Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann 1889-1974, American essayist and editor, b. New York City. He was associate editor of the New Republic in its early days (1914-17), but at the outbreak of World War I he left to become Assistant Secretary of War, later helping to prepare data for the peace conference. From 1921 to 1931 he was on the editorial staff of the New York World, serving as editor the last two years. In 1931 he began writing for the New York Herald Tribune a highly influential syndicated column, which moved to the Washington Post in 1962. He ceased writing a regular newspaper column in 1967. Lippmann's early books, written when he was a champion of liberalism, include A Preface to Politics (1913), Public Opinion (1922), and A Preface to Morals (1929). An early supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Lippmann became disillusioned and condemned collectivism in The Good Society (1937). His political stance became one of moderate detachment, and he won distinction as a farsighted and incisive analyst of foreign policy. A special Pulitzer Prize citation (1958) praised his powers of news analysis, which he demonstrated in U.S. War Aims (1944), The Cold War (1947), Isolation and Alliances (1952), and Western Unity and the Common Market (1962).

Bibliography: See M. W. Childs and J. B. Reston, ed., Walter Lippmann and His Times (1959); E. W. Weeks, ed., Conversations with Walter Lippmann (1965); R. Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980).

Lippmann, Walter (1889–1974), author, columnist, public‐affairs commentator.Born into a wealthy German‐Jewish family in New York City, Lippmann graduated from Harvard in 1910. A college socialist who grew more conservative over time, Lippmann epitomized the stresses of twentieth‐century American liberalism. Active over more than six decades, he advised Theodore Roosevelt, helped craft Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, aided in drafting John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, and assailed Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam War policies.

A founding editor of the New Republic magazine in 1914, Lippmann emerged as one of the Progressive Era's leading social theorists with two influential early books. A Preface to Politics (1913), reflecting his encounter with Sigmund Freud's work, examined the irrational aspects of politics. Drift and Mastery (1914) explored the transition from premodern to modern society, delineated the interest groups emerging in the new industrial order, and proposed loyalty to scientific method as a unifying force.

World War I soured Lippmann on progressive idealism. His Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925) criticized the media and advocated intervention by experts to help the masses deal with complex issues. A Preface to Morals (1929), his most enduring book, examined the alienation and aimlessness of the postwar “lost generation.” Turning once again to journalism, Lippmann wrote a daily column for the New York Herald Tribune from 1931 to 1967, and later for the Washington Post. Syndicated in more than two hundred newspapers and read by some fifty million people, his columns influenced both the political elite and the educated public. Critical of the New Deal in the 1930s, he forsook his neo‐Hamiltonianism, with its emphasis on governmental activism, to defend a market‐oriented liberalism that some critics mistook for warmed‐over laissez‐faire ideology. With the rise of totalitarianism abroad, Lippmann abandoned his youthful pragmatism and its attendant relativism. During and after World War II he criticized U.S. Cold War ideology for oversimplifying complex international realities, becoming an articulate exponent of a tough–minded foreign policy “realism.” Because he wrote so much, for so long, about so many issues, Lippmann occasionally seemed a man for every season. But a fundamental skepticism and elitism consistently characterized his views of public affairs and foreign policy.
See also Croly, Herbert; New Deal Era, The; Sixties, The; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Ronald Steel , Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 1980.
Barry D. Riccio , Walter Lippmann—Odyssey of a Liberal, 1994.

Barry D. Riccio