Worldmaking (32 page)

But the Second World War was Lippmann's time, not Beard's—as the latter's bitterness suggests. The stage was ideally set for a thinker of Lippmann's intellectual caliber. His journalistic prose was lucid and forceful, and he commanded significant bipartisan admiration, appearing to inhabit a plane far above the quotidian political fray. Throughout his long career, Lippmann endorsed Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in almost equal number. He was incredibly well connected, his friends and acquaintances spanning the worlds of politics, journalism, academia, and literature. When in London, he met with Churchill, Keynes, and George Bernard Shaw. He developed a close friendship with Charles de Gaulle. He maintained regular correspondence with Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet. The president, for his part, understood that retaining Lippmann's support for his war policy was important. Most significantly, Lippmann shaped public opinion in a manner that is difficult to trace but impossible to deny. His support for responsible American internationalism—his call for a balanced and realistic foreign policy—relieved many Americans of their geopolitical naïveté. Lippmann's writings on diplomacy speak to the dilemmas of U.S. foreign policy as we know them today. He shared a podium with Bob Dylan and Coretta Scott King when Princeton awarded him an honorary degree in 1970.
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Born to Victorian gaslight, Walter Lippmann is a bridge to the modern.

*   *   *

Lippmann was born on September 23, 1889, in a grand town house on Lexington Avenue, in New York City, to wealthy parents of German-Jewish descent. Walter's grandfather had fled Germany after the failed liberal uprisings of 1848, and he and his children never looked back, accumulating substantial wealth over two generations—first through garment manufacturing, a popular route to a stable income for émigré Jews, and then with a substantial inherited real estate portfolio.
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Walter's parents, Jacob and Daisy, made sure that their son did not want for anything. From the tender age of six, Walter was taken on annual trips to Europe, traveling to London, Paris, Florence, and Berlin, where he was introduced to the Old World's cultural jewels. Walter attended Sachs's School for Boys, an elite German-Jewish establishment notable for its intense curriculum, which subjected its young charges to sixteen hours of Latin and Greek a week.
14
A combination of inspiring teaching, Sachs's well-stocked library, and a fierce work ethic fashioned an intellectual prodigy. A fellow student at Sachs, Carl Binger, recalled, “I don't suppose that [Walter] … ever got less than an A on any examination in his life.”
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His brilliance was confirmed when Lippmann joined Harvard University's class of 1910, which counted T. S. Eliot and John Reed among its illustrious cohort.

Reveling in the laissez-faire elective system introduced by Harvard's reformist president, Charles William Eliot, Lippmann was drawn to the study of philosophy, swept away by the rhetorical gifts of the two towering figures on campus: George Santayana and William James. Santayana was an inspiring teacher and wonderfully gifted writer and philosopher, with a particular knack for aphorism. “Those who cannot remember the past,” Santayana wrote famously in his
Life of Reason
, “are condemned to repeat it.” In that same work, forming a critique to which Lippmann became increasingly amenable during the Cold War, Santayana wrote, “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” Yet while Lippmann admired Santayana's Platonism, his detailed reading of history, and his contempt for Germanic idealism (for Kant and Hegel in particular), he found his value system and personality troubling in other aspects, particularly when compared to the greater optimism, and likability, of William James: “The two men I admired were James and Santayana. James was the one I loved … The truth of the matter is that Santayana was a fearful snob. He was awfully nice to me, but he really disliked the human race as few people I ever met dislike it. I remember the shock he gave me when I first heard him say something rather mean about William James, which didn't seem a nice thing to do … James was too American to suit him.”
16

William James was a legendary figure at Harvard, best known for developing pragmatism as a coherent—and distinctly American—philosophical tradition, which abhorred dogma and valorized practical rather than abstract reasoning. Impressed by his range of intellect and sharpening social conscience, James grew close to Lippmann, meeting him every week for tea and conversation. James had become increasingly preoccupied by issues of social reform, and Lippmann, inspired partly by reading Charles Beard, was similarly inclined.

According to Ronald Steel, James's influence on Lippmann can be detected in three areas. First, James taught him that meliorism—the belief system that holds that incremental progress is achievable but perfection is unattainable—was the only plausible way to view the political world. Second, James stressed that men must make decisions, often quickly and decisively, without recourse to a pool of vast, objective knowledge. Lippmann posed this dilemma succinctly in observing, “We must choose whether we will it or not, and where all is doubt.”
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Finally, James instilled in Lippmann a work ethic grounded in strict observation of a recurring daily regimen. Every writer, said James, should draft one thousand words a day, irrespective of whether he has something important to say. Lippmann digested these lessons, which informed his work habits, intellect, and wider ambitions at every level. James and Lippmann wanted to improve the parlous lot of America's poor, but both were modest about the speed of progress that could be attained in a nation in which social reform had historically moved glacially.

A formative moment arrived for Lippmann in the spring of 1908, when a fire razed approximately half of the nearby town of Chelsea. Lippmann volunteered to assist in the relief process and was shocked by the deprivation he encountered in this overwhelmingly working-class town. Lippmann recalled, “That was the first time I realized the amount of poverty there was. In fact, it was the first time I realized the outer world in the sense that I'd been so immersed in philosophy and literature—Goethe, Dante, and Lucretius—and fine arts that I hadn't seen it.”
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Lippmann's social awakening recalled Charles Beard's in the slums of Chicago. And it moved him in a similarly leftward direction. He founded Harvard University's Socialist Club and formed a strong attachment to the visiting British professor Graham Wallas, an eminent social psychologist who had cofounded the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895.

Lippmann was something of a phenomenon at Harvard. At a meeting of Harvard's Western Club, John Reed, who would find enduring fame as a chronicler of the Russian Revolution, introduced Lippmann with the words “Gentleman, the future President of the United States!” There followed laughter and cheers of a knowing sort. Reed even composed a poem about Lippmann:

Lippmann,—calm, inscrutable,

Thinking and writing clearly, soundly, well;

All snarls of falseness swiftly piercing through,

His keen mind leaps like lightning to the True;

His face is almost placid—but his eye—

There is a vision born to prophecy!

He sits in silence, as one who has said:

“I waste not living words among the dead!”

Our all-unchallenged Chief!
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Harvard's faculty was as impressed by Lippmann's talent and potential as were his fellow students. George Santayana was determined to keep his protégé close and asked him to serve as an instructor for his course on introductory philosophy—to which Lippmann readily assented. Santayana was enigmatic and unlovable, but his wit and brilliance kept his teaching assistant enthralled. What could be more disarming and seductive than his description of the intellectual: “There are always a few men whose main interest is to note the aspect of things in an artistic or philosophical way. They are rather useless individuals, but as I happen to belong to that class, I think them much superior to the rest of mankind.”
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Yet Lippmann held no desire to embrace philosophical inconsequence, even when presented facetiously. In May 1910, he crossed the Charles River to start work as a journalist for the
Boston Common
.

*   *   *

Lippmann did not get along at the
Common
, a progressive weekly funded by the department store owner Edward A. Filene. Its editor insisted on draining oxygen from his journalists' prose, creating a chokingly dry effect that Lippmann found uncongenial. He complained to Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraking journalist whom he had come to know in 1908, that “any attempt to find the meaning, or the tragedy, or the humor of the story is rigorously edited out as an expression of opinion which belongs only in the editorial column … The work is so mechanical that I am learning nothing. I might as well be attached to a clipping bureau.”
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Lippmann desperately wanted to work for Steffens, whose crusading journalism and muscular prose he greatly admired. His wish was granted when Steffens hired Lippmann to serve as his assistant for a series of investigative articles commissioned by
Everybody's
magazine. He spent a year investigating the corrupt symbiotic relationship that existed between Wall Street financiers and Tammany Hall political hacks. Lippmann honed his craft under Steffens's guidance, learning that the best journalism was mined from empirical graft and written for the ages: “If I wrote a paragraph about a fire down the street, I must write it with as much care as if that paragraph were going down in one of the anthologies.”
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The series of “money power” articles was a great success, and an acquaintance named Alfred A. Knopf—a twenty-year-old Columbia graduate setting out on what would be a glittering publishing career—encouraged Lippmann to write a brief book on politics.

Lippmann's
A Preface to Politics
was published in 1913, when its author was just twenty-three years old. A work of daring self-confidence, owing something of an iconoclastic debt to Charles Beard's
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
, the book took aim at the naïve excesses of certain Progressives, dwelled on the ingrained flaws of human nature that invited political corruption, and cast early doubt on the common man's ability to act in his own or his country's best interests. Powerful political machines, for example, came into being to serve this inchoate mass, not necessarily to exploit it—which Lippmann characterized as a damning indictment of democracy in itself. “Tammany,” Lippmann wrote provocatively, “is not a satanic instrument of deception, cleverly devised to thwart ‘the will of the people.' It is a crude and largely unconscious answer to certain immediate needs, and without those needs its power would crumble.” The book marked Lippmann's departure from socialism—“socialism has within it the germs of that great bureaucratic tyranny which Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile State”—and delivered a strong endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Progressivism, combining strong leadership, big (though not overbearing) government, and monopoly reform to ideal effect.

But Lippmann did worry about Roosevelt's tendency to operate on assumptions formed in the last century: “It has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from public life every now and again … Every statesman like every professor should have a sabbatical year.” Lippmann found Woodrow Wilson a more interesting political prospect in the medium term, writing that “Wilson, less complete than Roosevelt, is worthy of our deepest interest because his judgment is subtle where Roosevelt's is crude. He is a foretaste of a more advanced statesmanship.”
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A definitive endorsement of the president, however, was still a while away. Lippmann cast his vote for Theodore Roosevelt in the election of 1912 and made his preference for him clear in
A Preface to Politics
. But he was keeping an open mind about the cerebral presidential incumbent, whose
Congressional Government
he had read and admired at Harvard.

Roosevelt declared himself an admirer of
A Preface to Politics
, just as he had with
The Influence of Sea Power upon History
.
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Where Mahan had provided robust and original views on foreign policy, Roosevelt believed that Lippmann could deliver the same in the domestic sphere. Roosevelt had read the book while spending a winter and autumn in Brazil's tropical climes, shooting crocodiles, contracting jungle fever and, consequently, finding a lot of time with a book, rather than a rifle, in his hands. Lippmann recalled of his evidently selective reading that “he was very pleased with my criticisms of Wilson and very pleased with my eulogies of him … He told me that he approved of the book and wanted to see me as soon as we got back.”
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The two men met at the Harvard Club in New York in 1914, joined by a mutual friend, the Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Roosevelt informed Lippmann that he was planning another run at the presidency in 1916 and asked him to assist in drafting his labor platform. Lippmann, who in his own words was “an unqualified hero worshiper” of Roosevelt, eagerly assented, and the two men shook hands on what Roosevelt described as a “common cause.”
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Yet while Lippmann helped Roosevelt with this specific request, he gradually shifted his affections from the old warrior to the philosopher-king in the Oval Office.

*   *   *

In October 1913, a high-profile intellectual and political commentator named Herbert Croly invited Lippmann to dine with him at Players, one of New York's private clubs. Croly had published
The Promise of American Life
to glowing reviews in 1909. In this influential Progressive tract, Croly argued that the United States' affirming story of societal progress, and vast latent potential, might combine to perfect not just America but also other nations, like Panama, where “order and good government” could be established with the right kind of tutelage.
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In respect to improving America, Croly believed that the government must play a larger role in managing the economy and redistributing wealth, so as to ensure the nation's continued vitality: “The Promise of American life is to be fulfilled—not merely by a maximum amount of economic freedom, but by a certain measure of discipline; not merely by the abundant satisfaction of individual desires, but by a large measure of individual subordination and self-denial.”
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Lippmann admired Croly's ambition to approach good governance and politics in a scientific fashion.