My Review of Tom Arnold-Forster's "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography"

 The Evolution of Walter Lippmann from Socialist to Conservative-Liberal

 

I previously reviewed Craufurd Goodwin’s book on Walter Lippman as an economist. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/11/my-amazon-review-of-craufurd-goodwins.html ) Here we have Tom Arnold-Forster’s work as a complete intellectual biography of Lippmann’s thought. Lippmann, born in 1889 from a wealthy Jewish family, would over the next seven decades would become one of America’s great pundits. He would ignore his Jewish heritage throughout his life.

 

Lippmann advised presidents, worked on Wilson’s 14 Points, was present at the Versailles Conference and with his 1922 “Public Opinion” became a leading political scientist. To Lippmann social psychology was the driving force behind the formation of public opinion.

 

After graduating from Harvard Lippmann hung out in the socialist milieu of the Greenwich Village and the New Republic crowd of the 1910’s. He became good buddies with the soon to be communist, John Reed. However, he never lived there and retreated to his upper-eastside family home.

 

From his perch as a syndicated columnist, first with the New York World and then with the Herald Tribune, through his "Today and Tomorrow" column he became widely known and very influential. He fully supported the urban liberalism of Al Smith. He was extraordinarily prescient in 1931 about the enormity of the crisis caused by the Great Depression and again in 1938 he fully understood Hitler’s motives to conquer Europe.

 

However, once the immediate emergency of the depression was over, Lippmann moved to the Right. So much so that a group of European conservative economists, including Hayek, sponsored a 1938 colloquium in his honor. Simply put Lippmann’s opposition to state planning put him in good stead with that group and it was there he coined the term “neo-liberal.”

 

He went all out to support the U.S. military build-up from 1939-41 and after the war he became an advocate of military-Keynesianism. Early on he understood the danger coming from the Soviet Union and he popularized the term, “Cold War.” His Eurocentricity made him a critic of the Vietnam war.

 

Lippmann was a great believer in the role of newspapers in forming public opinion. Afterall, he wrote “Public Opinion” just prior to the advent of radio. I wonder what he would think now of the collapse of newspapers and panoply of information sources that the public now has available?

 

My concern about the book is that Arnold-Forster largely presents criticisms of Lippmann from the Left about his economics and his belief in a strong America. Criticism from the Right comes very late in the book and is minimal. My guess is that the author unfortunately sides with the Left.