Lippmann, Walter (1889–1974)

Journalist, author, political theorist, and foreign policy analyst, Walter Lippmann parleyed his connections and writing prowess into power-broker status. Born in 1889 into New York City's German-Jewish elite, Lippmann was educated at Harvard. He impressed 20th-century intellects—pragmatist William James, fabian Graham Wallas, and freethinker George Santayana—with his mind. Lippmann founded Harvard's Socialist Club in the company of John Reed and Heywood Broun. Afterward, he researched for muckraker Lincoln Steffans and graced Mabel Dodge's bohemian salon. By 1914, however, socialist [Page 862]agitation seemed, to Lippmann, a useless strategy under corporate capitalism.

That same year Herbert Croly invited Lippmann to help launch the New Republic. Lippmann pushed the journal to support Woodrow Wilson's 1916 candidacy and the preparation for war, securing a position in the Department of War. Lippmann was instrumental in crafting Wilson's 14 Points. Although Lippman never again worked in government, his public influence never waned.

Author of 25 books, Lippmann's most significant work followed from his familiarity with wartime propaganda. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann despaired of mass democracy. The average citizen, stuck with pictures in his head, and buffeted by an irresponsible mass media, could not govern in a complex, modern world. Lippmann substituted expert control and a strong state. Public Opinion's legacy persists in the notions manufacturing of consent and pseudo-environment, concepts later employed by public relations specialist Edward Bernays and social critics Daniel Boorstin and Noam Chomsky. Lippmann later asserted that 20th-century cataclysms—the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and totalitarianism—stemmed from popular democracy's dysfunctions.

Despite his disregard for the masses, Lippmann addressed them regularly, first as a Vanity Fair columnist during its heyday from the 1920s, then as editorialist at Pulitzer's New York World beginning in 1922, and finally as the syndicated columnist of “Today and Tomorrow” from 1931. The column ran in more than 200 dailies until 1967 and had millions of readers.

Lippmann's thinking could seem fickle. The former socialist equated New Deal planning with totalitarian economies. A supporter of national self-determination, he accepted U.S. invasions in Latin America. Lippmann's Cold War of 1947 popularized the term, but he rejected the Cold War tenet of containment. With prescience, Lippmann criticized the Truman Doctrine as an “ideological crusade” that would lead the United States to support illegitimate governments. Lippmann's 1958 and 1961 visits with Nikita Khrushchev became the basis of his two Pulitzer Prizes. A realist who disbelieved Soviet ambitions of world dominance, Lippmann maintained that communism's promise of economic equity must be matched by Western guarantees of growth and democratic freedoms. In Lippmann's last years he attacked the escalating U.S. presence in Vietnam.

Lippmann's commentary on domestic and world affairs and his broad audience led him to be confidante, adviser, and gadfly to leaders worldwide. Presidential candidates of both parties sought his endorsement from 1916 on. Lippmann cultivated corporate heads, congressmen, diplomats, foreign ministers, popes, public thinkers like John Maynard Keynes, and world leaders like Charles de Gaulle, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. Lippmann died in 1974.