Lippmann, East & West

Newspaper editors generally pride themselves on letting a columnist say what he pleases, but last week Walter Lippmann said more than the editors of the New York Herald Tribune had bargained for. Writing once again from his own "neoisolationist" viewpoint, Lippmann declared: "My own view is that the conception of ourselves as the policeman of mankind is a dangerous form of selfdelusion. It is dangerous to profess and pretend that we can be the policeman of the world. How many more Dominican Republics can the U.S. police in this hemisphere? How many Viet Nams can the U.S defend in Asia?"

The Trib was piqued enough to offer an editorial answer the same day: "When Mr. Lippmann asks how many Viet Nams the U.S. can defend in Asia, perhaps the best reply is an indirect one. How many are there to be? And if we yield in the present confrontation, how much more difficult will be the next? For better or for worse, the U.S. is the 'policeman' on which the threatened peoples in China's expansionist path depend for whatever hope they have of independence and freedom."

It was not Lippmann's week. Having suffered a rebuttal of his Far Eastern policy, the columnist also found himself under attack for the policy he proposes in the West. Writing in the Saturday Evening Post, Dean Acheson quoted Lippmann's advice that the U.S. should leave Europe to the Europeans. Calling this the "grossest error," Acheson recalled that the U.S. was forced to intervene twice this century to settle an "essentially European" war. "Whether the problems be those left unresolved in Central Europe and Germany at the end of the last war; or the control and limitation of armaments; or the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the U.S. and Europe are indispensable parties to any political solutions. So let us recognize the plain fact that, whatever General de Gaulle says, or the commentators, we are irrevocably a European power. When our Government acts as one, it is responding to the realities of our time. The escapists, the new (though mostly old) isolationists are still with us. But let us recognize them for what they are --echoes from our colonial past."

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