Walter Lippmann

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The American author Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was his era's most respected journalist and a significant contributor to its political thought.

The only child of well-to-do, second-generation German-Jewish parents, Walter Lippmann studied at a private school in his native New York City. His parents took him often to Europe to absorb its culture. He completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard in three years with the highest honors and was an editor of the Harvard Monthly and cofounder of the Harvard Socialist Club. He remained at Harvard another year as assistant to George Santayana in the philosophy department. Also, the famous philosopher William James made himself available to Lippmann for private seminars.

In 1911 Lincoln Steffens, editor of the muckraking Everybody's Magazine, took Lippmann on as his secretary. His first book, A Preface to Politics (1913), brought him instant recognition and the opportunity to join Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl in founding the weekly New Republic. All three had backed Theodore Roosevelt for president in 1912; in 1916 they and their magazine switched to Woodrow Wilson. In 1917 Lippmann served as assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. As captain in military intelligence in 1918, Lippmann worked on Wilson's Fourteen Points program and on preparations for the Paris Peace Conference. In 1920 he left the New Republic to become editorial writer and, later, editor of the Democratic New York World.

When the World suspended publication in 1931, Lippmann moved to the Republican Herald Tribune, to which, for the next 30 years, he contributed his nationally syndicated column, "Today and Tomorrow." Here he recorded his responses to the ever-changing contemporary scene. Between 1912 and 1968 he supported, with varying reservations, six Republican and seven Democratic candidates for the presidency. In 1945, on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt - whom he had never greatly admired - Lippmann wrote, "Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer."

The following years raised even more such questions, and Lippmann responded with firmness and courage. He opposed the Korean War, the Senate hearings of Joseph McCarthy, and the war in Vietnam. He expressed admiration for France's Charles De Gaulle, with whom - as with the U.S.S.R.'s Nikita Khrushchev - he established relations of personal confidence as had no American official of the time. His second wife, Helen Byrne Armstrong, mastered the Russian language so thoroughly that her fluency delighted Khrushchev.

In the late 1960s, Lippmann's opposition to the Vietnam War earned him the enmity of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who derided him as a treacherous, senile old man. At last Lippmann was all but cut off from the American political establishment. Though even his critics gave him credit for his independent stance, Lippmann shortly retired from the public scene. Failing health in the ensuing years forced his wife to put him in a New York nursing home. He died there on December 14, 1974.

A number of Lippmann's books on political science have become classics in their field, including A Preface to Morals (1929), United States Foreign Policy (1943), and The Cold War (1947).

Further Reading

Aside from Lippmann's own writings, excerpts from his works and summaries of his thoughts are in Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, eds., The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy (1963). A biography of Lippmann is Edward L. Schapsmeier and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Walter Lippmann (1969). Useful studies are David E. Weingast, Walter Lippmann: A Study in Personal Journalism (1949); Marquis W. Childs and James Reston, eds., Walter Lippmann and His Times (1959); Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 (1961); and Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980). Barry D. Riccio, Walter Lippmann: Odyssey of a Liberal (1994) focuses on Lippmann's relationship to liberal political ideas in the course of his evolution from socialism to conservatism.

(1889-1974), journalist and author. Lippmann was unique among twentieth-century writers in combining a career as an editor and syndicated columnist with that of an intellectual. Symbolic of this life were his many books, most of them edited versions of his columns on contemporary issues.

Lippmann was brought up in comfortable circumstances in New York by his businessman father. He graduated from Harvard in 1909 in a class that included such future notables as T. S. Eliot and journalist-revolutionary John Reed. His disciplined intellectual style and gift for lucid exposition of complicated ideas were apparent early in life. At Harvard he became an assistant to philosopher George Santayana and was known for the precision with which he planned his career. This orderliness verged on rigidity. He once refused to change the time of an appointment with Nikita Khrushchev because his schedule was filled.

Although his political views shifted during his life from an early attachment to socialism to the carefully contrived conservatism of his mature years, a consistent, skeptical core of beliefs ran through these changes. A brief spell as an assistant to the socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, seems to have convinced him of the tediousness of political activism. Over the course of his life he became increasingly skeptical about the capabilities of the masses, and his social theories grew to depend on the intervention of experts. His work in propaganda during World War I left him pessimistic about the ability of the public to discern complex political issues.

Throughout his life he combined the careers of editor and publicist. He was a founder and an associate editor of the New Republic from 1914 to 1921. During the next decade he worked for the New York World and, after 1931, joined the Herald Tribune, where he wrote a column that was syndicated in over two hundred papers. He joined the Washington Post in 1961 in the same capacity.

Influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, Lippmann came to feel that humanity, ill-informed and subject to partiality, is driven by irrational impulses. His most influential book Public Opinion (1922) consolidated these ideas into an analysis said by Edward Bernays to have launched the profession of public relations. The Phantom Public (1925) was even more pessimistic.

Lippmann came to believe that civil society depended on the capacity of people to sublimate their aggressive impulses through the adoption of a rule of law. Although a lifelong religious skeptic, he recognized the void created by the absence of religious faith in A Preface to Morals (1929). He accepted as unavoidable the role of business organizations and their dominant place in industrial societies. He adopted a form of corporate collectivism: a state with a strong executive composed of private corporate entities managed by experts. He never wavered from these elitist ideas and continued to view popular government dependent on legislative procedures with skepticism, a view developed in The Public Philosophy (1955).

Throughout his career Lippmann retained a strong interest in foreign affairs. At the close of World War I he broke with Woodrow Wilson over the issue of ethnic self-determination, which he predicted would precipitate chaos in Central Europe. The rise of totalitarian governments during the thirties led him to develop his conception of a Western alliance based on Anglo-American solidarity. World War II confirmed his belief in collective security. Early in the cold war he opposed George Kennan's containment policy as a costly policy "of shifts and maneuvers" by fair-weather allies and puppets, which would risk war and undermine American prestige. He recommended instead consolidating the Atlantic community by helping through the Marshall Plan to reconstruct its economies. And during the Vietnam era he viewed the conflict as a dangerous strategic consequence of the cold war and urged caution in dealing with it.

Bibliography:

John Morton Blum, ed., Selected Letters of Public Philosopher Walter Lippmann (1985); Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980).

Author:

William R. Taylor

A journalist and author of the twentieth century. Lippmann wrote a widely read newspaper column and several books, including The Public Philosophy.

Quotes:

"Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power"

"Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles."

"This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement -- that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it -- that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings."

"What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority."

"In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes, it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation's history."

"No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people."

See more famous quotes by Walter Lippmann

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Walter Lippmann
Born	September 23, 1889(1889-09-23) New York, New York
Died	December 14, 1974 (aged 85) New York, New York
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Harvard University A.B. (1909)
Occupation	Writer, journalist, political commentator
Known for	Founding editor, New Republic Pulitzer Prize, 1958 & 1962
Parents	Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann

Walter Lippmann (23 September 1889 – 14 December 1974) was an American intellectual who was a writer, reporter, and political commentator, who twice was awarded, in 1958 and 1962, a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated newspaper column, “Today and Tomorrow”.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Journalism and democracy 3 Death 4 Bibliography 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links

Early life

Walter Lippmann was born on 23 September 1889, in New York City, to Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann; his upper-middle class German-Jewish family, took annual holidays in Europe. At age 17, he entered Harvard University where he studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas, concentrating upon philosophy and languages (he spoke German and French), and earned his degree in three years, graduating as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society.^[1]

Journalism and democracy

Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and a philosopher who tried to reconcile the tensions between liberty and democracy in a complex and modern world, as in his 1920 book Liberty and the News.

In 1913 Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic magazine. During World War I, Lippmann became an adviser 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. After Lippmann had become famous, 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 Soviet Ministry for State Security.

Walter Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that The New York Times' coverage of the Bolshevik revolution was biased and inaccurate. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize-winning column "Today and Tomorrow," 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.

It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. He argued that people—including journalists—are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than come to judgment by critical thinking. Humans condense ideas into symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed "the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation." Citizens, he wrote, were too self-centered to care about public policy except as pertaining to pressing local issues.

Lippmann saw the purpose of journalism as "intelligence work". Within this role, journalists are a link between policymakers and the public. A journalist seeks facts from policymakers which he then transmits to citizens who form a public opinion. In this model, the information may be used to hold policymakers accountable to citizens. This theory was spawned by the industrial era and some critics argue the model needs rethinking in post-industrial societies.

Though a journalist himself, he held no assumption of news and truth being synonymous. For him the “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” A journalist’s version of the truth is subjective and limited to how he constructs his reality. The news, therefore, is “imperfectly recorded” and too fragile to bear the charge as “an organ of direct democracy.”

To his mind, democratic ideals had deteriorated, voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies, they lacked the competence to participate in public life and cared little for participating in the political process. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann noted that the stability the government achieved during the patronage era of the 1800s was threatened by modern realities. He wrote that a “governing class” must rise to face the new challenges. He saw the public as Plato did, a great beast or a bewildered herd – floundering in the “chaos of local opinions."

The basic problem of democracy, he wrote, was the accuracy of news and protection of sources. He argued that distorted information was inherent in the human mind. People make up their minds before they define the facts, while the ideal would be to gather and analyze the facts before reaching conclusions. By seeing first, he argued, it is possible to sanitize polluted information. Lippmann argued that seeing through stereotypes (which he coined in this specific meaning) subjected us to partial truths. Lippmann called the notion of a public competent to direct public affairs a "false ideal." He compared the political savvy of an average man to a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain.

Early on Lippmann said the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." This class is composed of experts, specialists and bureaucrats. The experts, who often are referred to as "elites," were to be a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the "omnicompetent citizen". Later, in The Phantom Public (1925), he recognized that the class of experts were also, in most respects, outsiders to any particular problem, and hence, not capable of effective action. Philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) agreed with Lippmann's assertions that the modern world was becoming too complex for every citizen to grasp all its aspects, but Dewey, unlike Lippmann, believed that the public (a composite of many “publics” within society) could form a “Great Community” that could become educated about issues, come to judgments and arrive at solutions to societal problems.

Following the removal from office of Henry A. Wallace in September 1946, Lippmann became the leading public advocate of the need to respect a Soviet sphere of influence in Europe, as opposed to the containment strategy being advocated at the time by people like George F. Kennan.

Lippmann was an informal adviser to several presidents.^{[citation needed]} He had a rather famous feud with Lyndon Johnson over his handling of the Vietnam War, of which Lippman had become highly critical.^{[citation needed]}

On September 14, 1964, President Johnson presented Lippmann with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

A meeting of intellectuals organized in Paris in August 1938 by French philosopher Louis Rougier, Colloque Walter Lippmann was named after Walter Lippmann. Walter Lippmann House at Harvard University, which houses the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, is named after him too. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman used one of Lippmann's catch phrases, the "Manufacture of Consent" for the title of their book, which contains sections critical of Lippmann's views about the media: Manufacturing Consent.

Death

Lippman died on December 14, 1974 at age 85 in New York, New York.^[2]

Bibliography

• A Preface to Politics (1913) ISBN 1-59102-292-4
  • A Preface to Politics at Project Gutenberg
• Drift and Mastery (1914) ISBN 0-299-10604-7
• The Stakes of Diplomacy (1915)
• The Political Scene (1919)
• Liberty and the News (1920)
• Public Opinion (1922) ISBN 0-02-919130-0
  • Public Opinion at Project Gutenberg
• The Phantom Public (1925) ISBN 1-56000-677-3
• Men of Destiny (1927) ISBN 0-29595-026-9
• American Inquisitors (1928)
• A Preface to Morals (1929) ISBN 0-87855-907-8
• Interpretations 1931-1932 (1932)
• The Method of Freedom (1934) out-of-print
• The New Imperative (1935)
• Interpretations 1933-1935 (1936)
• The Good Society (1937) ISBN 0-7658-0804-8
• U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943)
• U.S. War Aims (1944)
• The Cold War (1947) ISBN 0-06-131723-3
• Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955) ISBN 0-88738-791-8

With William O. Scroggs

• The United States in World Affairs 1931 (1932)
• The United States in World Affairs 1932 (1933)

See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Walter Lippmann

• Harold Lasswell
• Edward Bernays

Notes

1. ^ Who Belongs To Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Beta Kappa website, accessed Oct 4, 2009
2. ^ Wooley, John T. and Gerhard Peters (December 14, 1974). "Gerald R. Ford: Statement on the Death of Walter Lippmann". The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4629. Retrieved 2008-11-09. 

References

• 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 0-7006-0740-4. 
• Riccio, Barry D. (1994). Walter Lippmann - Odyssey of a liberal. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1-56000-096-1. 
• Steel, Ronald (1980). Walter Lippmann and the American century. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-7658-0464-6. 
• Ferri, Mascia (2006). Come si forma l'Opinione pubblica. Il contributo sociologico di Walter Lippmann. Milan, Franco Angeli. ISBN 88-464-7627-1. 
• Lozito, Virginia (2008). By Walter Lippmann. Opinione pubblica, politica estera e democrazia. Rome, Aracne. ISBN 978-88-548-2220-7. 
• The American Presidency Project - Remarks at the Presentation of the 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards - September 14, 1964

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Walter Lippmann

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Communication Theory/Propaganda and the Public

• USC Center on Public Diplomacy Profile
• Works by Walter Lippmann at Project Gutenberg
• Public Opinion (1922) from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
• Walter Lippmann Men of Destiny (1927)
• Walter Lippman FBI FOIA
• Biography with excerpt from works
• Guide to the Walter Lippmann Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
• Walter Lippman, “The Mental Age of Americans,” New Republic 32, no. 412 (October 25, 1922): 213–215; no. 413 (November 1, 1922): 246–248; no. 414 (November 8, 1922): 275–277; no. 415 (November 15, 1922): 297–298; no. 416 (November 22, 1922): 328–330; no. 417 (November 29, 1922): 9–11.

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