippmann in the influential journal...

...By discounting the significance of Lippmann's ideas, Steel ironically seconds Lippmann's own early judgment of 7 November 1980: 633 their worth...

...Commonweal: 634...

...The nineteen-year-old opened it...

...His "Today and Tomorrow" column in the Tribune was eventually syndicated in over 200 dailies...

...The bad economic habits of the Jew," he wrote in 1915, "his exploiting of simple people, has caused his victims to assert their own nationality...

...He was a German-American Jew capable of promoting a quota on Jewish admissions at Harvard, making blatantly anti-Semitic statements in print, and ignoring the plight of European Jewry in the thirties and forties...

...He never forgave his former wife or his former best friend...

...James was so impressed by one of his published pieces that he knocked on Lippmann's dormitory door to congratulate him in person...

...It was no one's fault, and it made Lippmann—in Steel's view—not only a happier but in many ways a better person...

...Richard Wightman Fox AMONG American intellectuals in the twentieth century Walter Lippmann was one of a kind...

...On his frequent foreign tours heads of state tripped over one another trying to secure a place in his appointment book...

...It gave him "emotional strength" and delivered him from the "stoic detachment" to which he had surrendered during his first, unhappy marriage...

...Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of the Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs, was not so sure that it was ultimately all for the best...

...He was a cosmopolitan, "public" man who was at sea in the stormy waters of personal relations: in his forties, dissatisfied with his marriage, he leapt into a torrid, secret affair with his best friend's wife, decided to marry her when Hamilton Fish Armstrong accidentally learned of their deception, and then sent Armstrong an aggrieved letter that dwelt upon his own "unabated suffering...

...Steel's discussions, indeed dissection, of Lippmann's character puts the public career in perspective...

...Ronald Steel's monumental, authorized biography—based on Lippmann's unpublished letters, diaries, and oral reminiscences—is a masterful chronicle of the public life and a startling revelation of the private man...

...He came to speak of the Jews with the same dignified scorn as elite WASP nativists...

...He loved ideas, especially Platonic, "essentialist" ones, yet spent most of his adult life writing enormously influential editorials and columns- about the contingencies of politics and history...