The Man Who Stands Apart

Twice a week after breakfast, Walter Lippmann sequesters himself in the study of his ivy-clad home on Washington's sedate Woodley Road to write his syndicated column, "Today and Tomorrow." The study is manifestly a scholar's lair. Ceiling-high, Pompeian red bookcases line three walls; the fourth is decked with framed pictures of Lippmann friends, living and dead: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Georges Clemenceau. A snow of documents mantles the oaken desk.

For an event of such intellectual moment as the birth of a Lippmann column, the setting is deceptively casual. Lippmann, a lean, angular and agile man of 69. is dressed carelessly in his writing habit: grey pullover sweater, corduroy slacks, white wool socks and loafers. He has taken breakfast with his wife Helen, a handsome woman decidedly Lippmann's intellectual peer. He has paid brief but fond attention to his French poodles, Vicky and Coquet. He has concluded thoughtful tours of three morning papers, with stops at all the international datelines. Across Woodley Road and through his study windows drifts the gay, playtime treble of his neighbors, the girls at National Cathedral School.

Lippmann scarcely notices. The coils of a creative mood have been steadily tightening since 6 o'clock, when he awakened and lay awhile in bed, reflecting. Now it is 9. In two hours or so, writing with ink in a pinched, illegible script, abbreviating wherever possible ("negotiate" becomes "nego"), he composes 750 to 1,000 carefully chosen words. He declaims his handiwork into a Dictaphone, punctuation and all: "It is not probable comma I think comma that on the whole . . ." After his staff types and checks his message, it is read over the long-distance telephone to an automatic recording device at the Herald Tribune in New York.

By then the author has left his chore behind him. His interest is that of the scholar, advancing but not selling ideas and thoughts. He is as heedless of praise as censure, has no idea how many readers attend him, and does not care: "To worry about the size of your audience is like taking your blood pressure every day."

Think, Think, Think. All these are components of a ritual that has been called "the one continuous act of cerebration" in journalism. "Today and Tomorrow" runs in the Oslo Morgenbladet, the Calcutta Hindustan Standard, the Tokyo Yomiuri Shimbun, the Fayetteville Northwest Arkansas Times and some 270 other papers in the U.S. and abroad, with a combined multilingual circulation estimated at 20 million. Lippmann's pronouncements on foreign policy are weighed with gravity, awe, annoyance, respect, and sometimes envy, by editors, pedagogues, logicians and statesmen, if not by the average reader.

Behind those pronouncements lie 45 years of uninterrupted heavy thinking. Walter Lippmann never stops thinking, not even when scrambling around the Maine rocks with Helen at their summer place near Bar Harbor. "Walter," fretted his wife one day as he tripped over a boulder, "look. Don't think." For Lippmann, this is the idlest advice. He cannot help thinking. Where other journalists run after the news, Lippmann prefers to ponder it.

Disengage, Neutralize, Withdraw. For years the Lippmann headlight has focused on U.S. foreign policy. He stands a head above the field. A few other columnists, notably Joseph Alsop (TIME, Oct. 27) and Roscoe Drummond, regularly thrash through the international thicket, but they go mainly as temporal critics and observers. Lippmann is critical, too, in an Olympian, undisputatious manner transcending shifts in the policy line, substitutions in the diplomatic team and, all too often, the hard practicalities of statesmanship, which must daily translate fine theories into action.

Pundit Lippmann has evolved a foreign policy of his own, which rests on his premise that 20th century diplomacy is no more than a chain of tragic errors leading to war. Lippmann's contemporary recipe for the survival of liberty: disengagement from Russia and Red China, neutralization of nations not big enough or ambitious enough to enter the power fight, and, ultimately, withdrawal of West from East. At times even his closest friends have read Lippmann and muttered, "Appeasement." There is, in a Lippmann way, a quality of isolationism about his policy. He prefers the word "accommodation." "The world," he has written, "will have to be big enough to let differing systems of life and of government exist side by side."

This Lippmann conviction even embraces Red China. He thinks that Communist China should be seated in the United Nations, and that the U.S. should pull Chiang Kai-shek off Quemoy and Matsu. On Germany, he rejects the U.S. "standpat" policy and the holding of free elections on both sides of the German partition, endorses "confederation" of East and West Germany and withdrawal of Russian and Allied occupation troops, leaving two neutralized German fractions to work out their own common denominator. He is undismayed by the fact that many of his readers might find it hard to distinguish between his solutions and those preferred by the Kremlin.

Getting into Trim. Columnist Lippmann has spent a lifetime getting into cortical trim for his continuous act of cerebration. The only child of well-to-do German-Jewish parents living in New York City, he was encouraged in his appetite for art, scholarship, travel abroad, and the intellectual ferment of the time. As a brilliant Harvard undergraduate, he fell into step briefly with the Fabian Socialists, a tepid movement whose very tepidity appealed to him. After graduation with honors ('10), Lippmann served a hitch as secretary to the Rev. George R. Lunn of Schenectady, New York State's first Socialist mayor. In 1914 he helped found The New Republic. During World War I he became, successively, a member of The Inquiry, Wilson's clandestine architects of the terms of peace, an intelligence agent in France, and the author of an interpretation of Wilson's Fourteen Points.

In 1921 Lippmann was hired on Joseph Pulitzer's New York World as an editorial writer, and subsequently as editor. When the World died in 1931, Lippmann, by then author of ten books and one of the most authoritative voices of liberalism in the U.S., was invited aboard the then staunchly conservative Herald Tribune as a bylined columnist. The invitation intrigued him. "It was absolutely a new idea," he said. "It was the first time a paper had ever asked someone with opposite views to write for it."

During 27 years of association, the Herald Tribune has treated Columnist Lippmann with awe-struck respect, even going so far as to pass a typist's error in punctuation. The column, originally syndicated to twelve papers, has consistently picked up new subscribers. Today Lippmann is the most widely quoted and acclaimed pundit in the world; Pravda has reprinted at least one of his pieces verbatim; Historian James Truslow Adams solemnly declared after Lippmann joined the Trib that "what happens to Lippmann in the next decade may be of greater interest than what happens to any other single figure now on the American scene."

"Obfuscator de Luxe." Not all of his readers join in the paean of praise. Novelist James M. Cain, an associate on the World, said of him: "He may be thinking in terms quite divorced from what the American people are worrying about, which occasionally gives his work an extremely farfetched quality." The late Heywood Broun, a Harvard classmate and a World staffer, wrote wryly that Lippmann is "quite apt to score a field goal for Harvard and a touchdown for Yale in one and the same play." Liberal Lawyer Amos Pinchot gave him the title "Obfuscator de Luxe."

These thrusts are as valid as the accolades. As a columnist, writing for a potential readership of some 20 million, Lippmann has a reach far short of his grasp. His work is literate but can also be obtuse, repetitious, and obscure. The reader is expected to know all about "the long Soviet note to Berlin" and the ideology of John Maynard Keynes; Columnist Lippmann will not enlighten him. "I do not assume," he says, "that I am writing for anybody of a lower grade of intelligence than my own."

As a reporter Lippmann is by self-concession unqualified and unaspiring, consistently ignores opportunities for scoops. As an artificer of foreign policy, he locks himself in his quiet citadel, far from the diplomatic battleground where fragile theories, however finely spun, can die. As his convictions change and his errors become apparent, he abandons previous positions without apology. This can be confusing, especially to the dogged few who follow him with the patience, the tuition and the comprehension with which any serious Lippmann reader must come fully endowed.

20th Century Dialectician. A neutralist at heart, Pundit Lippmann swears allegiance to no political party, describes himself as "a liberal democrat--with a lower case d." When he called last October on Khrushchev in the Kremlin, he went not as a newsman but as a 20th century dialectician. From this interview he returned to write some 5,000 intricately convoluted words which were more of a testament to Lippmann's reliance on the ultimate ascendancy of reason than an insight into the machinations of the Soviet mind.

Walter Lippmann can wait peacefully, unperturbed, for the golden rule of reason. A quarter-century ago he had this advice for graduating seniors at Columbia University: "The world will go on somehow, and more crises will follow. It will go on best, however, if among us there are men who have stood apart, who refused to be anxious or too much concerned, who were cool and inquiring, and had their eyes on a longer past and a longer future."

Obviously, Walter Lippmann is confident he is one of those men.

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