Word: lippmann
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NONFICTION: Abroad, Paul Fussell China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston Laughing in the Hills, Bill Barich Lyndon, Merle Miller Nature and Culture, Barbara Novak No Man's Land, John Toland Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel
...Lippmann helped draft the Lend-Lease Act. He talked World War I Hero John Pershing, then 80, into endorsing Roosevelt's destroyer deal with Britain, helped write Pershing's speech, then in print praised it. Similarly he and his colleague James Reston flattered the vain old Republican isolationist Arthur Vandenberg into supporting the United Nations in 1945, and wrote the turn-around speech that Vandenberg read to the Senate. And, of course, praised...
Steel sees Lippmann as a man determined to be close to power and never too far in front of public opinion. Lippmann was flattered when President-elect Kennedy came calling to ask advice on picking a Secretary of State (when Kennedy would not accept Adlai Stevenson, it was Lippmann who persuaded Stevenson to take the lesser job of U.N. representative). Lyndon Johnson also gave Lippmann what Steel calls "the famous treatment: telephone calls for advice, birthday gifts, private lunches at the White House, invitations to state dinners," until Lippmann turned against the Viet Nam War and was denounced...
...Lippmann warned fellow journalists against "their need and their desire to be on good terms with the powerful," who were not only sources of news but dispensers of "many kinds of favor, privilege, honor and self-esteem." Later, embittered by L.B.J., he put it more succinctly: "I would have carved on the portals of the National Press Club, 'Put not your trust in princes...
This sound advice, rather than the contrary example of Lippmann's long career, is what the press follows. Nowadays top Washington journalists get White House invitations more as a matter of ego stroking than serious consultations. It is doubtful whether either Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan even faithfully reads the Washington columns. Politicians today hark to the polls, not the pundits; cocooned in their own little circle of strategists, they seem indifferent to outside advice. It is not a world Lippmann could understand or accept...