Word: lippmanns
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Steel places passages from Lippmann's staid and elegant writing expressing his reactions to political events within the larger framework of Lippmann's thought--his continual twists of opinion regarding the efficacy of democratic government and especially the challenge the new Keynesian liberalism posed to American freedom and morality. And there were some twists that are hard to fit into any framework...
...Many of Lippmann's friends and followers totally abandoned faith in his judgement as he muted any strong criticism of Nazism in his columns. Here, Steel treats Lippmann's irresolution along with his entire life of repressed Judaism with tactful compassion, but he does not come down hard enough on Lippmann for his waffling during the Holocaust. If many writers could find the courage to criticize Nazi atrocities, the evasion of responsibility by one of the most outspoken American journalists demands more scrutiny than Steel deigns to present...
Most of the second half of the biography describes the politics of the Cold War, as Lippmann himself dubbed it. His view was totally pragmatic, emphasizing the need for the United States to preserve an operational balance of power, not to concentrate on spreading the American gospel of freedom. He did not feel the United States could impress its version of democracy on foreign peoples themselves struggling for the right to self-determination. Yet he also felt the honesty and reason of American policy-makers would guarantee a peaceful and just resolution of the Cold...
...WALTER LIPPMANN was betrayed by Lyndon Johnson, his advisers and the public that condoned American military intervention in Vietnam. Having ridiculed Kennedy's attempt to focus Western efforts against Asian communism on the Vietnamese civil war, Lippmann often declared that the United States could only lose a war fought on mainland Asia. What outraged him was not the misappraisal of American military objectives. But the duplicity of the Johnson administration's selling the war to a gullible nation. His 40-year-old prediction that the tendency to fabricate facts and rely on mistaken public opinion would have dire consequences came...
...presenting a highly favorable portrait of an American sage, Steel fortunately does not overlook either his judgemental mistakes or his personal faults. But these cannot obscure the value of his vision. Lippmann once described the room he worked in. It was sound-proof, and he kept his desk away from the windows so the noise and glare of the outside world would not disrupt his concentration. In an electronic culture where the media forms public opinion through momentary impressions, where fragmentary polls haphazardly spell out the political future, Lippmann's example of a diligent, reflective spokesman who found the time...