Lippmann, Walter

(1889-1974)

   Born to wealthy German Jewish parents in New York City, Walter Lippmann made a name as a brilliant student at Harvard. He left the university in 1910 to become a journalist at the socialist newspaper Boston Common. Part of the radical Greenwich Village set, Lippmann produced a call for reform in his Preface to Politics in 1912. In 1914, he published Drift and Mastery, which captured much of the progressive ethos in advocating government run scientifically by a public-minded elite. The same year, Lippmann joined the staff of the New Republic magazine. He supported U.S. entry into World War I and joined a team of planners to draw up plans for the postwar world. He was one of the U.S. advisers at the Versailles Peace Conference but was disillusioned by the terms of the peace treaty and became a critic of it and the League of Nations. His wartime experience also made him skeptical of the democratic process, and his Liberty and the News (1920) and Public Opinion (1922) suggested that government was best left to the experts.

   In 1922, Lippmann joined the newspaper New York World, where he established a reputation as one of the leading journalists of his day. His book examining the “lost generation,” A Preface to Morals (1929), had a wide readership. Lippmann became a contributor to the conservative newspaper New York Herald Tribune in 1931, and his columns were nationally and internationally syndicated. While he was initially enthusiastic about the New Deal, Lippmann became increasingly critical. In criticizing what he saw as excessive collectivism and centralization, it appeared that he was defending laissez faire, but in fact he owed a great deal to the influence of John Maynard Keynes.

   In the late 1930s, Lippmann advocated U.S. support for Great Britain against Nazi Germany, and during the war he wrote a best seller entitled United States Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943), advocating a continuation of the Grand Alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union (USSR). When the alliance broke up after the war, Lippmann wrote a critical study of containment, The Cold War (1947), and he was probably the originator of the phrase used to describe postwar relations with the USSR.

   Lippmann was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and worked for the CBS television network for a number of years. However, he became increasingly critical of Lyndon Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, and he retired from journalism in 1967.