Reviews for Walter Lippmann And The American Century

The average rating for Walter Lippmann And The American Century based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-08 00:00:00 Marksman Peralta Walter Lippmann is a difficult person to read a biography of and come away liking him. An only child of wealthy parents, he had a classic East Coast Harvard path to a relatively comfortable life that allowed him to pursue his own pleasures and hob-knob with presidents and other politically powerful people. Ronald Steel breezes through Lippmann's childhood; we do not get a clear picture of whether he was happy or unhappy as a child, but one gets the sense that he felt isolated amongst the wealthy of New York City. The narrative slows down when Lippmann reaches Harvard, and here Steel focuses on some of the professors and other literary notables that influenced Lippmann's thinking. Being that he was not forced to find odd jobs while in college, he was free to focus on writing, thinking, and traveling. Lippmann quickly became influential out of all proportion to his age, especially given his lack of professional accomplishments. Before he was thirty, he had met with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Lippmann had a snobbish, condescending air about him - always trying to retain a detached view of worldly affairs and the everyday people caught up in them. This manifested itself in WWI: Lippmann was definitely of draft age and had no health issues. But he thought that he and his pen could not be spared, and that there were better uses of his service than being in the trenches with other young men of his age. Using his already growing influence, he was able to obtain a deferment, and then became a non-combat Captain. While it is true that he worked hard at trying to craft a peace treaty, this reminded me of rich people paying bounties to poor people in order to avoid serving in the Civil War. It is ironic that someone so thin-skinned as Lippmann would become one of America's most well-known critics. Lippmann had a gift for writing, for putting down on paper cogent political thoughts. And he could and frequently did lacerate people with his pen. But when the pen was turned against him, Lippmann immediately became defensive and would often try to distance himself from any blame that might lay at his doorstep. When something that he was involved in failed, it invariably was not his fault. Reed is very good at analyzing Lippmann's voluminous amount of writings, and of his political thought as he aged. He takes a fairly balanced approach, noting when Lippmann was inconsistent (which seemed to be quite often) but not harping on it. One area where Lippmann was unfortunately very consistent was in not writing about Jews. Reed posits that Lippmann held some sort of self-loathing for being Jewish himself, as throughout his life Lippmann did not come to the aid of Jewish people nor write approvingly about them. In the same vein, Lippmann had no compunction about severely impinging on civil liberties if he thought the cause was just. He approved the disgusting decision to essentially imprison Japanese Americans on the West Coast during WWII. It is beyond comprehension to me how anyone could have remotely thought that was the right thing to do. An unfortunate example of mob mentality, and Lippmann went right along with it and did not apologize for it. One area that Lippmann was consistent on, and consistently right on, was Vietnam. He did not view the U.S. sending more and more "advisers" there as a positive development. After Kennedy's assassination, he spoke frequently with Lyndon Johnson and his advisers, urging a negotiated settlement and withdrawal. As he did with so many other people, Johnson misled Lippmann into believing that he was serious about finding a peaceful solution and was not looking to escalate the war. Eventually, Lippmann realized that he had been lied to, and he turned savage in his attacks on Johnson and his administration. Reed reviews in detail Lippmann's middle-aged affair with Helen Armstrong, wife of one of his closest friends, Hamilton Fish Armstrong. Lippmann was stuck in a loveless marriage and found a way out of it, ultimately not caring who he hurt in the process. In an action that speaks about what type of person he was almost as loudly as the fact that he had an affair with a friend's wife, he refused to tell his wife, Kaye, that he wanted a divorce; instead, he pushed the task off on his father-in-law, who actually carried it out. He never saw his first wife again. Yet, at this exact time, he wrote to Helen that Kaye was a "coward about life" (page 359). Incredible. I actually had to re-read that part to make sure that the man had enough gall and chutzpah to write that. It is somewhat ironic that, in the last year of Lippmann's life, when is rapidly deteriorating both physically and mentally, Helen sticks him in a nursing home and takes off. Basically, she abandoned her husband. Lippmann was not totally lost, and realized what she had done but, although saddened, did not seem to hold it against her. While this is sad, and it was equally sad to read of Lippmann's difficult final year of life, I could not feel sorry for him thanks to how he treated Kaye and also because of how he was in general towards people. Steel makes a case that much of Lippmann's haughtiness was due to him being innately shy. Perhaps this is so, yet the impression I got was not favorable. This book got better as it went along, with Steel moving somewhat away from Lippmann's political thought and more towards the events that were occurring in his life. The cumulative effect that Lippmann had on society and leading politicians is notable. His era is one that has since passed; newspaper columnists were widely respected, and widely read. Lippmann led a long and interesting life, and the pure scope of his life is fascinating to read about. Spanning Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, Lippmann was a major player in politics. Ultimately, this is an interesting look at early and mid 20th century American politics.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-08-11 00:00:00 Jerald Williams Public Intellectuals of the early 20th Century occupy a strange place in the historical record. In their day they held immense influence as thinkers and popular philosophers but since their output was mostly journalism (a transitory medium), the actual evidence of their brilliance is mixed at best. Lippmann, like his great rival Dewey, tried to rectify this by writing dense philosophical text, which today are mostly used to scare students into showing up for test review sessions. Lippmann's strength as a writer and thinker was always its speed, not depth. The modern usage of "pundit" was coined to describe him, and his influence is directly tied to mass media supplanting parties as the primary unit of political mobilization. Having dedicated his intellectual life to warning of the dangers of mass democracy, the fact that he owed his influence to the democratization of political influence holds an irony that this book fails to explore. It was in his role as an instant analyst and philosopher that Lippmann helped usher in the end of the traditional public intellectual, as all pretext of depth and experience vanished, in favor of the camera's demands for the new, new thing.