Word: punditing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With these words, Pundit Walter Lippmann last week reprimanded Franklin Roosevelt for talking out of turn about religious freedom in Russia. Certainly the President was not very smart in arousing Mr. Lippmann and others. But perhaps the President was a little smarter than Walter Lippmann knew...
...Pundit Lippmann pointed out that keeping men in an idle army is a danger to morale, that the materials required for an idle army could better be used to send increased aid to Britain and Russia, or be converted to ship and aircraft building. But in one thing he erred: the present U.S. land force of 1,597,810 men is no mass army by modern standards. With Hitler estimated to have 300 trained divisions, the U.S. Army now comprises...
Exclusive of the Air Forces (which Pundit Lippmann excepted from his suggested reduction) the Army today numbers a round 1,400,000 in officers and men. For purely defensive purposes, military experts now consider that the U.S. Army needs as minima these forces outside the continental U.S.: Iceland, 15,000; Philippine Islands, 160,000; Canal Zone and Caribbean bases, 200,000; Hawaii, 200,000; Alaska, 110,000. Total 685,000. For permanent establishments in the U.S., to man fixed.bases, provide anti-aircraft and air defense for the coasts, it needs a minimum of 1,000,000 more. It also needs...
...light of all these contingencies, many a Lippmann reader thought last week that the pundit's suggestion made scant sense. Even his conclusion-an appeal to the President to prove that he was honest in his promise not to engage U.S. troops on foreign battlefields-could be charged to a wistful faith in a commitment made in disregard of the facts of present-day international life...
Like Herbert Hoover, Pundit Lippmann apparently assumed that the war against Hitler is already on the way to being won. Like many another American and Briton, he failed to recognize that the summer of 1941 has shown not the strength but a basic weakness of the alliance against Hitler: for a whole summer while the Nazis were busy fighting Russia, Britain did not have the strength to launch a single attack of importance on Germany...