WALTER LIPPMANN
Lippmann is a man of agile mind and great natural gifts … He thumps his tub as if he were God. He is handicapped only by his inability to emit fire and brimstone through the printer’s ink of his column.
—CHARLES BEARD
The early summer of 1940 was harrowing for Great Britain. German victories in the Low Countries and France made certain that the nation—and the battle-ready components of its empire—would face the Axis alone. In six weeks in May and June, some 112,000 French soldiers were killed attempting to repulse the German advance—a rate of attrition that was too high for a nation still traumatized by the First World War.1 The advancing Nazi troops toyed with Paris, pondering when to strike. No decision was required, as it turned out, because the defending French chose to abandon Haussmann’s elegant boulevards rather than see them mutilated by German bombers, artillery fire, and panzer divisions. At the French port of Dunkirk, the entire British expeditionary force of 200,000 men, plus 140,000 French soldiers, were trapped by the advancing Wehrmacht. Through a hastily improvised evacuation, in which private vessels sailed alongside the Royal Navy’s destroyers, this vast defeated army was ferried safely back to England. Against all odds, the British soldiers would regroup, rearm, and resume battle at a later stage (the French troops, conversely, returned swiftly and bravely to the mainland and to defeat). But this miraculous deliverance could not hide the shame and humiliation. In an address to the House of Commons on June 4, Prime Minister Winston Churchill described Dunkirk as a “miracle,” but cautioned that “we must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”2
Churchill recognized that the United States offered his nation the brightest prospect of salvation, and that securing American public support for the British cause was essential. As part of a no-stone-unturned diplomatic strategy, London turned to America’s most powerful print journalist for help. Walter Lippmann’s thrice-weekly column “Today & Tomorrow” was read by millions across the United States, and by millions more in syndication around the world. Successive presidents craved his approval, domestic and foreign politicians sought his counsel, and the American people relied on Lippmann to explain the world’s complexities. He was immortalized by a New Yorker cartoon of the 1920s showing two elderly women dining in a railroad car, one saying to the other: “Of course, I only take a cup of coffee in the morning. A cup of coffee and Walter Lippmann is all I need.”3 A “Talk of the Town” column on the reputed formation of a Monarchist Party reported that “many Americans would be glad to settle for Walter Lippmann” as their philosopher-king.4
As France confirmed abject surrender terms with Germany, the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian, a keen admirer of Lippmann, asked him to visit the embassy on a matter of highest significance. Upon his arrival, Lothian warned Lippmann that if defeatist politicians ousted Churchill to sue for “peace” with Hitler, an Atlantic without the Royal Navy would become a Nazi lake. Britain’s survival as an independent maritime power thus depended on the United States providing material assistance to shore up Churchill’s position and keep the ocean in virtuous hands. Lippmann needed little by way of persuasion, asking, “What would make a difference?” “The difference will be arms and destroyers,” Lothian replied, “because the Royal Navy is woefully weak in destroyers, and we cannot defend the sea lanes to Britain without them.”5 Lippmann agreed with this logic but cautioned that American largesse on this scale would require Britain to give up something substantial in return. After considering this dilemma, the two men devised a plan through which Washington would provide destroyers in exchange for leases to British bases in the western hemisphere. On such clandestine ground was the “destroyers-for-bases” deal sewn. Yet Lippmann still had to convince the American people of its merits.6
Lippmann commenced his campaign in the New York Herald Tribune, warning readers of his celebrated column that Nazi domination of Europe would threaten America’s own survival. If Germany assumed possession of the French and British fleets, Lippmann bleakly intoned, Hitler’s military reach would henceforth extend to the northeast seaboard. All Americans had to come together to aid Britain in a cause that transcended partisan politics.7 For his part, Lothian took his plan to President Roosevelt, deploying a crack legal team to explain how a destroyers-for-bases deal could circumvent the Neutrality Acts through claiming a solely defensive purpose. FDR found the rationale and loophole compelling and convenient. Lippmann later wrote that Lothian “showed Roosevelt—and showed the country—the basis on which we would gradually intervene to save England.”8
To bring the American public decisively around to viewing Britain’s defense as a top priority, Lippmann identified the ideal persuasive medium in General John Pershing, the heroic leader of American troops during the First World War. Over drinks at New York’s Carlton hotel, Lippmann asked Pershing if he might be willing to deliver a radio address firmly connecting British survival with congressional passage of the destroyers-for-bases deal. Moved by the force of Lippmann’s request, Pershing agreed, delivering a widely reported pro-intervention address—drafted in its entirety by Lippmann—which closed with an urgent plea: “Today may be the last time when by measures short of war we can still prevent war.” A living embodiment of bipartisan patriotism, Pershing’s intervention had a significant effect on the voting public’s willingness to assist Great Britain.9 The speech also made it difficult for Wendell Willkie, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, to resist the passage of destroyers-for-bases. Opposing a man of Pershing’s standing was either brave or foolhardy in a general election year. Willkie decided that it was not worth the risk.
Lippmann’s maneuvering did not remain clandestine for long. After doing “his part” to fashion the deal, Lippmann traveled to Maine to take a vacation with his wife. His solitude was disturbed when a reporter from the staunchly isolationist St. Louis Post-Dispatch called to ask about what had transpired in recent weeks. He asked, “Is it true that you had a hand in Pershing’s speech?” to which Lippmann replied, “I won’t say anything for quotation. If you want to know off the record, I’ll say ‘Yes, I did.’” The reporter replied, “We’re trying to start a Congressional investigation of this plot to get America into the war, and you’re in it. You’re in the plot warmongering.” Panicked at the prospect of such a high-profile investigation, Lippmann turned to his extensive list of contacts to halt the reporter’s momentum. He called Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the Dispatch, exclaiming, “For God’s sake, Joe! Have you gone stark raving mad? Why don’t you call off your lunatics down there!” Pulitzer did as requested, to Lippmann’s considerable relief. “Nothing came of it,” he was pleased to report. “They did write a violent editorial, but they didn’t start an investigation.”10
Lippmann successfully led a great cause close to his Atlanticist heart, though he had flown perilously close to the sun in doing so. That Pulitzer pulled the plug on the Dispatch suggested, in a small way, that the mood was changing, that isolationism was entering its endgame as a meaningful political force. From being friendly in the 1920s, for example, Charles Beard had grown to dislike Lippmann through the 1930s and beyond. Lippmann’s political moderation, closeness to elite business interests, and advocacy of military preparedness all suggested to Beard that Lippmann was a saber-rattling stooge of the propertied classes. For his part, Lippmann viewed Beard and his isolationist brethren as operating on nonsensical assumptions regarding American self-sufficiency that applied—if indeed they ever did—only to the early years of the republic. In later years Beard poked fun at Lippmann for accusing isolationists of “cherishing ancestral prejudices.” He observed bitingly, in reference to Lippmann’s nominal Judaism, that such remarks show “his lack of humor as a member of the ‘chosen people’—devoid presumably of ancestral prejudices.”11
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 1970.12 Born to Victorian gaslight, Walter Lippmann is a bridge to the modern.
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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.13 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.”15 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.”17 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.”18 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!19
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.”20 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.
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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.”21 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.”22 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.”23 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.24 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.”25 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.”26 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.
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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.27 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.”28 Lippmann admired Croly’s ambition to approach good governance and politics in a scientific fashion.
When Croly invited him to join the editorial staff of the new Progressive weekly, The New Republic, funded by Willard and Dorothy Straight, he a Morgan banker and she a Standard Oil heiress, Lippmann accepted on the spot. He now possessed a job that better matched his ambitions. The magazine was generously funded, strongly associated with Bull Moose Progressivism, and afforded Lippmann a gilt-edged opportunity to interact with the most powerful figures in New York City. Theodore Roosevelt was delighted at the prospect of a weekly magazine championing the political causes he held dear. Lippmann recalled, “During that period we were often in consultation with Theodore Roosevelt, who gave us his blessing and was very much interested in it.”29 Thrilled by his new job, Lippmann wrote to his friend Van Wyck Brooks, a prominent literary critic, to explain the magazine’s purpose:
We’re starting a weekly here next fall—a weekly of ideas—with a paid up capital—God save us—of 200,000. The age of miracles, sir, has just begun … If there is any word to cover our ideal, I suppose it is humanistic, somewhat sharply distinguished (but not by Irving Babbitt) from humanitarianism. Humanism, I believe, means this real sense of the relation between the abstract and the concrete, between the noble dream and the actual limitations of life.30
Croly captured the magazine’s essence more succinctly when he remarked, “We shall be radical without being socialistic and our general tendency will be pragmatic rather than doctrinaire.”31 This disavowal of socialism was perhaps a good thing in light of the magazine’s unproletarian office on West 21st Street, lavishly equipped with resources that modern journalists would find inconceivable. The Straights’ philanthropy funded a wonderfully stocked library, a wood-paneled dining room, and the services of an excellent French chef, who prepared lunches of uncommon quality for The New Republic’s lucky scribes.
It is doubtful that Lippmann saw anything exceptional in this. He rarely questioned the justness of his elevated station. With his impeccably tailored suits, elegant gray fedora, and air of high intellectual seriousness, Lippmann tended to impress—and maybe even unnerve—those he met. He was a solidly built man, five foot ten, 190 pounds, although the chubbiness of his early years earned him the affectionate nickname “Buddha.” A happy imbiber of Greenwich Village bohemia, in spite of his buttoned-up appearance, Lippmann formed a friendship with Mabel Dodge—a bisexual patron of the arts and friend of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed—who convened a high-culture bacchanalian salon at her apartment. Dodge described Lippmann as “big and rather fat, but he had … intellectualized his fat so that it shone a little.”32 The quality of his mind was a wondrous thing for his friends and colleagues to behold. He moved from one success to another, remaining true to his Stakhanovite work habits and unerring self-belief. He knew exactly who he was, liked what he saw, and did not adjust his personality depending on his audience. The variety of his intellectual interests made him stand out as an individual capable of discerning connections that others missed and offering large-canvas analyses of which few others were capable. He shone brightly in the early stages of his journalistic career, although foreign policy did not yet figure highly in his range of interests. This would change when total war visited the European continent in 1914.
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Lippmann was in England, meeting with H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, when the chain reaction of ultimatums and mobilizations commenced. Progressives and British Fabians were intellectually blindsided by the conflict and struggled to finesse a position in its wake. Beatrice Webb told Lippmann that “we don’t form opinions on foreign affairs. We don’t know the technique.”33 Neither did Lippmann. He wrote to Felix Frankfurter that “nothing can stop the awful disintegration now. Nor is there any way of looking beyond it: ideas, books, seem too utterly trivial, and all the public opinion, democratic hope and what not, where is it today? Like a flower in the path of a plough.”34 The first issue of The New Republic hit the newsstands on November 7, 1914. A magazine created to proselytize for Progressive domestic reform was now compelled to fix its attention on alliance-driven bloodletting in Europe. Lippmann’s debut editorial continued the lamenting tone of his letter to Frankfurter: “Who cares to paint a picture now, or to write any poetry now but war poetry, or to search the meaning of language, or speculate about the constitution of matter?” After dwelling on the humanities’ limitations, Lippmann turned to their centrality as a means to achieve a more peaceable world: “The final argument against cannon is ideas … For while it takes as much skill to make a sword as a ploughshare, it takes a critical understanding of human values to prefer the ploughshare.”35 These were hopeful words, naïve, even, but Lippmann would soon form a much stronger sense of what was required of America.
Lippmann’s views on the First World War were largely conditioned by his appreciation of the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan. On August 5, 1915, he wrote to Graham Wallas that “British sea power is the decisive factor in the future arrangement of the globe but I personally prefer its semi-benevolent autocracy to the anarchy of ‘equal.’ And I am prepared to have the U.S. join with Britain in the control of the seas, rather than see a race of ‘sovereign states’ oscillating in insecure ‘balance.’”36 The sinking of the Lusitania mainly suggested to Lippmann that the United States had ill-advisedly neglected its navy under Wilson and Taft, rendering the nation dangerously dependent upon Great Britain’s merchant marine to ferry passengers and trade across the Atlantic. The unspoken dependency logic of the Monroe Doctrine had to be abandoned in favor of rapid naval expansion to allow Britain and the United States to operate as equals. Nothing less than America’s sovereignty was at stake. German U-boats had shown beyond doubt that the Royal Navy was an unreliable instrument around which to build a nation’s commerce and wealth.
To further develop his knowledge on foreign policy, Lippmann decided to write a book on the subject. Published in 1915, The Stakes of Diplomacy observed that conflict arose from an emotional nationalism hardwired into human nature: “It is the primitive stuff of which we are made, our first loyalties, our first aggressions, the type and image of our souls … They are our nationality, that essence of our being which defines us against the background of the world.” Lippmann believed Mahan had been correct in identifying the existence of a Hobbesian world and was similarly convinced that the United States had to expend more energy in mastering it. “We have all of us been educated to isolation,” wrote Lippmann, “and we love the irresponsibility of it. But that isolation must be abandoned if we are to do anything effective for internationalism … The supreme task of world politics is not the prevention of war, but a satisfactory organization of mankind.”37 The United States needed to assume its responsibilities as a leader of the international order—and do so without illusion. Internationalism was the only plausible and respectable foreign-policy course, but a sense of limits had to undergird the framing of diplomacy. The book’s debt to Mahanian geopolitics is clear.
Yet aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign-policy vision also struck Lippmann as logical and necessary. The president had invited Lippmann to the White House in early 1916, and the young journalist had been impressed by the confidence Wilson possessed in his own judgment. On Mexico, for example, Lippmann recalled, “I remember Wilson’s talking about how he believed in the Jeffersonian principle of the sacred right of revolution. It’s something that no president would say today [in 1950]. He was defending his own policy and his belief that Huerta was a counter-revolutionist. He believed in the Madero Revolution.”38 A second meeting with Wilson, in the summer of 1916, moved Lippmann firmly into his camp of supporters. Aware that Lippmann’s purpose was endorsement reconnaissance, Wilson welcomed him into the Oval Office with the words “So you’ve come to look me over?,” rendering Lippmann mute. Wilson then said, “Let me show you the inside of my mind.” Wilson had clearly taken the measure of the intellectualism that made Lippmann tick. The president delivered what Ronald Steel has described as “a dazzling monologue covering virtually every issue, from the Mexican imbroglio to German designs on Brazil, from TR’s ambitions to dilemmas of neutrality.”39 Mightily impressed by Wilson’s intellectual range, and the absence of any obvious idées fixes, Lippmann embarked on a campaign to convince his colleagues at The New Republic that supporting Wilson’s reelection was the only sensible course in the midst of war: “We became more and more for Wilson. In 1916, we supported him in the campaign. It was a great struggle. Croly didn’t want to do it. I did. Finally, by September I persuaded them that [Secretary of State Charles Evans] Hughes was taking a pro-German line with a feeling toward the pro-German vote, and that Wilson was the man for us.”40
Lippmann’s endorsement in The New Republic praised Wilson’s potential more than his achievements to date. “I shall not vote for the Wilson who has uttered a few too many noble sentiments,” Lippmann wrote, “but for the Wilson who is evolving under experience and is remaking his philosophy in the light of it.”41 In Lippmann’s estimation, Wilson possessed “the most freely speculative mind we’ve had in Washington.”42 Firsthand experience had convinced Lippmann that the president’s cognition was supple and that he was destined for greatness. But this path was realizable only if Wilson resisted the temptation to moralize. Nothing was more likely to undermine America’s reputation with its hard-bitten Old World allies than cant. Lippmann believed that U.S. foreign policy should combine the best of both Mahan and Wilson, that realism and idealism work best in tandem.
In December 1916, Lippmann wrote a column titled “Peace Without Victory,” which evenhandedly examined the peace overtures the president had made to the European belligerents, alongside the reasons for their rebuttal. Two weeks later, Wilson delivered a speech declaring his strong support for achieving “peace without victory,” a rationale and compliment to Lippmann’s phrasemaking that the journalist was quick to appreciate.43 Yet there were clear differences between Wilson’s and Lippmann’s conception of the national interest—over what American aims should look like if war came. After Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, for example, Lippmann penned an influential article titled “The Defense of the Atlantic World,” which presented a straightforwardly realist rationale for an American declaration of war. Lippmann observed that there existed a virtuous “Atlantic Community,” consisting primarily of the United States, Britain, and France, which were all threatened by German domination of the Atlantic, and a future combination of authoritarian states in Eurasia: “A victory on the high seas would be a triumph of that class which aims to make Germany the leader of the East against the West, the leader ultimately of a German-Russian-Japanese coalition against the Atlantic world. It would be utter folly not to fight now to make its hopes a failure by showing that in the face of such a threat the western community is a unit.”44 Lippmann wanted Wilson to be clearer about his war aims and present them with the clarity that was his own journalistic hallmark. The war should serve America’s vital interests in preventing German naval domination of the Atlantic. But establishing war aims that redounded clearly to the nation’s advantage was a task that Wilson, consumed by grander visions of the future, failed to discharge.
Lippmann performed significant wartime service for his nation. He first served as a special assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, next as the executive secretary of the president’s “Inquiry,” and finally as a member of the Inter-Allied Propaganda Board in London, where he drafted propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind enemy lines. Lippmann played an important role in drafting the Fourteen Points and elucidating their meaning for the benefit of perplexed French and British diplomats, unused to diplomatic gambits of such abstract ambition. Here, Lippmann was sympathetic to Wilson’s idealism, which chimed with The New Republic’s perspective. Yet once the war ended, and peace negotiations commenced in Paris, Lippmann experienced a distinct sense of foreboding: “I remember very well Wilson’s arrival in Paris. It was a great event—one of the greatest spectacles. I had the most gloomy feeling all day. Everybody was rejoicing, but I had an ominous feeling that something was very wrong already.”45
Lippmann observed Wilson’s performance despairingly from his vantage point as a little-used member of the American delegation. While conceding that the League of Nations could prove useful in providing “a temporary shelter from the storm,” Lippmann could not fathom how the president could mortgage “peace without victory” for an untried international organization that had yet to clear the significant hurdle of Senate confirmation.46 He also viewed concurrent participation in counterrevolutionary military action against the fledgling Soviet Union as counterproductive and clearly at odds with the much-trumpeted Versailles principle of national self-determination. In May 1919, Lippmann observed that “looked at from above, below, and from every side I can’t see anything in this treaty but endless trouble for Europe, and I’m exceedingly doubtful in my own mind as to whether we can afford to guarantee so impossible a peace.” In a letter to Norman Hapgood, Wilson’s unofficial press liaison, Lippmann observed pointedly and accurately that the president had “bought the League from France and Britain with a bad peace instead of selling it to France and Britain for a good peace.”47
When the Treaty of Versailles emerged into the harsh light of public view, Lippmann followed Beard in experiencing an acute sense of betrayal. He felt gullible for following President Wilson with such enthusiasm, hoping for the best in such a jejune fashion. Usually so accurate when judging the character of his interlocutors, Lippmann had erred in identifying Wilson as a pragmatist. Lippmann was so riled by what had transpired in Paris that he provided William Borah, Hiram Johnson, and other “irreconcilables” in the Senate with insider anecdotes and evidence that helped undermine the peace accords.
Lippmann suggested that the president had dissembled in denying personal knowledge of Allied secret treaties prior to his arrival in Paris. Wilson’s concealment owed everything to his failure to use these revelations to his negotiating advantage. The Fourteen Points were partly conceived as a morally charged riposte to the treaties, made public by Lenin after the October Revolution in 1917. This made Wilson’s denials appear ridiculous. Borah and Johnson used these revelations to damaging effect and implored Lippmann to testify before a Senate committee. Unwilling to go quite this far, Lippmann instead suggested that the diplomat William Bullitt, similarly angered by events in Paris, take his place. On the hearings, Lippmann observed that “Billy Bullitt blurted out everything to the scandal of the Tories and delight of the Republicans. When there is an almost universal conspiracy to lie and smother the truth, I suppose someone has to violate the decencies.”48 Lippmann’s earlier preference for combining the best of Mahan and Wilson had ended with contempt for the latter. He would spend the remainder of his career tracking close to the worldview of the former.
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Lippmann’s break with Wilsonianism followed a similar pattern to that of Charles Beard. Reflecting on the role he had played supporting and advising President Wilson, Lippmann confessed, “If I had it to do all over again, I would take the other side … We supplied the Battalion of Death with too much ammunition.”49 Though let down by Wilson, Lippmann was less than enthused by his presidential successors, however. He wrote to Graham Wallas, “Harding is elected not because anybody likes him or because the Republican Party is particularly powerful, but because the Democrats are inconceivably unpopular.”50 On Calvin Coolidge, Lippmann noted that his laconic reputation regrettably did not tally with his own experience:
I … saw quite a lot of Calvin Coolidge in that period between 1922 and 1931, although we were opposing him rather strenuously. I used to go to lunch with him alone and we would have long interminable talks with him in his study. He did all the talking. He was far from a silent man … I had a strong impression with Coolidge that he really had nothing very much to do—that he was not at all a busy man. He always took a nap in the afternoon. His idea was, “Let the government drift.”51
Yet in the sphere of foreign policy, Lippmann was relaxed about drift—compared to the misdirected energy of the war years, at any rate. Though never strictly isolationist, he welcomed U.S. detachment from the League of Nations. Like Beard, he denigrated the dollar diplomacy that undergirded Harding’s and Coolidge’s policies toward Latin America, and he opposed military intervention in Nicaragua and Mexico, especially when justified in reference to supposedly vital economic interests. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Lippmann examined “the conflict between the vested rights of Americans in the natural resources of the Caribbean countries and the rising nationalism of their peoples.” He chided President Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank Kellogg for confusing nationalism with Bolshevism, for failing to comprehend the reality that Latin American nationalism mainly derived from the “desire to assert the national independence and the dignity of an inferior race.” The worst of all policies would slavishly follow economic self-interest, impinge on national sovereignty, and lead to the “realization in Latin America that the United States had adopted a policy, conceived in the spirit of Metternich, which would attempt to guarantee vested rights against social progress as the Latin peoples conceive it.”52 Lippmann did not dispute that economic interests were present—he simply wanted them handled with greater sensitivity and sense of proportion.
Lippmann left The New Republic for Pulitzer’s New York World—New York City’s most important liberal daily—at the beginning of 1922. He wrote for the World for the next nine years, drafting twelve hundred editorials, of which about a third focused on foreign affairs, a notably high proportion given the parochialism of the American public sphere in the 1920s. It was during this time that Lippmann developed a truly national reputation. His profile was enhanced by the publication of two books, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, which together caused a considerable stir.
In Public Opinion, Lippmann contended that the American people could not be trusted to make political decisions of high importance, and that more power should be placed in the hands of an administrative elite in respect to the framing of both domestic and foreign policy. In Lippmann’s pessimistic view, democracy could function effectively only if politicians dismissed the “intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs.”53 It was a brilliant and unsparing dissection of participatory democracy, which garnered glowing endorsements. John Dewey described Public Opinion as “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”54 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that “there are few living, I think, who so discern and articulate the nuances of the human mind.”55
Published in 1925, The Phantom Public pursued Public Opinion’s elitist logic to an even more discomfiting degree. Disregarding populist niceties, Lippmann wrote that viewing the average voter as “inherently competent” was a “false ideal” that had caused great damage.56 The American polity was in fact divided between elite “insiders,” with detailed contextual knowledge of salient political issues, and uninformed “outsiders,” whose interests did not extend far beyond the everyday combination of work, sleep, family, and leisure. Lippmann had first trialed this distinction in The New Republic in 1915, when he wrote that “only the insider can make the decisions, not because he is inherently a better man, but because he is placed that he can understand and can act.”57 His ideal “democracy” would give insiders free rein to make important decisions, permitting the mass of “outsiders” to exercise a veto only if they felt the decision would unfairly injure the majority—a utilitarian calculation that few were capable of making. Hence Lippmann anticipated useful apathy.
The Founding Fathers recognized the dangers of extended suffrage. But democracy since the presidency of Andrew Jackson had labored under the illusion that the common man possessed virtue and sound judgment as an Aristotelian “political animal.” Lippmann’s purpose in The Phantom Public was to ensure that “each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”58 It was a postmortem on the corpse of his earlier idealism and Progressive faith in the capacity of people to self-govern and pursue a sage foreign policy. He had lost faith in Wilsonianism and the Universalist optimism that justified the attempt to make “the world safe for democracy.” Democracy in the United States was clearly not safe in itself. Considerably more bracing and pessimistic than Public Opinion, the book met with an icy reception among reviewers and readers. Lippmann anticipated this when he observed that he was likely to be “put on trial for heresy by my old friends on The New Republic.”59 John Dewey’s 1927 book The Public and Its Problems, conceived as a response to Lippmann, noted persuasively that the “world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses.”60
Lippmann clearly diverged from Beard in these indictments of the political aptitude of the American people—although he shared his ambivalence toward unnecessary involvement in European affairs and opposition to interventionism in Latin America born of great power chauvinism. Sharp differences of opinion were becoming evident, though warm relations existed between the two men through the 1920s. On September 8, 1925, Lippmann wrote to Beard that “the answer, so far as I’m concerned, to the question about the collective capacity of democracy to plan a state is emphatically ‘no.’” A few days later, Beard replied, “I shall wait with impatience the coming of your book on ‘The Phantom Public’ … At all events you always shoot every subject you touch full of holes and full of light.” Lippmann thanked Beard for his letter, which “gave me a great deal of pleasure,” before asking if he was available to meet in person: “I want lots of time and some solitude.” Beard suggested that they meet at his house for an informal dinner, in order “to polish off the unfinished business of the universe. I suggest dining here because we can be as quiet and profane as we like in my lookout tower.”61 This intriguing flirtation is all we have to connect the two men during the 1920s. Regrettably, no record exists of their “survey of our little cosmos,” as Beard poetically described it.
While Beard moved swiftly and purposefully toward his continental Americanism, Lippmann equivocated on the necessary dimensions of diplomatic retrenchment. Intellectually he was in flux. He became close with Senator William Borah, the retrenchment-inclined chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1924 to 1933. The two men collaborated in supporting naval disarmament and its attendant international agreements, and in opposing military intervention in Latin America. Yet they also joined forces in calling for a renegotiation of Allied war debts and supporting diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union—policies that could not be characterized as isolationist in the orthodox sense. Their endeavors sometimes echoed internationalist goals and sometimes tended toward insularity. At one point Borah supported U.S. membership in the World Court. The next year he professed faith in the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war, which Lippmann found ludicrous in its detachment from reality. That “Europe should scrap its whole system of security based on the enforcement of peace,” wrote Lippmann in The World in 1927, “and accept in its place a pious, self-denying ordinance that no nation will disturb the peace” was nonsensical. The support that Borah extended toward such folly represented an “extraordinary spectacle” in light of his own well-recorded contempt for the League of Nations.62 Yet by 1930, Lippmann’s foreign-policy views appeared as illogical in their entirety as Borah’s. Ronald Steel captures this well: “During the 1920s, and much of the 1930s as well, Lippmann was neither consistent nor persuasive in his prescriptions for preventing war. Simultaneously espousing disarmament and American naval strength, international cooperation and an Anglo-American domination of the seas, American freedom of action and a ‘political equivalent of war,’ he reflected the confusions of the age.”63
It took the onset of the Great Depression, the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and the rise of Germany and Japan to instill in Lippmann’s diplomatic thought a realist consistency.
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The World’s circulation began to flag in the late 1920s. The newspaper had been drained of its capital (human and otherwise) by the feckless stewardship of Herbert Pulitzer, and there appeared little realistic prospect of recovery, in spite of a loyal readership. A variety of organizations began to bombard Lippmann with job offers. Impressed by his ability as a political scientist, despite the absence of a doctorate, Harvard offered Lippmann an endowed chair in government. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, asked Lippmann to become director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. These were prestigious offers and destinations. Yet Lippmann decided that universities and think tanks were too far removed from the power that he so artfully cultivated. The solitude that lured certain intellectuals to the ivory tower discouraged this particular thinker, who thrived on flesh-and-blood relationships.
Politely declining these overtures, Lippmann instead accepted a job at the International Herald Tribune—a national Republican newspaper rather than a metropolitan Democratic one—which offered a significant salary of $25,000 a year in return for four columns a week. The paper also provided a personal assistant, generous travel budget, and two weeks’ paid vacation in winter and six weeks over the summer. These vacations were essential to Lippmann in terms of business and pleasure. During his annual jaunt to Europe, he invariably met the continent’s brightest intellectual and political lights.
Lippmann’s first “Today & Tomorrow” column—or “T&T,” as it became known among the cognoscenti—first rolled off the press in September 1931. A year later, the column was syndicated to a hundred papers with a combined circulation in excess of ten million.64 Lippmann remained at the Tribune for the next thirty-six years. The column became a journalistic phenomenon, its author a trusted explanatory voice in a world changing fast for the worse. A rival of Lippmann’s, the journalist Arthur Krock, observed bitterly that “to read, if not to comprehend, Lippmann was suddenly the thing to do.”65
One of Lippmann’s best-remembered “T&T” columns cast a critical eye on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On August 1, 1932, Lippmann described FDR as “a highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions … He is an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything.” So far, so conventional. FDR’s lack of fixed ideological moorings had been noted by observers before. More damning was Lippmann’s description of the Democratic presidential nominee as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.” Lippmann had kept a close eye on Franklin Roosevelt since the Wilson administration and had arrived at a mixed conclusion. While admiring his rhetorical facility and keen political antennae, Lippmann found the generality and vagueness of FDR’s policy interests unsettling, concluding that he was unqualified for high office. There was more to politics than merely winning elections: something meaningful had to be done with the accompanying power. While dismayed by the onset of the Depression, Lippmann could at least detect ideological constancy in President Hoover’s response, resting on a substantial record as a public servant.
“The two things about him that worry me,” Lippmann wrote Felix Frankfurter after FDR secured his party’s nomination, “are that he plays politics well and likes the game for its own sake and is likely to be ultra-political almost to show his own virtuosity. The other fear I have is that he is such an amiable and impressionable man, so eager to please, and, I think, so little grounded in his own convictions that almost everything depends on the character of his own advisers.” Roosevelt’s forceful presidency proved Lippmann to be wide of the mark on this second point. Nonetheless, in the absence of any better options, Lippmann placed his reservations to one side, stating his intention come Election Day to “vote cheerfully for Governor Roosevelt.”66 Parlous domestic circumstances suggested to Lippmann that change was essential.
Lippmann met President-elect Roosevelt at a dinner in New York in honor of the retiring president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell. Conscious of Lippmann’s rapt national readership, Roosevelt brushed off the earlier criticism and invited Lippmann to visit him in Warm Springs, Georgia, where doctors attended annually to the paralysis caused by his childhood polio. It was a remarkable encounter by all accounts. In Roosevelt’s private cottage near the medical facility, Lippmann reminded his host that Hitler had assumed power two days before, exploiting the ineffectiveness of a weak government that appeared incapable of dealing with economic meltdown. Roosevelt’s most pressing task was to tackle America’s economic malaise—a combination of low growth and high unemployment—head on and to forestall the threat of extremism. “The situation is critical, Franklin,” Lippmann observed darkly. “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.” According to Ronald Steel, “The starkness of the phrase, particularly from Lippmann, took Roosevelt aback.”67 Over the space of a few months, Lippmann had gone from casting serious doubt on Roosevelt’s suitability for high office to advising him to assume the necessary role of enlightened despot. Lippmann’s 1920s mercurialness was continuing well into the 1930s.
Lippmann was enthralled by the executive energy of the early stages of Roosevelt’s presidency, writing that the nation “had regained confidence in itself” and that “by the greatest good fortune which has befallen this country in many a day, a kindly and intelligent man has the wit to realize that a great crisis is a great opportunity.”68 His vote against Hoover had been vindicated in a short time. On foreign policy, Lippmann celebrated President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy enunciated in his inaugural address—which promised noninterference in the affairs of Washington’s Latin American neighbors—as a “radical innovation” and a “true substitute for empire.”69 On April 18, 1933, Lippmann called for the abandonment of the gold standard to inflate the money supply, combat deflation, and thus boost the economy. His column sparked a day of frantic trading on Wall Street; such was the expectation that Lippmann’s positioning foreshadowed executive action. And so it came to pass when President Roosevelt denounced the logic of collaborative currency stabilization and removed the United States from the gold standard. British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald desperately called Lippmann from the London economic conference, imploring him to use his influence to revisit the decision to so brutally reject multilateral action—to no avail. An earlier discussion with John Maynard Keynes had convinced Lippmann that his position had been sound and the president’s decision wise, so he politely rebuffed MacDonald’s request. Keynes himself celebrated FDR’s decision as “magnificently right.”70 Roosevelt could do little wrong during his first six months.
It was during the remainder of Roosevelt’s first term that Lippmann found fault with his president, primarily in regard to the outsized statist ambitions of the New Deal. On domestic issues, Lippmann turned rightward as the president led the nation purposefully to the left. His disenchantment was such that in the presidential election of 1936, Lippmann endorsed Roosevelt’s opponent, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. Many liberals were appalled by Lippmann’s strong move against Roosevelt and the New Deal. Writing in The Nation, Amos Pinchot dismissed Lippmann as an “obfuscator … who can be quoted on either side of almost any question.” Pinchot compared Lippmann to the sometimes liberal bête noire Alexander Hamilton, who was “the first strong advocate of plutocratic fascism in America.” Denigrating Lippmann’s close links to lawyers and bankers, Pinchot described him as “an ambassador of goodwill to the philistines.”71 Unruffled by this assault, Lippmann welcomed The Nation’s scorn as proof that his rightward track was correct. He continued to denigrate the New Deal as an assault on political liberty and focused particular ire on FDR’s ill-considered plan to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices. In 1937, Lippmann published The Good Society, a frontal assault on what he viewed as Roosevelt’s socialistic collectivism, which bore comparison to Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Influenced by the conservative Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, Lippmann’s polemic was criticized by previously supportive voices. John Dewey thought the book gave “encouragement and practical support to reactionaries.”72
An aspect of the New Deal that Lippmann found particularly irksome was the participation of university professors. President Roosevelt evidently believed that law and the social sciences might assist the government in solving intricate problems in those arduous times—convening an august group of academics to assist his administration’s efforts. FDR’s original “Brain Trust,” as they became known, consisted of a triumvirate of Columbia University law professors—Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle—who combined to shape the first wave of New Deal reforms (1933–1934), which focused on practical measures to combat mass unemployment.73 Not to be outdone, Harvard Law School, smarting perhaps from Columbia’s prominence in the policy process, offered teaching relief to three scholars—Benjamin Cohen, Thomas Corcoran, and Lippmann’s friend Felix Frankfurter—who helped shape the second wave of New Deal legislation (1935–1936), which pursued the more ambitious goal of effecting fundamental reforms in American society. Some attacked the Brain Trust as a phalanx of unaccountable ivory tower idealists. Others attacked them for lacking intellectual substance. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, complained through the 1930s that it was not the intellectual but “the technician … [who was] the really big man in the modern world.”74
Lippmann declined to impugn the Brain Trust’s intellectual substance, instead delivering a pointed speech at the University of Rochester in June 1936 that cautioned professors against sullying their independence in the pursuit of policy influence. Lippmann dwelled powerfully on the perils of co-optation:
Members of the university faculties have a particular obligation not to tie themselves to, nor to involve themselves in, the ambitions and pursuits of the politicians … Once they engage themselves that way, they cease to be disinterested men, being committed by their ambitions and their sympathies. They cease to be scholars because they are no longer disinterested, and having lost their own independence, they impair the independence of the university to which they belong … If the professors try to run the government, we shall end by having the government run the professors.75
At the time of this speech, Lippmann was being routinely denounced by liberals for his sympathy for reactionary causes and the absence of any value system connecting his inchoate views on politics, society, and foreign policy. It is no stretch, therefore, to detect an element of catharsis in Lippmann’s words. But his opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and its irresponsible academic facilitators, remained constant through the remainder of his presidency. Lippmann just longed for a competent Republican to appear on the national scene with the ability to oust the incumbent and take a hatchet to the bloated government bureaucracy. One thing prevented Lippmann from professing clear allegiance to the GOP: the party’s views on foreign policy, which tended toward muddle-headed isolationism. Lippmann was deeply concerned by the socialistic nature of the New Deal. But he came to view the rise of Germany and Japan as graver concerns, requiring an emphasis on military preparedness that only Roosevelt appeared capable of delivering.
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Reflecting on Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and the bellicosity displayed by irredentist Italy, Lippmann wrote in 1934, “As long as Europe prepares for war, America must prepare for neutrality.”76 Ostensibly, this entreaty might have been crafted by Charles Beard. But the operative word in Lippmann’s sentence was “prepare,” not “neutrality”—an important difference in emphasis. Lippmann believed that building a formidable American military was the surest way to repel predators. Like Beard, Lippmann harbored few illusions about the diabolical nature of the Nazi regime. Yet Lippmann thought that Hitler would pay little heed to professions of neutrality that were unsupported by serious military power. Avowedly neutral nations must also possess a big stick, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt.
While Lippmann believed that much more should be spent on military procurement, he did detect some cause for hope in Europe. In a bracingly amoral column of May 1933, he discerned two forces—well, one force and one persecuted minority—that might collectively restrain Hitler’s territorial ambitions. The first was the French army, which still commanded respect from learned individuals steeped in Napoleonic history, oblivious of the hollowness of its contemporary military capabilities. The second phenomenon that Lippmann thought might localize German ambitions was the persecution of its Jewish population. In the spring and summer of 1933, Nazi thugs organized the burning of books written by Jews (and liberals) and perpetrated violence and intimidation on a national scale. The repression of Germany’s Jews, Lippmann wrote, “by satisfying the lust of the Nazis who feel they must conquer somebody and the cupidity of those Nazis who want jobs, is a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe.”77 Here Lippmann displayed considerable callousness, and badly underestimated the extent of Hitler’s ambitions. Felix Frankfurter recorded his understandable dismay about the “implications and attitude of feeling behind that piece.”78
Though not as cruel as the logic undergirding his views on Germany’s Jews, Lippmann’s assessment of the Spanish Civil War was conditioned by a similar cold calculation. As Lippmann observed, “I never took a passionate, partisan interest in the Spanish Civil War. I feared it as a thing which was going to start a European war.”79 Notions of right and wrong never entered into Lippmann’s reasoning on the conflict—Spain’s Republicans were not worthy of U.S. support simply because they possessed greater legitimacy through the ballot box; the Nationalists’ protofascist ideology was not sufficient cause for the United States to register meaningful disapproval. In this regard, of course, he was far from alone. The Popular Front government in France, the British government, and indeed President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull all prioritized the quarantining of the conflict ahead of saving democracy in Spain and preventing the rise of another dictator. With German and Italian assistance, therefore, General Francisco Franco established another fascist regime on continental Europe in 1939—after a brutal conflict in which approximately half a million died. Lippmann’s final word was that Iberia was essentially tangential to the European balance of power.80
Continuing this logic of selective disengagement, Lippmann called for the United States to retreat from those Pacific interests that clashed most obviously with Tokyo’s regional ambitions. In December 1936, he wrote that the “vital interests of Japan and the United States do not conflict,” that war would be a “monstrous and useless blunder,” and that this might be a “very opportune moment for the United States to withdraw gracefully from its Far Eastern entanglements.” Uttering a sentiment that clashed with those of certain isolationists—Europe was beyond hope but China was very much a wronged party—Lippmann declared, “We can well afford to say plainly that the Chinese must defend their own country, and that we have no political interests whatever in Asia.”81 Retrenchment became imperative. Lippmann worried that the Philippines could become a source of contention with Japan. As Ronald Steel writes, “The ‘blue water’ strategy he had learned long ago from Alfred Thayer Mahan left him with a rule he held to all his life: the United States Navy should project American power in the Pacific, but the United States must never be drawn into military conflict on the Asian mainland.”82 Withdrawal from the archipelago should proceed forthwith. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to convince Lippmann that war with Japan was unavoidable. Yet even then he continued to view the Pacific theater as secondary to the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Franklin Roosevelt would subsequently follow this prioritization, to Winston Churchill’s great relief.
Lippmann knew where America should not invest resources and credibility. So what exactly did constitute the national interest? Lippmann partially answered this question in an article for Foreign Affairs titled “Rough-Hew Them How We Will,” in July 1937, which resumed the “defense of the Atlantic world” rationale he had first developed during the Wilson presidency. Lippmann wrote that if Great Britain were to lose control of the Atlantic to Germany, then “all that is familiar and taken for granted, like the air we breathe, would suddenly be drastically altered.” Echoing Mahan on the importance of Anglo-Saxon amity, Lippmann wrote: “In the final test, no matter what we wish now or now believe, though collaboration with Britain and her allies is difficult and often irritating, we shall protect that connection because in no other way can we fulfill our destiny.” Assuring continued Anglo-American domination of the Atlantic thus remained the one cause clearly worth fighting for. Charles Beard predictably dissented—in this instance by quibbling with his mischaracterization of the Neutrality Act—cautioning Lippmann in a letter dated June 17, 1937, that “some things are not so rough hewn as they appear on the surface.”83 But Lippmann was moving far from Beard’s worldview and was coming to fear that London underestimated the importance of this common purpose.
A visit to Europe in the summer of 1937 had left Lippmann despondent about Anglo-French complacency regarding the scale of the German threat. He was far ahead of his high-powered interlocutors in his understanding of the nature of Nazism and on the particularities of Hitler’s psyche. In a farsighted “T&T” column, Lippmann observed perceptively that Hitler’s continued dominance of German politics depended “not upon receiving tangible benefits by grace of his opponents, but upon taking things by the exercise of his own power … He cannot be placated by gifts; he must appear to conquer what he seeks.”84 If France and Britain continued on the track of denial and ignorance, Lippmann observed bleakly, “then the future of the Old World is once more in the hands of the warrior castes, and the civilian era, which began with the renaissance, is concluded.”85 In February 1938, during a meeting with Joseph P. Kennedy, the appeasement-inclined U.S. ambassador to the UK (and father of a future president), Lippmann insisted that “democracies must not delude themselves with the idea that there is any bloodless, inexpensive substitute for the willingness to go to war.”86
Lippmann’s prescience on the extent of Hitler’s ambitions, and his critique of Anglo-French irresponsibility in the face of this threat, became more pointed through 1938 and 1939. In a letter to Harold Nicolson, Lippmann complained, “I don’t see how Great Britain and France are going to hold their possessions or even preserve their independence if they go on living in peace when they are under the constant threat of three nations that are on a war footing all the time … While it was possible to surrender Czech territory, how is it going to be possible to surrender French territory … when I hear people talk about appeasement, I feel as if they were talking about a wholly imaginary and wholly incredible state of affairs.”87 Lippmann continued to make a case to the American people that military preparedness was the number-one political priority. Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson thanked Lippmann in December 1938 for his journalistic efforts to elucidate the national (Atlanticist) interest and his lucid warnings to Americans to reject the type of complacency and wishful thinking that so consumed Britain and France:
I have just reread for the third time your comment which appeared a day or two ago in the Washington Post under the title “First Line and Preparedness for War” … Your views on this vital subject are so eminently sane and sound and your presentation of them is so forthright and so clear that I am impelled to the belief that if the country does not realize the situation as you have so admirably expressed it … in your column, I greatly fear that bitter days may be in store for us … You have told the country some straight-forward truths which, palatable or not, it should take to heart.88
Increasingly reconciled to the possibility of war, and of the likely necessity of material support for Britain and France, Johnson was delighted to have a journalistic ally as powerful as Lippmann.
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In June 1939, as the unavoidability of war with Germany darkened the British mood—to the dissonant backdrop of summer’s arrival—Lippmann met Winston Churchill for the first time. The art historian Kenneth Clark had arranged a supper with a guest list that included the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley and Harold Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, the author, poet, and lover of Virginia Woolf. This was a group not short on personality and opinion. Clark had convinced Churchill—suffering at that time from the periodic depression he labeled the “black dog”—to attend with the promise of Lippmann’s attention. As Churchill sat quietly at dinner, Lippmann recounted the grim detail of a meeting with Joseph Kennedy earlier in the day. The gist of the ambassador’s message was that Britain stood no chance of winning a war against Germany. Kennedy believed that London had to concede German freedom of action in Eastern and Central Europe—that no other choice was available. He had observed cuttingly to Lippmann that “all Englishmen in their hearts know this to be true, but a small group of brilliant people has created a public feeling which makes it impossible for the government to take a sensible course.”89
Churchill was roused from his ennui by Lippmann’s précis of the encounter. He regarded Ambassador Kennedy as a craven and credulous Anglophobe—his Irish lineage rousing immediate suspicion—appointed by Roosevelt during one of his periodic (though grave) lapses in judgment. Harold Nicolson recounted that Churchill, “waving his whisky and soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other hand,” growled that while it was inevitable that “steel and fire will rain down upon us day and night scattering death and destruction far and wide,” the British would endure the German assault stoically and return the “destruction” with interest. And in the unlikely event that Kennedy’s “tragic utterance” was proved correct, Hitler would still have to pacify or defeat the world’s most powerful nation. Churchill fixed Lippmann with a purposeful stare, imploring him to advise his fellow Americans to “think imperially” and continue their tradition of holding aloft the “torch of liberty.”90 Lippmann was mightily impressed by Churchill’s bearing and eloquence. He came to view him as a colossal figure in Western civilization, whose significance and leadership qualities eclipsed even Theodore Roosevelt’s.
As war edged closer, Lippmann observed events thoughtfully, mindful of historical analogies that illuminated the world’s predicament. Responding to news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lippmann advised Lord Lothian—whom he knew in friendship as Philip Kerr—not to set too much store in professions of Russo-German friendship:
So far as historical analogies hold at all … I recommend to you reading, if you haven’t it in mind, the concluding chapter of Mahan’s book on the French Revolution. There is, it seems to me, a striking resemblance between the policy of Russia then and now. Alexander, like Stalin, first wanted an all-embracing agreement against Napoleon, whereas the British held out for more specific and limited agreements. Then, having been totally against Napoleon, he turned around and made peace with Napoleon. In the Napoleonic analogy, I shouldn’t be surprised now to see a series of wars with intervals of armistice and truce and shifting of the subordinate patterns in the new coalitions.91
With characteristic insight, Lippmann had laid bare the hollowness of alliance formation, particularly among despots of such brutal ambition. As the war progressed, Lippmann maintained his position that Britain and the United States should not give up on Stalin as a potential ally farther down the line—that Molotov-Ribbentrop was ephemeral. After Hitler reneged on his nonaggression agreement in 1941, Churchill followed the logic of the journalist’s utilitarian views on Stalin’s Soviet Union: as a useful force with which to crush Nazism. In an oft-quoted speech in Parliament, Churchill observed that “if Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”92
Lippmann was not surprised when Hitler’s actions forced Britain and France to declare war in September 1939. Yet he understood that Allied military psychology was much more fragile than in 1914, when soldiers volunteered in droves to fight Germans to the backdrop of bunting and street parades. He wrote to Ronald C. Hood, the former editor of the Birmingham Age-Herald, that “even if a decisive military victory could be obtained by the sacrifice of, let us say, another million men, the Allied statesman would not seek such a decision as a matter of high political policy … I had a long talk in June with General [Maurice] Gamelin and I know that the problem of the French birth rate as affected by two great wars in one generation is a controlling element in his whole philosophy of war. The allies have to win the war by methods that do not cost that many lives.”93 In February 1940, Lippmann met again with Gamelin, commander in chief of the French army, during a tour of the Maginot Line. He asked France’s military leader what might happen if Germany ignored Maginot and attacked through undefended Belgium. “Oh,” said Gamelin, “we’ve got to have an open side because we need a champ de bataille. We’re going to attack the German army and destroy it. The Maginot Line will narrow the gap through which they can come, and thus enable us to destroy them more easily.”94 Gamelin’s failure of imagination was shown up a few months later when German troops poured through Belgium, little concerned by the narrowness of their route, and defeated the French army soon after.
After the fall of France, President Roosevelt, unshackled from his usual caution, declared that it was a “delusion” to believe that America might remain “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.”95 Lippmann reveled in the speech’s power and clarity. In his column, Lippmann developed the president’s reasoning by observing that isolationists had been “duped by a falsification of history” and “miseducated by a swarm of innocent but ignorant historians.” Lippmann’s quarry is easy to identify here. It was a grave misreading of history, he continued, to believe that America entered the First World War “because of British propaganda, the loans of the bankers, the machinations of President Wilson’s advisors, and a drummed up patriotic ecstasy.” Wilson had failed to identify the primary reason the United States went to war: because the “safety of the Atlantic highway is something for which America should fight.” To shirk in this task twenty years later would be to invite German aggression.96 And Lippmann was at pains to ridicule isolationists who believed that the Atlantic was some form of magical barrier that no belligerent nation could cross. To the economist Edmund E. Lincoln, Lippmann wrote that “given command of the seas, the landing of troops in this hemisphere is a perfectly conceivable operation … If our navy is bottled up by superior navies in both oceans, it would be no more difficult for Germany to land troops in Venezuela, Colombia or Brazil than it has been for Great Britain to land Australian troops in Egypt. Distance as such is no barrier if the seas are under control.”97
Lippmann played a major role in assuring congressional passage of the destroyers-for-bases deal, and he offered strong support for its more ambitious successor, Lend-Lease. Acknowledging that sophistry and loopholes were no longer required in rationalizing significant material support for Great Britain, Lippmann wrote, “With aid to Britain, this country passes from large promises carried out slightly and partially by clever devices to substantial deeds openly and honestly avowed.”98 Unlike destroyers-for-bases, Lippmann “had nothing to do with the idea, except by writing articles explaining the need of making a contribution to aid the Allies.” Yet a national syndicated audience of ten million of America’s wealthiest and most influential readers meant that his persuasive role was significant. Having opposed FDR through the New Deal, Lippmann became a staunch supporter of his diplomacy toward the Second World War. The author of Public Opinion even paid homage to the genius of the president’s phrasemaking: “The name Lend-Lease was Roosevelt’s own invention. It didn’t mean anything, but it sounded as if we weren’t giving the money.”99 Best of all was the president’s magnificent Fireside Chat of December 29, 1940. Speaking to the largest radio audience in history—three-quarters of Americans tuned in to listen to the president—Roosevelt observed that the time had come for the United States to serve as “the great arsenal of democracy.”100 London endured a devastating bombing raid over the course of the night, but its markets rallied to FDR’s speech the following day.
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Lippmann grew to admire FDR’s deft and purposeful leadership over the course of World War II. Roosevelt’s keen political skills—his caution, optimism, and eloquence—allowed him to prepare the American public for participation in a world war and for a pivotal role in world affairs thereafter. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the president responded stirringly to this shocking turn of events, identifying “a date which will live in infamy” that America would never let stand. His prioritization of defeating Germany first was sound and his appointment of senior Republicans to his administration was tactically adroit and appropriate in the circumstances. Aside from Roosevelt’s hostile views toward the grandstanding leader of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle—whom Lippmann regarded as a major figure in world affairs—Lippmann viewed the president’s management of American participation in the Second World War in a favorable light. Indeed, Lippmann even supported Roosevelt’s most controversial action in wartime: the internment of Japanese Americans. In an infamous “T&T” column on February 12, 1942, Lippmann warned of “imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without” if a fifth column of Japanese ancestry were allowed to roam free.101 On February 19, President Roosevelt authorized the War Department to remove and intern any citizen of Japanese descent it deemed a threat: some 120,000 people in total. Lippmann cheered this mutilation of habeas corpus—sustained by a notorious ruling by the Supreme Court—in subsequent columns.
Lippmann’s views on the Republican Party, conversely, were scathing. Writing to Congressman John M. Vorys of Ohio in February 1941, Lippmann observed that “there is nothing in the record of the Republicans, either on questions of national defense or on our relationship to the Allies, to justify any belief that they have had foresight. If they had had it, they would now be compelled to reverse themselves so completely that the only issue left between them and the Administration is one of procedure.”102 Wendell Willkie had proved a major disappointment during the 1940 campaign, declining to adopt a clear pro-Allied position and instead accusing FDR of harboring cynically concealed interventionist goals. Willkie had refused to follow Lippmann’s earlier advice that “you have nothing to lose … by being the Churchill rather than the Chamberlain of the crisis, and by charging Roosevelt with being the Daladier, the weak man who means well feebly and timidly.”103 But Lippmann detected graver problems with Willkie than his refusal to assume the Churchillian mantle.
After his election defeat in 1940, Willkie showed admirable grace in supporting President Roosevelt’s foreign policies. It was too late to make a political difference, but Willkie had surmised that Lippmann’s campaign advice to him had been sound: U.S. support for Great Britain was a just cause and Churchill was the model statesman in such tumultuous times. Willkie thus gave his strong support to Lend-Lease, before going one step further in calling for the unlimited supply of Britain’s war effort in the summer of 1941. Delighted to have his support, FDR asked Willkie to travel the world on a goodwill mission as the president’s personal envoy. Willkie promptly agreed, visiting Great Britain, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and China throughout 1941 and 1942. Impressed by the commonality of human experience he encountered in these diverse nations and regions, Willkie surmised that it was possible and preferable to govern the postwar world through a global peacekeeping organization. Woodrow Wilson had been correct, Willkie decided, to believe that human progress had no geographical limits and that universal peace was attainable if the right kind of multilateral organization was established to lead the way.
Willkie began the process of writing up his travel experiences in a book, published in 1943 under the title One World. Drawing on his fresh, cosmopolitan understanding of nationalities and ethnic groups, Willkie contended that the altruistic, sociable traits that unite humanity are far stronger than those that divide it. Under these circumstances, imperialism must be rejected, racial divisions should be addressed as a priority at home, and all nations must cede some sovereignty to live in one world—not many—in which mature, open diplomacy would eliminate the bloodletting that had so scarred human affairs. The book captured a transitory moment of multilateral idealism in the history of U.S. diplomacy. Willkie had channeled Woodrow Wilson, and then some. An opinion poll in 1942 had found that 73 percent of Americans believed that Wilson had been correct about joining the League of Nations, up from 33 percent in 1937.104
Having recanted such idealism through painful experience during the First World War, Lippmann was adamant that the United States must avoid repeating the blunder of substituting concrete goals with platitudes born of wishful thinking rather than comprehension of history. Lippmann wrote that “I felt that the One World doctrine was a dangerous doctrine … I felt it wasn’t possible to make one world, and the attempt to do it would produce a struggle … that the right line was to recognize the pluralism of the world and hope for an accommodation among many systems.”105 There were certain geopolitical phenomena that could not be transcended: nationalism and the naked pursuit of commercial self-interest were at the top of the list.
Writing to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (who had followed his distinguished grandfather in representing Massachusetts in the Senate), Lippmann poured scorn on his self-righteous and self-deluding observation that the United States, unlike Great Britain, was not an imperial nation. “In this respect,” Lippmann wrote, “we have exactly the same definite practical aim as Britain: we too intend to maintain our prewar position—in Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, in the Caribbean, and in South America.” Lodge had also made a rash remark regarding the utility of international collaboration, which Lippmann took to task: “I think that the first point in your summary—about ‘effective international collaboration’—is an example of the cosmic transcendentalism which you deplore. It is too late in the day for any man to use such empty phrases: the time has come to particularize and to be practical by defining the strategic positions, the commitments, the alliances which give substance to the phrase.”106 Lippmann had embarked on this process of particularization by writing a book of his own. He halved the frequency of his weekly column to write the book in just four months, aware of the advanced stage of his adversary’s book in progress. While “Willkie’s One World helped to educate the people of this country to a participation in world affairs,” Lippmann wrote, “it also helped … to miseducate them to an expectation about things which caused a furious resentment when it didn’t come true.”107 America’s world position would be gravely harmed by the unchallenged dissemination of such ignorance. Lippmann’s contribution to public education, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, was published in the spring of 1943, at the same time as One World. Rarely have two foreign-policy books combined so perfectly to capture the public’s imagination.
U.S. Foreign Policy was Lippmann’s best book on diplomacy. Writing with his typical elegance and sustained by pertinent references to America’s historical experience, Lippmann interrogated foreign policy with a sharpness and accessibility that few writers before or since have achieved. Consider Lippmann’s presentation of his core argument: “The thesis of this book is that a foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power. The constant preoccupation of the true statesman is to achieve and maintain this balance.”108 The essence of realism has rarely been captured so well.
A central target in U.S. Foreign Policy is Woodrow Wilson, whom Lippmann lambasts for failing to enunciate America’s war aims clearly—a familiar theme throughout his interwar journalism. “The reasons he did give,” wrote Lippmann disapprovingly, “were legalistic and moralistic and idealistic reasons, rather than the substantial and vital reason that the security of the United States demanded that no aggressively expanding imperial power, like Germany, should be allowed to gain the mastery of the Atlantic Ocean.”109 In Lippmann’s opinion, Wilson had entered World War I “without a foreign policy,” and that “it was made to seem that the new responsibilities of the league flowed from President Wilson’s philanthropy and not from the vital necessity of finding allies to support America’s vast existing commitments in the Western Hemisphere and all the way across the Pacific to the China Coast.”110 In this respect Wilson operated in a regrettable tradition that sanctimoniously misread the nation’s history. The cause of this diplomatic naïveté was miscomprehension of the Founding Fathers’ views and actions. George Washington decried “entangling alliances” only because fixed allegiances did not suit the young republic at that time. The Louisiana Purchase and the Monroe Doctrine proved beyond doubt that U.S. foreign policy was not conceived in a vacuum, unsullied by consideration of the Old World. And nineteenth-century America nearly always possessed sufficient military power to serve its limited purpose: subjugating a continent and winning territory from weak adversaries in the form of Mexico and Spain. “Though Jefferson had some odd ideas about the navy,” Lippmann wrote, “the Founders never thought of making unpreparedness for war a national ideal.”111 Thinking otherwise was America’s original diplomatic sin.
It was the dawn of the twentieth century that compelled the United States to reconsider its foreign-policy responsibilities with a clearer head: “As soon … as Britain no longer ruled all the oceans—which was after about 1900—our own strategic doctrine ceased to be adequate.”112 In respect to the Spanish-American War, Lippmann quotes Mahan’s view that the United States was fortunate to face such an incompetent enemy. This scenario was unlikely to be repeated during future conflicts, making it essential that America’s vital interests be firmly established. Lippmann did so in observing that “we are committed to defend at the risk of war the lands and the waters extending from Alaska to the Philippines and Australia, from Greenland to Brazil to Patagonia.”113 That this represented a major commitment—nearly half the world’s surface—was not lost on Lippmann. But hostile encroachment into any of these areas could pose a mortal threat to the nation’s independence. Germany’s quest for hegemony in Europe, for example, made the continental United States considerably more vulnerable:
The fall of France laid Spain and Portugal open to the possibility of invasion and domination. This in turn opened up the question of the security of the Spanish and Portuguese island stepping-stones in the Atlantic. The fall of France gave Germany the sea and air bases from which Britain was besieged and American shipping along our Eastern shore and in the Caribbean subjected to a devastating raid.114
It was this reality of American vulnerability—little appreciated across a parochial nation—that compelled participation in the Second World War.
The book’s other purpose was to identify the alliances most likely to sustain a stable postwar world. In this respect, Lippmann expected the core relationship among the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—the so-called Big Three—to prove as indispensable in peacetime as it had proved in fighting Germany. To maintain cordial relations with Moscow, it was imperative that Washington accept that the land to the east of Germany was firmly within the Soviet sphere of influence: “To encourage the nations of Central and Eastern Europe to organize themselves as a barrier against Russia would be to make a commitment that the United States could not carry out … the region lies beyond the reach of American power, and therefore the implied commitment would be unbalanced and insolvent.”115 Ensuring peace after the defeat of the Axis depended on acceptance by the great powers in general—and America in particular—that traditional diplomatic cooperation was a surer bet to avoiding war than vesting faith in a world parliament or binding arbitration. Maintaining close postwar relations with its two major wartime allies, furthermore, required Washington to look beyond behavior that clashed with cherished norms and values—whether in respect to Churchill’s determination to preserve the British Empire or Stalin’s heavyhanded creation of a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe.
U.S. Foreign Policy was a work of stark political realism that struck a resonant chord across the United States—a nation prone to gazing admiringly at its innocent self-image. Lippmann is better than anyone else at capturing the reasons for its remarkable popular success: “I think U.S. Foreign Policy has had by all odds the greatest circulation of anything I’ve ever written. It’s been translated into almost every language. Its virtue was that it had certain very simple and fairly obvious ideas which just happened to be apropos. It was a time when people were beginning to take foreign affairs seriously.”116
This short volume of “simple and fairly obvious ideas” sold close to half a million copies. A condensed version was published in Reader’s Digest, while the Ladies’ Home Journal published a remarkable rendering of Lippmann’s thesis in the form of seven pages of cartoon strips—unique testament to his accessibility. The U.S. Army distributed a version to its troops, priced at 25¢.117 On June 14, 1943, Lippmann appeared on the cover of Time, which hailed the quality of the analysis provided by the “pundit Lippmann.” Newsweek praised Lippmann as “perhaps the foremost editorial voice of enlightened conservatism in this country.” A review even appeared in the French Resistance magazine Les Cahiers Politiques, published under the perilous circumstances of German occupation.118 In November 1943, Charles Beard complained that Lippmann was the “Dean of the World Savers,” and that he was keen to “take a whack … [But] I haven’t the time or strength”—a prospect that would have cheered Lippmann immensely.119 Yet in spite of the global attention and review plaudits, Lippmann viewed the book as a failure. In the final calculation, U.S. Foreign Policy simply did not make good on its ambition of educating Americans out of their tendency to view the world immodestly through an idealistic lens. As Lippmann noted, “The theory that the nation’s commitments and its power must be in balance is really an obvious idea, but it was a new one. It’s one that we haven’t learned of course. The book is a complete failure in that respect, because we proceeded right away to make more commitments than we had power to fulfill after the war.”120
Through the spring and summer of 1943, the first rumblings of grand alliance fracture had become audible. Stalin believed that Britain and the United States had been purposefully tardy in refusing to sanction a cross-channel invasion to carve open a second front and relieve pressure on the Red Army, which bore the overwhelming burden of fighting Germany. For his part, Churchill had grave misgivings about the Soviet Union’s territorial intentions in Eastern Europe. The prime minister had no desire to sacrifice Polish independence—for which Britain had declared war on Germany in the first place—for the sake of hypothetical postwar unity. At this stage Churchill did not view Eastern Europe as a sacrificial lamb. At the Tehran Conference of November–December 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to launch a cross-channel invasion the following spring. But Stalin was relentless in holding the line that Moscow would assume a “special” stake in the nations the Red Army occupied on its path to Berlin. The Soviet Union would swallow the Baltic states, and Poland would never again fall into hostile hands. At Tehran the disagreements that lurked beneath Allied bonhomie presaged new rivalries, which Lippmann was keen to avoid.
After Roosevelt returned from Tehran to reports of growing discord among the Allies, Lippmann wrote in his column that “we must not make the error of thinking that the alternative to ‘isolation’ is universal ‘intervention.’ A diplomacy which pretended that we were interested in every disputed region everywhere would easily disrupt the alliance.” All nations throughout history have possessed spheres of influence and it was fallacious to believe that the creation of a United Nations—a term first used by FDR in January 1942—might allow something more equitable to take its place. Indeed, stability and peace were often predicated on powerful nations dominating the geographical region in which they resided—repelling predators and ensuring “stability.” Lippmann observed that it was “not only unavoidable but eminently proper that each great power does have a sphere in which its influence and responsibility are primary,” and that One World disciples engage in “the pretense, wholly illusory and dangerously confusing, that every state has an identical influence, interest, power and responsibility everywhere.”121 Lippmann was concerned that U.S.-Soviet postwar cooperation might founder on the marginal issue of Polish or Czech independence. He began writing a follow-up to U.S. Foreign Policy to warn the public of the dark consequences that might flow from well-intentioned miscalculations.
The sequel, U.S. War Aims, was published as Allied troops poured onto Normandy’s beaches, establishing with considerable bravery, and grave human cost, the second front promised at Tehran. It was a propitious moment for the book to appear, as the Second World War in Europe was clearly entering its endgame. As with U.S. Foreign Policy, Lippmann criticized Wilson: “The Wilsonian principles are prejudices formed in the Age of Innocence, in the century of American isolation. Wilson wished America to take its place in a universal society. But he was willing to participate only if the whole world acted as the United States acted when it enjoyed isolationism during the nineteenth century … He supposed that international relations could then be conducted verbally by meetings at Geneva.”122 Lippmann believed Roosevelt should closely examine Wilson’s diplomatic performance during and after the First World War and then do the opposite. Driven forward by abstract Kantian theories, Wilson forgot about the enemy and the fundamental Hobbesian nature of the world. Victorious nation-states, not untested world peacekeeping institutions, should make and keep the peace. People live for “their families and their homes,” Lippmann wrote, “their villages and lands, their countries and their own ways, their altars, their flags, and their hearths—not charters, covenants, blueprints, and generalities.”123
Lippmann’s contempt for the worldviews presented by Wilson and Beard inform the book at every juncture. Instead, Lippmann championed Mahanian causes of realism, alliance-driven diplomacy, and hostility to arbitration:
The argument developed in this book is that we should reverse the Wilsonian principles: that we should seek to conserve the existing political states, rather than to dismember them on the ground of self-determination, and that we should approve, not forbid, should perfect and not dissolve, the regional groupings of national states … We have to reverse the Wilsonian pattern of collective security. We cannot build a universal society from the top downwards. We must build up to it from the existing national states and historic communities.124
It was vital that America secure something concrete from hard-won victories on the battlefield. “We shall not squander the victory,” Lippmann wrote, “as we did twenty-five years ago, if we hold fast to this simple idea: that the fundamental task of diplomats and public men is to preserve what is being accomplished by the war.”125 To “preserve” the fruits of war—the final and decisive defeat of militarism in Germany and Japan—Lippmann proposed that international affairs henceforth stem from “a nucleus around which order can be organized.” This nucleus would consist of four centers of power, comprising the “Atlantic Community,” spearheaded by the United States, Britain, and France, the “Russian Orbit,” including a Soviet sphere in Central and Eastern Europe, and two other “constellations”: China and the other forming in “the Hindu and in the Moslem worlds, but that is more distant.”126 In combination, these four powers would serve a police function. All would possess a vital economic stake in avoiding conflict and maintaining stability both within and outside the “orbits.” Constituent nations were free to join the United Nations, but peace was served best by Lippmann’s transnational alliance system, not through countless atomized nation-states arguing their selfish case to an impotent deliberative body.
In dispensing instruction on how best to shape the postwar world, Lippmann was farsighted on some issues but unduly pessimistic on a host of others. Insightfully, Lippmann observed that Germany should be weaned off notions of autarky—or continental Germanism—and encouraged to forge a new economic identity as an exporting nation: “It will be safer for all of Europe, and also for Russia, if Germany becomes dependent upon maritime commerce. The less self-sufficient Germany is, the better for her neighbors whom she has sought to dominate, and for the Atlantic nations which will emerge from this war with the command of the seas.”127 Channeling Germany’s formidable economic potential in this export-led direction made sound geopolitical sense and anticipated the nation’s remarkable journey from militarized, authoritarian aggressor to war-averse, export-led superpower. On Japan, conversely, Lippmann’s usual perspicacity was hindered by a failure of imagination. He wrote, “The American objective will have been attained if Japan is incapable of recovering the military force to strike again. The reform and reconstruction of Japan are beyond our ken, and we shall be wise to solidify our relations with China by being in these matters her second … we cannot manage a Japanese revolution.”128 The United States has enjoyed few foreign-affairs successes comparable to its occupation of Japan, which indeed amounted to a revolution of sorts in the nation’s polity and external bearing.
On potential sources of conflict with Moscow, Lippmann appeared blithe. He downgraded the significance of ideology and focused instead on the positive aspect of geographical remoteness. “The two strongest states in the world will be as widely separated as it is possible to be,” Lippmann wrote. “The core of the Soviet power is at the Urals in the deep interior of the Eurasian continent; the American power is in the Mississippi Valley in the heart of the island continent of North America. Not since the unity of the ancient world was disrupted has there been so good a prospect of a settled peace.”129 Here, Lippmann was guilty of viewing events through a nineteenth-century paradigm, failing to anticipate that a divided Europe would become a source of considerable friction between Moscow and Washington, and that liberalism-capitalism and Marxism-Leninism represented not just antagonistic ideologies in theory but also proactive rationales for intervening across the world to steer “progress” in the right direction.
The important thing to note is that Lippmann’s realism was a theory. It assumed permanent trends in the structure of world affairs. It held that the “true statesman” balances resources and commitments, and eschews reckless adventurism, in pursuing policies that redound to the nation’s advantage. It was a social scientific insight. But Stalin was not motivated simply by material concerns. Soviet foreign policy required a wider ideological purpose; it was bound tightly into the nation’s raison d’être. In a pugnacious speech delivered at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1946, Stalin observed that the First and Second World Wars had broken out “as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism.” He pondered whether such wars were avoidable in the future but concluded that only the universal victory of Marxism-Leninism made this possible: “Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries in conformity with their economic weight by means of concerted and peaceful decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of world economic development.”130
Stalin’s reading of Marx and Lenin blinded him to the reality that conflict between liberal-capitalist states was not inevitable. Under American leadership the West cohered rapidly and effectively in opposing the spread of communism. But in holding that Stalin’s rationality outweighed his ideological convictions, Lippmann similarly misread the taproots of Soviet foreign policy.
Lippmann was also unduly optimistic about Stalin’s capacity to evolve in a more humane direction, writing that “since we became allies in war, the Soviet Union has been committing itself more and more definitively to a foreign policy based on democratic, and not totalitarian, principles … The fact is that Marshal Stalin has now repeatedly affirmed the democratic principle in respect to his dealings with his neighbors within the Russian Orbit.”131 Thinking the best of Stalin was forgivable to someone less informed; the despot had been presented to the American public in a flattering light—as “Uncle Joe”—due to the pressing concern of defeating Hitler. As someone with privileged political access and a wealth of published information, however, Lippmann might have known better.
Lippmann’s purpose in writing the book was to elevate the importance of a close working relationship with the “Russian Orbit” and steer Americans away from their habitual tendency to view their place in the world through a moralistic lens. But U.S. War Aims failed to achieve the desired impact. Some people liked it, certainly. Within the Roosevelt administration, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes described the book as “an outstanding piece of work … novel and extremely interesting.”132 John Foster Dulles, then a foreign affairs adviser to the Republican presidential candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, complimented Lippmann on performing “a most able and constructive job,” particularly in identifying the limitations of the proposed United Nations.133 Like U.S. Foreign Policy, it appeared on the bestseller list and was serialized in Reader’s Digest.
But hostility outweighed praise. Henry Luce, the publisher of Life magazine, considered serializing the book, then declined after reading the galleys. Luce viewed Lippmann’s book as “too anti-Russian” for describing the Soviet Union (accurately) as a “totalitarian state,” even though Lippmann was crystal clear in detailing the diplomatic benefits of a close working relationship between the orbits.134 A former colleague at The World, John L. Balderston, complained to Lippmann that the book’s underlying pessimism left him with a “feeling of despair.” Lippmann defended his portrait of the postwar world as both accurate and reasonably optimistic:
There’s a great deal of confusion among our friends who think that war, which is a destructive process, can create the brave new world. The brave new world, in my view, can be created only if and when the threat of great war had disappeared for two or three generations. In other words, I think we shall get a peace as conclusive as that which followed the Napoleonic Wars and a century as free from great wars as was the Nineteenth. That’s a devil of a lot when you think about it.135
The “friend” who had detailed a path to creating “a brave new world” from the ashes of war was Sumner Welles, FDR’s undersecretary of state and an architect of his Good Neighbor Policy. In 1944, Welles published The Time for Decision, which restated Woodrow Wilson’s ambitions in calling for the creation of a much-strengthened League of Nations. The book was driven by the idealism that Lippmann’s book set out to denigrate, and it captured the public’s mood of optimism much more successfully. The book sold a million copies and garnered critical plaudits from across the spectrum of opinion. Welles also reviewed U.S. War Aims critically. As Lippmann recalled, “Sumner Welles reviewed the book and opposed it because he said it was old-fashioned belief in the balance of power … all of which we had to get away from in one word—the United Nations.”136 In 1944, foreign policy appeared to be running away from Lippmann’s modest spheres-driven realism, as he well realized: “The whole trend of our policy went in the other direction. The first theory was that we were going to unite everybody, including the Russians, in one world, and all were going to think alike. When that broke down, then we were going to unite everybody but the Russians in one world … The book came out as Roosevelt was in his last phase, and Truman, of course, never read a book.”137
As Lippmann had cautioned in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, the “outsider” American population, “served” by weak political leadership, was driving the nation toward needless confrontation with the one power with which America should remain on reasonably good terms. Worst of all was the notion that the United Nations should assume the essential role of arbiter. Lippmann complained later that “I can’t help feeling that Welles’s book did enormous damage in diverting the American people from an understanding of the historical realities … I might have accomplished more by a running criticism of him than I did by my own book.”138 Lippmann’s plans had been frustrated by a population swayed by the Wilsonian sophistry of Sumner Welles and Wendell Willkie. If only, he lamented, “the public, and particularly the idealistic public, were not so stubbornly naïve.”139
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Sumner Welles’s collaborative ideas were put to the test from August to October 1944, when representatives from the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and China met in Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., to draw a blueprint for a successor organization to the League of Nations. During these discussions the four major components of the United Nations were established: the Security Council, the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, and a Secretariat. Significantly, the four delegations agreed that the United Nations should possess a military capability. This would be created through member states placing their militaries at the disposal of the Security Council at moments of crisis. Woodrow Wilson’s dreams were being realized. As were Mahan’s and Lippmann’s nightmares.
In a long letter to his friend Grenville Clark, chairman of the Citizens Committee for a National War Service Act, Lippmann poured scorn on events at Dumbarton Oaks. He complained that “the Dumbarton Delegates have sought to create a universal society to enforce peace before the world has been sufficiently pacified … With these conventions to pacify and unite, we should not be quarrelling with Russia over the conundrum of legal equality, but should be bound together with Russia to make and keep the peace in the critical generation ahead of us.” Lippmann thought that the creation of the United Nations was a foolish distraction at a time of profound global flux. When world peace became reality was the right time to vest faith in a new geopolitical experiment. It was “a false major premise” to believe that Dumbarton Oaks could conjure up “a universal society to pacify the world.”140 On this count, Lippmann’s skepticism was well founded.
Remarkably, the creation of a United Nations was not even a campaign issue during the general election of 1944. Both Roosevelt and the Republican candidate, New York governor Thomas Dewey, agreed on the wisdom of establishing a new global organization to keep the peace. Lippmann had grown mightily tired of FDR’s presidency—then in its twelfth year—but Dewey struck him as a worse prospect. Dewey had criticized Roosevelt for refusing to confront Stalin over his future plans for Poland. In “Today & Tomorrow” Lippmann criticized Dewey’s support for those “reactionary Poles” who were foolish enough to resist compromise with Stalin over the nation’s frontiers and political composition.141 John Foster Dulles was furious with Lippmann, writing that “the basic issue between you and the governor is that you do not believe that the United States should have any policies at all except in relation to areas where we can make those policies good through material force. The governor, on the other hand, believes in moral force.” Unwilling to accept a sanctimonious attack from a man who previously favored the appeasement of Hitler—even after the fall of France—Lippmann penned a cutting retort: “I wonder if it would be profitable to argue about who is more aware of the moral issues involved in this war, for that would involve examination of the record, whereas I for one prefer to let bygones be bygones.”142
Lippmann did not so much endorse Roosevelt as eviscerate Dewey. In “T&T,” he wrote, “I cannot feel that Governor Dewey can be trusted with responsibility in foreign affairs. He has so much to learn, and there would be no time to learn it, that the risk and cost of change during this momentous year seems to me too great.”143 The voting public appeared to agree with Lippmann, reelecting Roosevelt with 432 electoral college votes to Dewey’s 99—a winning margin of 3.5 million cast ballots. Isolationists such as Hamilton Fish and Gerald P. Nye were voted from office. Self-declared “internationalists” entered Congress in considerable number, including a young, well-traveled Rhodes scholar from Arkansas named J. William Fulbright. Lippmann was pleased with the outcome at both the executive and legislative levels. But he remained concerned by the administration’s still buoyant enthusiasm for the United Nations and the prospect that growing U.S.-Soviet discord might derail his hopes for postwar stability. Roosevelt’s new vice president, Harry S. Truman, did not inspire much confidence in this regard. On June 23, 1941, Truman had observed, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.”144
Engaging in diplomatic cynicism of a different kind, Winston Churchill visited Moscow in October 1944 to propose to Stalin a “percentages deal,” whereby Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe (excluding Poland) would be divided into distinct spheres of interest. The Soviet Union would secure a preponderant stake in Romania, for example, while Britain would play the dominant role in Greece. This was a diplomatic gambit of which nineteenth-century prime ministers such as Disraeli and Palmerston would have been proud. Churchill appeared oblivious of how the times had changed, however, so when his proposal went public, a significant backlash ensued—FDR was compelled to disown his ally’s proposal. In Lippmann’s opinion, Churchill had displayed considerable skill in extracting a quid pro quo from a relatively weak diplomatic position. He was dismayed by such a violent response to sensible diplomacy. Lippmann wrote in December 1944 that American troops had not died to “have a plebiscite in eastern Galicia or to return Hong Kong to Chiang Kai-shek.”145 The irrational passions of the masses were again skewing the pursuit of sound diplomatic strategy driven by those privy to “insider” knowledge.
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met for a final time at the Crimean resort town of Yalta in February 1945. While Germany stood on the cusp of defeat, the daunting prospect of a sea invasion of Japan remained likely. The U.S. atomic bomb was still in development. It is in this context that we must comprehend FDR’s primary goal of securing Soviet support for continued military action against Japan—to which Stalin agreed at a fixed point three months after Germany’s unconditional surrender. The Big Three also hammered out a Declaration on Liberated Europe, which called for free elections in those nations liberated from Nazi occupation. This read well on the page, but the terms were ambiguous and effectively unenforceable.
Attempting to extract a Soviet concession on Eastern Europe, Churchill made clear that an independent Poland for him was a matter of honor. Stalin retorted testily that for the Soviet Union a friendly Poland was a matter of security. Roosevelt interjected that free elections in Poland “should be as ‘pure’ as Caesar’s wife.” Ominously, Stalin replied, “They said that about her, but in fact she had her sins.” Five days of grueling negotiations had produced cloudiness on the fate of Eastern and Central Europe. When Admiral William Leahy, serving as the president’s chief of staff, complained that the common declaration was so elastic that it could be stretched from the Black Sea to Washington without fear of rupture, FDR replied, “I know, Bill. But it’s the best I could do for Poland at this time.”146
Lippmann agreed. Yalta was as good an agreement as could have been made in the circumstances. In “T&T” he wrote that “there has been no more impressive international conference in our time, none in which great power was so clearly hardened to the vital, rather than the secondary, interests of nations.”147 Lippmann was as enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s presidency as he had ever been. Then, at this high point of goodwill, reports began circulating about the fragile state of FDR’s health. The long trip to Yalta had taken a severe physical toll on a man with serious and long-standing health problems. Upon his return, Roosevelt had retreated swiftly to Warm Springs for rest and medical attention. The prognosis was not good, as photographs of a visibly frail Roosevelt at Yalta testified. “Fearing that the president might not live much longer,” Ronald Steel writes, “Lippmann, as a final gesture to the man toward whom he had such conflicting feelings, decided to write a tribute to FDR—in effect an obituary—while the president was still able to read it.”148 Having subjected Roosevelt to scathing critical treatment throughout the 1930s, Lippmann graciously observed that his performance during the Second World War had been exemplary. In this respect, the warmth of Lippmann’s assessment was aided by the fact that Roosevelt’s narrow conception of the national interest had come to converge so closely with his own. Painful concessions to Stalin at Yalta had proved beyond doubt that “[President Roosevelt’s] estimate of the vital interests of the United States has been accurate and far-sighted. He has served these interests with audacity and patience, shrewdly and with calculation, and he has led this country out of the greatest peril in which it has ever been to the highest point of security, influence, and respect which it has ever attained.”149
It was an accurate and generous premortem eulogy. America’s greatest twentieth-century president died from a cerebral hemorrhage five days later.
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Lippmann had emerged from war as the nation’s most powerful journalist-analyst of foreign policy. U.S. War Aims had failed to hit its intended target, but his “Today & Tomorrow” column went from strength to strength in terms of its national and international readership. Losing a president devoted to a friendly relationship with the Soviet Union, however, was a major blow to Lippmann’s persuasive aspirations regarding the postwar world. President Harry Truman’s blunt, straight-talking style and provincial roots concerned Lippmann. Yet there were other political problems that commanded Lippmann’s attention. Foremost was the imperative that the Republican Party be prevented from turning lethal fire on FDR’s legacy—in the same way as Woodrow Wilson’s diplomatic goals were crushed after the First World War.
Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was the likeliest candidate to emulate Henry Cabot Lodge’s spoiling role in 1919. Participation in the Nye Committee in the 1930s had convinced Vandenberg that participation in the First World War had been a colossal error of judgment. Vandenberg argued that the Neutrality Acts did not go nearly far enough and that Roosevelt had been misguided in condemning Japanese aggression toward China. He was equally adamant that the rise of Hitler did not threaten America’s vital interests. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor gave him little option but to abandon isolationism, but it was a reluctant recantation. As war commenced, Vandenberg offered a despairing appraisal: “We have tossed Washington’s Farewell Address into the discard. We have thrown ourselves squarely into the power politics and the power wars of Europe, Asia, and Africa. We have taken the first step upon a course from which we can never hereafter retreat.”150 Lippmann was determined to keep him to his elegiac word.
Vandenberg was unenthused at the prospect of the United States assuming a central and proactive world role, but he possessed thinly disguised presidential ambitions, which Lippmann adeptly manipulated. Lippmann advised Vandenberg that running for the presidency in 1948 required a conversion to a responsible internationalism. The United States was the world’s most powerful nation by a vast margin—controlling approximately 50 percent of all world trade—and this came with grave responsibilities in respect to maintaining benign international conditions to sustain this dominance. Lippmann and James Reston of The New York Times collaborated in drafting a major speech that Vandenberg delivered to the Senate on January 19, 1945. In an address that bore Lippmann’s distinctive authorial mark, Vandenberg declared, “I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by its own exclusive action. Since Pearl Harbor, World War II has put the gory science of mass murder into new and sinister perspective. Our oceans have ceased to be moats which automatically protect our ramparts.”151 His congressional colleagues were stunned at this volte-face. For their part, Reston and Lippmann complimented Vandenberg (and their own phrasemaking) in their respective columns the following day. Lippmann later spotted Vandenberg at a diplomatic reception, striding from one admirer to the next “just like a pouter pigeon all blown up with delight at his new role in the world.” A keen student of psychology and a seasoned observer of politicians, Lippmann knew exactly how to deal with this “vain and pompous and really quite insincere man.”152
President Truman would prove less susceptible to Lippmann’s bag of persuasive tricks. He never invited Lippmann to the White House, and their correspondence was limited to a few stiffly formal notes. Truman’s first order of business was to preside over the creation of the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference that commenced on April 25, 1945. Addressing the fifty national delegations whose job was to revise the Dumbarton Oaks agreements and devise a foundational Charter, Truman remarked that the moment had come to give “reality to the ideal of that great statesman of a generation ago—Woodrow Wilson.”153 Such words were never likely to rouse Lippmann’s enthusiasm—or indeed those of a continental Americanist like Charles Beard. When the United Nations Charter was signed on June 26, Beard joined realist skeptics in rubbishing the UN’s decision-making procedures. “It gives Russia, Britain, and the United States a veto on everything they do not like,” Beard complained. “How people with any knowledge and intelligence can be taken in by it passes my understanding.”154 Predictably, Lippmann took the opposite tack, contending that the Charter foolishly empowered smaller nations and failed to appreciate the centrality of great power relationships and systems of “orbits” that better reflected reality. The negotiations also brought sharp disagreements with the Soviet Union into the open.
One of the goals of the U.S. delegation, led by Edward R. Stettinius Jr., was to prevent the seating of the so-called Lublin delegation, a grouping of mainly pro-communist Polish political leaders favored by Stalin. This caused considerable strain in the Moscow-Washington relationship. The Soviet delegation had also been greatly irritated by American and British efforts to seat Argentina—a nation openly sympathetic to Germany during the war and a home to Nazi war criminals thereafter—as a founding member of the United Nations. Lippmann was dismayed that both issues had combined to sour relations between the world’s two greatest powers. Midway through negotiations, he wrote to James F. Byrnes—an influential foreign-policy adviser to Truman who was appointed secretary of state in July—to register his displeasure:
I have been more disturbed about the conduct of our own policy than I have thought it expedient during a great conference of this sort to say in print … There is a far deeper conflict of interest between the British and the Soviets than between the U.S.A. and the Soviets, but we have allowed ourselves to be placed in a position where instead of being the moderating power which holds the balance, we have become the chief protagonists of the anti-Soviet position. This should never have happened. It would never have happened, I feel sure, if President Roosevelt were still alive, and it will lead to great trouble not only over such matters as the Polish question but throughout the Middle East if we do not recover our own sense of national interest about this fundamental relationship.155
In paying insufficient attention to the balance of power, the United States had behaved naïvely and irresponsibly. As Lippmann recalled, Moscow “had a good case on Argentina and we wouldn’t listen to it.”156 But Argentina and Poland were of little material significance in the larger scheme of things—unlike the prospect of antagonizing Moscow.
The San Francisco Conference, then, was a distressing affair for Lippmann. He complained to John Maynard Keynes that the preparations were “amateurish and second rate” and that “I do wish we’d had the foresight to make some kind of security pact as underpinning between Britain, France, and North America.”157 The United Nations had been signed into existence, meaning the maintenance of world peace would once again rest upon an illusion. The United States had lost sight of what mattered most, clinging doggedly to idealist diplomacy born of self-delusion about the nation’s purpose in the world. Great Britain did not make such cardinal errors during its century of dominance. Lord Palmerston phrased it best when he remarked, “We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies. Our interests are eternal, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”158 The Truman administration appeared intent on making an eternal enemy to promote peripheral interests. As Lippmann wrote to a former colleague at the New York Herald Tribune: “There are no direct conflicts of vital interest as between the Soviet Union and the United States, and in fact none as between the United States and any other of the four big powers. This seems to me to indicate clearly our role as mediator—that is, intercessor, reconciler, within the circle of the big powers.”159 Yet Lippmann had strayed from the mainstream. This became abundantly clear when he attended an off-the-record briefing delivered by the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, W. Averell Harriman. Convinced that nothing good would come from vesting faith in efforts to maintain the prewar alliance with Moscow, Harriman remarked baldly that “our objectives and the Kremlin’s objectives are irreconcilable.” Stunned by the irresponsibility of the message and the bluntness of the language, Lippmann rose from his seat and strode angrily from the room.160
Just as Lippmann became strongly opposed to the Truman administration’s reckless actions, he received a surprising job offer from the State Department. Archibald MacLeish, a distinguished poet and librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944, had resigned from his position as assistant secretary of state for public information. Secretary of State Byrnes identified in Lippmann the ideal successor to MacLeish. He was respected across the political aisle, was tremendously persuasive in print, and had written two important books on public opinion. Lippmann rebuffed the offer, questioning the logic of the role:
The office itself is a new one, and it is founded, I believe, on the misconception—quite common these days—that public relations are a kind of advertising which can be farmed out to specialists in the art of managing public opinion. At the higher levels of government this is certainly an error: the conduct of public relations is inseparable from leadership, and no qualified public official needs the intervention of a public relations expert between himself and the people.161
One wonders if Lippmann was dodging the issue by questioning the necessity of the office rather than the policies of the administration. It is conceivable that Lippmann’s reluctance to serve his nation was conditioned by an aversion to selling President Truman’s foreign policy. Regardless, Lippmann continued to avoid government service, embracing his dual position as an insider-outsider throughout the remainder of his distinguished career. To his death in 1974, he remained insistent that America act responsibly in pursuit of achievable goals that were incontrovertibly in the national interest. The ideological crusade against the Soviet Union offended Lippmann’s pragmatic instincts and provoked the writing of some magnificent and polemical journalism. As George Kennan observed in 1995, Lippmann was “a man who had carried journalism into something much greater than what the term generally describes, a fine writer with a brilliant mind and an impressive store of what I might call liberal erudition.”162 He would coin a term—“the Cold War”—to describe the bipolar hostility that would divide Europe, brutalize the developing world, and make thermonuclear war over Cuba conceivable in 1962. Lippmann’s term defined the age, which in turn would shape the strategic thought of his successors.