AND LIPPMANN STILL GOES ON'

...And then go out and eat a hearty lunch served in dainty flesh-pots and paid for with 30 pieces of silver...

...He goes on to explain that what makes us "the oldest and most stable large democracy in the world" is that "the party rising to power is not in sharp contrast with but is a 'carbon copy' of the party it is displacing...

...Reverently I carried my copy of the New York Herald-Tribune to my hotel room, spread "Today and Tomorrow" on my desk, and started to find out whither we have all been drifting in the month during which I have been Lippmannless...

...On the right, a little girl waved an American flag...

...Then there was the New Republic phase with Walter in the role of Delphic oracle to Wilson's New Freedom...

...Gosh, it makes a traveller from beyond the daily delivery zones of the Tribune feel like Rip Van Winkle to hear from the horse's mouth or vice versa all that has been going on since the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November...

...There on the masthead, to the left of the eagle-mounted clock, pointing for reasons which I have now forgotten to 13 minutes past six, sat Father Time brooding over his hour glass behind which an Egyptian fellah plowed the fields, with the Pyramids as background...

...I hope F.D.R...

...In a confused welter of change the Tribune stands, lasting as the Pyramids, yet progressive as the masthead locomotive, puffing smoke out of its pot-bellied stack...

...Like the bear and Moses he has come over the mountain with that Law to the effect that if we don't have a Democratic Administration, we have, can you guess?, a Republican...

...Then at length his star led him to the staid columns of the Niagara Hudson Power Company's favorite paper where ever since, under the aegis of Father Time and the little child waving the flag, he has been comforting the old gentlemen of the Union League and the young matrons of Englewood, N. J., with the impression that they are reading "highbrow stuff" when they turn to Lippmann...

...In the little girl's background was a factory and choo-choo train going over a bridge...

...When that crystal ball was shattered, Walter moved on to soothsaying for the old New York World...

...But Walter has spoken and let all us little people keep silence before him...

...It gives the reader an awed sense of the long Olympian vision of the stoutish, past middle-aged Harvard prodigy who lo...

...They are the men who, having lived in the real world and not in the dream world of their private resentments and jealousies, accept the fact that the period of history which comprises the New Deal and the great World War cannot be treated as if it had not happened...

...Here I was a stranger in a great, wild country missing something that was part and parcel of my East Coast routine...

...And inside the dear old paper on the page well ahead of the editorials damning John L. Lewis, the New Deal, and the Japanese with impartial fervor, Walter Lippmann, like Tennyson's brook, was still going on...

...Today and Tomorrow" Walter, as all the cultured world knows, calls his daily pontification, and what an appropriate head for Walter's column to be sure...

...True, there is the formality of a national election to be gone through with next year, but Walter says that "the responsibility of governing the country" has been practically taken over by the GOP and '44 will simply confirm this patent fact...

...This Changing Walter My world resumed its unity...

...And just now, passing an out-of-town newspaper stand, I found what I had been missing...

...Found it in the familiar sight of the masthead of the good old New York Herald-Tribune ("Grandfather is dead, please cancel our subscription to the Tribune...

...They are the men who know that the terms on which life has to be lived in the near future are set by what has inexorably occurred in the recent past...

...He goes always down to the central core of things and comes up with a Law...

...At her feet lay a cog wheel and a sheaf of wheat...

...It seems that we are now being governed by the Re-publicans in everything but name...

...My God, in New York they pay people for writing things like that...

...To be sure, there was a time shortly after graduation when Lippmann was out to scrap a lot of the old Republic's capitalist foundations and make a Socialist America out of the leftovers...

...these many years has been advising this Republic on its manifest destiny...

...A Cozy Life The only definite plank which Walter has as yet laid down for our soon to be rulers, the "post-New Deal Republicans," is a bust-the-labor unions program...

...It might seem to us "lesser breeds without the law" that Walter should make an exception in the case of this present Administration which has been rejuvenating itself since 1932 with a truly Steinbach glandular facility...

...Be Still, Little People Walter is not satisfied with the infantile explanation that a lot of folks voted Republican last time out of sheer lassitude, and a lot more stayed enthusiastically away from the polls and played golf or gin rummy...

...In his present mood he is likely to upset all of Walter's prognostications by snatching the plank from under the triumphant GOP and thereby clearing out some more space at the top for such starry-eyed liberals as Averill Harriman, Steelman Stettinius, maybe even Walter himself...

...It must be sort of cozy to sit in a big office on West 41st Street dictating to an awed stenographer a paragraph such as the following: "The post-New Deal Republicans will prevail...

...This time the Law is that no party, once in power, "seems ever to be capable of rejuvenating itself by retirements at the top in order to clear the way for those who are rising to the top...

...didn't read that particular column...

...My lovely one world of fish cakes and the Tribune for breakfast back in the days of my Manhattan youth in the fading brown-stone house on West 73rd Street...

...Lost, lost as Tom Wolfe used to put it, beyond time and the Hudson River...