Books

The insiders' outsider

Nicholas von Hoffman

Walter Lippmann and the American Century Ronald Steel (Bodley Head pp. 688, £8.95) Walter Lippmann was such a good newsPaper columnist, so influential and respected, that he has soiled the careers of half a dozen talented men and women who followed him into the business. The ambition to be 'the next Lippmann' or, worse, 'the second Lippmann' has screwed up and stunted Joseph Kraft and a number of other less well known but certainly gifted epigori.

But to read this truly splendid biography IS to understand why they chose this model to imitate. You can't fault their judgment, for even now this austere dead man, this columnist who put brain over heart, has more sensible things to Say to living Americans than those whose words now fill the Op-ed page space his used to occupy.

The American Century' is a phrase Coined in 1941 by Henry R. Luce, the founder of Time, Inc. and its presiding maniacal spirit. Poetically, though, it can be said to commence about the time Lippmann Was born in 1889, and Mr Steel is quite right to use it in the title of his wonderfully researched, excellently put together book.

Lippmann, born into a wealthy family of German Jewish background, went to Harvard where he made a brilliant name for himself. As a Jew he was excluded from the topmost Wasp social clubs, which may account for his young man's dalliance with socialism. His was not the angry socialism of the rejected. Instead, having been blocked in one direction, he seems to have embraced it as another path towards distinction, a different way up. His gentlemanIY socialism did serve to make him known but it didn't last long. By the beginning of the second decade, Lippmann had become a progressive of the Te,ddy Roosevelt stripe, that is a sort of primitive social democrat Who would arm himself with the power of the centralised state to provide for the wretchedly poor. By the 1930's, however, LiPpmann, who was at best an occasional and fitful supporter of Teddy's cousin Franklin, would have developed such misgiving about centralised state power that he would be more or less regarded as a Republican.

However, if Lippmann's reputation rested on what he had to say about domestic politics, this biography would never have been written. Several of his books on mass media, society and democracy were influential, pioneering probes in the area of social Psychology and are still read, but Lipp' Mann's fame rests on his foreign policy analysis as it appeared in his newspaper column, which he wrote until 1967. (His magazine column continued until 1971.) In this part of his work we read a man of titanic detachment who could not be rushed off his feet by the gusts of patriotism that blew down weaker folks. Perhaps some of that detachment came from his experience as a Jew at the Harvard of his undergraduate years.

It appears to have left him with a lifelong feeling of being an outsider. A number of American reviewers of this book have come away thinking less of Lippmann because of his discomfort with the subject, his repeated suggestions that, if not Jews in general, then some Jews provoke persecution and his absolute silence on the Nazis and their crematoria. Steel quotes an important letter from Felix Frankfurter, a Jewish justice of the supreme court in the New Deal era, to Lippmann. It is worth excerpting because this criticism has followed the columnist into his grave: 'Only recently I have learned that you expressed regret that I should have "dropped" you because we happened to differ politically . . . Disagreement in opinion has for me never been a barrier to intimacy.

'But when, in your column of 19 May, 1933, you described Hitler as "the authentic voice of a genuinely civilised people" — I'm not unaware Of the context — and likened the Reich's cold pogroms and the expulsion of some of its greatest minds and finest spirits, merely because their grandmothers or their wives happeneid to be Jewesses, to the fact that "Jews have their parvenues," then something inside me snapped.'

So Lippmann did not particularly care to be a Jew and yet, though he became a member of the most exclusive non-Jewish clubs and social circles, a part of him never really joined anyone — though he was certainly not only of the ruling class in the abstract sense but the ruling people in a concrete sense. He was the confidant of Presidents and the peer of plutocrats, yet a portion of him remained rejected enough so that sight remained acute, enabling him to understand his special subject — power and policy. He, better than any man of influence in his time, knew how far was far enough and how far was too far. So he could be committed to the North Atlantic alliance and yet still write, am convinced that the question of war or peace hangs upon the Soviet willingness to engage in a general war, and not on the strength of local defenses in any particular part of the world. For that reason I have never believed in the policy of containment as preached by the State Department . . . I do not believe in the possibility of creating an army in Western Europe capable of fighting the Red Army on equal terms . . . The attempt to create it will not only exhaust Western Europe and strain us, but j:nobably would throw Western Europe into political convulsion.' That was written in the late Forties: in the early Sixties he was to write, `The price of a military victory in the Vietnamese war is higher than American vital interests can justify.' Lippmann was the real realpolitiker.

It wasn't shining idealism that put him at odds with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, it was his understanding of the practicalities of the power placed in their hands. If he were alive today, he would undoubtedly be thrilled by President Reagan's budget cutting but appalled and terrified by Alexander Haig. He would say that foreign policy that has no definable objectives, no specific goals is therefore outside the realm of diplomacy. He might say to Haig what he once said to George Kennan, the man generally credited with supplying the intellectual rationale for the post war cordon sanitaire: `The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, which did not enjoy political intimacy, and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless, there have been settlements. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them did. For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is all about .

As journalist Lippmann could never decide if he were an insider or an outsider. That is because he saw his work as a professional calling not unlike a lawyer's, but he knew you had to be financially independent to practise it as he thought it ought to be practised: 'A journalist who can do something else, if only drive a taxicab or make shoes, is a free man if he wants to be. No man ought to go seriously into journalism who is absolutely and solely dependent upon what he can earn by it.'

But Lippmann himself was hugely paid even when he said things that rich and powerful people were irked to hear. The reason was that at bottom they knew he believed what they believed, he held the same values they held and when he differed it was only because he thought he saw a more effective way to run the boat, not because he was nursing any thoughts of making the officers take a long walk on a short gangplank.

Walter Lippmann wasn't an investigative journalist, nor an adversarial one in the sense of looking for small contradictions and minor fumbles. He was a journalist whose job was to help run the country and to do it by giving the sort of tough advice an administration can't get from its own people or, quite frequently, from the more intelligent members of the opposition party. Somebody who isn't up for re-election and isn't currying favour is needed to argue, test and refute this week's Washington shit, boleth. Walter Lippmann did that and an example of how he did it is charmingly told by Steel in this anecdote about John Foster Dulles and the Great Columnist: "Foster," he asked, "what do you think you're going to accomplish with that thing SEATO (the South East Asia Treaty Organisation)? You've got mostly Europeans, plus Pakistan, which is nowhere near Southeast Asia."

"Look, Walter," Dulles-said, blinking hard behind his thick glasses, "I've got to get some real fighting men into the South of Asia. The only Asians who can really fight are the Pakistanis. That's why we need them in the alliance. We could never get along without the Gurkhas."

"'But Foster," Lippmann reminded him, "the Gurkhas aren't Pakistanis, they're Indians."

—Well," responded Dulles, unperturbed by such nit-picking and irritated at the Indians for refusing to join the alliance. "They may not be Pakistanis, but they're Moslems."

"No, I'm afraid they're not Moslems either, they're Hindus."

"No matter," Dulles replied Did you hear that, General Haig? They're Hindus.