Walter Lippmann and the American Century

Rating:
Summary: Dean of American Journalism
Review: This book is excellent. The 20th Century has often been described as the "American Century" and this book surveys the major part of that era from the vantage point of the life and work of one of America's leading intellectuals, journalists and pundits. Lippmann began his intellectual career as a young follower and aide to Theodore Roosevelt while a student at Harvard, moving quickly thereafter into the leading milieu around Woodrow Wilson for whom he authored the famous "14 Points" upon which the vison of the League of Nations and America's ostensible goal of promoting world democracy was based. Prior to that time he played a leading role in the formation of the still influential liberal magazine, "The New Republic" in 1915. After the First World War he became the editor of the New York World, a prominent New York City daily newspaper founded by Joseph Pulitzer, a demanding position, but one that did not prevent him from acting, as he did throughout much of his life from then on, as an unofficial ambassador and troubleshooter for the U.S. government and leading American business interests, first in Mexico in 1927 and later in Italy, Germany and elsewhere.

In the wake of the bankruptcy of the New York World, Lippmann became one of America's most prominent newspaper columnists and opinion leaders and in fact wrote a seminal work "Public Opinion" dealing with the interaction of mass culture and politics. Lippmann continued and grew in this role as an ideologue and high priest for the New Deal, the Allied cause in World War 2 and more generally for America's leading role in world affairs until 1971 when his last column was published, three years before his death at the age of 85. By the time of the Kennedy/Johnson administration, Lippmann had solidified his reputation as, if not the Dean, certainly the grand old man of American journalism whose life had embodied and reflected all the great events and issues of American and world history through Vietnam which he came to view with skepticism and regret, a view presaged by some reservations he had held, notwithstanding his anti-communism, towards the "Truman Doctrine" and the Cold War.

Rating:
Summary: absolutely first rate biography and history
Review: This is an absolutely wonderful book. Walter Lippman was the first modern journalist of the US: in a time of parochialism, self-congratulatory muckraking, and yellow journalism, he had an internationalist perspective and strove to introduce the American people to new ideas. At the same time, he was deeply interested in the currents of virtually all major political movements in America, and he studied and then participated in them as an opinion maker. What is truly remarkable about the book is the way that Steel recounts the elements of these movements - encapsulates them in brilliant and stimulating descriptions - in paragrpah after paragraph on the development of Lippman's restless and omnivorous mind. He starts with the muckrakers and Lincoln Steffens as well as Wilson's ideas on the League of nations, moved through the implications of Freud for public policy, to the New Deal (and the ideas of Keynes), the Cold War, and his last great battle on the Vietnam War. But as Lippman looks at each of these problems, he also critiques them, probing for their limitations before moving on to the next great movement. The result is an absolutely first-rate intellectual history of about the first 70 years of the 20C, which in my opinion were far more interesting than the remaining 30. With each movement, at least for me, I wanted to learn more, to go back to the sources and other histories and biographies. Finally, there are also fascinating anecdotes of his intereactions with the great politicos of his time, from his dismissal of FDR as a mediocre thinker to a screaming argument at a party with Dean Acheson over the COld War - "it was two titans facing off" - to the bitter obsession that LBJ developed about him in the 1960s.

Of course, Lippman had a charmed career and sprung from an elite background. This made him somewhat insensitive or disinterested in some developments that hurt people, from the Ku Klux Klan to the McCarthy era. Nonetheless, as Steel points out, in his conservatism he also reflected the most popular opinions of his time, which is the reason he was so relevant.

Steel also gives us a portrait of the man, and it is charming and admiring. His father was a slum lord, of whom he was ashamed and Steel speculates that Lippman's life was a search for a better father figure in American politicians. He also had an empty first marriage, which he abandoned when he fell in love with his best friend's wife, renewing his life in middle age and breaking a number of 1950s taboos. THe portrait is quite moving.

This is a truly great book, and I hope that it will be viewed as a classic someday. I learned an immense amount and felt hungry for more, which is my principal criterion for true excellence in writing.

Highest recommendation.