Syndicated Columnist Walter Lippmann
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Walter Lippmann was a syndicated columnist with considerable influence. He wrote his column for over 40 years, and it appeared in leading newspapers in the United States and throughout the world, going into semiretirement in 1967, leaving a number of readers who had long depended on his column without an important part of their lives. He started his life as a journalist before the First World War and would continue writing into the Vietnam War era some 50 years later. Lippmann had a strong influence on various presidents and political leaders, and he made use of this influence to try to shape policy and influence decision-making in government. Many journalists and columnists may aspire to this sort of power, but few achieve it to the degree that Lippmann did. Biographer Ronald Steel writes, Influence was Lippmann's stock-in-trade; was what made him a powerful public figure. The influence was tangible, but hard to measure. He commanded no divisions, but he did have an enormous power over public opinion. This in turn gave him a power over Presidents, politicians and policymakers. An examination of Lippmann's use of his column to influence public opinion will show how he made use of his popularity, the sorts of issues that fired him, and the methods he used to shape policy, especially during the period of his greatest influence from the New Deal to the Truman presidency. Understanding Lippmann requires understanding his background and the changes in his professional
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he practice of both Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt, though the two seemed opposites:
Hoover's term differed from Roosevelt's not because it eschewed government oversight of the economy generally, but because of the type and degree of intervention it advocated. It was Hoover and not Roosevelt, he averred, that established the precedent for state action on a far more extensive basis than had been seen during previous economic crises.
Lippmann told his readers only a week after Roosevelt was inaugurated that the nation had regained confidence in itself. Lippmann brushed away any fears of a presidential abuse of power and said that the wise thing to do was to give the Administration all the power it needed to cope with circumstances as they developed. In doing so, Lippmann was reversing himself. He had said before the election that Roosevelt had no particular qualifications for the office; now, Lippmann saw Roosevelt as an inspirational leader.
Roosevelt welcomed Lippmann's support, but he also did not want to antagonize Congress with the sort of fulsome praise Lippmann was offering, as well as with the ideas Lippmann had about the need for a more and more powerful leader. Felix Frankfurter was assigned the task of calming L
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Approximate Word count = 3818
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
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