Walter Lippmann and the American Century

Ronald Steele's Walter Lippmann and the American Century is everything an historical biography should be and much more because it is also a valuable study in political science that takes the reader deep into the character, thought and impact of perhaps the finest political journalist in American history. When he was 25, Walter Lippmann was described by Teddy Roosevelt as "the most brilliant young man of his age in all the United States." He built his global, popular reputation for 36 years in his column, "Today and Tomorrow" written from 1931 to 1962 for the New York Herald Tribune and from 1963 to 1967 for the Washington Post and their respective international syndicates. Lippmann was one of the founders of the New Republic, a columnist for Vanity Fair, editor of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the voice of early 20th century America's liberal conscience, and a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Millions of Americans didn't decide what to think about an issue until Walter Lippmann published his opinion on it. Steele says he was read not for solutions but for his dispassionate analysis, an intellect of the sort rarely attracted to journalism. English contemporary Van Wyck Brooks said Lippmann's career was the most brilliant ever devoted to political writing in America. Lippmann was born in 1889 in New York City, the only child of well-to-do Jewish parents of German heritage. They had inherited wealth from Lippmann's grandparents, especially from his maternal grandfather who had invested wisely in New York real estate. An exceptionally bright youngster, he was practically ignored by his mother, superficially acknowledged by his father and coddled by his maternal grandmother whom he loved dearly. Lippmann was educated in the demanding curriculum of a prestigious New York City secular Jewish school and spent his summers touring Europe and its museums with his parents. He pursued university studies in philosophy at Harvard where he learned to think under the personal tutelage of William James and George Santayana and to write from the irascible Charles Copeland. Steele says "Copey" shouted blunt criticism at Lippmann and his fellow students while they read their papers aloud in his office. Describing his experience learning to write under Copeland, Lippmann said "you began to feel that out of the darkness all around you long fingers were searching through the layers of fat and fluff to find your bones and muscles." His first job of note out of Harvard was as assistant to the muckraking journalist, Lincoln Steffens, "...looking not for the evils of Big Business, but for its anatomy." Lippmann helped Steffens with a thoroughly researched report showing the secret arrangements between New York banks and the major financial houses on Wall Street. The material Steffens and the young Lippmann dug up helped trigger the Pujo Committee's investigations that attempted to regulate America's big banks through the Federa

This is an absolutely wonderful book. Walter Lippman was the first modern journalist of the US: in a time of parochialism, self-congratulatory muckraking, and yellow journalism, he had an internationalist perspective and strove to introduce the American people to new ideas. At the same time, he was deeply interested in the currents of virtually all major political movements in America, and he studied and then participated in them as an opinion maker. What is truly remarkable about the book is the way that Steel recounts the elements of these movements - encapsulates them in brilliant and stimulating descriptions - in paragrpah after paragraph on the development of Lippman's restless and omnivorous mind. He starts with the muckrakers and Lincoln Steffens as well as Wilson's ideas on the League of nations, moved through the implications of Freud for public policy, to the New Deal (and the ideas of Keynes), the Cold War, and his last great battle on the Vietnam War. But as Lippman looks at each of these problems, he also critiques them, probing for their limitations before moving on to the next great movement. The result is an absolutely first-rate intellectual history of about the first 70 years of the 20C, which in my opinion were far more interesting than the remaining 30. With each movement, at least for me, I wanted to learn more, to go back to the sources and other histories and biographies. Finally, there are also fascinating anecdotes of his intereactions with the great politicos of his time, from his dismissal of FDR as a mediocre thinker to a screaming argument at a party with Dean Acheson over the COld War - "it was two titans facing off" - to the bitter obsession that LBJ developed about him in the 1960s.Of course, Lippman had a charmed career and sprung from an elite background. This made him somewhat insensitive or disinterested in some developments that hurt people, from the Ku Klux Klan to the McCarthy era. Nonetheless, as Steel points out, in his conservatism he also reflected the most popular opinions of his time, which is the reason he was so relevant.Steel also gives us a portrait of the man, and it is charming and admiring. His father was a slum lord, of whom he was ashamed and Steel speculates that Lippman's life was a search for a better father figure in American politicians. He also had an empty first marriage, which he abandoned when he fell in love with his best friend's wife, renewing his life in middle age and breaking a number of 1950s taboos. THe portrait is quite moving.This is a truly great book, and I hope that it will be viewed as a classic someday. I learned an immense amount and felt hungry for more, which is my principal criterion for true excellence in writing.Highest recommendation.

This book is excellent. The 20th Century has often been described as the "American Century" and this book surveys the major part of that era from the vantage point of the life and work of one of America's leading intellectuals, journalists and pundits. Lippmann began his intellectual career as a young follower and aide to Theodore Roosevelt while a student at Harvard, moving quickly thereafter into the leading milieu around Woodrow Wilson for whom he authored the famous "14 Points" upon which the vison of the League of Nations and America's ostensible goal of promoting world democracy was based. Prior to that time he played a leading role in the formation of the still influential liberal magazine, "The New Republic" in 1915. After the First World War he became the editor of the New York World, a prominent New York City daily newspaper founded by Joseph Pulitzer, a demanding position, but one that did not prevent him from acting, as he did throughout much of his life from then on, as an unofficial ambassador and troubleshooter for the U.S. government and leading American business interests, first in Mexico in 1927 and later in Italy, Germany and elsewhere. In the wake of the bankruptcy of the New York World, Lippmann became one of America's most prominent newspaper columnists and opinion leaders and in fact wrote a seminal work "Public Opinion" dealing with the interaction of mass culture and politics. Lippmann continued and grew in this role as an ideologue and high priest for the New Deal, the Allied cause in World War 2 and more generally for America's leading role in world affairs until 1971 when his last column was published, three years before his death at the age of 85. By the time of the Kennedy/Johnson administration, Lippmann had solidified his reputation as, if not the Dean, certainly the grand old man of American journalism whose life had embodied and reflected all the great events and issues of American and world history through Vietnam which he came to view with skepticism and regret, a view presaged by some reservations he had held, notwithstanding his anti-communism, towards the "Truman Doctrine" and the Cold War.