Walter Lippmann and the American Century

Abstract

Walter Lippmann began his career as a brilliant young man at Harvard--studying under George Santayana, taking tea with William James, a radical outsider arguing socialism with anyone who would listen--and he ended it in his eighties, writing passionately about agony of rioting in streets, war in Asia, and collapse of a presidency. In between he lived through two world wars, and a depression that shook foundations of American capitalism. Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) has been hailed as greatest journalist of his age. For more than sixty years he exerted unprecedented influence on American public opinion through his writing, especially his famous newspaper column Today and Tomorrow. Beginning with The New Republic in halcyon days prior to Woodrow Wilson and First World War, millions of Americans gradually came to rely on Lippmann to comprehend vital issues of day. In this absorbing biography, Ronald Steel meticulously documents philosophers and politics, friendships and quarrels, trials and triumphs of this man who for six decades stood at center of American political life. Lippmann's experience spanned a period when American empire was born, matured, and began to wane, a time some have called the American Century. No one better captured its possibilities and wrote about them so wisely and so well, no one was more mind, voice, and conscience of that era than Walter Lippmann: journalist, moralist, public philosopher.