July 2006
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann
(1889-1974)Walter Lippmann, the son of second-generation
German-Jewish parents, was born in New York City on 23rd September, 1889. While studying at Harvard University he became a socialist and was co-founder of the Harvard Socialist Club and edited the Harvard Monthly.Lippman's book, A
Preface to Politics (1913) was well-received and the following
year he joined Herbert
Croly in establishing the political weekly, the New Republic.
Lippmann rejected his earlier socialism in Drift
and Mastery (1914) and in 1916 became a staunch supporter of Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party. In 1917 Lippmann was appointed as
assistant to Newton
Baker,
Wilson's secretary of war. Lippman worked closely with
Woodrow Wilson and Edward
House in drafting the Fourteen Points Peace Programme.
He was a member of the USA's delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919
and helped draw up the covenant of the League of Nations.
In 1920 Lippmann left the New Republic to work for the New York World. His controversial books, Public
Opinion (1922) and The
Phantom Public (1925), raised doubts about the possibility of
developing a true democracy in a modern, complex society.
Lippmann became editor of the New York World in 1929, but after it closed in
1931, he moved to the New York Herald Tribune. For the next 30 years
Lippmann wrote the nationally syndicated column, Today
and Tomorrow.
Lippmann developed a very pragmatic approach to
politics and during this period supported six Republican and seven Democratic presidential candidates.
After the Second World War, Lippmann returned to the liberal views of his youth. He upset leaders of both
the Democratic and Republican parties when he opposed the Korean War, McCarthyism and the Vietnam
War. Walter Lippmann died on 14th December, 1974.
Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974),
was an influential United States writer, journalist, and political commentator.
Lippmann was born in New York City to German-Jewish parents, Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann. The family lived a comfortable, if not privileged, life. Annual family trips to Europe were the rule.
At age 17, he entered Harvard University where he studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas. He concentrated on philosophy and languages (he spoke both German and French) and graduated after only three years of study.
In 1913 Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic magazine. During World War I, Lippmann became an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points.
Lippmann had wide access to the nation's decision makers and had no sympathy for communism. But the Golos spy ring used Mary Price, his secretary, to garner information on items Lippmann chose not to write about or names of Lippmann's sources, often not carried in stories, but of use to the MGB (USSR).
Early on, Lippmann was optimistic about American democracy. He believed that the American people would become intellectually engaged in political and world issues and fulfill their democratic role as an educated electorate. In light of the events leading to World War II and the concomitant scourge of totalitarianism however, he rejected this view.
Lippmann came to be seen as Noam Chomsky's moral and intellectual antithesis: He agreed with the Platonic view that the population is a great beast, a herd, that has to be controlled by an intellectual specialist class.
Chomsky used one of Lippmann's catch phrases for the title of his book about the media:
Manufacturing Consent.See also: Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays
Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, found that the New York Times coverage of the Bolshevik revolution was neither unbiased nor accurate.
It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. In addition to his newspaper columns, he published several books. Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "cold war" to common currency in his 1947 book by the same name.
Drift and Mastery (1914) ISBN 0299106047
Public Opinion (1922) ISBN 0029191300
Public Opinion, available freely at Project Gutenberg
The Good Society (1937) ISBN 0765808048
The Cold War (1947) ISBN 0061317233
McAllister, Ted V. (1996). Revolt against modernity:
Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin & the search for postliberal order.
Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas. ; pp. 58-68; ISBN 0700607404.
Riccio, Barry D. (1994). Walter Lippmann - Odyssey of a liberal.
Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1560000961.
Steel, Ronald (1980). Walter Lippmann and the American century.
Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0765804646.
USC Center on Public Diplomacy
Profile Works by Walter Lippmann at Project Gutenberg
Walter Lippmann Men of Destiny (1927)
Biography with excerpt from works
Walter Lipmann & blue-water strategy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann
July 23, 2006