Worldmaking (35 page)

One of Lippmann's best-remembered “T&T” columns cast a critical eye on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On August 1, 1932, Lippmann described FDR as “a highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions … He is an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything.” So far, so conventional. FDR's lack of fixed ideological moorings had been noted by observers before. More damning was Lippmann's description of the Democratic presidential nominee as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.” Lippmann had kept a close eye on Franklin Roosevelt since the Wilson administration and had arrived at a mixed conclusion. While admiring his rhetorical facility and keen political antennae, Lippmann found the generality and vagueness of FDR's policy interests unsettling, concluding that he was unqualified for high office. There was more to politics than merely winning elections: something meaningful had to be done with the accompanying power. While dismayed by the onset of the Depression, Lippmann could at least detect ideological constancy in President Hoover's response, resting on a substantial record as a public servant.

“The two things about him that worry me,” Lippmann wrote Felix Frankfurter after FDR secured his party's nomination, “are that he plays politics well and likes the game for its own sake and is likely to be ultra-political almost to show his own virtuosity. The other fear I have is that he is such an amiable and impressionable man, so eager to please, and, I think, so little grounded in his own convictions that almost everything depends on the character of his own advisers.” Roosevelt's forceful presidency proved Lippmann to be wide of the mark on this second point. Nonetheless, in the absence of any better options, Lippmann placed his reservations to one side, stating his intention come Election Day to “vote cheerfully for Governor Roosevelt.”
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Parlous domestic circumstances suggested to Lippmann that change was essential.

Lippmann met President-elect Roosevelt at a dinner in New York in honor of the retiring president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell. Conscious of Lippmann's rapt national readership, Roosevelt brushed off the earlier criticism and invited Lippmann to visit him in Warm Springs, Georgia, where doctors attended annually to the paralysis caused by his childhood polio. It was a remarkable encounter by all accounts. In Roosevelt's private cottage near the medical facility, Lippmann reminded his host that Hitler had assumed power two days before, exploiting the ineffectiveness of a weak government that appeared incapable of dealing with economic meltdown. Roosevelt's most pressing task was to tackle America's economic malaise—a combination of low growth and high unemployment—head on and to forestall the threat of extremism. “The situation is critical, Franklin,” Lippmann observed darkly. “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.” According to Ronald Steel, “The starkness of the phrase, particularly from Lippmann, took Roosevelt aback.”
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Over the space of a few months, Lippmann had gone from casting serious doubt on Roosevelt's suitability for high office to advising him to assume the necessary role of enlightened despot. Lippmann's 1920s mercurialness was continuing well into the 1930s.

Lippmann was enthralled by the executive energy of the early stages of Roosevelt's presidency, writing that the nation “had regained confidence in itself” and that “by the greatest good fortune which has befallen this country in many a day, a kindly and intelligent man has the wit to realize that a great crisis is a great opportunity.”
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His vote against Hoover had been vindicated in a short time. On foreign policy, Lippmann celebrated President Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy enunciated in his inaugural address—which promised noninterference in the affairs of Washington's Latin American neighbors—as a “radical innovation” and a “true substitute for empire.”
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On April 18, 1933, Lippmann called for the abandonment of the gold standard to inflate the money supply, combat deflation, and thus boost the economy. His column sparked a day of frantic trading on Wall Street; such was the expectation that Lippmann's positioning foreshadowed executive action. And so it came to pass when President Roosevelt denounced the logic of collaborative currency stabilization and removed the United States from the gold standard. British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald desperately called Lippmann from the London economic conference, imploring him to use his influence to revisit the decision to so brutally reject multilateral action—to no avail. An earlier discussion with John Maynard Keynes had convinced Lippmann that his position had been sound and the president's decision wise, so he politely rebuffed MacDonald's request. Keynes himself celebrated FDR's decision as “magnificently right.”
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Roosevelt could do little wrong during his first six months.

It was during the remainder of Roosevelt's first term that Lippmann found fault with his president, primarily in regard to the outsized statist ambitions of the New Deal. On domestic issues, Lippmann turned rightward as the president led the nation purposefully to the left. His disenchantment was such that in the presidential election of 1936, Lippmann endorsed Roosevelt's opponent, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. Many liberals were appalled by Lippmann's strong move against Roosevelt and the New Deal. Writing in
The Nation
, Amos Pinchot dismissed Lippmann as an “obfuscator … who can be quoted on either side of almost any question.” Pinchot compared Lippmann to the sometimes liberal bête noire Alexander Hamilton, who was “the first strong advocate of plutocratic fascism in America.” Denigrating Lippmann's close links to lawyers and bankers, Pinchot described him as “an ambassador of goodwill to the philistines.”
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Unruffled by this assault, Lippmann welcomed
The Nation
's scorn as proof that his rightward track was correct. He continued to denigrate the New Deal as an assault on political liberty and focused particular ire on FDR's ill-considered plan to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices. In 1937, Lippmann published
The Good Society
, a frontal assault on what he viewed as Roosevelt's socialistic collectivism, which bore comparison to Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Influenced by the conservative Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, Lippmann's polemic was criticized by previously supportive voices. John Dewey thought the book gave “encouragement and practical support to reactionaries.”
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An aspect of the New Deal that Lippmann found particularly irksome was the participation of university professors. President Roosevelt evidently believed that law and the social sciences might assist the government in solving intricate problems in those arduous times—convening an august group of academics to assist his administration's efforts. FDR's original “Brain Trust,” as they became known, consisted of a triumvirate of Columbia University law professors—Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle—who combined to shape the first wave of New Deal reforms (1933–1934), which focused on practical measures to combat mass unemployment.
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Not to be outdone, Harvard Law School, smarting perhaps from Columbia's prominence in the policy process, offered teaching relief to three scholars—Benjamin Cohen, Thomas Corcoran, and Lippmann's friend Felix Frankfurter—who helped shape the second wave of New Deal legislation (1935–1936), which pursued the more ambitious goal of effecting fundamental reforms in American society. Some attacked the Brain Trust as a phalanx of unaccountable ivory tower idealists. Others attacked them for lacking intellectual substance. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, complained through the 1930s that it was not the intellectual but “the technician … [who was] the really big man in the modern world.”
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Lippmann declined to impugn the Brain Trust's intellectual substance, instead delivering a pointed speech at the University of Rochester in June 1936 that cautioned professors against sullying their independence in the pursuit of policy influence. Lippmann dwelled powerfully on the perils of co-optation:

Members of the university faculties have a particular obligation not to tie themselves to, nor to involve themselves in, the ambitions and pursuits of the politicians … Once they engage themselves that way, they cease to be disinterested men, being committed by their ambitions and their sympathies. They cease to be scholars because they are no longer disinterested, and having lost their own independence, they impair the independence of the university to which they belong … If the professors try to run the government, we shall end by having the government run the professors.
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At the time of this speech, Lippmann was being routinely denounced by liberals for his sympathy for reactionary causes and the absence of any value system connecting his inchoate views on politics, society, and foreign policy. It is no stretch, therefore, to detect an element of catharsis in Lippmann's words. But his opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal, and its irresponsible academic facilitators, remained constant through the remainder of his presidency. Lippmann just longed for a competent Republican to appear on the national scene with the ability to oust the incumbent and take a hatchet to the bloated government bureaucracy. One thing prevented Lippmann from professing clear allegiance to the GOP: the party's views on foreign policy, which tended toward muddle-headed isolationism. Lippmann was deeply concerned by the socialistic nature of the New Deal. But he came to view the rise of Germany and Japan as graver concerns, requiring an emphasis on military preparedness that only Roosevelt appeared capable of delivering.

*   *   *

Reflecting on Adolf Hitler's rise to power, and the bellicosity displayed by irredentist Italy, Lippmann wrote in 1934, “As long as Europe prepares for war, America must prepare for neutrality.”
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Ostensibly, this entreaty might have been crafted by Charles Beard. But the operative word in Lippmann's sentence was “prepare,” not “neutrality”—an important difference in emphasis. Lippmann believed that building a formidable American military was the surest way to repel predators. Like Beard, Lippmann harbored few illusions about the diabolical nature of the Nazi regime. Yet Lippmann thought that Hitler would pay little heed to professions of neutrality that were unsupported by serious military power. Avowedly neutral nations must also possess a big stick, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt.

While Lippmann believed that much more should be spent on military procurement, he did detect some cause for hope in Europe. In a bracingly amoral column of May 1933, he discerned two forces—well, one force and one persecuted minority—that might collectively restrain Hitler's territorial ambitions. The first was the French army, which still commanded respect from learned individuals steeped in Napoleonic history, oblivious of the hollowness of its contemporary military capabilities. The second phenomenon that Lippmann thought might localize German ambitions was the persecution of its Jewish population. In the spring and summer of 1933, Nazi thugs organized the burning of books written by Jews (and liberals) and perpetrated violence and intimidation on a national scale. The repression of Germany's Jews, Lippmann wrote, “by satisfying the lust of the Nazis who feel they must conquer somebody and the cupidity of those Nazis who want jobs, is a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe.”
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Here Lippmann displayed considerable callousness, and badly underestimated the extent of Hitler's ambitions. Felix Frankfurter recorded his understandable dismay about the “implications and attitude of feeling behind that piece.”
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Though not as cruel as the logic undergirding his views on Germany's Jews, Lippmann's assessment of the Spanish Civil War was conditioned by a similar cold calculation. As Lippmann observed, “I never took a passionate, partisan interest in the Spanish Civil War. I feared it as a thing which was going to start a European war.”
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Notions of right and wrong never entered into Lippmann's reasoning on the conflict—Spain's Republicans were not worthy of U.S. support simply because they possessed greater legitimacy through the ballot box; the Nationalists' protofascist ideology was not sufficient cause for the United States to register meaningful disapproval. In this regard, of course, he was far from alone. The Popular Front government in France, the British government, and indeed President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull all prioritized the quarantining of the conflict ahead of saving democracy in Spain and preventing the rise of another dictator. With German and Italian assistance, therefore, General Francisco Franco established another fascist regime on continental Europe in 1939—after a brutal conflict in which approximately half a million died. Lippmann's final word was that Iberia was essentially tangential to the European balance of power.
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Continuing this logic of selective disengagement, Lippmann called for the United States to retreat from those Pacific interests that clashed most obviously with Tokyo's regional ambitions. In December 1936, he wrote that the “vital interests of Japan and the United States do not conflict,” that war would be a “monstrous and useless blunder,” and that this might be a “very opportune moment for the United States to withdraw gracefully from its Far Eastern entanglements.” Uttering a sentiment that clashed with those of certain isolationists—Europe was beyond hope but China was very much a wronged party—Lippmann declared, “We can well afford to say plainly that the Chinese must defend their own country, and that we have no political interests whatever in Asia.”
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Retrenchment became imperative. Lippmann worried that the Philippines could become a source of contention with Japan. As Ronald Steel writes, “The ‘blue water' strategy he had learned long ago from Alfred Thayer Mahan left him with a rule he held to all his life: the United States Navy should project American power in the Pacific, but the United States must never be drawn into military conflict on the Asian mainland.”
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Withdrawal from the archipelago should proceed forthwith. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to convince Lippmann that war with Japan was unavoidable. Yet even then he continued to view the Pacific theater as secondary to the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Franklin Roosevelt would subsequently follow this prioritization, to Winston Churchill's great relief.