Walter Lippmann and the American Century
Article Summary
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.
Harry C. McPherson, Jr. is a partner in the firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard & McPherson. He was Special Counsel to Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965-69, and is the author of A Political Education.
By this he meant that the Germans should not be judged simply by Nazi rantings or treated as permanent outcasts. . . . People were capable of both good and evil. 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? Or for that matter, "the Jews by their parvenus"? (p. 331)
That Lippmann could compare the flashiness of Jewish parvenus with terrorism and brutality is, as Steel writes, deeply shocking and offensive. In part, it must have emerged from his subliminal disdain for his own Jewishness, in part from a kind of cultural squeamishness that made order and tranquillity for him the chief constituents of a good society.
II
He was, both in his active social life and in his politics, a conservative-inclined, for the most part, to adopt the views and endorse the policies of those in power, at least at the beginning of their terms; then, as their inevitable failures or excesses carried them and the nation into stormy waters, to chide them and at last to demand their removal-in order that "safer" men, such as Landon, Willkie, Dewey, Eisenhower, and Nixon in 1968, might guide us to harbor. This progress was doubtless consonant with that of many readers, whose more visceral feelings were confirmed by Lippmann's Olympian prose.
Conservative in general, but various in particulars:
During the 1920's, and much of the 1930's as well [Steel writes], Lippmann was neither consistent nor persuasive in his prescriptions for preventing war. Simultaneously espousing disarmament and American naval strength, international cooperation and an Anglo-American domination of the seas, American freedom of action and a "political equivalent of war," he reflected the confusions of the age. Like the broad-minded financiers who were his friends, he wanted stability within the framework of an international system that, far more than he realized, was already breaking down. (pp. 255-6)
If his proposals were contradictory, his fundamental preference for caution was clear. He was, throughout the period, pessimistic about the usefulness of American intervention. In 1935 he wrote:
A cold appraisal of the American interest which is, I take it, to protect our own development as a free nation, seems to me to lead to the conclusion that we can contribute nothing substantially to the pacification of Europe today, that vague commitments would only mislead Europe and mask the realities. For the time being, therefore, our best course is to stand apart from European policies, (p. 334)
If this was true of Europe, it was even more true of Asia. When Japan seized Manchuria and Outer Mongolia, Lippmann wrote, "In the whole great region in which Japan claims predominance we have no particular political interest of our own to protect. If there is to be any concerted action, let the policy emanate from the governments which have a definite stake in the area"-Russia, China, the European powers. This was "a policy of realism."
The same realism caused him to think Chamberlain wise in 1938, because he was "expedient" in the face of superior force:
In dealing with these warrior statesmen, the democracies must not delude themselves with the idea that there is any bloodless, inexpensive substitute for the willingness to go to war. Collective security, economic sanctions, moral pressure, can be made effective only by nations known to be willing to go to war if necessary. If that willingness to fight does not exist, then Mr. Chamberlain is right when he concludes that he must try to make tolerable terms with the dictators, (p. 370)
This is Realpolitik at its purest. It offers a specific application of Lippmann's famous dictum that a workable foreign policy "consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power." Where power (which includes national will) is limited, so should be commitments. That it would have been better for Britain, the United States and France to have expressed a common determination to resist German aggression in the mid-1930s-despite the reluctance of their people to risk the renewal of war-seems almost a wistful judgment today, compared to Lippmann's astringent realism at the time. No one knows where such an allied policy, which would have created political storms in each country, might have gotten us. We all know, of course, where Munich led.
What runs through Lippmann's commentaries from the 1930s forward is a plea for the recognition of limits. Acknowledge the limits of your power, and of your essential interests. Acknowledge that equivalent powers also have essential interests, which you must respect in order to avoid war-to maintain tranquillity. This was not a counsel of appeasement: Lippmann was not pleased that behind Chamberlain were few Britons besides Winston Churchill who were willing to beard the Nazis. It was, in his mind, a counsel of realism.
It led him to propose, toward the end of World War II, that the West acknowledge and respect Russia's dominant influence in Eastern Europe, a region it considered vital to its security. This was, he argued, hardly heretical; the United States, after all, had a "privileged zone" in Latin America and the Pacific. Great powers required such friendly buffer zones. Thus the "right-wing" Poles-the anti-communist ones-should be ignored if they sought to create a hostile coalition against the Soviet Union. Lippmann did not argue, as some American liberals did in the aftermath of the war, that the Soviets would bring a more liberal and beneficent rule to areas long dominated by monarchies and privileged classes. He saw it purely in terms of territorial interests, the mutual recognition of which, he believed, would insure the peace.
