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Overview"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 the agony of rioting in the streets, war in Asia, and the collapse of a presidency. In between he lived through two world wars, and a depression that shook the foundations of American capitalism. Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) has been hailed as the 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 the halcyon days prior to Woodrow Wilson and the First World War, millions of Americans gradually came to rely on Lippmann to comprehend the vital issues of the day. In this absorbing biography, Ronald Steel meticulously documents the philosophers and politics, the friendships and quarrels, the trials and triumphs of this man who for six decades stood at the center of American political life. Lippmann's experience spanned a period when the 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 the mind, the voice, and the conscience of that era than Walter Lippmann: journalist, moralist, public philosopher." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Ronald SteelPublisher: Taylor & Francis Inc Imprint: Transaction Publishers Edition: Revised ed. Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.80cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.453kg ISBN: 9780765804648ISBN 10: 0765804646 Pages: 690 Publication Date: 30 April 1999 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Manufactured on demand  We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier. Table of ContentsReviewsA difficult subject has found a conscientious exponent - as regards columnist Lippmann and postwar U.S. foreign policy, an incisive, even eloquent one. Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a Harvard wunderkind drawn into socialism (Steel posits) as a Jewish outsider. In short order he worked as Lincoln Steffens' legman, as an aide to the Socialist mayor of Schenectady, as an editorialist for the Masses and the Call; at 23 he produced A Preface to Politics, the first application of Freudian concepts (of human drives and sublimation) to political thought. His reputation made, he became an editor of the new New Republic, a writer/ advisor to TR, a favorite of eminent elders (Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand), the author - most strikingly - of several of Wilson's Fourteen Points; and, meanwhile, an ex-Socialist. It was the first of many shifts - in Lippmann's theorizing, his attitude toward public figures, his position on public issues. Steel cites the discrepancies, lauds Lippmann's intellectual flexibility, never comes to grips with the problem of inconsistency in a professional pundit - such as Lippmann became on the New Republic and remained as a columnist for the World (1922-31) and the Herald-Tribune (1931-1967). Neither - in noting that Lippmann was silent on the Nazi persecution of Jews (after a deeply offensive 1933 column), that he clamored for Japanese expulsion from the West Coast in World War II - does he face the incongruity of this behavior in the author of books of moral philosophy. The result, here, is that the interwar years lack force or focus: seeing the complexity, we seek more than Steel's narrow psychological interpretation. But as World War II progresses, as Lippmann - the golfing partner of moguls-becomes the voice of reason against mindless anti-communism, Cold War militancy, American messianism, McCarthy, and finally the Vietnam War, his pragmatism becomes principle; and Steel, expert in these events, cuts through to the quick of them. If the book has a dramatic climax, it's the presence of radical journalist I. F. Stone at the Lippmanns' annual mint julep garden party in 1966. Lippmann's private life and personal habits we learn about incidentally - save for the scandal of his affair with (and subsequent marriage to) the wife of his best friend, related here as she told it to the author. (The episode is more chilling than otherwise - Lippmann asked his father-in-law to break the news to his wife, and he never saw or spoke to her again.) He was not a lovable man and perhaps not an admirable one; one might even wonder whether he deserves to be called without doubt the nation's greatest journalist. But he changed great events by his participation in them or his opinions on them - and it makes for a momentous story. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationRonald Steel has written extensively on American politics and foreign policy, and is the author of several books, including Pax Americana. Born in Ilinois and educated at Northwestern and Harvard Universities, he is professor of international relations and history at the University of Southern California. 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