Word: lippmann
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...DEATH at 85 this week of Walter Lippmann '10, a decent man whose pretensions to incisive brilliance as a commentator on the news were largely unproven, evoked an outpouring of adulation from journalists across the country. Some of the hyperbole lavished on the retired columnist and author--The Boston Globe's obituary labeled him the dean of American journalism, The New York Times's told of how he'd brought "reason, clarity and ethics to the tumult and intrigue of politics"--may have derived from the respect Lippmann attracted just for surviving so long, for maintaining the same principles...
...Lippmann started his public career as president of Harvard's Socialist Club and he finished it by giving qualified support to Richard Nixon; at first glance, it looks as though there were contradictions in the development of his thinking. But unlike most of those one-time socialists who wound up celebrating the American consensus, Lippmann suffered no traumatic disillustionment, no sudden or gradual discovery that led him to discard his earlier views. Right from the beginning, his hopes centered not on revolutionary uproar or change, not on the tumult and intrigue of politics, but on solutions quietly worked...
...same impulse that led Lippmann to criticize public opinion's stereotypes, and to distrust crowds and disorderly masses of ordinary people generally, led him to write in 1914 of the need, first and foremost, for "exorcising of bogeys." It led him to write in 1920, as millions of people faced hunger, privation and a war that still smoldered, that "the real enemy is ignorance." It led him to reverse himself and accept the electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti as soon as a commission headed by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell endorsed it. And four decades later, Lippmann's opposition...
...Lippmann's distrust for ordinary people and events permeated his writing. The simplest matter was likely to set him pontificating about the need for a synthesis between Jeffersonian liberty and Hamiltonian authority, or half-whimsically going back to liberal first principles. And though such an attitude seems particularly silly for a journalist presumably dedicated to letting ordinary readers know about day-to-day events, it's precisely this quality that folks this week were praising...
...Harvard Lippmann wrote only for The Advocate and other literary magazines. He was cut from the Editorial Board competition of The Crimson, reportedly for failure to keep up with the demands of the comp...