Worldmaking (36 page)

Lippmann knew where America should
not
invest resources and credibility. So what exactly did constitute the national interest? Lippmann partially answered this question in an article for
Foreign Affairs
titled “Rough-Hew Them How We Will,” in July 1937, which resumed the “defense of the Atlantic world” rationale he had first developed during the Wilson presidency. Lippmann wrote that if Great Britain were to lose control of the Atlantic to Germany, then “all that is familiar and taken for granted, like the air we breathe, would suddenly be drastically altered.” Echoing Mahan on the importance of Anglo-Saxon amity, Lippmann wrote: “In the final test, no matter what we wish now or now believe, though collaboration with Britain and her allies is difficult and often irritating, we shall protect that connection because in no other way can we fulfill our destiny.” Assuring continued Anglo-American domination of the Atlantic thus remained the one cause clearly worth fighting for. Charles Beard predictably dissented—in this instance by quibbling with his mischaracterization of the Neutrality Act—cautioning Lippmann in a letter dated June 17, 1937, that “some things are not so rough hewn as they appear on the surface.”
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But Lippmann was moving far from Beard's worldview and was coming to fear that London underestimated the importance of this common purpose.

A visit to Europe in the summer of 1937 had left Lippmann despondent about Anglo-French complacency regarding the scale of the German threat. He was far ahead of his high-powered interlocutors in his understanding of the nature of Nazism and on the particularities of Hitler's psyche. In a farsighted “T&T” column, Lippmann observed perceptively that Hitler's continued dominance of German politics depended “not upon receiving tangible benefits by grace of his opponents, but upon taking things by the exercise of his own power … He cannot be placated by gifts; he must appear to conquer what he seeks.”
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If France and Britain continued on the track of denial and ignorance, Lippmann observed bleakly, “then the future of the Old World is once more in the hands of the warrior castes, and the civilian era, which began with the renaissance, is concluded.”
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In February 1938, during a meeting with Joseph P. Kennedy, the appeasement-inclined U.S. ambassador to the UK (and father of a future president), Lippmann insisted that “democracies must not delude themselves with the idea that there is any bloodless, inexpensive substitute for the willingness to go to war.”
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Lippmann's prescience on the extent of Hitler's ambitions, and his critique of Anglo-French irresponsibility in the face of this threat, became more pointed through 1938 and 1939. In a letter to Harold Nicolson, Lippmann complained, “I don't see how Great Britain and France are going to hold their possessions or even preserve their independence if they go on living in peace when they are under the constant threat of three nations that are on a war footing all the time … While it was possible to surrender Czech territory, how is it going to be possible to surrender French territory … when I hear people talk about appeasement, I feel as if they were talking about a wholly imaginary and wholly incredible state of affairs.”
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Lippmann continued to make a case to the American people that military preparedness was the number-one political priority. Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson thanked Lippmann in December 1938 for his journalistic efforts to elucidate the national (Atlanticist) interest and his lucid warnings to Americans to reject the type of complacency and wishful thinking that so consumed Britain and France:

I have just reread for the third time your comment which appeared a day or two ago in the
Washington Post
under the title “First Line and Preparedness for War” … Your views on this vital subject are so eminently sane and sound and your presentation of them is so forthright and so clear that I am impelled to the belief that if the country does not realize the situation as you have so admirably expressed it … in your column, I greatly fear that bitter days may be in store for us … You have told the country some straight-forward truths which, palatable or not, it should take to heart.
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Increasingly reconciled to the possibility of war, and of the likely necessity of material support for Britain and France, Johnson was delighted to have a journalistic ally as powerful as Lippmann.

*   *   *

In June 1939, as the unavoidability of war with Germany darkened the British mood—to the dissonant backdrop of summer's arrival—Lippmann met Winston Churchill for the first time. The art historian Kenneth Clark had arranged a supper with a guest list that included the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley and Harold Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, the author, poet, and lover of Virginia Woolf. This was a group not short on personality and opinion. Clark had convinced Churchill—suffering at that time from the periodic depression he labeled the “black dog”—to attend with the promise of Lippmann's attention. As Churchill sat quietly at dinner, Lippmann recounted the grim detail of a meeting with Joseph Kennedy earlier in the day. The gist of the ambassador's message was that Britain stood no chance of winning a war against Germany. Kennedy believed that London had to concede German freedom of action in Eastern and Central Europe—that no other choice was available. He had observed cuttingly to Lippmann that “all Englishmen in their hearts
know
this to be true, but a small group of brilliant people has created a public feeling which makes it impossible for the government to take a sensible course.”
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Churchill was roused from his ennui by Lippmann's précis of the encounter. He regarded Ambassador Kennedy as a craven and credulous Anglophobe—his Irish lineage rousing immediate suspicion—appointed by Roosevelt during one of his periodic (though grave) lapses in judgment. Harold Nicolson recounted that Churchill, “waving his whisky and soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other hand,” growled that while it was inevitable that “steel and fire will rain down upon us day and night scattering death and destruction far and wide,” the British would endure the German assault stoically and return the “destruction” with interest. And in the unlikely event that Kennedy's “tragic utterance” was proved correct, Hitler would still have to pacify or defeat the world's most powerful nation. Churchill fixed Lippmann with a purposeful stare, imploring him to advise his fellow Americans to “think imperially” and continue their tradition of holding aloft the “torch of liberty.”
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Lippmann was mightily impressed by Churchill's bearing and eloquence. He came to view him as a colossal figure in Western civilization, whose significance and leadership qualities eclipsed even Theodore Roosevelt's.

As war edged closer, Lippmann observed events thoughtfully, mindful of historical analogies that illuminated the world's predicament. Responding to news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lippmann advised Lord Lothian—whom he knew in friendship as Philip Kerr—not to set too much store in professions of Russo-German friendship:

So far as historical analogies hold at all … I recommend to you reading, if you haven't it in mind, the concluding chapter of Mahan's book on the French Revolution. There is, it seems to me, a striking resemblance between the policy of Russia then and now. Alexander, like Stalin, first wanted an all-embracing agreement against Napoleon, whereas the British held out for more specific and limited agreements. Then, having been totally against Napoleon, he turned around and made peace with Napoleon. In the Napoleonic analogy, I shouldn't be surprised now to see a series of wars with intervals of armistice and truce and shifting of the subordinate patterns in the new coalitions.
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With characteristic insight, Lippmann had laid bare the hollowness of alliance formation, particularly among despots of such brutal ambition. As the war progressed, Lippmann maintained his position that Britain and the United States should not give up on Stalin as a potential ally farther down the line—that Molotov-Ribbentrop was ephemeral. After Hitler reneged on his nonaggression agreement in 1941, Churchill followed the logic of the journalist's utilitarian views on Stalin's Soviet Union: as a useful force with which to crush Nazism. In an oft-quoted speech in Parliament, Churchill observed that “if Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
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Lippmann was not surprised when Hitler's actions forced Britain and France to declare war in September 1939. Yet he understood that Allied military psychology was much more fragile than in 1914, when soldiers volunteered in droves to fight Germans to the backdrop of bunting and street parades. He wrote to Ronald C. Hood, the former editor of the
Birmingham Age-Herald
, that “even if a decisive military victory could be obtained by the sacrifice of, let us say, another million men, the Allied statesman would not seek such a decision as a matter of high political policy … I had a long talk in June with General [Maurice] Gamelin and I know that the problem of the French birth rate as affected by two great wars in one generation is a controlling element in his whole philosophy of war. The allies have to win the war by methods that do not cost that many lives.”
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In February 1940, Lippmann met again with Gamelin, commander in chief of the French army, during a tour of the Maginot Line. He asked France's military leader what might happen if Germany ignored Maginot and attacked through undefended Belgium. “Oh,” said Gamelin, “we've got to have an open side because we need a
champ de bataille
. We're going to attack the German army and destroy it. The Maginot Line will narrow the gap through which they can come, and thus enable us to destroy them more easily.”
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Gamelin's failure of imagination was shown up a few months later when German troops poured through Belgium, little concerned by the narrowness of their route, and defeated the French army soon after.

After the fall of France, President Roosevelt, unshackled from his usual caution, declared that it was a “delusion” to believe that America might remain “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.”
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Lippmann reveled in the speech's power and clarity. In his column, Lippmann developed the president's reasoning by observing that isolationists had been “duped by a falsification of history” and “miseducated by a swarm of innocent but ignorant historians.” Lippmann's quarry is easy to identify here. It was a grave misreading of history, he continued, to believe that America entered the First World War “because of British propaganda, the loans of the bankers, the machinations of President Wilson's advisors, and a drummed up patriotic ecstasy.” Wilson had failed to identify the primary reason the United States went to war: because the “safety of the Atlantic highway is something for which America should fight.” To shirk in this task twenty years later would be to invite German aggression.
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And Lippmann was at pains to ridicule isolationists who believed that the Atlantic was some form of magical barrier that no belligerent nation could cross. To the economist Edmund E. Lincoln, Lippmann wrote that “given command of the seas, the landing of troops in this hemisphere is a perfectly conceivable operation … If our navy is bottled up by superior navies in both oceans, it would be no more difficult for Germany to land troops in Venezuela, Colombia or Brazil than it has been for Great Britain to land Australian troops in Egypt. Distance as such is no barrier if the seas are under control.”
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Lippmann played a major role in assuring congressional passage of the destroyers-for-bases deal, and he offered strong support for its more ambitious successor, Lend-Lease. Acknowledging that sophistry and loopholes were no longer required in rationalizing significant material support for Great Britain, Lippmann wrote, “With aid to Britain, this country passes from large promises carried out slightly and partially by clever devices to substantial deeds openly and honestly avowed.”
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Unlike destroyers-for-bases, Lippmann “had nothing to do with the idea, except by writing articles explaining the need of making a contribution to aid the Allies.” Yet a national syndicated audience of ten million of America's wealthiest and most influential readers meant that his persuasive role was significant. Having opposed FDR through the New Deal, Lippmann became a staunch supporter of his diplomacy toward the Second World War. The author of
Public Opinion
even paid homage to the genius of the president's phrasemaking: “The name Lend-Lease was Roosevelt's own invention. It didn't mean anything, but it sounded as if we weren't giving the money.”
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Best of all was the president's magnificent Fireside Chat of December 29, 1940. Speaking to the largest radio audience in history—three-quarters of Americans tuned in to listen to the president—Roosevelt observed that the time had come for the United States to serve as “the great arsenal of democracy.”
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London endured a devastating bombing raid over the course of the night, but its markets rallied to FDR's speech the following day.

*   *   *

Lippmann grew to admire FDR's deft and purposeful leadership over the course of World War II. Roosevelt's keen political skills—his caution, optimism, and eloquence—allowed him to prepare the American public for participation in a world war
and
for a pivotal role in world affairs thereafter. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the president responded stirringly to this shocking turn of events, identifying “a date which will live in infamy” that America would never let stand. His prioritization of defeating Germany first was sound and his appointment of senior Republicans to his administration was tactically adroit and appropriate in the circumstances. Aside from Roosevelt's hostile views toward the grandstanding leader of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle—whom Lippmann regarded as a major figure in world affairs—Lippmann viewed the president's management of American participation in the Second World War in a favorable light. Indeed, Lippmann even supported Roosevelt's most controversial action in wartime: the internment of Japanese Americans. In an infamous “T&T” column on February 12, 1942, Lippmann warned of “imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without” if a fifth column of Japanese ancestry were allowed to roam free.
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On February 19, President Roosevelt authorized the War Department to remove and intern any citizen of Japanese descent it deemed a threat: some 120,000 people in total. Lippmann cheered this mutilation of habeas corpus—sustained by a notorious ruling by the Supreme Court—in subsequent columns.