Word: lippmann
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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...
...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...
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...
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...
...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...