Austere Moralist, Fallible Man

By Paul Gray

WALTER LIPPMANN AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY by Ronald Steel; Atlantic-Little, Brown; 669pages; $19.95

He was tutored by George Santayana and recruited as a protege by William James and Teddy Roosevelt; he lived long enough to receive an honorary degree (from Princeton) on the same platform with Bob Dylan. During his 85 years, Walter Lippmann came to know twelve U.S. Presidents personally and nearly everyone else who mattered in the 20th century. He consorted with poets and politicians, philosophers and financiers. He discussed psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, socialism with George Bernard Shaw, economics with John Maynard Keynes, law with Louis Brandeis, Utopias with H.G. Wells, painting with Bernard Berenson and the grandeur of Charles de Gaulle with Charles de Gaulle. He also played Ping-Pong with Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg.

Getting such a long and varied life between the covers of a single volume seems challenging enough; harder still to record the vast panorama of history that Lippmann observed and, in some instances, helped shape. Author Ronald Steel performs these two tasks brilliantly. Walter Lippmann and the American Century thoroughly lives up to its title. It is both an engrossing biography and a splendid primer to six decades of turbulent political life.

The main outlines of Lippmann's journalistic and literary careers are familiar enough. He became a public figure shortly after he graduated from Harvard in 1910. He published his first book, A Preface to Politics, at age 23 and was one of the founding editors of the New Republic. Woodrow Wilson consulted him regularly and asked him to help draw up the peace plan that emerged as the Fourteen Points. During the '20s, Lippmann wrote editorials for the New York World, the most influential Democratic paper of its time. When the World folded in 1931, he went over to the Republican Herald Tribune. His column, "Today and Tomorrow," made him a celebrity; at its peak, it was carried by more than 200 papers and was considered required reading up and down the corridors of power. "Zip!" sang a stripper in the Broadway musical Pal Joey, "Walter Lippmann wasn't brilliant today." A series of TV interviews in the '60s exposed him to millions more who had never read him.

What few people guessed about Lippmann was the extent to which he worked behind the scenes, influencing the very policies that he boosted in his columns. Writes Steel: "Unknown to many of his readers he plotted strategy with politicians, drafted programs for Secretaries of State, advised Senators, promoted friends for public office, launched presidential booms, wrote speeches for candidates, and even helped negotiate a secret agreement that averted an American invasion of Mexico." Such activities, fully documented in Steel's narrative, make for uncomfortable reading in this post-Viet Nam, post-Watergate era. The innocence that allowed Lippmann the working journalist to coexist so easily with Lippmann the powerbroker has probably been lost forever.

Steel understands and displays Lippmann's virtues as a journalist: an elegant and supple prose style and a mind that quickly perceived the fundamental components of any issue or crisis. His celebrated Olympian detachment served him and his readers well; amid the hubbub and uproar of daily events, Lippmann could be counted on for the long view, for the dispassionate analysis that could somehow drown out all the noise around him. In Public Opinion (1922), his best book, he anticipated a problem that has grown worse through the years: How can democracy survive in a mass society, when its citizens are no longer able to grasp all the complexities of government and when sophisticated propaganda techniques are available to misinform them? Although he was often wrong and self-contradictory, Lippmann remains one of the sanest and most reliable guides through the theories and practices of his age.

Yet he paid a price for his analytical purity. Frequently, as Steel claims, "Lippmann's concern with the process of government made him lose sight of the human drama involved." Indeed, heated emotions exasperated him. His columns on the imminent executions of Sacco and Vanzetti seem peculiarly bloodless, especially since he privately believed that an injustice had been done. In 1938 he supported a Southern-led filibuster against a federal antilynching law, arguing that "if the spirit of democracy is to be maintained, a minority must never be coerced unless the reasons for coercing it are decisive and overwhelming." Steel adds, tartly, "Lynching was apparently not an overwhelming reason."

The austere public moralist was capable of some extremely fallible private behavior, and his biographer does not back away from such lapses. Lippmann urged President Wilson to begin military conscription, then worked hard to make sure that he would not have to serve himself. "What I want to do is to devote all my time to studying and speculating," he wrote a friend in the office of the Secretary of War. He also appealed for exemption on the ground that "my father is dying"; Jacob Lippmann. a clothing manufacturer, lived ten years longer. In his 40s Lippmann had an affair with the wife of Hamilton Fish Armstrong, his best friend. When the liaison was discovered and Lippmann decided to marry Helen Armstrong, he persuaded his father-in-law to break the news to his wife of 20 years. He never saw her again. He was touchy all his life about his Jewish origins. He blamed anti-Semitism on the Jews who would not blend quietly and inconspicuously into the Protestant mainstream. He wrote nothing about the Nazi death camps.

These flaws diminish the Lippmann myth but reveal the whole man. Above the feet of clay, an undeniably awesome figure arose. In his 70s, Lippmann courageously opposed L.B.J.'s escalation of the war in Viet Nam; he endured abuse from the White House, snubs from many of his friends and malicious suggestions that he was turning senile. After a lifetime of enjoying an insider's access to the powerful, he became an outsider on a matter of principle, an old stoic practicing what he had always preached. His life was inspiring. His biography is that, and more: required reading for everyone interested in this troubled century. By Paul Gray

Excerpt:

"No one was in a better position than Lippmann to know the dangers of wanting to be on good terms with the powerful. He had tried to keep his distance, but even he was not immune to the lure of privileged access to the mighty. He had allowed himself to be drawn into Johnson's web, not by any bribes or rewards, but simply because he was flattered at being called in for advice ... When he discovered that the White House was merely trying to butter him up, he was hurt and angry. He could not forgive Johnson for lying about his intentions in Viet Nam and using him. Nor, in a way more difficult to admit, could he forgive himself for being used.

'He misled me,' Lippmann said later of his break with the President. 'The day before making his Baltimore speech, Johnson told me that the war had to be won on the nonmilitary side. But a short time later I found that he was telling other people other things ...' Lippmann never set foot in Johnson's White House again ... L.B.J. became to him, as he said privately in a comment that soon got around, the 'most disagreeable individual ever to have occupied the White House.' Lyndon Johnson now faced a formidable--adversary."

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