LIPPMANN, Walter

(b. 23 September 1889 in New York City; d. 14 December 1974 in New York City), Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author, one of the most respected and politically influential writers in the United States, and author of the popular syndicated column Today and Tomorrow, in which he analyzed world events, from 1931 to 1967.

Lippmann, the only child of Jacob and Daisy (Baum) Lippmann, was born to privilege. He grew up in a wealthy German-Jewish family. His parents took him to Europe most summers and exposed him to culture and famous people. As a small boy he shook hands with President William McKinley and Admiral George Dewey. Jacob Lippmann was a clothing manufacturer in a business started by his father when he came to the United States in 1848. Daisy Lippmann was educated at Hunter College.

Lippmann received his early education at Dr. Julius Sachs School for Boys in New York City, followed by the Sachs Collegiate Institute, from which he graduated in 1906, where he was groomed to attend Harvard University. At Harvard, Lippmann received praise for his academics and his writing. He wrote for both the political Harvard Illustrated and the more literary Harvard Monthly. He saw poverty for the first time when he joined other Harvard students to help victims of a slum fire in Chelsea, Massachusetts. With his social conscience aroused, Lippmann and eight other students formed the Socialist Club. He earned his A.B. with honors from Harvard in 1910.

His parents' wealth came in part from inherited real estate that included some tenements in the Lower East Side of New York City. In 1921 Lippmann urged his father to fix or sell them and when he would not, Lippmann no longer accepted money from his father. Lippmann always maintained a social conscience, but his political leanings were based on the candidate he felt he could support, which through the years included many world leaders and U.S. presidents, including John F. Kennedy, and, for a while, Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.

In 1931 Lippmann was invited to write a column for the New York Herald Tribune, which, after some misgivings, he called Today and Tomorrow. Lippmann wrote that column until 1967, although he left the Herald Tribune in 1957 for the Washington Post. He started a similar column in Newsweek in 1963. Millions of readers were kept informed on national and world events through more than four thousand nationally syndicated columns written by Lippmann.

Lippmann's column brought him fame from its style as a political column devoted entirely to opinion. Influence also helped make Lippmann a powerful public figure. Lippmann traveled in grand style every year, usually conferring with heads of state along the way. Leaders often sought to meet with him. In his engagement book he wrote on one of his later trips: "saw the King, the prime minister, etc.—the usual people."

When Lippmann turned seventy he was honored by the National Press Club with even more people in attendance than had come to hear the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev the previous week. Although Lippmann had little regard for television, he was persuaded by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) to grant a one-hour taped interview to the newscaster Howard K. Smith. The program ran on 11 August 1960. Public response was far more than CBS expected. The network ultimately ran six more interviews, which were later published in book form.

In 1958 and again in 1961 Lippmann met with Khrushchev in Russia to discuss crucial aspects of the East-West conflict. He won a Pulitzer Prize for each of the Today and Tomorrow columns in which he published accounts of the meetings. The special citation for the 1958 column was for "the wisdom, perception and high sense of responsibility with which he has commented for many years on national and international affairs." In 1962 the award was for "wise and responsible international reporting."

Lippmann supported Kennedy for president in 1960, and once he was in office they consulted regularly. When Kennedy was assassinated Lippmann was shocked for days but recognized the immediate need for the country to get behind Johnson. He praised Johnson's inaugural address with its promise of a "Great Society" and called the president "a bold innovator." Although Lippmann was not immediately attracted to Johnson personally, he succumbed for a time to the famous Johnson flattery campaign. Lippmann received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 "for profound interpretation of his country and the affairs of the world."

In February 1965 Lippmann supported Johnson when he ordered the bombing of military sites in North Vietnam in retaliation for the killing of several American "advisers" sent to Vietnam by Kennedy in 1963. He believed air strikes put the United States in "a better bargaining position for negotiations." But in mid-March 1965 Lippmann was having serious doubts about Johnson's approach to the Vietnam question. Although he did not object to the use of the military on principle, Lippmann could see no justification for the country's getting involved in a land war in Asia, and he kept pushing Johnson for a "peace offensive." Lippmann understood something of combat; he had served as an army captain with a propaganda team in Europe in World War I.

Lippmann's objections to how Johnson was handling the Vietnam War were the undoing of their relationship. He described Johnson's Vietnam policy as it was unfolding by the end of 1965 as a "historic mistake" and began criticizing Johnson in personal and uncompromising language as he began to see what he perceived as the outlines of American imperialism in the administration's policies. In 1967 Lippmann wrote, "We are seeing how a war waged without hope of military decision degenerates into savagery." In his later years Lippmann's usual optimism waned, driven in part by the seemingly interminable Vietnam War. He wrote his final article for Today and Tomorrow on 25 May 1967, and the final one for Newsweek on 11 January 1971.

Lippmann was married twice, first to Faye Albertson on 24 May 1917. They had one foster daughter. The couple divorced in 1937 when Lippmann became involved with Helen Byrne Armstrong, the wife of a close friend; after Armstrong divorced her husband, she and Lippmann married on 26 March 1938. After a disabling illness lasting several years, Lippmann died of cardiac arrest at the age of sixty-five. He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered off the coast of Maine, a state where for many years he had taken refuge to think and write.

Lippmann's papers are at the Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. The authorized biography is Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980). See also Marquis Childs and James Reston, Walter Lippmann and His Times (1959), and Barry D. Riccio, Walter Lippmann—Odyssey of a Liberal (1996). For his writings in the 1960s see Clinton Rossiter and James Lave, eds., The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy (1963), and Conversations with Walter Lippmann, a CBS Reports television program with introduction by Edward Weeks (1965). An obituary is in the New York Times (15 Dec. 1974).

M. C. Nagel