Walter Lippmann and the American Century

To James Thurber, in a 1943 New Yorker cartoon, Walter Lippmann was the object of respectful humor: a wife looks up from a newspaper and tells her husband, "Lippmann scares me this morning." To Judge Learned Hand, Colonel House, and five hundred guests at a testimonial dinner in 1931, he was, in the words of Time magazine, "their Moses, their prophet of Liberalism." To Dean Acheson, writing his memoirs, he was "that ambivalent Jeremiah." To Woodrow Wilson, for whom Lippmann prepared several of the famous Fourteen Points, his judgment was "most unsound"; to Lyndon Johnson, it was ultimately far worse than that. The one inescapable conclusion to be drawn from his six decades as a public correspondent is that Lippmann was America's, and perhaps the world's, most influential journalist.

That this should be so, when he changed his views so radically and so often, and indeed when he was so often wrong, is at first puzzling. But there were good reasons for it. His style, for one thing. From his Harvard days, the student and protégé of William James, George Santayana, and Charles Copeland commanded a forceful rhetoric that at best was both simple and magisterial. His concerns were elevated above political gossip; his focus was long and clear in almost everything he wrote, from his muckracking days as a young New Republic editor to his profoundly conservative middle years. Though he often came about 180 degrees within a few months, he was seldom ambivalent at any moment, and his limpid, reasonable prose gave his readers an impression of assurance and profundity.

He was influential as well because he developed with the nation's politicians a symbiotic relationship that enabled him to write about their policies with a degree of prescience, since in some instances he helped form them. Ronald Steel, in his insightful and stylish biography, credits Lippmann with a seminal role in shaping American war aims in 1917; in helping Senator Borah defeat the Versailles Treaty; in settling an angry dispute with Mexico in the late 1920s; in developing the concepts of the 1940 destroyer-bases deal and of Lend-Lease; and even in responding to Soviet threats after the war. According to Steel:

The Soviets-citing an agreement reached at Yalta and Potsdam-put pressure on Turkey for a naval base in the Dardanelles and joint control over the straits. In late February 1946, Lippmann talked the matter over with Navy Secretary Forrestal, with whom he had grown quite friendly, and together they decided that the United States should make a show of force in the Mediterranean to indicate its interest in Turkey. Forrestal came up with the idea of sending the battleship Missouri to return the body of the Turkish ambassador, who had just died in Washington. Lippmann hailed the plan in his column, (p. 427)

Steel may exaggerate Lippmann's contribution to making this decision and others cited in Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Public men have been known to induce powerful opinion-makers to believe that they have played a key part in forming policies, in order to give them a stake in celebrating those policies. And though Lippmann in later life warned his fellow journalists to beware of growing too close to politicians, he was himself not only susceptible to the attractions of power and ambitious to share in its use, but rightly considered himself one of the elite. For historical purposes, it is a pity that Steel's many accounts of Lippmann's participation in making American policy could not be posed to Wilson, House, Dwight Morrow, Forrestal, and the others with whom he is said to have shared their creation.

Still, it is undeniable that many public figures sought Lippmann's advice, and, like millions of their fellow Americans, were persuaded by his books and columns. Style alone could not have made this so, nor long-term consistency of opinion, since this was lacking. What most attracted his readers and won him their trust over more than half a century was, I believe, his constant effort to be fair; his essential conservatism; and his willingness to traverse, in his own mind, almost the entire range of political opinion. He was, in his youth, a socialist. Later, he found in scientific "disinterestedness" the key to sound government. Having once apotheosized the masses, he came to believe that democratic man was totally incapable of understanding the complex world about him, and should, for his own good, give over to experts the management of public affairs. At last, in his sulfurous tirades against American involvement in Vietnam, he denounced the experts who had planned it. In this life-long saga what mattered most was not the wide variety of his opinions, but his honesty in embracing, if only for a time, the many conflicting truths that make up truth.

On occasion, his fairness led him into dark corners. Immediately following the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Lippmann, then editorial page director of the New York World, composed a piece that praised both the Lowell Committee for its "bravery" in confirming the jury's guilty verdict, and Felix Frankfurter and the defense for upholding the "rights of the humblest and most despised." Amos Pinchot replied that "the important thing is that the contending factions should be united by a common appreciation of Walter Lippmann's fairness."

Later, in 1933, Lippmann sought to be fair to Nazi Germany. Following a seemingly conciliatory speech by Hitler, he wrote: "We have heard once more, through the fog and the din, the hysteria and the animal passions of a great revolution, the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people." Ronald Steel writes: