Lives of the American Century

AMERICA HAS BECOME obsessed with its fall from grace, as the faery world affluence of the '60s and '70s fades into the dim gray of an inflationary, post-industrial society. Current disillusionment and failure naturally foster exaggerated perceptions of past-promise and potential. There was a time when something special about American ingenuity, self-confidence and leadership exalted patriotism beyond hyper-nationalism to the realm of highest religious abstraction: faith was grounded in sheer success. The country could have no trouble fighting its enemies abroad or preserving liberty and prosperity at home--this, after all, was the American century.

But, like Hitler's 1000-year Reich, it ran out of steam long before anybody expected. Where American ideals and ideas once inspired millions worldwide with hope for the future, the nation now perceives itself as spiritually bankrupt and narcissistic. As the obsession with the gilded past and tragic future continues, it becomes imperative for historians to bulldoze the mythology surrounding the rise and decline of American culture and clear a space for honest interpretation of the bygone era. Ronald Steel depicts American political history through the life and work of Walter Lippmann '10, and achieves a syncretic vision of the American glory and dream.

The century's most prolific and widely read journalist, Lippmann consorted with the heroes of American mythology from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy '40. While his personal advice and machinations influenced the course of the century, Lippmann's life and work signify the success of its pragmatic spiritualism in tackling both human and scientific problems.

Widely recognized as a conservative, Lippmann began and ended his career as a political radical. A critic of many U.S. Cold War policies, he fiercely decried the absurdity of intervention in Vietnam. But the genesis of his concern for social justice was the South Boston slums he visited while a Harvard undergraduate in the early years of the century. Both indignation and guilt over his privileged Manhattan upbringing incited his imagination to challenge the prevailing capitalist orthodoxy at Harvard, embracing socialism as the only guarantor of liberty and justice to all Americans.

The Harvard Steele describes in his early chapter differs vastly from the megalith today's students know. Big-name professors devoted time to undergraduates; patrician competition for acceptance to social clubs was not the exception but the rule; and students lacked the "social awareness" to rally at protests and demonstrations. Lippmann's Jewish heritage barred his entrance to most college groups and organizations. The Crimson blackballed him. But Lippmann gained recognition as one of the keenest minds of his class. To strengthen his grasp of the moral issues socialism involved, he pored through volumes of Fabian society tracts and Marxist literature. He gained acceptance to the narrow circle of Harvard's academic elite: the favorite student of George Santayana, he was also on intimate terms with William James.

ALTHOUGH HE HAD the intellect of a philosopher, Lippmann shunned a strictly contemplative career in academia. Four years after graduation and work in Boston politics and journalism, a group of New York writers asked Lippmann to join them as founding editor of the New Republic, launched as the voice of anticorporate progressivism. His editorials in the New Republic's early days drew the attention of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The war president chose Lippmann to serve in a clan-destine group helping draft political boundaries for post-World War Europe; from its inquiry emerged the famous Fourteen Points.

Growing tired of the New Republic, Lippmann moved on to the Pulitzer-owned New York World to expand his influence among a wider circe of readers. Working there until 1931, when financial difficulties forced the World, the nation's most important liberal newspaper, to fold, his political sentiments gradually shifted. Appalled by the ignorance expressed in popular opinion, Lippmann feared strict adherence to decisions determined by numerical majority could threaten the welfare and freedom of the nation. The pivotal event for Lippmann was the Chattanooga, Tenn., Scopes trial, where law-abiding officials manipulated a popular consensus to convict a young schoolteacher for instructing his pupils in Darwin's evolutionary theory. He outlined his revised stance in Public Opinion, arguing that chief authority for public decision-making should be left to professional experts privy to classified information. Public Opinion naturally did not go over well, but it earned Lippmann respect among intellectuals for hard nosed, rational criticism.

Steel intersperses narrative with Lippmann's articles and opinions through the onset of the Depression and Roosevelt's rise. Sometimes the journalist remained on the sidelines and patiently observed. But, more often--as in the late '20s when Lippmann and Ambassador Dwight Morrow mediated a dispute between American oil companies, the Catholic Church and a hostile Mexican government--Steel finds the journalist in the thick of the action.

After the World went bankrupt, Lippmann took up a column at the New York Herald Tribune, expecting to continue for several years at most. He often complained about the life of a columnist, having to glean his thoughts for a deadline when the subject called for considerably more contemplation, and the need to sully some paper when he had nothing to say. But "Today and Tomorrow," which was syndicated to more than 200 newspapers, lasted for 37 years, until Lippmann's retirement during the Vietnam war.

Steel places passages from Lippmann's staid and elegant writing expressing his reactions to political events within the larger framework of Lippmann's thought--his continual twists of opinion regarding the efficacy of democratic government and especially the challenge the new Keynesian liberalism posed to American freedom and morality. And there were some twists that are hard to fit into any framework.

Many of Lippmann's friends and followers totally abandoned faith in his judgement as he muted any strong criticism of Nazism in his columns. Here, Steel treats Lippmann's irresolution along with his entire life of repressed Judaism with tactful compassion, but he does not come down hard enough on Lippmann for his waffling during the Holocaust. If many writers could find the courage to criticize Nazi atrocities, the evasion of responsibility by one of the most outspoken American journalists demands more scrutiny than Steel deigns to present.

Most of the second half of the biography describes the politics of the Cold War, as Lippmann himself dubbed it. His view was totally pragmatic, emphasizing the need for the United States to preserve an operational balance of power, not to concentrate on spreading the American gospel of freedom. He did not feel the United States could impress its version of democracy on foreign peoples themselves struggling for the right to self-determination. Yet he also felt the honesty and reason of American policy-makers would guarantee a peaceful and just resolution of the Cold War.

WALTER LIPPMANN was betrayed by Lyndon Johnson, his advisers and the public that condoned American military intervention in Vietnam. Having ridiculed Kennedy's attempt to focus Western efforts against Asian communism on the Vietnamese civil war, Lippmann often declared that the United States could only lose a war fought on mainland Asia. What outraged him was not the misappraisal of American military objectives. But the duplicity of the Johnson administration's selling the war to a gullible nation. His 40-year-old prediction that the tendency to fabricate facts and rely on mistaken public opinion would have dire consequences came true, taking on tragic proportions in Vietnam. This time, however, the professionals and experts he trusted were the ones to casually deceive the public and betray his confidence. Ostracized for his strident criticism of the war, Lippmann actively encouraged radical protest.

In presenting a highly favorable portrait of an American sage, Steel fortunately does not overlook either his judgemental mistakes or his personal faults. But these cannot obscure the value of his vision. Lippmann once described the room he worked in. It was sound-proof, and he kept his desk away from the windows so the noise and glare of the outside world would not disrupt his concentration. In an electronic culture where the media forms public opinion through momentary impressions, where fragmentary polls haphazardly spell out the political future, Lippmann's example of a diligent, reflective spokesman who found the time and patience to sift through complex issues and arrive at stark but usually accurate conclusions could serve our period well