Lippmann Revived – Jay Nordlinger

In the past, Walter Lippmann was virtually a household name. Today, it is the rare household that knows him. Some people may associate him with the phrase “American century.” But it was Henry Luce, the media magnate, who said that the twentieth century would be “the American century.” (That was in 1941.) So why the association with Lippmann? In 1980, Ronald Steel published his biography Walter Lippmann and the American Century.

What Lippmann is responsible for is the common understanding of the word “stereotype.” He took the term from the printing trade. (The word “cliché” also comes from that trade.) Also, Lippmann popularized the term “cold war” to describe the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II. In 1947, he published his book The Cold War.

Steel’s biography won every award under the sun, with the exception of the Pulitzer. It won the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, etc. In a new biography of his own, Tom Arnold-Forster calls Steel’s book “classic” and says that it is “still indispensable.” So why the new biography? In his subtitle, Arnold-Forster identifies his book as “an intellectual biography.” He will concentrate on Lippmann’s writing and ideas, not his life per se—although Lippmann’s life was certainly consumed by writing and ideas.

Walter Lippmann was a New Yorker, born in 1889. His family was German-Jewish and well-off. Lippmann entered Harvard at 16 and graduated in three years. He stayed on for a fourth, to assist Professor George Santayana. Arnold-Forster quotes a freshman essay titled “Who I Am and Why I Came to Harvard.” Young Lippmann wrote, “I have always taken a deep interest in the great issues of the day.” He always would.

It is interesting to know that this young man—whose name would become a byword for journalism, of the most exalted kind—failed to land a spot on the undergraduate newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. It could not have helped to be Jewish, as Ronald Steel notes in his book.

In the first sentence of his own book, Arnold-Forster says, “Few writers had more influence on American politics in the twentieth century than Walter Lippmann.” That is a normal sentence—hedging, cautious, unobjectionable—that any of us might have written. But consider: Did any writer have more influence on the politics of the previous century? H. L. Mencken? William F. Buckley Jr.? Who? An equally safe sentence, I think, would be, “Few writers had as much influence on American politics …”

When Lippmann died in 1974, the Crimson’s obituary said that he was widely regarded as “the dean of 20th-century American journalism.” He had a career “that saw him attain almost the status of an oracle in the course of publishing over 4,000 columns.”

In a somewhat mystical but apt sentence, Arnold-Forster says that Lippmann “has an omnipresence but is hard to place.” He goes on to say that Lippmann “appears in so many contexts and moments that he can seem chronically peripatetic and inconsistent, always changing his mind, moving on elsewhere and everywhere.”

Several years ago, I heard Richard Brookhiser, the journalist and historian, make a point: The word “day” is embedded in “journalism” (jour). In a sense, “daily journalism” is a redundancy. (So is “daily diary,” in light of día.) You take note of what seems most important or truest on that day. As the times shift, you may well too, while retaining a general outlook.

“For all of his networked globetrotting,” writes Arnold-Forster, “Lippmann spent most of his days sitting at his desk, reading a book or writing a column.” I think of what George F. Will, the veteran columnist, told me in a podcast last year: “If someone said, ‘What do you do, Mr. Will?,’ I’d say, ‘I’m a writer,’ but actually I’m a reader. I have to read four or five hours a day—journalism, books, etc.—to get the material.”

Walter Lippmann worked “at the intersection of daily news and democratic theory,” says Arnold-Forster. “He was not a system-building philosopher, nor an ur-liberal archetype, but a political writer engaged in controversies with his contemporaries.” This makes me think of Bill Buckley’s habitual title for a speech. He was often booked far in advance. The title of his speech was “Reflections on Current Contentions,” allowing him to talk about whatever was in the air.

Arnold-Forster says that Lippmann’s career was “a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics.” So was Buckley’s; so has Will’s been. You can find inconsistencies in the writings of all of these men, and certainly different emphases, depending on the day, or the era. This is only natural.

Walter Lippmann believed that good journalism was essential to liberal democracy. Bad journalism went hand in hand with bad politics and bad government.

Lippmann had a huge audience, with his syndicated newspaper column, and various articles in Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, Reader’s Digest, etc. His books were available through the Book-of-the-Month Club. This landscape was described, and scorned, as “middlebrow.” Where I sit, however, that landscape seems to me of a higher brow: serious, decent. Enviably so.

I got a kick out of a tidbit in Arnold-Forster’s book, and you may, too. In the 1960s, Lippmann began appearing on CBS television for annual interviews. He had a proviso, though: no ads for dog food or deodorant. Such ads, apparently, were gauche. (In her 1997 autobiography, Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, would write that Lippmann was “very intelligent” but also “a prima donna.”)

What was Lippmann, politically? Arnold-Forster writes that his subject “took the well-trodden path from young liberal socialist to old conservative liberal.” Arnold-Forster’s final chapter is titled “American Conservative Liberal.” Nehru, speaking in his country’s parliament, called Lippmann “an American conservative liberal.” (It says something about Lippmann’s importance that the prime minister of India was engaging with him.)

In a 1955 book—The Public Philosophy—Lippmann “suggested that liberalism had lost touch with ‘man’s fallen nature.’” (I have quoted Arnold-Forster, quoting Lippmann.) That is, of course, a common conservative critique of a liberalism of a certain kind.

When it came to foreign affairs, Lippmann was—depending on the day, depending on the emphasis—an “internationalist,” a “realist,” an “interventionist,” a “non-interventionist.” In other words, he was not a dope. Nor was he a dogmatist. By and large, he dealt with the world as it was, and the world was messy, as usual.

It was communism and fascism, writes Arnold-Forster, that pushed Lippmann into constitutionalism—that landed him on constitutionalism as the guardian of liberty. Here is a healthy passage from the new biography:

He argued in 1934 that, both in Russia and in Germany, the rulers of the state were “subject to no law. There are no customs, contracts, constitutions, or ancient usages which limit them.” He claimed in contrast that law ruled in America, where the Constitution was “undoubtedly the greatest attempt ever made consciously by men to render popular rule safe for the nation as a whole, the local community, and the individual.” Celebrations of the American Constitution became routine aspects of Lippmann’s political writing in the 1930s. What he wanted to construct were clear divisions between rule-of-law liberalism and lawless totalitarianism.

Some of this biography seems ripped from today’s headlines, as issues perdure. What is the interest of the United States in the security of Europe? How to contain, or counter, the expansionists in the Kremlin? On the domestic front, what are the limits of free speech, if there are any? Are there “real Americans” and a “real America,” as opposed to false ones?

Arnold-Forster writes that, after the 1960 presidential election, in which Kennedy beat Nixon by a hair, “Lippmann stressed that democratic life depended on accepting election results.” In 1968, that overheated year, Lippmann himself wrote, “We are suffering not from communism and radicalism but from nihilism.” In 1971, Lippmann worried about extreme polarization: “a party system in which the two parties were diametrically opposed.” You could even get a “civil war.”

If you will indulge a self-reference, I wrote, some years ago, a history of the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the pleasures of writing this history is that it allowed you, or me, to survey the twentieth century. A biography of Lippmann allows you to do the same (to a large degree). Tom Arnold-Forster has done very well with his.

I have complaints, of course. He paints Bill Buckley as a McCarthyite, a racist, and an illiberal. (Let me disclose that WFB was a beloved friend of mine.) Left and Right like to do this: freeze Bill in the early stages of his career, not allowing for the last 40 years of his busy, evolving, magnificent life. At the same time, Arnold-Forster quotes Noam Chomsky uncritically. Of the many questions one could ask, here’s one: Who was wiser about the Khmer Rouge? Buckley or Chomsky?

Nevertheless, this new biography is a pleasure for anyone interested in—well, just about anything, where politics and history are concerned.

Walter Lippmann believed that good journalism—sound journalism, honest journalism—was essential to liberal democracy. Bad journalism went hand in hand with bad politics and bad government. Talking about journalists, Lippmann said, “We do what every sovereign citizen is supposed to do but has not the time or the interest to do.” And “that is no mean calling.”