Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann (
September 23,
1889 -
December 14,
1974), was an influential
United States writer,
journalist, and
political commentator.
Lippmann was born in
New York City to German-Jewish parents, Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann. The family lived a comfortable, if not privileged, life. Annual family trips to
Europe were the rule.
At age 17, he entered
Harvard University where he studied under
George Santayana,
William James, and
Graham Wallas. He concentrated on
philosophy and languages (he spoke both German and French) and graduated after only three years of study.
In
1913 Lippmann,
Herbert Croly, and
Walter Weyl became the founding editors of
The New Republic magazine. During
World War I, Lippmann became an advisor to
President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's
Fourteen Points.
Lippmann had wide access to the nation's decision makers and had no sympathy for
communism. But the
Golos spy ring used
Mary Price, his secretary, to garner information on items Lippmann chose not to write about or names of Lippmann's sources, often not carried in stories, but of use to the
MGB (USSR).
Early on, Lippmann was optimistic about American
democracy. He believed that the American people would become intellectually engaged in political and world issues and fulfill their democratic role as an educated electorate. In light of the events leading to
World War II and the concomitant scourge of
totalitarianism however, he rejected this view. Lippmann came to be seen as
Noam Chomsky's moral and intellectual antithesis: He agreed with the
Platonic view that the population is a great beast, a herd, that has to be controlled by an
intellectual specialist class. Chomsky used one of Lippmann's catch phrases for the title of his book about the media:
Manufacturing Consent.
See also: Harold Lasswell,
Edward BernaysWalter Lippmann and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled
A Test of the News, found that the
New York Times coverage of the Bolshevik revolution was neither unbiased nor accurate.
It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. In addition to his newspaper columns, he published several books. Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "
cold war" to common currency in his 1947 book by the same name.
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A Preface to Politics (1913) ISBN 1591022924
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Drift and Mastery (1914) ISBN 0299106047
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Public Opinion (1922) ISBN 0029191300
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The Phantom Public (1925) ISBN 1560006773
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A Preface to Morals (1929) ISBN 0878559078
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The Good Society (1937) ISBN 0765808048
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The Cold War (1947) ISBN 0061317233
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Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955) ISBN 0887387918
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USC Center on Public Diplomacy Profile*
Free ebook of Walter Lippmann at
Project Gutenberg*
Walter Lippmann Men of Destiny (1927)*
Walter Lippman FBI FOIA*
Biography with excerpt from works
