Walter Lippmann, Moral Maverick
Crawford, Kenneth
Walter Lippmann, Moral Maverick Herald Tribune Pundit Gets His Back Rubbed By Kenneth Crawford AFTER the last war Walter Lipp-mann "did not have the tense to - see thst the acquisition of the...
...Lippmann knew they were worrying about the way the United States was pursuing a unilateral policy in Japan and at the same time objecting to Russia's pursuit of a unilateral policy in Eastern Europe and the Balkans...
...Perhaps he is indulging in wishful thinking in his repeated insistence that the American people are confused about it all...
...The fuddy-duddy leaders resent the fact that labor is gaining a foothold in the management of the Red Cross...
...In the name of sweet liberty Russia must be given the liberty of threatening us and the rest of the world with the discovery our scientists have made—and this at once...
...The distinction between democratic British Socialism and dictatorial Russian Communism is well understood hi this country...
...And in a later column Lippmann found that they also were "badly confused by a mistaken estimate of the influence which the Soviet Union is able to exert beyond its own frontiers...
...What Lippmann thought and did after the last war isn't particularly important anyway—if he lacked sense and was weak-minded, as he so disarmingly contends, let us attribute his folly to the exuberance of youth, an affliction common to us all at one time or another, and get on with it But what Lippmann does and says now, after another war has come and gone, is important because he is unquestionably the most influential foreign aft*airs commentator in the United States...
...It is a good idea, therefore, to know what he it advocating and why This ia not at simple as it seems...
...In his first encyclical after the back-rubbing interlude, he said: "With nothing to do for a fortnight except to have my back rubbed and to wonder about thinga in general, I have been asking myself how much our accumulating difficulties srise from wanting to go in opposite directions at the ssme time...
...In his case the course which he colls realistic will be qtttU literally reactionary, representing thi reaction of an idealist from Wilsonmn idealism—the stuff he fell for when hi was young and weak-minded...
...They are often more persuasive than they have any right to be for that reason...
...corporated Into the Soviet Union...
...The American conscience is divided and, therefore, we are not thinking clearly about the settlement of the war and about the future which It will shape...
...Walter Lippmann, Moral Maverick Herald Tribune Pundit Gets His Back Rubbed By Kenneth Crawford AFTER the last war Walter Lipp-mann "did not have the tense to - see thst the acquisition of the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator by Jspan was a fatal blow to our defenses in the Pacific...
...If they did, more of them would throw up...
...Thinking Americans read the election returns from Britain and France with about as much understanding as Lippmann...
...Many of Lippmann's constant readers probably never know exactly what he is getting at...
...The AFL and CIO contributed J3O.0O0,-000 last year, with an administrative cost of less than one percent...
...He answered that Britain and the USA couldn't guarantee the independence of Eastern Europe but that Russia might allow Poland and the other states in question to become neutrals between East and Wsst, their independence guaranteed by law rather than force—"if Russia will permit them to exist at all as independent states...
...I'm willing to take him at his word...
...The American people, being reasonably bright, Lippmann to the contrary notwithstanding, probably understand that too...
...He did quite a bit of thinking about the American people and their dopiness while in a hospital having his back rubbed and he has been harping on It ever since...
...The reason he gives for sdviting the Truman administration to give up the secrets of the atomic bomb's manufacture is that we as Americans believe in liberty and therefore can't reasonably "establish a censorship of science...
...Red Cress Bureaucrats Attacked • Mrs...
...In other words, he wants the United States Government to acknowledge Russia's murderous police states in unhappy Eastern Europe and to hand over to the swashbuckling hierarchy everything we know about the atomic explosive...
...But even Lippmann could scarcely have forseen with what heavy-handed stupidity th« Russians would go about it, particularly at London...
...We had not pillaged the land or indulged in the hypocrisy of setting up a puppet government and calling it an independent democracy...
...Eugene Meyer assailed the reactionary faction in control of the American Red Cross and said it must rejuvenate its '•antiquated organization...
...No nutter...
...Even Lippmann had his doubts...
...We have this on authority of Lippmann himself in the introduction to his book, published in 1943 and still selling in the book shops, V. S. Foreign Policy Shield of the Republic...
...Why should they have been...
...One wonders, in considering Lippmann's line on the atomic bomb, whether he won't be introducing another book in a few years, with the confession that he was a little soft-headed back in 1945...
...What he is telling them right now in fairly plain language, for him, is that they are a pack of hopelessly confused dopes...
...As for the puppet states, Lippmann argues that they must be recognized because "such influence as we can exert will be greater if we are present than if we stand aside...
...Lippmann is currently advocating a change in American foreign policy and again his counsel will have weight in Washington...
...Lippmann discovered it, apparently, only after ha had had his back rubbed...
...The trouble with them is that the major premise is so frequently incorrect It is easy to proceed from the premise that the poor American people are being taken in again, whether they are or not What Lippmann is advocating, often with logic so spurious that one wonders on second reading why It sounded reasonable the first time, is that we abandon our "inflated" moral principles and immediately "establish diplomatic relatione with all da facto governments, even puppet governments" in Europe and that we "seek security from the appalling danger of atomic explosions in the widest and freest diffusion of knowledge" about the atomic bomb...
...eludes an insatiably imperialistic Russie, Lippmann, on the rebound from Wil-sonianism, has become a moral maverick in world affairs and the "dopey" American people will do well to ignore his lip and let him wander among the appeas...
...Moreover, we had made it plain that Russia was welcome to heckle General MacArthur as a member of an advisory commission on Japan...
...Moreover, "American thinking has been much muddled on the whole subject (of European developments) because of the vulgar partisan trick of calling everyone a Communist who is to the left of the extreme right...
...The bureaucrats are more interested in power than in service to mankind, slit said...
...There is good reason to assume that the book he introduced with so much self-deprecation greatly influenced not only the American people but high officials of the Roosevelt Administration as well...
...Here one can't help wondering whether that isn't what Lippmann thinks necessary snd therefore correct The key to Lippmann's current so-called thinking probably is to M found in his book, which in effect Invented the "nuclear alliance" ef Britain, Rusaia and America, around which a world organisation, admittedly undemocratic and amoral in concept, was to run the world by cornering force...
...They knew what Lippmann also knew, but hadn't bothered to mentien, that our handling of Japan, a defeated enemy, and Russia's handling of, say, Poland, a defeated Ally, were not comparable...
...He seems bent upon defending it with all his considerable journalistic talents and prestige, however unpromising it has become...
...I shall not be so brash as to dispute Lippman's conclusions about Lippmann...
...The point is that it doesn't much matter to a Pole with a Red Army bayonet in his ribs that he isn't being taken in by Russian propaganda...
...Nor were the American people confused by a false estimate of Russia's influence in Eastern Europe...
...Obviously, he is still resigned now that Russia's behavior has clearly shown that she will reduce Eastern Europe to a condition of complete slavery the moment it is abandoned by Great Britain and the United States...
...4/nerican Pwb/ic Not So Dumb ACTUALLY, the American people probably were not troubled in their con-cience about a fancied contradiction between our policy in the Pacific and our attitude toward Russia's policy in Eastern Europe...
...If Russia chooses to accept that offer, its representatives most certainly will be listened to with somewhat more courtesy than American advisers get in, let us say, Russian-operated Rumania...
...Indeed, it is not too extravagant to say that this book provided the first rationalisation of the foreign policy adopted by President Roosevelt as the European and Pacific wars were drawing to a close...
...What they have been slower to catch onto is the vulgar Communist device of calling all European non-Communista Fascists...
...Most Americans probably didn't realise that they had been suffering from schizophrenia ef the conscience...
...This organisation was to "preserve the national liberties of other peoples...
...As for the American people being tricked by the vulgar device of branding all liberals Communists, such a charge is a libel on the American JQ...
...As matters stand, Lippmann is stuck with his nuclear alliance...
...He wrote: "Does this mean that Poland, the Danubian states and the Balkan states have no prospect of assured independence and that they are destined inexorably to become satellites of Russia or to be In...
...So Lippmann was quite resigned to the possibility that Poland and the rest would be sold down the river to Russian dictatorship...
...It will be convenient to the defense in th« future as it has been in the past to close his eyes as long as possible to lots of unpleasant facta...
...Granting that there may be a good case against non-recognition as an habitual instrument of diplomatic policy, Lippmann must realize that to extend recognition to the puppets at this moment would be tantamount to approving of their puppetry and a sign to the world that we have abandoned Eastern Europe to the ungentle mercies of the Soviets...
...Lippmann also "was too weak-minded to take a stand against the exorbitant folly of the Washington Disarmament conference...
...ers of the current Cliveden Set...
...What Lippmann said should be done, wae done, up to and through San Francisco...
...They had know for months, if they read Lippmann's columnist colleague, Dorothy Thompson, or any one of several other commentators, or the daily news columns, that the Red Army's habits of rape, looting, and brigandage had endeared neither Russia nor Communism to the peoples of Eastern Europe...
...In accusing Americans of ignorance, Lippmanp is only resorting to a threadbare literary device, Hia carefully prepared columns are frequently syllogisms —major premise, minor premise, conclusion...
...Many hoped at the time Lippmann wrote title that the USSR might Join in "preserving the liberties'' aj> other peoples, even in Poland, but few well-informed students of Soviet history thought so...
...feetly willing to have the people of EasU era Europe pay a terrible pries for order under the aegis of a Big Three that i...
...This argument, praise be, hasn't as yet convinced the President, or Congress, or Albert Einstein—and almost certainly hasn't convinced the American public...
...He wanted it to be a polite job at least...
...He is per...
Vol. 28 • November 1945 • No. 47
