Word: lippmann
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During the Republican '20s, the World was the nation's most articulate Democratic newspaper, and Lippmann's stately leaders became required reading for policymakers of all persuasions. When Lippmann later took command of the World's editorial page, he transformed it into an austere daily seminar. Novelist James M. Cain, then an editorial associate, warned Lippmann that not all World readers were up to the demands that he made on their intelligence. "You are always trying to dredge up basic principles," Cain said. "Now if what you've got to blow is a bugle, there...
Throughout the '20s, Lippmann denounced in measured terms the main thrusts of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. He opposed the isolationism that kept the U.S. out of the League of Nations and the World Court. He consistently skewered the passive presidencies of Harding and Coolidge (his epitaph on the latter's Administration: "Nothing ventured, nothing lost"). Neither Lippmann nor the World foresaw the Great Depression, but his verdicts on the '20s -reached in the heat of daily events-have held up remarkably well...
...World folded into a merger with the New York Telegram in 1931; on the afternoon of the announcement, Ogden Reid, owner of the nation's most influential Republican paper, asked Lippmann to write two columns a week for the New York Herald Tribune. The switch startled many, and some of Lippmann's liberal friends accused him of selling out to the conservative opposition. Their suspicions seemed to be confirmed later when Lippmann blasted the "collectivism" of the New Deal. In the 1936 election, Lippmann supported Alfred Landon...
...Lippmann had not gone over to the Republicans. He was simply displaying once again his distrust of any grand scheme whose success depended on measures he considered oppressive. "The Good Society has no architectural design," he wrote in 1937. "There are no blueprints." Lippmann's refusal to interpret events according to doctrine struck some critics as vacillation. In fact, Lippmann shifted far less than did the political spectrum against which his positions were measured...
Inconvenient Army. Most columnists' predictions are forgotten in a matter of days or weeks. Walter Lippmann's were not, and even admirers cherished his occasional blunders, perhaps to reassure themselves that he was human. He undervalued F.D.R.'s abilities and failed to take Hitler very seriously until 1939. In September 1941, calling the U.S. Army a "definite inconvenience," he urged a reduction in the armed forces and a step-up of economic aid to England and Russia. Harry Truman's upset victory in 1948 forced Lippmann to begin his next column with the pained and decidedly...