Comrade of the Powerful

By Thomas Griffith

Calling Walter Lippmann the last of the great political columnists is an implied rebuke to his successors, suggesting that they don't make them like that any more. Well, they don't. A man not afraid to be caught reasoning in print, Lippmann intellectually dominated the editorial pages of American newspapers for a half-century. On-the-other-hands were not for him: wrong he might sometimes be, but rarely uncertain.

Perhaps today's columnists lack Lippmann's talent and intellectual resources, but there is another reason why they cannot command Lippmann's prestige. This becomes evident in a reading of Ronald Steel's fine new biography, Walter Lippmann and the American Century. A columnist today couldn't carry on in the way Lippmann did, participating in all sorts of political maneuvers and policy decisions. The times demand more standoffish behavior from a columnist if he is to be trusted as an observer identified with the public's side.

Lippmann's first major participation in events cannot be faulted: he contributed to the shaping of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. But Lippmann never did have a rigid belief in journalistic celibacy. In the nine years that he was the influential editor of Pulitzer's New York World, he promoted friends for office, plotted strategies, intrigued behind the scenes, all unbeknownst to his readers. When Al Smith ran for President in 1928, Lippmann commuted to Albany in the Governor's private railway car to coach him on foreign policy, advise him on strategy, help write his acceptance speech. Shortly before Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, the two men lunched at Warm Springs, Ga., where Lippmann said: "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers." As the Depression worsened, Lippmann had lunch on Wall Street with a Morgan partner who urged him to advocate abandoning the gold standard. So Lippmann wrote the column, and a floundering stock market shot up. That very night Roosevelt told his advisers he was going off gold.

Lippmann helped draft the Lend-Lease Act. He talked World War I Hero John Pershing, then 80, into endorsing Roosevelt's destroyer deal with Britain, helped write Pershing's speech, then in print praised it. Similarly he and his colleague James Reston flattered the vain old Republican isolationist Arthur Vandenberg into supporting the United Nations in 1945, and wrote the turn-around speech that Vandenberg read to the Senate. And, of course, praised it.

Steel sees Lippmann as a man determined to be close to power and never too far in front of public opinion. Lippmann was flattered when President-elect Kennedy came calling to ask advice on picking a Secretary of State (when Kennedy would not accept Adlai Stevenson, it was Lippmann who persuaded Stevenson to take the lesser job of U.N. representative). Lyndon Johnson also gave Lippmann what Steel calls "the famous treatment: telephone calls for advice, birthday gifts, private lunches at the White House, invitations to state dinners," until Lippmann turned against the Viet Nam War and was denounced in a petulant Johnson speech. So much for comradeship with power.

In his mid-70s, Lippmann warned fellow journalists against "their need and their desire to be on good terms with the powerful," who were not only sources of news but dispensers of "many kinds of favor, privilege, honor and self-esteem." Later, embittered by L.B.J., he put it more succinctly: "I would have carved on the portals of the National Press Club, 'Put not your trust in princes.' "

This sound advice, rather than the contrary example of Lippmann's long career, is what the press follows. Nowadays top Washington journalists get White House invitations more as a matter of ego stroking than serious consultations. It is doubtful whether either Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan even faithfully reads the Washington columns. Politicians today hark to the polls, not the pundits; cocooned in their own little circle of strategists, they seem indifferent to outside advice. It is not a world Lippmann could understand or accept.

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