Journey on Television

Across a rugged, rock-strewn sector of Maine seacoast, the solitary figure meandered into the camera's eye. And for the next hour, Walter Lippmann, 70, filmed both at his Maine summer home and in Washington, led a CBS television audience on a reflective journey of the world as it is seen and pondered by the dean of U.S. newspaper columnists.

Questioned by CBS's Howard K. Smith, Lippmann ranged from the nature of the U.S. presidency to the international problems of the present to the needs of the future. Coolly, almost impersonally, he criticized the presidencies of both Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Harry S. Truman. Said he of Truman: "I never thought his quick way of shooting from the hip was the way the presidency should be conducted." As for Eisenhower, said Lippmann, the President "is not aware of the nature of the world as it is after two world wars, and he's out of date." In the U.S. system of government, the "only leadership that's possible is from the White House." President Eisenhower's "training as a staff officer in the Army makes him avoid decisions. He wants his subordinate staff officers, his department heads, to come to him with agreed decisions . . . The next President will conduct the office very differently from President Eisenhower--no matter whether he's a Republican or a Democrat.

It can't be conducted this way through the '60s; the problems are too severe and too urgent."

Shifting to the U.S. economy, Lippmann recommended that the country raise from 20% to 24% the share of its gross national income devoted to "public needs." Said he, in one of his less persuasive remarks: "You do not revolutionize an economy by rising from 20% to 24% ... I think it's quite thoughtless of people who'd say, Let's have private economy--everybody buy an automobile. That's, fine. But spend the money to produce the streets in which the automobile can run and park? That's terrible. That's Government spending. That's socialism. Well, of course, they haven't really thought it through."

Public Needs. What are the U.S.'s greatest and most urgent public needs? Said Walter Lippmann: "First of all, there is the national defense. It is absolutely necessary to the peace of the world that there should be no question at all that the American military arm is basically invulnerable . . . The second public need, and which is urgent, is education. We are not considering the rate of growth of the school population. We are not keeping up with it. We're falling behind . . . We are committed as a nation, and rightly so, to the mass education of a whole people."

For the U.S. to solve its problems, it must have a new sort of leadership, said Lippmann. "The thing to remember is that we're at the beginning of a new political generation. The old gentlemen, who have run the world during the war and after it, are going to retire from the stage --all of them--and the men who are going to rule, not only in this country but the other Western democracies, are men in their 40s or early 50s."

World Prospects. In the cold war, the prospects seemed "pretty good" to Walter Lippmann--but only in the sense that he thinks it will not become a shooting war. "What I mean is that the Russians have become concentrated on an objective which is incompatible with war, namely the development of the Soviet territory, which is one-sixth of the globe and is an enormously rich thing to develop, and that has become their great purpose. And they cannot improve their standard of life, they cannot succeed in any of the practical purposes that they have today, unless they can avoid war."

Again, Lippmann was hopeful about Russian intentions in Germany. Said he: "I don't think the Russians are out to absorb West Berlin into East Germany . . . They have two reasons. One is we won't let them do it, and therefore they cannot risk a war over that issue. But there's another reason, and that is that West Berlin would be an indigestible thing in the system of East Germany. And I think they know it."

Asked about U.S. relations with Red China, Lippmann's reply seemed remote from the facts of world life. Said he: "I think the right thing would be if they were admitted to the U.N.--on the condition that they will adhere to the agreement for nuclear testing; that could be taken as proof that they mean to be a peace-loving state, under the definitions of the United Nations--and I would hold that out to them as the price, really."

Lippmann's hour-long television debut held a fascination for the listener, giving him an intimate look at an otherwise remote man. He seemed to be playing host to an interviewer, rather than being hectored by newshounds as in TV's usual current events style. He was thus free to state, without interruption, provocative views that were quietly expressed. The effect was to emphasize the Olympian detachment that is Lippmann's special quality, a worried observer of events but not a participant in them, a man who speaks of urgency but believes basically that time will heal all.

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