Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography.
By Tom Arnold-Forster.
Princeton University Press, 2025.
Hardcover, 368 pages, $35.
Reviewed by John C. “Chuck” Chalberg.
Immersed as he must have been in the papers, columns, and books of Walter Lippmann, intellectual biographer Tom Arnold-Foster might be excused. Excused? For what? As the book proceeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the sentences of Mr. Arnold-Forster and those of his subject. Gradually, the prose of each begins to merge into a single stream. Is that stream more Lippmannesque or more Arnold-Forsterian? The nod clearly goes to the former, who seemed to specialize in prose that was always reaching for the profound before eventually collapsing into cliches and generalities, and, all too often, into what might be termed either-or-ness or both-and-ness. The same might be said of this book.
Ronald Steel, wherever he is, need not worry. His Lippmann biography, published more than forty years ago, should remain the first—and perhaps the last—Lippmann biography anyone ought to bother to read. In fact, for Arnold-Forster, it is a “classic biography” that is “still indispensable.”
That stated, this is truly—and almost exclusively—an intellectual biography. There is an occasional brief reference to this or that detail of Lippmann’s personal life, whether that be his German-Jewish background and his assimilation as an American, and as an essentially secular American at that. Then there are almost off-hand mentions of his two marriages, his life in New York City, his subsequent move to Washington, and finally his return to New York. But there is no attempt to develop his non-intellectual life. Nor is there any attempt to connect his ideas and his thinking to the rest of his life. This book finds Walter Lippmann “at his desk” and keeps him right there. By the same token, Arnold-Forster is content to keep his own focus on what Lippmann managed to produce while sitting, thinking, writing, and, yes, pontificating.
That stated, there does seem to be a theme to the book, even if it is not a theme that is emphasized by the author. Lippmann sought to be—and was—what might be described today as an influencer. As such, he never sought to wield power, but he long desired to have the ears and eyes of the powerful. Arnold-Forster is certainly not unaware of that. But it is never his central message. If there is such a message in these pages, and there is, it is his effort to make the reader aware that Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of the efficacy of progressive government, was also Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of both the reality and importance of empire in general and of the American empire in particular.
What clutters all this up are repeated detours into various Lippmann debates and differences with other thinkers and writers. In many respects, this is an attempt at an intellectual biography of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, but always with an emphasis on the left-liberal side of the mind as Lippmann and others of a mostly similar mind sought to apply their minds to matters of governmental affairs and actions. So it is Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, coupled with Lippmann v Dewey, or Lippmann and John Maynard Keynes, as well as Lippmann v Keynes, or even Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, which meant Lippmann duelling with Hayek, or Lippmann and John Kenneth Galbraith, or Lippmann and George Kennan, as well as Kennan on Lippmann. The list is long and more than occasionally distracting.
The result is what amounts to a series of extensive reviews of Lippmann’s many books, all written and analyzed by Arnold-Forster, who then adds snippets of reviews written by any number of Lippmann’s contemporaries. Just who is praising or criticizing what, and why and how? Add to this the matter of disentangling Lippmann and Arnold-Foster. Or should that be disentangling Arnold-Foster from Lippmann? By his own admission, Arnold-Forster had “no wish to celebrate or defend Lippmann’s political thought as a coherent liberal project.” Fair enough. But was it an incoherent project? Perhaps it was simply an ever-evolving project. It’s difficult to know, since Arnold-Forster’s prose verges on the Lippmannesque as he seeks to explain Lippmann’s positions.
Sorting through it all, what we have here is the story of an ambitious young Harvard-educated progressive who wanted to make a name for himself–—and did. A student of Graham Wallas at Harvard, the young Lippmann saw journalism as his calling. More than that, he regarded journalism as vital to the life, legitimacy, and success of a mass modern society that was—and hoped to continue to be—a truly democratic society.
It was all very simple and straightforward. Or at least it should have been. Initially, Lippmann’s understanding of the purpose of journalism and his idealistic view of its practice were to inform public opinion and help what was once an agrarian democracy continue to function as a democracy in a post-agrarian world. And yet always lurking not very far in the background was Lippmann’s progressivism. In other words, Walter Lippmann had an agenda even then. In truth, he always had an agenda. He may have thought of himself as a journalist, but he was never a reporter out to discover the truth of a story. If anything, he was a commentator out to impose his version of the truth on events as he saw them.
Before a fellow by the name of Walter Lippmann became the Walter Lippmann, he was already about the business of seeking to persuade voters rather than simply informing them. Of course, he would never have used the verb “persuade.” That was the job of politicians. Instead, he would confine himself to the loftier business of guiding, steering, and massaging his readers. Of course, once he became the Walter Lippmann, he concentrated on guiding, steering, and messaging the politicians as well—and the experts, whether they were out to serve the politicians or subvert them.
Lippmann always seemed to have something on the order of a love-hate relationship with experts and their alleged expertise. On the one hand, expertise was “crucial and inevitable.” On the other hand, he denied that experts could be a “plausible source of techno-political legitimacy.” (In case you might be wondering, both quotes are Arnold-Forster on Lippmann, rather than directly from Lippmann himself. But you surely could be excused for presuming the reverse.)
The role of experts in a democracy is a constant sub-theme in the book. In the end, this theme provides Arnold-Forster with a rueful note of irony. Having wrestled with the dilemma of the role of esports in a democracy, Lippmann finally had to come to terms with the failure of expertise. To be sure, there were occasional failures all along the way, but nothing in Lippmann’s experience could compare with the failure of the “best and brightest” (to borrow from David Halberstam, since Arnold-Forster does just that as well) when it came to the war in Vietnam.
At the same time, the Vietnam debacle provided an aging Walter Lippmann with an excuse. Ah, experts and expertise explained the Vietnam misadventure. And his own fascination with and attraction to the idea of an American empire, nay, the fact of an American empire, apparently did not. Arnold-Forster may well be trying to hang too much on his Lippmann-as-imperialist theme. In the process, he may have tried to stretch things farther than they ought to be stretched, but he does have a point to make.
In fact, that point stretches all the way back to the early twentieth century and a young Walter Lippmann’s support for the Bull Moose campaign of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, as well as his subsequent, if initially reluctant, support of Woodrow Wilson, first as a belated convert to big government progressivism once he had become president and ultimately as a convert once again, this time to the role of war leader.
Lippmann’s perch by this point was a desk in the offices of The New Republic. One of its three young founding fathers, Lippmann helped steer the new publication along a line that fellow founder Herbert Croly vaguely defined as “radical without being socialistic.” Lippmann voted for Wilson in 1916 and endorsed the Democratic president’s decision to take the United States into the Great War in April of 1917. In fact, just a few months earlier Lippmann had taken to the pages of The New Republic to make a case for the United States to join the war against Germany for “both strategic and civilizational reasons.” Once again, that’s an Arnold-Forster summation. Even then, access was already beginning to be important to Walter Lippmann. It would become more and more important as time went on and as his standing grew. Did such concerns color his thinking? Did they ever seem to govern his thinking? The Arnold-Forster approach is so relentlessly, even single-handedly intellectual, that he easily dodges such questions.
Arnold-Forster also has Lippmann “dodging the draft.” Given that the draft was a lottery, “avoiding military service” would have been more accurate, not to mention something other than a cheap shot. But for the first and only time in his life, Lippmann did sign on for government work. Initially, he served as a special adviser to War Secretary Newton Baker, but he subsequently joined the Colonel House-created Inquiry, where Arnold-Forster judges that Lippmann’s“most enduring work” was his role in helping to draft Wilson’s Fourteen Points as the basis for a peace settlement.
American entry into the Great War was a watershed moment in this nation’s history. More than once in these pages, Arnold-Forster notes Lippmann’s refusal to look back on any of his past commentary and past actions. For Walter Lippmann, it was always now or what’s to come. What had happened in the past was not important or not to be examined, or not worth the time spent examining.
Yet nothing could be more worth examining and reflecting on than Wilson’s 1917 decision to go to war on the basis of a crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” Apparently, an always forward-looking Walter Lippmann never bothered to reflect on that decision or his endorsement of it. Is that true? If so, that itself is at least regrettable. Is it also deserving of criticism? If not, it’s at least worth some attention and some speculation on the part of his intellectual biographer. Walter Lippmann letting himself off the hook is one thing; his biographer doing it for him is quite another.
Faving labeled Lippmann an imperialist and then having couched Lippmann’s entire career in imperialist terms, Arnold-Forster is almost relieved to return Lippmann to domestic matters in the 1920s. Here the key figure is Al Smith and Lippmann’s support for and endorsement of Smith’s progressive actions and policies as governor of New York. A still young Walter Lippmann in New York City in the 1920s might well have been Walter Lippmann at his best, at his most independent, and at his most optimistic. Despite conservative Republican rule nationally, this was Al Smith’s New York, and as far as Walter Lippmann was concerned, New York was the wave of the American future. New York City was the most important American city; cities were engines of assimilation, and Smith was at once a progressive and a “visionary” leader. What could be better than that?
Lippmann’s new perch/desk was within the New York World, where editor Herbert Bayard Swope sought to “give the public part what it wants and part of what it ought to have, whether it wants it or not.” That was largely Walter Lippmann’s sentiment as well, especially if the larger part was the latter part.
Smith’s defeat in 1928 at the hands of a “technocrat” (Lippmann’s term for Hoover and occasionally Arnold-Forster’s as well) was a blow to Lippmann. But it was far from a fatal blow. The Walter Lippmann would have four more decades of continuing to rise in national prominence and in general windiness. Arnold-Forster devotes the lion’s share of this book to these decades. To be sure, during those years, there was much Lippmann writing that could produce much Lippmannesque writing in response to it.
Two books deserve at least a brief mention. The first is A Preface to Morals. In it, Arnold-Forster tells us that Lippmann “argued that the ‘complexity of modern civilization’ and the process of urbanization produced a moderate liberal consensus through the necessity for ‘some kind of harmony in a plural society.’” There you have it: vintage Arnold-Forster and vintage Lippmann all in one sentence. The second is The Good Society, which Arnold-Forster’s deems to have been a “direct attack on New Deal planning.” Always suspicious of Franklin Roosevelt, Lippmann actually voted for Alf Landon in 1936. More than that, Lippmann, the young progressive who had once regarded the Constitution as outmoded, now called upon the Constitution to restrain the New Deal.
Clearly, Walter Lippmann was moving to the right. But there was something about his having become the Walter Lippmann that kept him from aligning with the right, much less embracing the right. Either step was a bridge too far. The best he could do was support Rockefeller Republicanism and vote for Ike twice. And the best that Arnold-Forster can do is label Lippmann a “conservative liberal.” How that compares to a liberal conservative remains unresolved. The vagueness of it all may have been Arnold-Forster’s point. For that matter, it may well have been Walter Lippmann’s point as well.
On that point, let’s briefly return to A Preface to Morals. Better yet, let’s zero in on one of the innumerable book reviews that dot this book. Arnold-Forster borrows from one Helen Hill, described here as a “southern critic sympathetic to the Agrarians” of Vanderbilt University. In reviewing A Preface to Morals, she concluded very simply and directly that Lippmann’s version of liberalism was “all swirl and no substance.” And there you have in one phrase the perfect summation of much of Walter Lippmann’s post-1920s journalistic career as the Walter Lippmann.
John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Minnesota and once performed as G. K. Chesterton.
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