Walter Lippmann 1889－1974

進步運動領袖寫文章，多刊登在李普曼（Walter Lippmann）於1913年所創立的《新共和》（New Republic）。胡適留美期間最醉心於《新共和》，回國以後更積極仿效它的 ...

20世紀的幾位"大老" (dean)，都是很有名望、學問；

Walter Lippmann, the retired columnist and author who was the dean of American political journalism in the 20th century,...

讓我想起翻譯成 "華爾街教父"的這本"The Dean of Wall Street"

有意思的是，該文給胡適下的不朽處，竟不是胡先生的三不朽（楊聯陞先生在給《陳世驤選集》作序敬輓，就是用胡適的話來破題的，該文功力不凡），或是像我們在《華爾街大老》(The Dean of Wall Street)中了解的，傳主 Benjamin Graham的墓誌銘是刻了丁尼生詩歌Ulysses 的句子--他與胡適都極喜愛。（詳《努力、探尋、發現、永不退讓、不屈服》）

dean:The senior member of a body or group: the dean of the Washington diplomatic corps.

Walter Lippmann, Political Analyst, Dead at 85
By Alden Whitman
Dec. 15, 1974



Walter Lippmann, the retired columnist and author who was the dean of American political journalism in the 20th century, died of a heart ailment yesterday morning at a private nursing home at 755 Park Avenue, He was 85 years old.

One of the most respected and influential political writers of his time, Mr. Lippmann was for millions of readers the conscience of the nation through the trials of Depression, wars and international confrontation.

Bringing reason, clarity and ethics to the tumult and intrigue of politics, he wrote a score of books and more than 4,000 columns—nationally syndicated as “Today and Tomorrow”—in a career that spanned six decades.

The course of those years carried him from cub reporter to elder statesman as a kind of philosopher‐journalist, and they were filled with controversy and accolades.

His awards were legion: Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 and 1962; the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964; Overseas Press Club awards for interpretation of foreign news in 1953, 1955 and 1959, and many others.

Only two months ago, on Oct. 8, Mayor Beame presented Mr, Lippmann with the city's highest honor, the Bronze Medallion, at Gracie Mansion. Yesterday, President Ford said the nation had “lost a great American,” and, added:

“As a newsman, political analyst and author, Walter Lippmann played a major role for more than half a century in the development of a public dialogue and in shaping a new standard of journalism.”

Mr. Lippmann retired several years ago and had hen in failing health, suffering a series of strokes in the last year. His wife, the former Helen Byrne Armstrong, died last February. He is survived by a stepdaughter, Mrs. Edwin Gamble, of Brunswick, Me.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete yesterday.

Walter Lippmann's first byJim? article appeared in national magazine in 1911, shortly, after he had become a cub journalist in unusual circumstances. At his death, several‐million words later, he was a public political thinker of towering eminence whose wisdom was pondered by men in high station and low the world over.

Mr. Lippmann was to his time what Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips, two notable journalists who molded American political opinion in the crisis if slavery and the Civil War, were to their era. All wrote for large and appreciative audiences; all dealt intellect Tally? with fundamental issues. But there were important differences: whereas Greeley was a shaker and Phillips a mover, Mr. Lippmann was an Olympian—“a Manhatted Zeus,” Edward Hunt, a friend of his early years, once called him.

A description of Mr. Lippmann as reason incarnate, made in 1912 by John Reed, a Harvard classmate and friend, hardly differed from assessments of him at the close of his life. The Reed description, written as part of a poem, had said:

Lippmann — calm, inscrutable.

Thinking and writing clearly, soundly, well;

All snarls of falseness swiftly piercing through.

His keen mind leaps like lightning to the True

“He is first and foremost a child of the Enlightenment, with a Gallic mind and a Gallic passion for reason,” Dr. Carl Binger, the psychiatrist and a boyhood friend of Mr. Lipprann, wrote in 1959. An academician, Dr. David E. Weingast, found his writing “restrained, judicious and reasonable, and almost never alarmist.”

“Lippmann is not in the fight” Dr. Weingast continued. “He wears no battle scars because he is an observer. rather than a participant in the struggle. He has elected a position that is detached and somewhat remote.”

Distrusting passion and emotion as components of “thoughtful analysis, Mr. Lippmann himself agreed that he tended to deal generally with politics rather than specifically. “Look here,” he once told a colleague, “I can't always be raising a flag and rushing off to battle.”

A Public Schoolmaster

Mrs; Lippmann's growth to eminence over the last several decades was the triumph of persistent application of reason to world and domestic problems. In his columns and other writings, he disdained the personal and shied from the scoop and the oracular. What. gave him readability and, immense authority was his ability to take a tangled headline issue; analyze it coolly and relate it convincingly to the underlying problems of which it was a part. He always wrote from a background of solid information, and in this sense he was also a public schoolmaster who obliged his readers to think of the transient in terms of the everlasting.

From Mr. Lippmann's columns, especially those since 1938, and from his books, there emerged an insistence that Americans “face up to the facts” of their historical heritage, their experience in government, their responsibilities in the world. In a typical expression of this concept of American freedom, he wrote:

“To perpetuate the Republic in this epoch of war and revolution it is now more than ever necessary that we maintain the marriage of Jeffersonian liberty and Hamiltonian authority. We can do ourselves no greater injury than to become unconscious of either principle; so enamored of freedom that we do not construct strong lawful authority to contain it and sustain it, or so apprehensive of freedom that we seek to deny it and suppress it.

“The conflict of the two principles can be resolved only by uniting, them. Neither can live alone. Alone, that is, without the other, each is excessive and intolerable. Freedom, the faith in man's perfectability, has always and will always in itself, lead through anarchy to despotism. Authority, the conviction that men have to be governed and not merely let loose, will in itself always lead through arbitrariness and corruption to rebellion and chaos. Only in their, union are they fruitful. Only freedom which is under strong law, only strong law to which men consent because it preserves freedom, can endure.”

As a public political thinker who exposed his views to millions, Mr. Lippmann was subject more than most to faultfinders and critics, especially those who professed active liberalism in the New Deal years. Among the Most acid of his critics was Heywood Broun Mr. Lippman, his friend and Colleague said, was “quite apt to score a field goal for Harvard and a touchdown for Yale in one and the same play. But, of course, he specialized, in safeties.”

Not all criticism was as flip as Mr. Broun's. Prof. Fred Rodell of the Yale Law School took the commentator to task in The American Mercury in 1945 as a columnist who wrapped in portentousness, not to say solemnity, of language ideas of small import. The elaborateness, of the package, Professor Rodell argued, hid the meagerness of the gift inside.

I Much of the controversy over Mr. Lippmann concerned “liberalism.” It was also inspired by his compulsion to see many sides of a question, by his tendency to associate with wealthy companions, the great and the powerful to the exclusion of the rank and file. Lippmann friends countered, however, that he applauded the policies of Roosevelt, Wilson and Alfred E. Smith; that he, opposed the Ku Klux Klan and peonage in Florida; that he advocated humanizing in industry, Social Security, public works, and coexistence and trade with the Soviet Union. On the other hand, his columns opposed the Wagner Labor Relations Act and much New Deal legislation; and he voted for Alfred M. Landon in 1936, for Thomas E. Dewey, in 1944 and 1948 and for Dwight D. Eisenhover in 1952.

Turned to Democrats

He swung to the Democrats in the Kennedy‐Johnson years, and he was a cautious supporter of President Nixon, although not of Mr. Nixon's “prolongation” of the Vietnam war: “I think on the whole [Mr. Nixon's] done pretty well at [governing the country],” he said in an interview in February, 1973.

Summing up the contentions of Mr. Lippmann's critics, Dr. Weingast said:

“Lippmann's record suggests that his enthusiasm for reform measures ends at the point where they are written into law. For while he has steadily professed liberal principles, he has often recoiled from liberal enactments.”

If Mr. Lippmann took notice of these jibes at all it was not apparent in the serene tenor of his writings, but over his study desk he kept a James Thurber line drawing of a man and a woman, with the latter saying: “Lippmann scares me this morning.”

Order and self‐discipline characterized his adult life. These traits were nurtured virtually from his birth into a world of quiet affluence. He was born Sept, 23, 1889, in a brownstone on Lexington Avenue near 61st Street. His father, Jacob, was a prosperous clothing manufacturer and real estate broker who retired early in life, His mother, Daisy Baum Lippmann, was gracious and handsome, the able manager of a genteel, upper‐middle‐class household, The third adult in the family was Mrs. Lippmann's mother, a wealthy, cultured matriarch who doted on her grandchild.


An Only Child

Walter was an only child, and he was treated as a, spevial kind of person. He was shielded from the rough‐andtumble experienced by most children, and tiresome chores were done for him by servants. He took only a small part in boyhood sports. Instead, he read and traveled, going to Europe almost every summer with his parents.

When Walter was 13 or 14 the family moved to a big stone house at 46 East 80th Street, where he lived until his first marriage, in 1917. Meantime from 1896 to 1906 he attended Dr. Julius Sachs's School for Boys, along with other sons of well‐to‐do German‐Jewish fainflies. There he was a quick learner and acquired a formidable knowledge in history, geography, Greek and French.

Young Lippmann entered Harvard in 1906 and took his bachelor's degree, cum laude, in three years. At the university, then a place of ferment, his imagination was captured by Fabian Socialism, and he became president of the Harvard Socialist Club. His emotions were also caught up in humanitarianism, which prompted him to work with underprivileged children at Hale House, a Boston settlement house.

In 1910, in what would normally have been his senior year, he took a discussion course with Graham Wallas, a visiting British lecturer and well‐known Fabian Socialist. He made such an impression on Mr. Wallas that he dedicated his book “The Great Society” to Mr. Lippmann when it was published in 1914. He also met Ralph Albertson, a liberal Socialist with three daughters, one of whom, Faye, Mr. Lippmann married in 1917.

Throughout college, he wrote for the various Harvard literary magazines, and one of his articles brought him to the attention of George Santayana, whose “The Life of Reason” (1906) is still a philosophical classic. Mr. Lippmann served his fourth year at college as that gentle and urbane Spaniard's assistant.

Protégé of Lincoln Steffens

In the summer of 1910 Mr. Lippmann went to work for Mr. Albertson as a writer on The Boston Common, a small left‐of‐center journal. It was from there that he was plucked to national journalism in unusual circumstances. It came about in this fashion. Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraker, was the major byline writer for Everybody's magazine. He proposed finding and training a cub writer and was challenged by doubting editors to do it. As Mr. Steffens retold the incident:

“It was late that summer (1910) when I went to Cambridge. The graduated class of Harvard had scattered. There were a few of them left around Boston, and some professors. I described the man I was after. I asked for the ablest mind that could express itself in writing. Three names were offered, only three, and after little bit of conversation everybody agreed on one — Walter Lippmann. I found Lippmann, rind saw right away what his classmates saw in him. He asked me intelligent, not practical, questions about my profession and when they were answered, gave up the job he had and came to New York to work with me on my Wall Street series of articles. It was reporting. I was writing in my house in Connecticut. He went to Wall Street for the facts, which he reported to me. He ‘caught on’ right away. Keen, quiet, industrious, he understood the meaning of all that he learned; and he asked the men he met for more than

Mr. Steffens thereupon gave Mr. Lippmann his first magazine assignment, to do “a subject well within his personal knowledge.” The article, “The Open Mind — William Tames,” came up in proof under Mr. Steffens's byline, which he changed only at the moment before publication. The article impressed the editors Of Everybody's, and within a year Mr. Lippmann was on the editorial board and fairly started on his career.


From that point on, Mr. Lippmann's life divided itself into four quite distinct phases —the young intellectual who worked with Herbert Croly on The New Republic; the brilliant but sometimes bored editor of the editorial page of The New York World; crusty years in opposition to the New Deal as writer of the column “Today and Tomorrow” in The New York Herald Tribune and other papers; and, beginning in 1938 with a move from New York to Washington, columns on world affairs and columns, with largeness of spirit, on American politics.

Mr. Lippmann left, Everybody's in 1912 to become executive secretary to the Rev. George R. Lunn, the new Socialist mayor of Schenectady, N. Y. He departed after four months, having discovered that he had no taste for practical politics and no head for Social ism. Nevertheless, his first book, “A Preface to Politics,” published in 1913 and still highly regarded, spoke favorably of such Socialist‐advocated reforms as the abolition of child labor, slum clearance and votes for women;

But Socialism as a movement was brushed off as doctrinaire and sterile in his “Drift and Mastery,” issued in 1914. In that year The New Republic started and Mr. Lippmann was with it. Both he and the magazine, then as now a slightly left‐of‐center journal of ideas, were soon in the clasp of the drama of World War J.

Failed to Dissuade Wilson

In his New Republic articles Mr. Lippmann gravitated toward support of President Wilson's war policies. He was in such good standing at the White House that he was put on a special committee that drafted the territorial sections on Wilson's Fourteen Points for peace. And after a brief Army hitch as a propagandist, he was attached to the staff of Col. Edward M. House, Wilson's intimate adviser, at the Paris Peace Conference.

Mr. Lippmann returned to the United States after Wilson decided to attend the conference, a step Mr. Lippmann deplored, and also after having failed to dissuade the President from intervening in the Soviet Union on the White Russian side. “I tried in vain,” Mr. Lippmann said, “to remind Wilson of the incongruity of the situation. I pointed out that by participating in this war during the era of pacification we were bound to cancel out the effectiveness of the peace treaty we were drafting.”

Back in New York Mr. Lippmann worked again briefly on The New Republic, resigning to complete his book “Public Opinion.” Shortly thereafter he was invited to join The World, where he wrote editorials for two years. In 1923, on the death of Frank Cobb, he was given charge of the editorial page with the title of editor. To some, like Mr. Croly,, this shift to The World was an apostasy of idealism for the fleshpots of Park Row. The World, however, was the nation's most scintillating newspaper and the goal of aspiring writers. Mr. Cobb was legendary as a great editor; and besides there were Rollin Kirby, the cartoonist, and the writers Heywood Broun, Arthur Krock, Allan Nevins, James M. Cain, Franklin P. Adams and Charles others.

Capable of Wry Humor

The World, under Mr. Lippmann's leadership, inveighed against the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover Administrations, supported the World Court, urged more cooperation with the League of Nations, wanted lower tariffs and more world trade and gave strong backing to Alfred E. Smith for the Presidency.

Many of his characterizations of public personages were laced with wry humor. For example, of Coolidge he wrote:

“Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, with such force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task. . . . There have been Presidents in our time who knew how to whip up popular enthusiasm. There has never been Mr. Coolidge's equal in the art of deflating interest.”

One of the most controversial positions that The World (and Mr. Lippmann) took was on the Sacco‐Vanzetti case. The paper questioned the justice of the conviction of those two anarchists in a Massachusetts payroll robbery, but swung around when a commission headed by A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard and a onetime teacher of Mr. Lippmann, sustained the judgment. Mr. Lippmann wrote a piece praising the commission's good intentions, which outraged Mr. Cain and led to Mr. Broun's leaving the paper when it declined to publish his column attacking the Lippmann editorial.

Soon after The World was taken into the Scripps‐Howard chain and its name merged with that of The Telegram, in 1931, Mr. Lippmann entered the third, and most controversial, phase of his career when he was invited to write a signed column, “Today and Tomorrow,” for The Herald Tribune. When he accepted, many liberals were aghast, for the newspaper was widely regarded as the organ of Wall Street Republicanism.

Then 41, he was the author of 10 books and already one of the most authoritative voices of liberalism. The Herald Tribune promised him complete freedom of expression.

Like every other commentator, Mr. Lippmann proved fallible. He made some mistakes in judgment, and some of his predictions turned sour.

He thought, for example, that Franklin D. Roosevelt would never make it. As the 1932 Presidential contest approached, Mr. Lippmann wrote:

“Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”

Years later he defended this curiously arbitrary judgment by insisting it was true at the time. “I didn't believe he had any strong convictions,” the columnist said. “Just look at his campaign—180 degrees opposite to the New Deal. The fact is that the New Deal was wholly improvised after Roosevelt was elected.”

A month before the election, Mr. Lippmann announced he would “cheerfully” vote for Governor Roosevelt.

His columns on the New Deal were favorable at first. But after 1935 he grew steadily more hostile, suspecting that the New Dealers were bunch of Socialists leading the country toward collectivism. He had long since emerged from his own Socialist phase. Some of his liberal friends were appalled by what they considered a strong shift to the right. They were convinced when he came out for Alfred M. Landon in 1936.

An Independent Spirit

But Mi. Lippmann proved an independent spirit. He came to appreciate Mr. Roosevelt as a great wartime, President.” He felt that he probably saved the war from being lost by getting Congress and the nation to accept lend‐lease at a time when this country was still neutral.

This was after 1938, when Mr. Lippmann had begun the fourth period of his career. His first marriage having broken up in divorce, he married Helen Byrne Armstrong and moved to Washington. Increasingly, from that time, he turned his attention to world affairs. His cool prescriptions of sanity and reason, emanating from what was now a truly world capital, increased his influence and gave his columns a new authority, This maturity showed, too, in his book “U.S. Foreign Policy,” which stresses Amer ican world responsibilities after World War II.

Mr. Lippmann never thought much of President Harry S. Truman, so he came out for Gov. Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.

“I think it a tragedy that Dewey wasn't elected in 1948,” he said years later in defending his choice. “If the Republicans could have come to power under an able and intelligent man like Dewey, they would have become a responsible party. And the damage of McCarthyism would have been avoided

As for Mr. Truman, Mr. Lippmann remarked: “I never thought that his quick way of shooting from the hip was the way the Presidency should be conducted.”
比較 Peter Drucker

As postwar relations worsened between the United States and the Soviet Union, he wrote series of columns, later published as a book, “The Cold War,” in which he first set forth his conviction that there would be no peace unless all armies were withdrawn from Germany.

He declared that the Truman Doctrine, designed to “contain” Communism, would certainly fail. He suggested an alternative strategy: that the United States make known that it would tolerate no aggression against North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries while assuring Moscow that the West recognized the Russians' preeminent position in Eastern Europe.

Mr. Lippmann was irritably impatient with the second Eisenhower Administration. He had voted for General Eisenhower in 1952 “because I felt he would be able to end the Korean war and because, he would be able to liquidate [Senator Joseph R.] McCarthy.” But he thought the President had made a mistake by accepting the nomination in 1956 after having had a heart attack.

To Republicans, Mr. Lippmann seemed hopelessly biased as the 1960 elections approached. They were not surprised when he declared for Senator John F. Kennedy. His columns criticizing the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, appeared in Republican papers throughout the country and had a shattering effect. Many readers complained of his partisanship.

“I felt that a new generation had to come into power,” he said in an interview after the election. “A Nixon administration would have been an extension of the Eisenhower regime. Nixon would not have attracted new brains to Washington. The intellectuals were overwhelmingly for Kennedy brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican party. We needed younger, more experienced and better educated men running the government, so a Nixon victory would have been a very bad thing‐although I suppose the country could have stood it.”

He was 71 when the New Frontier came to Washington, but despite his age he found the change of air exhilarating. Once he made a scornful reference to the New Frontier as “the third Eisenhower administration,” but generally his columns were friendly.

In the election of 1964, Mr. Lippmann was a biting, sometime sarcastic, critic of Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, and of the Republican party for having chosen him. Not as a necessary consequence, however, Mr, Lippmann supported Lyndon B. Johnson for election, praising his deliberateness, his appeal to reason and to a national consensus. In foreign affairs, Mr. Lippmann continued to press for a Soviet‐American rapprochement and for more realistic dealings with Communist China.


Column for Newsweek

Ino 1967 Mr. Lippmann gave up newspaper work and his Washington home, moving to New York. He lived in Riverdale, the Bronx, for about three years and then in an East Side hotel. Since 1963 he had been an occasional contributor to Newsweek, a column he continued until January, 1971.

When he discontinued his column, many readers who had come to depend on it over the years felt that their day had been disoriented. They were reflecting an attitude expressed in a New Yorker cartoon of several years ago that depicted two suburban matrons at breakfast, with one of them saying, “Of course, I only take a cup of coffee in the morning. A cup of coffee and Walter Lippmann is all I need.”

When Mr. Lippmann was 80 in 1969 he was the object of praise and retrospection. One of those to sum up his career was The New Republic, which wrote, “He always addressed himself to possibilities — not imaginings.” It added:

“[He] took the risks of journalistic judgment which can come only with the unfolding of events far off. For 55 Smears he had no peer in American journalism.”




沃爾特·李普曼（英語：Walter Lippmann 1889年9月23日－1974年12月14日），美國作家、記者、政治評論家，傳播學史上具有重要影響的學者之一，代表作《公眾輿論/輿論學》（Public Opinion）。李普曼以最早引入冷戰概念而聞名，並在現代心理學意義上創造了「刻板印象」一詞。李普曼在他的報紙專欄和幾本著作中評論媒體，最著名的是他在1922年出版的《輿論學》(Public Opinion)。

李普曼作為伍德羅·威爾遜第一次世界大戰後的調查委員會的研究主任，也發揮了重要作用。他對新聞在民主中的作用的觀點與約翰·杜威的同期著作形成了的對比。他與約翰·杜威的同時期著作後被稱為李普曼-杜威辯論。李普曼獲得了兩項普利茲獎，一項是因為他的聯合報紙專欄，另一項是他1961年對赫魯雪夫的採訪。


目錄
1早年
2生平
3影響
4著作
5傳記
6外部連結