Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography
By Tom Arnold-Forster
(Princeton University Press, 368 pages, $35)
Walter Lippmann was at one time the most influential American writer on politics and world affairs. His writing career spanned the time period from the Progressive Era to the middle of the Cold War. He wrote about every U.S. president from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson. His career, writes Tom Arnold-Forster in his book Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography, “was a six-decade commentary on the vicissitudes of politics.”
Interestingly, facts later emerged that Lippmann’s onetime secretary Mary Price was a communist agent.
Arnold-Forster calls Lippmann a “liberal,” but also notes that his intellectual journey “involved many changes of mind, new starts, false starts, idiosyncrasies, and disputes with contemporaries.” Lippmann was both a proponent and critic of democracy; a supporter of Wilsonian foreign policy who evolved into a foreign policy realist; a crusader during the Second World War who became a critic of what he viewed as an overcommitted Cold War America; and, finally, a disillusioned liberal who thought that the Vietnam War helped destroy liberalism at home.
Arnold-Forster describes Lippmann’s Harvard education and early involvement with New York’s Socialist Party. He began writing for what the author calls “bourgeois publications,” including beginning in 1912, reviewing books for the New York Times.
He was at that time, writes Arnold-Forster, a “prolific and rising political writer” on the ideological left. He wrote his first book in 1913 — A Preface to Politics — which was reviewed positively in newspapers throughout the country. It was a psychological-political promotion of progressivism which called for shaping public opinion to favor political reforms.
His model political leader at that time was Theodore Roosevelt, the former president who had again entered the national political arena to save the country from the conservatism of his chos...