Walter Lippmann

Lippmann was born on New York's Upper East Side as the only child of Jewish parents of German origin. According to his biographer Ronald Steel, he grew up in a "gilded Jewish ghetto". His father, Jacob Lippmann, was a rentier who had become wealthy through his father's textile business and his father-in-law's real estate speculation. His mother, Daisy Baum, cultivated contacts in the highest circles, and the family regularly spent its summer holidays in Europe. The family had a Reform Jewish orientation; averse to "orientalism", they attended Temple Emanu-El. Walter had his Reform Jewish confirmation instead of the traditional Bar Mitzvah at the age of 14. Lippmann was emotionally distanced from both parents, but had closer ties to his maternal grandmother. His family was Republican.

From 1896 Lippmann attended the Sachs School for Boys, followed by the Sachs Collegiate Institute, an elite and strictly secular private school in the German Gymnasium tradition, attended primarily by children of German-Jewish families and run by the classical philologist Julius Sachs, a son-in-law of Marcus Goldmann from the Goldman-Sachs family. Classes included 11 hours of ancient Greek and 5 hours of Latin per week.

Shortly before his 17th birthday, he entered Harvard University where he wrote for The Harvard Advocate and studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas, concentrating upon philosophy and languages (he spoke German and French). While at Harvard, he tried out for The Harvard Crimson but was rejected. He took only one course in history and one in government. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society, though important social clubs rejected Jews as members.

Lippmann became a member, alongside Sinclair Lewis, of the New York chapter of the Socialist Party of America. In 1911, Lippmann served as secretary to George R. Lunn, the first Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, during Lunn's first term. Lippmann resigned his post after four months, finding Lunn's programs to be worthwhile in and of themselves, but inadequate as socialism.

Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and an amateur philosopher who tried to reconcile the tensions between liberty and democracy in a complex and modern world, as in his 1920 book Liberty and the News. In 1914, Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic.

During World War I, Lippmann was commissioned a captain in the Army on June 28, 1918, and was assigned to the intelligence section of the AEF headquarters in France. He was assigned to the staff of Edward M. House in October and attached to the American Commission to negotiate peace in December. He returned to the United States in February 1919 and was immediately discharged.

Through his connection to House, Lippmann became an adviser to Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points speech. He sharply criticized George Creel, whom the President appointed to head wartime propaganda efforts at the Committee on Public Information. While he was prepared to curb his liberal instincts because of the war, saying he had "no doctrinaire belief in free speech," he nonetheless advised Wilson that censorship should "never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression."

Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that The New York Times' coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution was biased and inaccurate. In addition to his newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow", he wrote several books.

Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "Cold War" to a common currency, in his 1947 book by the same name. He may also have coined the metaphor about newspaper reporters, "...‘the fly on the wall,’ seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly detached, utterly objective...’’.

Lippmann was married twice, the first time from 1917 to 1937 to Faye Albertson (1893–1975). Faye was the daughter of Ralph Albertson, a pastor of the Congregational Church. He was one of the pioneers of Christian socialism and the social gospel movement in the spirit of George Herron. During his studies at Harvard, Walter often visited the Albertsons' estate in West Newbury, Massachusetts, where they had founded a socialist cooperative, the (Cyrus Field) Willard Cooperative Colony.

Lippmann was divorced by Faye Albertson to be able to marry Helen Byrne Armstrong in 1938 (died 16 February 1974), daughter of James Byrne. She divorced her husband Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs. He was the only close friend in Lippmann's life. The friendship and involvement in Foreign Affairs ended when a hotel in Europe accidentally forwarded Lippmann's love letters to Mr. Armstrong.

Political thought

Lippmann saw nationalist separatism, imperialist competition, and failed states as key causes of war. He envisioned the eventual decline of the nation-state and its replacement with large inclusive and democratic political units.

As solution to the problem of failed states, he proposed the creation of regional authorities to provide political control, as well as education of public opinion to build support for these regional governments. He called for the creation of international organizations for each crisis region in the world: "there should be in existence permanent international commissions to deal with those spots of the earth where world crises originate."

He saw the creation of the United States in 1789 as a model for a proposed World State or supranational government, as it was possible to create a constitution to bring order to an otherwise anarchic area. Commerce and regular interactions between people from different nations would alleviate the adverse aspects of nationalism.