For more than half a century after his graduation from
Harvard, Lippmann dominated and influenced Washington circles from a singular
perch. He was less interested in breaking news stories than in explaining and
teaching about their import.
In other words, he saw himself less of a reporter or editor than as a political philosopher. To that end, he produced book-length arguments, not just columns, on such subjects as public opinion, democracy, mass culture, and the Cold War (which he correctly feared would drag the US into a role as the world's policeman).
After graduating from college, Lippman’s initial hero
was Theodore Roosevelt. Later he drafted the “Fourteen Points” that Woodrow
Wilson used in negotiating the end of World War I.
The punitive peace that followed profoundly disappointed Lippmann, but he continued to offer counsel to American
Presidents, meeting all the ones that followed through Nixon. JFK, for instance, took the columnist’s notes on an interview with
Nikita Khrushchev with him to the 1961 Vienna summit, while LBJ sought his
approval for the growing US involvement in the Vietnam War.
Within a year or so, Lippmann, concluding he had been misled by the administration, turned vehemently against the war. Before retiring and leaving Washington for New York in 1967, he went so far as to accuse Johnson of "messianic megalomania."
Over the years, the coolness with which Lippmann
viewed events and leaders struck many observers, both left and right, as
problematic. It seemed to spill over from objectivity to a kind of smug
superiority.
Trying to define what the genre he called “the New Journalism”
meant, Tom Wolfe cited Lippmann, in a 1972 New York Magazine article, as what his group of upstarts was countering:
“For 35 years Lippmann seemed to do nothing more than
ingest the Times every morning, turn it over in his ponderous cud for a
few days, and then methodically egest it in the form of a drop of mush on the
foreheads of thousands of readers of other newspapers in the days thereafter. The only form of reporting
that I remember Lippmann going for was the occasional red-carpet visit to a
head of state, during which he had the opportunity of sitting on braided chairs
in wainscoted offices and swallowing the exalted one’s official lies in person
instead of reading them in the Times.”
In his 1965 novel Capable of Honor, Allen Drury, a former member of the DC press corps, conjured up some traces of Joe Alsop and James Reston and a lot more of Lippmann in his main character. The pompous fictional columnist, given to offering advice, requested or not, to Presidents and others, is nicknamed “Walter Wonderful,” but Drury’s attitude might be better gleaned from the character’s surname: Dobius.
If it sounds an awful lot like “Dubious,” the right-wing novelist –who regarded as anathema ideas for negotiating with the Soviets (such as spheres of influence) that Lippmann proposed—would not have been annoyed by any such association. (In fact, he disregarded advice from his publisher's lawyers to come up with a different name for this pundit that, he wrote, thought had "a mandate from the Lord to run the White House, the country, and the world").
A less bitingly satiric but more direct and piercing
depiction of a Lippmann prototype is contained in The House of the Prophet, with his lawyer, Louis Auchincloss, providing a thinly fictionalized
version of his life in the character Felix Leitner.
With the journalist dead a half-dozen years by the
time the novel appeared, Auchincloss could allude more directly to two aspects
of Lippmann’s private life that Drury, for all his animus, didn’t address: a desire to subsume his Jewish identity (to such a point that he initially downplayed the danger posed by Hitler to European Jews), and Lippmann’s scandalous affair with
Helen Byrne Armstrong, a relationship that destroyed two marriages and ended the
columnist’s close friendship with Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign
Affairs Magazine.
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