About the other Walter Lippmann...
Because my name is spelled exactly as his was, people sometimes ask if we are related. There's no family or other connection. He was more or less the George Will of his time, so we shared little beyond our name. Some scholars whose work I appreciate have written about his ideas and politics, including these:
Historian Herbert Aptheker, author of American Negro Slave Revolts, editor of the writings of, and literary executor of W.E.B. DuBois, and of the Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States and numerous other works on Black history, wrote a comprehensive analysis in 1955 . It was reprinted in Dr. Aptheker's History and Reality.under the title "Walter Lippmann and Democracy" Here are three short excerpts:
We shall not enter into the game of guessing Mr. Lippmann motivations because we do not know him or them; because we are interested in his ideas, not his psyche; and because, therefore, his personal motivations are irrelevant to our inquiry.
All of his political activities and intellectual endeavors since then [1913] have been directed towards preserving monopoly capitalism by bringing to the rich responsible thinking geared to their interests, by urging upon them a "reasonable" approach, and by attacking democratic concepts and practices.
Mr. Lippmann, with the exception of his extreme youth, has always been anti-democratic; his latest book confirms and sharpens his anti-democratic outlook. Read the full analysis
Howard Zinn, in Discovering John Reed, contrasted the evolution of Reed and Lippmann during World War 1, where Reed moved left and Lippmann moved right:
The big periodicals of New York
pressed him to cover the European war for them, and he agreed to go for
the Metropolitan. At the same time he wrote an article for the Masses It
was a war for profit, he said. On the way to Europe, he was conscious of
the rich on the first-class decks, and three thousand Italians kept like
animals in the hold. He was soon in England, in Switzerland and Germany,
and then, in France, walking through the fields of war: rain, mud,
corpses. What depressed him most was the murderous patriotism seizing
everyone on both sides, even some Socialists, like H.G. Wells in England.
When he returned to the States after
four months, he found the radicals Upton Sinclair and John Dewey among the
patriots. And Walter Lippmann too. Lippmann,
now editor of the New Republic, wrote in December, 1914 a curious essay:
"The Legendary John Reed." It defined the distance between
himself and Reed. "By temperament he is not a professional writer or
reporter. He is a person who enjoys himself." And then Lippmann,
who clearly had pride in himself as "a professional writer,"
gave the ultimate dismissal: "Reed has no detachment and is proud of
it."
Read Zinn's essay on John Reed at "Third World Traveler"
"A
Murder and Its Meaning"
Elias Vlanton's review of Kati Marton's THE
POLK CONSPIRACY, a book on the role of mainstream journalists in
supporting the Cold War as it was inaugurated after World War II. Vlanton
says:
Kati Marton has written a thrilling account of Polk's murder and of the cover-up by the American press and foreign-policy establishment. Her story is fast-paced, compellingly written and entirely engaging, and many will finish it convinced that American journalism has finally gotten its man. Marton rightly condemns American government officials for having been more concerned with protecting their investment in the Greek government than in finding Polk's killers. She also properly raps Walter Lippmannfor his gullibility in having accepted, virtually without question, information supplied by American officials and General Donovan. But by singling out Donovan and Lippmannas the chief villains in the press cover-up of the murder, Marton misses a larger point.
It wasn't Walter Lippmannalone who failed George Polk and Gregory Staktopoulos; it was American journalism. Although a central figure in the case, Lippmannwas hardly the only journalist to accept blindly that the Communists killed Polk, while ignoring evidence that suggested right-wing involvement. He has to share that responsibility with most of his fellows, including Edward R. Murrow and other top journalists at CBS, the major dailies such as The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, and other American reporters then covering Greece. The only dissenters were a handful of members of the New York Newspaper Guild.
The Polk Conspiracy
has again drawn attention to how American journalists forty years ago
sacrificed their integrity to solidify domestic support for the cold war.
The uncritical praise The Polk Conspiracy has received, however,
shows how American journalists today accept a terrific story and stylish
prose in lieu of meticulous research and critical analysis. Either way,
they are still not getting it right.
Read the detailed review-essay from The Nation
magazine
Activist and scholar
Noam Chomsky said in an
interview:
....the term
"manufacturing consent" is not mine, I took it from Walter Lippmann,
the leading public intellectual and leading media figure of the twentieth
century, who thought it was a great idea.
He said we should manufacture consent, that's the way democracies should
work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of
the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent
by controlling, regimenting their minds.
Read the full Chomsky interview
In "Deterring
Democracy"
Chomsky wrote:
The techniques of
manufacture of consent are most finely honed in the United States, a more
advanced business-run society than its allies and one that is in important
ways more free than elsewhere, so that the ignorant and stupid masses are
more dangerous.
Read the full article in "Z" magazine
In "Thinkers
of the Twentieth Century"
Alan Waters writes
Lippmann proposed that there should be
a system of collaboration between administrators, policymakers, and
fact-finding experts. The role of the citizenry would be to maintain
surveillance over the decision-making procedures of these knowledgeable
rulers. Liberty and the News, Public Opinion, and The Phantom
Public express Lippmann's pessimism concerning
the compatibility of democracy with the social conditions of modern
society. An Enquiry into the Principles of the Good Society
advanced the principle of disinterestedness on the part of statesmen as a
cure to the excesses of majority rule and as an antidote to the dangers of
elitism.
Cited in Chomsky's "Necessary Illusions"
Walter Lippmann's American Century (Foreign Affairs Fall 1980) Harry C. McPherson
Following a flirtation with socialism prior
to World War I, Lippmann moved quickly to support mainstream thought.
Here's a biographical note on his move from left to right.
From "First World War.com"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lippmann
"Information
Please" (on-line encyclopedia)
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0829929.html
"Walter Lippmann was a highly respected
columnist for the New York Herald Tribune,
considered by many the most influential
political commentator of the twentieth
century. His opinions informed every
president from Woodrow Wilson to
Richard Nixon."
Original
source image by Al Hershfeld