Journalism and the Right Crowd
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Journalism and the Right Crowd Walter Lippmann and the American Century By Ronald Steel Atlantic Little, Brown $19.95 699pp. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Walter Lippmann entered journalism in...
...In his late years, he became a militant critic of the American role in Vietnam...
...Three months after the Nazis came to power, Lippmann warned against making hasty judgments of the new regime...
...In sum, concluded the amateur psychoanalyst, FDR was "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would like very much to be President...
...Once Nikita Khrushchev, pleading a political crisis, sought to rearrange the date of a Lippman appointment...
...During the 1920s he moved on to write editorials for the New York World, the legendary newspaper graced with the bylines of Hey-wood Broun and Franklin P. Adams, served for a time as the paper's executive editor and supervised its editorial page...
...If that much abused designation "opinion-maker" applied to anyone, it was Lippmann-even though the views he purveyed often were those of his influential friends in the business community and the Washington Establishment...
...Khrushchev kept the appointment...
...Similar deficiencies of social concern marred Lippmann's analysis of the Great Depression...
...This earned him the wrath of his former admirer, Lyndon Johnson, a new experience for the confidant of presidents...
...After he discarded his youthful radicalism, Lippmann never had much sympathy for any of the downtrodden...
...His judgments of the mighty frequently are embarrassing and difficult for his biographer to justify...
...The imperious visitor informed the leader of the Soviet Union that his plans could not be altered...
...The great romance of his life occurred in his middle 40s...
...A New Yorker cartoon portraying two dowagers in a dining car had one of them saying, "Of course I only take a cup of coffee in the morning...
...And in the musical Pal Joey, as the less proper stripper disrobed, she remarked, "Zip, Walter Lippmann wasn't brilliant today...
...His first marriage was to a woman who shared as few of his interests as he did of hers...
...The murder of blacks by white mobs did not ascend to this dignity...
...Steel correctly notes that for others, it "aroused passions, divided families, defined loyalties, and spawned a literature of social protest and engagement...
...As Lippmann aged and was less and less able to move in the company of the eminent, Helen's impatience with him increased...
...Although he encountered John Maynard Keynes in 1919 at the Versailles peace conference and continued to meet him from time to time, he profited not at all from Keynes' evolving support for activist public policy...
...Thrift was his great remedy...
...His political discrimination appeared to go downhill from there...
...he was not troubled by the tribulations of the sort of people with whom he did not mingle...
...She died of cardiac arrest before Lippmann did...
...A cup of coffee and Walter Lippmann is all I need...
...Her abiding abhorrence of illness finally led her to place her husband in a nursing home...
...Ronald Steel began work on this book while Lippmann was still alive and, as the authorized biographer, had full access to Lippmann's private papers...
...Before he embarked on his annual swing around the major European capitals, he was briefed by secretaries of state and entrusted with delicate missions for presidents...
...Jewish anti-Semitism colored his views even into the Hitler era...
...The moral here for ambitious columnists: Far better to be wrong for conventional reasons than prematurely right on grounds unpopular with business and political leaders...
...His itinerary resembled that of a visiting statesman, his precious time doled out to heads of state, prime ministers and influential intellectuals...
...Whatever the case, Steel has made it unnecessary to read anything further about Walter Lippmann...
...He published books as well...
...After Pearl Harbor, it was the older Robert A. Taft who, alone in the Congress, opposed the deportation of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps...
...For five years, he stayed mercifully away from Jewish affairs, but in 1938 he was delphically prepared to send European Jews to Africa...
...Echoing Herbert Hoover, he feared that Federal help for the unemployed would "corrupt" the character of those aided...
...Lippmann, fresh from a briefing by the general in charge of the shameful operation, solemnly instructed his readers that the deportations were necessary because the entire Pacific Coast stood "in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without...
...Responsibility, dispassion and respect for the opinions of the successful of authoritative middle age were characteristics Lippmann acquired early and retained throughout most of his life...
...Stone to one of his big Washington parties...
...Steel paraphrases his reasoning: "Would it be fair, he asked, to judge the French by the Terror, Protestantism by the Ku Klux Klan, the Catholic Church by the Inquisition...
...Here is Lippmann on the subject: "I never took a passionate, partisan interest in the Spanish Civil War...
...They reveal a personal life less satisfactory than the glittering public career...
...I cannot help wondering whether Steel came to his task with more enthusiasm for Lippmann than he had at the end...
...A determined assimilationist and non-Zionist, he became the token Jew in clubs like the River and Metropolitan...
...Taxed beyond endurance, his biographer regretfully observes: "He seemed to ignore that for many those appetites were as simple as a job, a roof, and a meal...
...On high constitutional principle, he opposed the child-labor amendment and early payment of veterans' bonuses...
...In 1932, he favored Newton Baker over Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the Democratic candidate...
...Lippmann soon changed course and supported the New Deal through its initial two years...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Walter Lippmann entered journalism in 1914 as an editor of the fledgling New Republic...
...Or, in Lippmann's own unforgivable words, "the Jews by their parvenus...
...The second marriage, at least in Steel's discreet account of it, was happier than the first, although Helen's temper is described as "vile...
...Lippmann became the quintessential insider...
...Between 1931-57, he devoted only 10 of his columns to segregation and, to cite Steel again, "As late as 1955 he could refer perfunctorily in one of his books to the 'special conditions of the South.'" He endorsed senatorial filibusters even when that meant blocking antilynching bills, for "If the spirit of democracy is to be maintained, a minority must never be coerced unless the reasons for coercing it are decisive and overwhelming...
...So much for civil liberties in wartime...
...My mind works like a spotlight on things, and it wasn't one of those things that I was interested in at that time," Indeed, The pampered child ef wealthy Qerman Jews, Lippmann clearly grew up sharing their distaste for the uncouth Yiddish-speakers from Eastern Europe: the type who encourage anti-Semitism and queer the pitch for the better crowd...
...The object of his affections, Helen Byrne Armstrong, happened to be married at the time to Lippmann's best friend, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs...
...An innovation when it began, the column was to be a model for such commentators as the Alsops, Lippmann's friend James Reston, Joseph Kraft, plus a host of lesser pundits...
...He is an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything...
...This is a sad but continuously intelligent and interesting chronicle...
...His international fame and influence, however, derived from "Today and Tomorrow, " the widely syndicated column he launched in 1936 and continued writing until his retirement in 1973...
...The civil war in Spain did not move Lippmann either...
...On the deck of a warship, he argued, "everyone should be compelled to prove he has a good reason for being there" and "nobody's constitutional rights include the right to business on a battlefield...
...His name was as recognizable as that of a mere, transient President of the United States...
...only by accident did the aggrieved husband discover the liaison between his trusted wife and devoted friend...
...Americans, he instructed the readers of the Ladies' Home Journal, lacked "firm and convincing standards by which to control the growth of their appetites for material things...
...His notoriously wrongheaded assessment described Roosevelt as "a highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions...
...Lippmann unheroic-ally concealed the affair as long as he could...
...The subsequent divorce created something of a scandal...
...The United States manifestly could not be expected to entertain their alien presence...
...With the honorable exception of Vietnam, Lippmann's record on issues tended to be conservative and unenterprising...
...Then he became distressed by Roosevelt's continuing emphasis upon social reform and voted in 1936 for Alf Landon...
...To people like myself growing up during the 1930s, it demonstrated the triumph of evil...
...By turns, Lippmann somewhat cautiously admired Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Al Smith...
...Personally shocked and disappointed by the mendacity of the likes of McGeorge Bundy and the president himself-insiders, after all, are not expected to lie to each other, no matter how necessary therapeutic deception of the public may be -lippmann became sufficiently disaffected to invite I.F...
...Certainly I know of few authorized biographies in which the author quarrels so often with his "hero...
...So it went: Dewey in 1948, Eisenhower in 1952 (though he considered Stevenson the better man) and Nixon in 1968...
...Like a great many economists, Lippmann favored higher taxes and a balanced Federal budget...
...As a young man, Lippmann was a mild socialist...
Vol. 63 • September 1980 • No. 16
