Walter Lippmann and the American Century

by Ronald Steel

The journalist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a magisterial figure who relished his role as an insider, an adviser to presidents, a shaper & sometime purveyor of government policy. Drawing on conversations with Lippmann & exclusive access to his private papers, Ronald Steel documents the broad flow of Lippmann's career from his brilliant Harvard days & his role in helping formulate Wilson's Fourteen Points in World War I to his bitter break with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam. Written with clarity & objectivity, this definitive biography presents a commanding portrait of a complicated man & "guides its reader through the first three-quarters of this American century"--The New Yorker.

Genres: History, Biography, American History, Journalism, Nonfiction, Politics, Autobiography

690 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Ronald Stee was an American writer, historian, and professor. He was the author of the definitive biography of Walter Lippmann.

Reviews

[Aaron Million · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walter Lippmann is a difficult person to read a biography of and come away liking him. An only child of wealthy parents, he had a classic East Coast Harvard path to a relatively comfortable life that allowed him to pursue his own pleasures and hob-knob with presidents and other politically powerful people. Ronald Steel breezes through Lippmann's childhood; we do not get a clear picture of whether he was happy or unhappy as a child, but one gets the sense that he felt isolated amongst the wealthy of New York City. The narrative slows down when Lippmann reaches Harvard, and here Steel focuses on some of the professors and other literary notables that influenced Lippmann's thinking. Being that he was not forced to find odd jobs while in college, he was free to focus on writing, thinking, and traveling. Lippmann quickly became influential out of all proportion to his age, especially given his lack of professional accomplishments. Before he was thirty, he had met with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Lippmann had a snobbish, condescending air about him – always trying to retain a detached view of worldly affairs and the everyday people caught up in them. This manifested itself in WWI: Lippmann was definitely of draft age and had no health issues. But he thought that he and his pen could not be spared, and that there were better uses of his service than being in the trenches with other young men of his age. Using his already growing influence, he was able to obtain a deferment, and then became a non-combat Captain. While it is true that he worked hard at trying to craft a peace treaty, this reminded me of rich people paying bounties to poor people in order to avoid serving in the Civil War.

It is ironic that someone so thin-skinned as Lippmann would become one of America's most well-known critics. Lippmann had a gift for writing, for putting down on paper cogent political thoughts. And he could and frequently did lacerate people with his pen. But when the pen was turned against him, Lippmann immediately became defensive and would often try to distance himself from any blame that might lay at his doorstep. When something that he was involved in failed, it invariably was not his fault.

Steel is very good at analyzing Lippmann's voluminous amount of writings, and of his political thought as he aged. He takes a fairly balanced approach, noting when Lippmann was inconsistent (which seemed to be quite often) but not harping on it. One area where Lippmann was unfortunately very consistent was in not writing about Jews. Steel posits that Lippmann held some sort of self-loathing for being Jewish himself, as throughout his life Lippmann did not come to the aid of Jewish people nor write approvingly about them. In the same vein, Lippmann had no compunction about severely impinging on civil liberties if he thought the cause was just. He approved the disgusting decision to essentially imprison Japanese Americans on the West Coast during WWII. It is beyond comprehension to me how anyone could have remotely thought that was the right thing to do. An unfortunate example of mob mentality, and Lippmann went right along with it and did not apologize for it.

One area that Lippmann was consistent on, and consistently right on, was Vietnam. He did not view the U.S. sending more and more “advisers” there as a positive development. After Kennedy's assassination, he spoke frequently with Lyndon Johnson and his advisers, urging a negotiated settlement and withdrawal. As he did with so many other people, Johnson misled Lippmann into believing that he was serious about finding a peaceful solution and was not looking to escalate the war. Eventually, Lippmann realized that he had been lied to, and he turned savage in his attacks on Johnson and his administration.

Steel reviews in detail Lippmann's middle-aged affair with Helen Armstrong, wife of one of his closest friends, Hamilton Fish Armstrong. Lippmann was stuck in a loveless marriage and found a way out of it, ultimately not caring who he hurt in the process. In an action that speaks about what type of person he was almost as loudly as the fact that he had an affair with a friend's wife, he refused to tell his wife, Kaye, that he wanted a divorce; instead, he pushed the task off on his father-in-law, who actually carried it out. He never saw his first wife again. Yet, at this exact time, he wrote to Helen that Kaye was a “coward about life” (page 359). Incredible. I actually had to re-read that part to make sure that the man had enough gall and chutzpah to write that. It is somewhat ironic that, in the last year of Lippmann's life, when he is rapidly deteriorating both physically and mentally, Helen sticks him in a nursing home and takes off. Basically, she abandoned her husband. Lippmann was not totally lost, and realized what she had done, but although saddened, did not seem to hold it against her. While this is sad, and it was equally sad to read of Lippmann's difficult final year of life, I could not feel sorry for him thanks to how he treated Kaye and also because of how he was in general towards people. Steel makes a case that much of Lippmann's haughtiness was due to him being innately shy. Perhaps this is so, yet the impression I got was not favorable.

This book got better as it went along, with Steel moving somewhat away from Lippmann's political thought and more towards the events that were occurring in his life. The cumulative effect that Lippmann had on society and leading politicians is notable. His era is one that has since passed; newspaper columnists were widely respected, and widely read. Lippmann led a long and interesting life, and the pure scope of his life is fascinating to read about. Spanning Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, Lippmann was a major player in politics. Ultimately, this is an interesting look at early and mid 20th century American politics.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Public Intellectuals of the early 20th Century occupy a strange place in the historical record. In their day they held immense influence as thinkers and popular philosophers but since their output was mostly journalism (a transitory medium), the actual evidence of their brilliance is mixed at best. Lippmann, like his great rival Dewey, tried to rectify this by writing dense philosophical text, which today are mostly used to scare students into showing up for test review sessions. Lippmann’s strength as a writer and thinker was always its speed, not depth. The modern usage of “pundit” was coined to describe him, and his influence is directly tied to mass media supplanting parties as the primary unit of political mobilization. Having dedicated his intellectual life to warning of the dangers of mass democracy, the fact that he owed his influence to the democratization of political influence holds an irony that this book fails to explore. It was in his role as an instant analyst and philosopher that Lippmann helped usher in the end of the traditional public intellectual, as all pretext of depth and experience vanished, in favor of the camera’s demands for the new, new thing.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a delightful, if long, biography of probably the standout journalist of the 20th century ... and thus is aptly titled. Born in 1889 and passed in 1974, Lippmann's influence covers most of the 1900s ... in large part because he met with a total of 11 US presidents—beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson all the way through to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—and many of the world leaders who helped shape history, such as Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Nikita Khrushchev. He also cultivated relationships with leading jurists of the time, such as Learned Hand and Felix Frankfurter ... all the while living through two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam.

Lippmann's specialty seemed to be politics, and criticism of same from all viewpoints. His advice was sought out by many, and given nonetheless in his column "Today and Tomorrow" ... from 1931 through 1967, an era when paper still ruled the world. Much of Lippmann’s influence was behind the scenes … somewhat like an éminence grise. All to say, this was an engaging book and is recommended.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning book that made me want to be a journalist and, I hope, an intellectual. An engaging account of liberal and journalistic struggles in the 20th century.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what stopped this book from being outrageously great. It might be that I never thought that the author got ahold of Lippmann's unified theory toward life . . . But that may be because, like most people, Lippmann just changed his mind about things -- back and forth, even -- over time.

[Patrick Bair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some biographies are actually history books with a personal focus. This is such a book. A flawed but remarkable man.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m interested in Walter Lippmann as a homegrown example of anti-democratic thought. People will plotz if you describe him as a fascist or a reactionary, and they’d have some reason to- Lippmann was a consummate liberal, so much so that the forerunner to the ur-neoliberal gathering, the Mont Pelerin Society, was originally called the Colloque Walter Lippmann. But he partook of a project similar to that of such forerunners of fascism as the Italian elitist school of critics of democracy- analyzing the weak points of mass democracy in the context of a rapidly changing, growing, and ever more complex society. He was the guy who introduced the study of “public opinion” into American discourse, complete with inventing our use of the word “stereotype” to mean what the average man had in his head instead of thoughts. Lippmann, like the erstwhile liberals in the Italian elitist school (and the Fabian socialists he associated with), believed that society needed to be run by experts, who could dispassionately take in the whole of society scientifically. Who were these experts? Well, mostly they looked a lot like Lippmann and his friends.

Biographer Ronald Steel appears to be interested in Walter Lippmann primarily because of Lippmann’s wide range of friends and associates, which included a dozen-odd presidents and numerous major political figures in America and across the Atlantic. More than Lippmann the thinker, he’s interested in Lippmann the institution of Atlantic establishment liberalism. We get analyses of Lippmann’s books- it’s a thick biography. But we get a lot more of Lippmann’s career as a journalist and the figures with whom it brought him into contact. This makes sense- that’s where the emphasis and the drama of Lippmann’s life lay. From helping Woodrow Wilson lay out the Fourteen Points to breaking with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War, Lippmann was there for a lot of the high (and low) points of drama in the titular “American century.”

Steel lays all this out admirably enough but it can’t help but replicate Lippmann’s own shallowness and to a degree, his elitism. From youth as a moderately rich NYC brat and Harvard wunderkind, Lippmann’s thought was in the service of the “best” people, even when he was notionally a socialist as a youth. “Best” here was determined not (directly) by hereditary status or wealth — after all, Steel and other Lippmann-involved people would remind us, he was no simple reactionary — but by intelligence and “seriousness” as defined by Harvard people, more or less. There was no idea that Lippmann really believed in, just a class whose interest he defended. This gives his back and forth on the issues of the day — from big government proponent to New Deal opponent, from neutrality-booster to war hawk and back again any number of times over a half-century — a unity it would otherwise lack.

Moreover, Lippmann wasn’t a major decisionmaker himself. He was a behind the scenes guy at best, recommending people to other people, and more often an observer and shaper of (mostly elite) opinion. So he wasn’t stuck with many decisions. This winds up giving the narrative of the book the character of one damn thing after another with little consequence, as Lippmann’s calculation of who represented the sort of elite he had in mind and what they should be up to shifted, and his relationships shifted with them. If I didn’t have a background in twentieth century history, a lot of it would be meaningless- who cares what Newton Baker or Bernard Baruch or Dean Acheson thought of things or what people thought of them? Well, I do, a little. But I care a lot less about that and more about how Lippmann’s ideas and worldview came to be and came to become influential, which this book is less strong on. ***

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone interested in knowing about the American political culture and its growing world dominance during the 20th century will benefit from reading this book about Walter Lippmann's life and career.

Lippmann was born at the end of the 19th century (1889) and did not die until after Richard Nixon left office in 1974. He was a journalist, a soldier, a World War I strategist, a diplomat, a bon vivant, a columnist, an advisor to Presidents from Wilson to Johnson, and seemingly always stayed in five-star hotels. The question that he never answered was the appropriate balance of liberty versus absolutism .

[Wally Bowen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walter Lippmann is arguably the most powerful American journalist in our nation's history. He was definitely the most media-literate. This straightforward biography is a walk through the first 75 years of the 20th century at the elbow of a superb writer, thinker, and power-broker whose democratic principles were in constant battle with his insatiable desire for acceptance by political and social elites.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a massive (599 pages!) work that spans Lippmann’s long life, from his birth in 1889 to his death in the last month of 1974, and it not only serves as a superb history of his amazing life but also as a thoughtful inquiry into many of the United States’ most challenging moments.

For most alive today, the name of Walter Lippmann probably draws a blank. But for older persons like me, I have vivid memories of reading his columns during the 1960s when he was still writing prolifically. For decades, he was the premier newspaper columnist whose writings appears in major newspapers throughout the United States. He wrote vigorously and insightfully about the important matters of his time.

His focus was primarily on politics and on the major issues and conflicts of his lifetime, but his scope was both wide and deep. He was something of an intellectual patrician – his suspicions of, and doubts about, the ability of the average citizen to understand and make intelligent decisions concerning important matters reflected this – but he was also something of a philosopher who struggled to discern, and then communicate through his many major books, how and why people thought and behaved as they did.

He was a confident of every major American president from Theodore Roosevelt until Lyndon Johnson, the only exceptions being the Republicans Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Nixon, and the Democrat Truman. Because of this, and since he and his second wife kept such voluminous notes, we have some fascinating details about, and insights into, these fascinating men and the lives that they also led.

Moreover, although he never held public office, he knew, was befriended, and his opinions closely attended to by major political and social figures throughout Europe, including Moscow.

Although often characterized as a “liberal” by his contemporaries, Lippmann was a tad more complicated than that. While he did share the Progressive sentiments and admired the achievements of such men as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he also entertained classic conservative opinions, too, especially as to the size and role of the government, the proper place of business and business leaders, and the abilities of the people. Moreover, his positions were not static; his involvement with major questions throughout his life saw him experiencing a wide gamut of emotions and positions, some of which were quite contradictory to those he had espoused earlier.

But this is to also say that Lippmann was too honest to be rigid, to open to new information and to honest examination (and re-examination) of policy outcomes to be inflexible, and too sensitive to condemn or abandon honest players in what was, after all, a fluid, dynamic, and information-confusing environment.

In this book you will reexperience the hope of the Progressives, the domestic achievements of such men as Teddy and Frankly Roosevelt, Wilson, Kennedy and Johnson, as well as the huge mistakes made at Versailles after World War I and following World War II when, after FDR’s death, Truman turned to advisors who were ardent anti-communists and suspicious of Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Much as is the case with each human life, early surges of hope and accomplishment are often followed with extensive “dry” periods in which earlier optimism and progress now seem to have been more delusion than real. And then there are the times when, in Yeats’ words, the center cannot hold and it all seems to come apart at the seams: World War I, rise of the fascists and the incredible failure of the Great Powers to stop them when they could have, and the stupid hubris of the United States in misunderstanding the “lessons” of the 20th century and assuming that this nation had the opportunity and responsibility to be the World’s Policeman, leading us into the very dangerous Cold War period, the disaster of Vietnam, the stupidities of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the repeated mis readings of our leaders in which nationalism and spheres of interest were mistakenly seen to be evidence of communist subversion and plots to “take over the world.”

All this, and more, you will find in these gripping pages. Because the narrative is almost always in the “now” of first-person documentation, the book has an amazing you are there feeling to it, an immediacy which makes events of the now distant past hauntingly part of the present, too. And there were so many times when I felt that maybe, just this one time, things will turn out differently, we will avoid that mistake and seize the moment….. even if, of course, such might-have-beens are already part of the receding past.

The author of this book, an eminent American historian who only recently died, writes about Lippmann sympathetically, but not uncritically. His extensive research into, and citations from, primary documents allows us to share Lippmann’s perspectives, his emotions, his doubts, and his very human susceptibility to error.

This is amazing work of history, and an instructive one about how consistently we humans, we Americans at least, make the same damn mistakes over and over again!

[Clif · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the perfect combination of biography and American history. Walter Lippman was a journalist who for decades wrote an opinion column syndicated in newspapers throughout the United States, dealing primarily with international affairs.

Because Lippman came up via a privileged path with money no problem and finished his schooling at Harvard, he was from the start an insider who made the usual network of friends who were either influential at the time or would become so. Incredibly, before the age of 30 he had the ear of a President (Wilson). Toward the end of his career he had the ear and then the enmity of LBJ. Throughout he mingled with just about every known political personality not only in the United States but in Europe as well. Trips to Europe were frequent and always put to good use with visits to such as the Pope and heads of state. Not simply formal visits, friendships were maintained through intelligent conversation about the pressing issues of the day, Lippman's second wife, Helen, not only taking copious notes but often acting as translator.

The reader could not ask for more vivid portraits of the powerful, the people that the public know only as images. For example, in a visit by the Lippmans to the USSR, Khrushchev invited them to play badminton and, surprisingly for a short and portly man, won. This is a book filled with personal encounters. LBJ, known for his domination of others in conversation, remarked of Lippman, "as soon as I pull my chair toward him, he pulls his away"

This was a perfect sign of Lippman's high standard for journalism. The journalist should remain aloof from the danger in relationships with power. The reporter could not let personal relationships interfere with reason when deciding on the value of this or that political policy. By adhering to this, he established himself as a person both in the know and worth listening to. His readership was vast and influential because he wasn't a toady to anyone and would quickly speak out against bad policy with good reasons to shun it. Politicians attempted to cultivate him and he enjoyed the attention, connections and socializing this made possible but kept his columns dedicated to suggesting the best policies based only on the facts of the matter. He was a public intellectual unlike any journalist today.

Not only did he write his column, Today and Tomorrow, several times a week, he also wrote books that were well received and remain highly regarded. He had no respect for the mythology of democracy: that each citizen is omnicompetent and that the collective will of the citizenry is capable of making the right policy choices through the vote. He felt that only an impartial group of technical experts on specific subjects, groups that could only offer advice without a say in policy making, could make a democracy workable. We the people would be limited to voting in qualified people and voting out those who proved to be poor choices.

With a good income and the companionship of a second wife that fully supported him and helped him engage fully with emotion, Lippman flourished, rewarded with the respect of the powerful, living an expansive life of travel and intellectual challenge that will awe any reader. Lippman lived exactly the life he wanted. Though he did not always suggest the right direction for policy, he arrived at his views honestly with a sincere desire to offer the best path for his country.

As for the American century, Lippman's intellectual lifetime covered the period from before World War I to the Vietnam War. Starting with Teddy Roosevelt, Lippman had something to say through the terms of Wilson, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and LBJ. Ronald Steel gives an excellent background on all the issues throughout. Any lover of history will find this book a delight.

[王维蔚WeiweiWang · Rating 4 out of 5]

原来李普曼和我想象中的印象差别挺大的。很好的传记，也捕捉了李普曼的弱点和缺陷。

[Vincent Lombardo]

This is a very well written book. However, I decided that I was not so interested in Lippmann to invest so much time reading this book!