This Day in Journalism History (Walter Lippmann, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist, Dies)

Dec. 14, 1974— Walter Lippmann, whose analyses of foreign affairs and democracy netted him two Pulitzer Prizes, a position in the Establishment, and criticism of his Olympic detachment, died of cardiac arrest at age 85 in New York.

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.

Quote of the Day (Richard Rovere, on a Roguish Prep School Friend)

“The two most expressive things about him [school friend Wallace Wentworth] were his mouth and the pockets of his jacket. By looking at his mouth, one could tell whether he was plotting evil or had recently accomplished it. If he was bent upon malevolence, his lips, were all puckered up, like those of a billiard player about to make a difficult shot. After the deed was done, the pucker was replaced by a delicate, unearthly smile. How a teacher who knew anything about boys could miss the fact that both expressions were masks of Satan I'm sure I don't know. Wallace's pockets were less interesting than his mouth, perhaps, but more spectacular in a way. The side pockets of his jacket bulged out over his pudgy haunches like burro hampers. They were filled with tools screwdrivers, pliers, files, wrenches, wire cutters, nail sets, and I don't know what else. In addition to all this, one pocket always contained a rolled-up copy of Popular Mechanics, while from the top of the other protruded Scientific American or some other such magazine. His breast pocket contained, besides a large collection of fountain pens and mechanical pencils, a picket fence of drill bits, gimlets, kitchen knives, and other pointed instruments. When he walked, he clinked and jangled and pealed.”—American journalist Richard Rovere (1913-1979), “Wallace,” in The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 1950

At least a few times in their careers, teachers are likely to come across the Wallace Wentworth type: a devil-may-care student who can lead friends astray. In Richard Rovere, a fellow student at Stony Brook School in the early 1930s, Wallace found a kindred spirit at the Long Island boarding school: a youngster with little use for studies. “Pretty low marks coming up in Chem. and Eng., folks,” Rovere warned his parents on his upcoming grades. “Also Bible and Fr. Ok with you if I bet this week’s allowance on athletics. I changed my underwear Wednesday.”

But in Rovere, teachers are likely to find another type with which they are familiar, one who leads them to think that their efforts are not completely lost: the proverbial “late bloomer” who, through curiosity and love of reading, exceeds what many initially expected of him. In the case of Rovere, he ended up acclaimed as the “Predominant Magazine Political Journalist of the 20th Century,” according to this article by historian/journalist Mark Weisenmiller.

As Washington political correspondent at The New Yorker for three decades, Rovere would write an early influential biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy; create an equally incisive study of The American Establishment; and land what may have given him the most street cred with other journalists of his generation: a place on the Nixon Administration’s “Enemies List.”

And Wentworth? I haven’t been able to come across more information on him, though maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. But I doubt if classmates like Rovere could ever forget some of his antics, such as pouring sugar into the fuel line of a coach’s car, leading it to stall on its way back home from a winter match, or dumping a bag of flour into the organ pipes of the school’s chapel, causing an extra loud burst of that mighty instrument. 

(The image accompanying this post, of Stony Brook faculty, staff and students in 1922—a few years before Rovere started classes—is from the school’s archives.)

Quote of the Day (Edwin Newman, Sending Up Academese)

“Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, ‘God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.’”—NBC newscaster and language maven Edwin Newman (1919-2010), Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English? (1974).

The fame of TV newscasters tends to be fleeting. I mean, does anyone under the age of 60 know anything about Chet Huntley, let alone remember him? Unless you become known for something else besides intoning the nightly news, you can forget about people recalling you 20 years after you go off the air. Unless, that is, you stake a claim for something outside the broadcast booth.

Edwin Newman—born 100 years ago today in New York City—may have spent more than 30 years with NBC News, and he may have had as high a profile there as you could want: covering the JFK assassination, interviewing the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Muhammad Ali and David Ben-Gurion on Speaking Freely, and moderating the first televised debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976, and the second debate between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan eighty years later. 

But the obituaries following his death eight years ago gave equal attention to another aspect of his career: two best-selling books from the mid-1970s that described, in teeth-grinding but hilarious detail, how the English language was being roundly abused by politicians, athletes and other celebrities. Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue enjoyed well-deserved long runs on the bestseller lists for their delightful skewering of the pompous and pretentious.

Photos like the one accompanying this post may surprise today’s younger viewers: Newman was nothing like a newsman out of central casting. But he spoke and wrote the news with admirable economy.  "He was a consummate professional, a brilliant guy, a brilliant mind, and a joy to work with," remembered Lucy Jarvis, producer of the show The Nation's Future, in an interview for the Television Academy Foundation.

That proved to be an advantage as he sought to demonstrate the need for news to a citizenry requiring information. He was able, for instance, to convince NBC brass that he baseball fans wouldn’t miss a pitch in a playoff game if he would only be permitted to break in to announce the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on air, recalled David Hinckley of the New York Daily News in an obit for the newscaster.

The machinations of politicians also motivated his campaign to keep language pure through his books, he told Terry Gross in a 1988 interview for her NPR show “Fresh Air”: 

"I thought that it was the business of anybody in the news business to examine what he or she was told," he said. "And you cannot do that -- you cannot examine what is being told and judge its veracity -- unless you understand language, particularly unless you understand when language is being used in an attempt to mislead you. I took that very seriously."

While taking his work seriously, Newman hardly viewed himself in the same manner. One month after retiring from NBC in 1984, he made a memorable appearance on Saturday Night Live as one of two young rival gang leaders interviewed on the “news show” “Urban Answers”: the polysyllabic Crazy Max of the Insane Unknowns. 

I guffawed as the camera panned to Newman, clad in a blue vest and bandana, intoned to his host about excitable “Little Rat” (Brad Hall), “We’re willing to engage this adversary group in a variety of contests of strength, will and fortitude to underscore our claim.” Then, poker-face, pulling out a switchblade, to Little Rat: “I am prepared to fillet you, if necessary.”

‘The Combination of the Few’: Slavery, Trumpism, and Violence Against the Media

“Who are the men that issue this invitation to silence the press by violence? Who but an insolent, brawling minority, a few noisy fanatics, who claim that their own opinions shall be the measure of freedom for the rest of the community, and who undertake to overawe a vast, pacific majority by threats of wanton outrage and plunder? These men are for erecting an oligarchy of their own and riding rough-shod over the people and the people’s rights. They claim a right to repeal the laws established by the majority in favor of the freedom of the press. They make new laws of their own, to which they require that the rest of the community shall submit, and, in case of a refusal, they threaten to execute them by the ministry of a mob. There is no tyranny or oppression exercised in any part of the world more absolute or more frightful than that which they would establish. So far as we are concerned, we are determined that this despotism shall neither be submitted to nor encouraged. In whatever form it makes its appearance, we shall raise our voice against it…. We hold that this combination of the few to govern the many by the terror of illegal violence is as wicked and indefensible as a conspiracy to rob on the highway. We hold it to be the duty of good citizens to protest against it whenever and wherever it shows itself, and to resist it, if necessary, to the death.”— Journalist-poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), “Abolition Riots,” New York Evening Post, Aug. 8, 1836, in Power for Sanity: Selected Editorials of William Cullen Bryant,1829-1861, compiled and edited by William Cullen Bryant II (1994)

I suppose that we should count our blessings when President Trump acts merely “combative, humorous and boastful” at the press conference this week described by The New York Times’ Julie Hirschfeld Davis. After all, if he had a crowd larger than the reporters gathered in that room—like one of those ravenous rallies he enjoys with supporters out in the American Heartland—journalists might eventually hear something along the lines of, “People are telling me I should have them dragged out and thrown to the wolves.”

The fear of physical harm to the media is nothing new, as I was reminded in the above quote I found recently in a kind of message in a bottle: an American Literature textbook of the early 1950s created especially for Catholic high schools. One of the writers included was William Cullen Bryant, whose poems “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl” I had encountered previously in a college American lit survey course. 

But I had never read any of Bryant’s nonfiction writings—mostly produced in a half-century as owner and editor of the New York Evening Post—until I came across this excerpt from an editorial denouncing violence perpetrated by a mob against an abolitionist newspaper. 

Bryant—for whom the park behind the main branch of the New York Public Library was named—wrote these words at an urgent moment in American history, and I discovered them at a similar one today. They hurled defiance at the proponents of entrenched privilege who hoped to intimidate the press from espousing alternative points of view and from revealing ugly truths. 

In the 1830s, the “combination of the few to govern the many” consisted of Southern plantation owners and their smaller cadre of Northern sympathizers. Today, it consists of a different set of “noisy fanatics”; a lying, bullying New York real estate developer who somehow convinced a sizable portion of the Republican Party, then the nation, to vote for him as President; the opportunists who went along for the ride; and GOP officeholders now terrified of taking him head-on lest they lose their jobs.

What the “combination of the few,” then and now, have in common is the fear that aggressive reporting might bring to light unsettling questions about accommodations to a human-rights monstrosity: a racism-based, mercantile-enhanced slave system in antebellum America, and a nationalist authoritarian regime in post-Communist Russia that now has an ally in the 21st-century U.S.

It is ironic indeed that Trump and the ideologue who passes as his “brain trust,” Steve Bannon, look to Andrew Jackson as a forbear in their battle against the elites, for it was Jacksonian Democrats, firmly entrenched in the South, who attempted to stamp out criticism of the source of their power: cheap, ill-gotten slave labor. To accomplish that, the Jacksonians not only passed the infamous “Gag Rule”—the most serious Congressional attempt in American history to interfere with the right of petition—but fomented mob violence against the abolitionist press.

The “Abolition Riot” that drew Bryant’s denunciation was perpetrated against The Philanthropist, a newspaper founded by anti-slavery advocate James Birney. It consisted not simply of riff-raff but also of two of the most respectable leaders in town—Judge Jacob Burnet and banker, winemaker and art patron Nicholas Longworth—and was observed, silently but approvingly, by Mayor Samuel W. Davies. The mob not only tore apart the paper’s presses but threw a part of it into the river—and when they did not find Birney at home they turned on the African-American community, smashing up homes along the way. 

Though Birney escaped physical harm that night, another Midwestern abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, was not so fortunate a year later. Having had three of his presses already destroyed, he drew his gun to prevent a fourth from being wrecked in Alton, Ill., when he was killed (an act depicted in the image accompanying this post). It was the logical culmination of a period when slaveholders tried to suppress not just unrest among the slaves they directly controlled but dissent among the whites beyond their ken.

As bad as abolitionist editors had it, they did not have to contend with instant communications from a President who could summon mobs to do his bidding. “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok?” candidate Donald Trump said in January 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”  

Since Trump, despite his reputation from The Apprentice, has had difficulty firing people himself, one doubts he would have the nerve to fire a gun against an irate, righteous citizen. Instead, he would get others to do it—like a mob, whose citizens collectively surrender their consciences. 

The President has never come right out and commanded mayhem and murder toward his critics, mind you. But he does so much through a conspiratorial nod and smirk between him and his followers. 

Sometimes it might involve a calculated silence, followed by approving verbiage from this least subtle of politicians. Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte, for instance, slammed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs to the ground, after being asked a question he didn’t like about the GOP healthcare bill. A tape of the attack proved definitively that Gianforte committed the assault, then lied to police about it. Yet supporters awarded him a win at the polls. 

Not only did Trump never condemn the assault, but he strongly implied an endorsement of it. “I’ll tell you what, this man has fought — in more ways than one — for your state,” Trump said. “He has fought for your state. Greg Gianforte. He is a fighter and a winner.”

Even more striking if Trump’s consistent, odd refusal to condemn Russian President Vladimir. "They said, you know, he's killed reporters. I'd never kill them," Trump said at one rally in Grand Rapids, Mich. "But I do hate them. Some of them are such lying, disgusting people."

Please read that statement again. They said, you know, he’s killed reporters. Yes, dozens of them, according to a Scott Simon report on NPR back in April. Yet the President’s tone suggests only that the Russian leader is a bit…excitable. Sort of like a college frat boy who gets into a drunken scrape with the police. 

Instead, his real scorn is reserved for reporters—people who doubtless never feared until now, unlike those in Russia, that their lives are at stake with every critical word that they write about a President.

Even before the 2016 campaign, Trump would routinely threaten reporters and editors with litigation. Since then, he has escalated to insults and denunciations of the media for spreading “fake news” and, more seriously, for being the “enemy of the people,” an epithet once routinely employed under Josef Stalin.

That has been enough to incite his followers. Shirts have been sold at Trump rallies reading "Rope, Tree, Journalist: Some assembly required." NBC’s Katy Tur has described the atmosphere at the Grand Rapids rally this way: “The arena is packed, and it's a basketball stadium so the seats go very steep. The media, there was like 30, 40 people surrounded on all sides. And Donald Trump leaves, and so does the Secret Service, and suddenly it's like anybody can do anything in there."

Reporters like Tur who cover Trump rallies now must be prepared to be verbally harassed, beaten and thrown to the ground—in at least one instance, by a Trump staffer (in 2016, by hideous campaign operative Corey Lewandowski—who now, irony of ironies, makes money off the very group he attempted to physically manhandle, as a political commentator for CNN).

Even away from such stages, the poisonous rhetoric and helpful little hints have had their effect. Last month, a California man termed Boston Globe employees the “enemy of the people” in the course of threatening to shoot them. (Fortunately, he was arrested.)

After staffers at Annapolis, Maryland’s Capital Gazette were killed in June, Trump issued a statement saying that “journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job.” But it came with the same dry, perfunctory tones with which he’d delivered his sort-of apology for his Access Hollywood tape about groping women, or his walk-back criticism of white separationists in Charlottesville. Before long, he was back to doing and saying what came naturally.

The hypocrisy of Trump’s braying about how this group has done him wrong defies description. All of this comes from a real estate developer who thrived on publicity, even of a critical sort. Reporters he could not use to inflate his reputation could be turned into his foils. Far from being enemies of him, let alone “the people,” journalists should be on his permanent Christmas mailing list.

Instead of squelching opposition to slavery, the attempt to intimidate 1830’s press critics like Birney and Lovejoy only hastened a realignment of party politics, with Northerners such as Lincoln’s future Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, turning to anti-slavery parties. Trump is pushing 21^st century American politics toward a similar partisan hardening. 

The President has made much ado about his scorn toward the “lying, disgusting” people who chronicle what he says and does. But even at this still-early stage of his administration, more and more Americans are realizing that he just professes to despise the same qualities he finds every morning in his own mirror.

Photo of the Day: Horace Greeley Bust, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

When I visited Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn a year and a half ago, I had no plan for how to maximize my time. I didn’t know, for instance, that shuttle tours operate only at certain times and days. As this is a megalopolis of the dead, with more than half a million “permanent residents” in their final resting place, I would have to get around on foot, and though a map I got near the center’s entrance helped me some, it seemed to collapse distances. Finding a grave would be a matter of serendipity.

The one you see here was among the most dramatically situated, on a hill in Section 35, Lot 2344—one of the highest points in the whole sprawling cemetery. How appropriate: the man in this 12-ft.-high green bust that I photographed, newspaper editor Horace Greeley, possessed not only a lofty vision for his readers, but also for himself in the life of the country. He was more successful in achieving the former view than the latter.

Greeley is often credited with a famous saying that epitomized Americans’ movement across the continent: "Go west, young man, go west." His actual advice, though essentially the same, was not as pithy: "If any young man is about to commence in the world with little in his circumstances to prepossess him in favor of one section above another, we say to him publicly and privately, Go to the West; there your capacities are sure to be appreciated and your industry and energy rewarded." It goes to show, I guess, that even an editor may need editing.

I have been looking to write about Greeley and his final resting place for a while, and now I have a ready excuse: this month marks the 175^th anniversary of his newspaper, the New York Tribune. Hiring top talent (including leading literary figures of the time such as Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and Richard Hildreth), and adding editorials and commentaries, Greeley created a “penny paper” affordable for the working class. That enabled the Tribune to reach a circulation of more than a quarter of a million, fulfilling the ambition he had proclaimed to the wife of a clergyman friend of his: that it would be “a power in the land.”

One cause after another absorbed Greeley’s interest: workers’ rights, women’s rights, scientific farming, free distribution of government lands, and Irish nationalism. But, coming to feel that journalism wasn’t enough to shape the nation’s debates, he longed to be part of the political arena. A three-month stint in Congress as a Whig in the 1848-49 term only whetted his interest. Over the next 24 years, he ran three times for Congress, twice for the U.S. Senate, and once for the Presidency. He lost every race.

What bedeviled him was the same issue that vexed the nation: slavery. He was simultaneously an abolitionist and a pacifist who believed that the South had a right to secede; then a supporter of war and immediate emancipation; then, as Northern forces temporarily stalled in 1863 and 1864, a backer of peace negotiations with the Confederates. Abraham Lincoln bore patiently with his constant offers of unsolicited advice and hot-and-cold attitudes. “I do not suppose I have any right to complain," the President remarked wryly. "Uncle Horace agrees with me pretty often after all; I reckon he is with us at least four days out of seven."

In 1872, Greeley came as close as he ever could to real power by being nominated for President by both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties. His campaign brought catastrophe on him in multiple forms. Backers of President Ulysses S. Grant pointed to Greeley’s vacillating support of the war as evidence of his unsteadiness of purpose, and cited multiple aspects of his appearance and personality (e.g., oversized boots, rumpled trousers, a battered hat, and a white overcoat jammed with papers) as proof of his extreme eccentricity. In the election that November, Greeley was soundly trounced in the Electoral College.

Just before the election, Greeley’s wife died. Within a few weeks of his crushing defeat at the polls, he also lost control of the Tribune to Whitelaw Reid. The cumulative effect of all of this was so devastating that Greeley first suffered a complete breakdown, then died a month after the election. 

Such was Greeley’s eminence that after his death, his opponents felt obliged to honor him. President Ulysses Grant, who had defeated him in the election of 1872, attended his funeral, and the committee formed to create his memorial was headed by Thurlow Weed, a onetime ally who had fallen out with Greeley when this New York state Whig political boss did not secure for him the party nomination for U.S. Senate in 1854.

The Greeley sculpture, unveiled in December 1876, was created by Charles Calverley, who also fashioned busts in Green-Wood Cemetery of sewing-machine inventor Elias Howe and “Precious Georgie,” a four-year old boy who died of scarlet fever. The Greeley bust anchors the family plot in Green-Wood. You have to hope that Greeley finds more serenity here than those closest to him would have provided the editor during his life: only two of his seven children lived to adulthood, and his wife experienced so many nervous ailments and neglected the household so much that he was obliged to sleep closer to his city office.