ABSTRACT
Title of Dissertation: WALTER LIPPMANN, STRATEGIC 
INTERNATIONALISM, THE COLD WAR, 
AND VIETNAM, 1943-1967
Matthew A. Wasniewski, Doctor of Philosophy, 
2004
Dissertation Directed By: Professor Shu Guang Zhang, Department of 
History
This dissertation examines the Cold War writings and activities of the American 
commentator Walter Lippmann?in particular his observations about U.S. policy in 
Vietnam.  Lippmann was the preeminent columnist of his era, writing 2,300 
installments of his Today and Tomorrow column between 1945 and 1967.   Lippmann 
crafted a conceptual framework for promoting American internationalism that 
blended political realism, cosmopolitanism, and classical diplomacy.  That approach 
shaped his role as a moderator of the domestic and international dialogue about the 
Cold War, as a facilitator of ideas and policies, and as a quasi-diplomat.  Chapter one 
suggests that based on new archival sources a re-evaluation of Lippmann is necessary 
to correct inadequacies in the standard literature.  Chapter two surveys his strategic 
internationalist approach to foreign affairs from the publication of his first foreign 
policy book in 1915 to three influential volumes he wrote between 1943 and 1947.  
Chapter three explores Lippmann?s position on a prominent and controversial Cold 
War issue?the partition of Germany.  Chapter four makes a comparative analysis of 
Lippmann with the French commentator Raymond Aron, examining Lippmann?s part 
as a dialogue-shaper and public broker during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 
subsequent debate about nuclear sharing in the Atlantic Alliance. Chapter five moves 
the study toward his writings on U.S. policy in Asia?particularly U.S.-China policy 
and the Korean War.  Chapter six examines Lippmann?s analyses of U.S.-Vietnam 
policy from 1949 to 1963 framed by three consistent arguments: first, that America 
had no vital interests at stake there; second, that it could not win a military victory 
there at any reasonable cost; and, third, that its best course was to use diplomacy to 
promote Vietnamese neutralism.  Chapter seven explores Lippmann?s efforts to 
dissuade U.S. officials from intervention in 1964.  Chapter eight details 
policymakers? elaborate efforts to delay Lippmann?s public criticisms of the Vietnam 
policies.  Chapter nine explores the Johnson administration?s determination to 
discredit Lippmann?s public criticisms of the war after July 1965.  Chapter ten 
counters the standard literature?s portrayal of Lippmann?s Cold War commentary and 
suggests that his most influential activity as a public figure may have been as a quasi-
diplomatist. 
WALTER LIPPMANN, STRATEGIC INTERNATIONALISM, 
THE COLD WAR, AND VIETNAM, 1943-1967   
By
Matthew A. Wasniewski
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy 
2004
Advisory Committee:
Professor Shu Guang Zhang, Chair
Professor Keith W. Olson
Professor Jeffrey Herf
Professor George H. Quester
Dr. Donald A. Ritchie
? Copyright by
Matthew A. Wasniewski
2004
ii
For Mimi, Ella, and Evan
iii
Acknowledgements
Historians stand on the shoulders of archivists. Mike Parrish of the Lyndon 
Baines Johnson Library, with good cheer, provided invaluable research assistance 
during and after my stay in Austin. Judith Schiff and Bill Massa, Jr., of Yale?s 
Sterling Library Manuscripts Division were invaluable in filling requests for photo-
duplication from the Lippmann Collection.  The staffs of each of the following 
repositories also were unfailingly helpful: the presidential libraries of Harry S. 
Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy; the Virginia Historical 
Society, particularly Nelson Lankford; the Library of Congress, Manuscripts and 
Reading Division; the Mudd Library Twentieth Century Public Policy Collection at 
Princeton University; the National Archives and Records Administration II at College 
Park; and the United Nations Archives and Records Management Section.  Each of 
the following institutions extended generous research grants: Harry S. Truman 
Library Foundation, Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, John F. Kennedy Library 
Foundation, Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, and Virginia Historical Society.
I also am indebted to persons who consented to personal interviews. Elizabeth 
Midgley and Francis Bator kindly opened their homes to me and shared their 
memories of Lippmann. With patience and insight, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Louis 
Auchincloss spent a long lunch fielding questions about Lippmann.  Walt Rostow 
graciously volunteered his recollections of Vietnam.
iv
Ronald Steel, whose biography is the standard by which Lippmann 
scholarship must be measured, provided encouragement, suggestions, and a lunch or 
two.  His belief that there was room for another Lippmann study inspired me to shape 
out my own views.  Though I disagree with some of Ron?s conclusions I found him to 
be one of the most agreeable people on a journey filled with many such persons.
My research began at James Madison University where I had the privilege to 
know some fine teachers: Skip Hyser, Lee Congdon, Steve Guerrier, David Owusu-
Ansah, Chris Arndt, and Clive Hallman.  As a visiting scholar at National Archives, 
Melvyn Leffler led an inspiring course that broadened my research horizons.  I thank 
my patient advisor at the University of Maryland, Shu Guang Zhang, who offered me 
the latitude to tackle this subject.  I also thank my other readers: Art Eckstein, Jeffrey 
Herf, Keith Olson, and George Quester of the University of Maryland, as well as 
Donald Ritchie of the U.S. Senate Historical Office, for thoughtful commentary.
For four decades, Keith Olson and his wife Marilyn have mentored?with 
thoughtful conversation, meals, and lodging?a constellation of students from 
Scandinavia to Shanghai.  Though academic culture does not reward such good works 
they are its lifeblood.  I am greatly indebted to the Olsons? kindness.
I thank, too, my colleagues at the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, especially 
Don Kennon, who provided a flexible work schedule and a ?sabbatical? in August of 
2001. Beth Bolling transcribed interviews and also catalogued many of Lippmann?s 
columns. As I approached the final stages of writing, my colleagues at the Office of 
History & Preservation in the U.S. House of Representatives also offered support and 
encouragement, especially Ken Kato, Farar Elliott, and Andrew Dodge.
v
Friends, family, and other colleagues along the way who provided food, 
shelter, good company, childcare services, encouragement, perspective, or 
combinations of the above: David and Valerie Adams, Eleanor Adams, Carl Ashley, 
Rennie and Katie Scott-Childress, Geoff Coats, Joann Crockett, Craig Daigle, 
Michelle Denevan, Josh Freed, Chris Hopkins, Patrick and Shea Hopkins, Ali 
Noorani, Greg O?Brien, Jeff Pickron, Paul and Kelly Raymond, Terrance Rucker, 
Frank Schumacher, John and Kathleen Wasniewski, and Stanley Wasniewski.
My parents, Andy and Connie Wasniewski, have been two of my most 
steadfast supporters even when (with justification) they may have wondered if it 
would ever end.  Hamid and Jenny Noorani welcomed me into their family as a son-
in-law and they have unfailingly made me feel at home with their support.
My wife, Mimi Noorani, sacrificed more than anybody to help me finish.  
Mimi is a thoughtful critic, ruthless editor, gifted conceptualizer (from childhood 
education issues to gardening), and she is my best friend.  She has known of Walter 
Lippmann since our first date but, in all these years, has had the patience to insist on 
writing well rather than writing quickly.  In the midst of my project we embarked on 
a far more ambitious adventure: parenthood.  Our twin children, Evan and Ella, 
provided the inspiration to finish?allowing us more time to know the wonder of 
watching them grow.  
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication..................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements......................................................................................................iii
Table of Contents......................................................................................................... vi
Chapter 1: Reconsidering Walter Lippmann ............................................................... 1
Chapter 2: Walter Lippmann and Strategic Internationalism: 
Cosmopolitanism, Realpolitik, and the Education of ?Fully Enlightened
American Nationalists, 1915-1942 ............................................................................. 27
Chapter 3: Conflict and Convergence: Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, 
Raymond Aron, and the Problem of German Partition, 1947-1963 ......................... 118
Chapter 4: Trans-Atlantic Brokering: Walter Lippmann, Raymond Aron, 
The Cuban Missile Crisis, and Nuclear Sharing, 1962-1963.................................... 176
Chapter 5: "An Unendng Series of Insoluble Dilemmas":
Walter Lippmann and Containment in Asia, 1947-1955.......................................... 236
Chapter 6:  ?Long . . . A Pessimist About Vietnam?: 
Walter Lippmann and U.S. Policy in Indochina, 1949-1963.................................... 298
Chapter 7: Personal Persuasion and Calculations of Co-Optation:
Walter Lippmann, McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson, and Vietnam
November 1963 to February 1965 ............................................................................ 376
Chapter 8: ?Give Him More of the Same?: The Johnson Administration?s 
Efforts to Slow Walter Lippmann?s Dissent, February to July 1965........................ 440
Chapter 9: At War: Pundit Versus Policymakers and
Pro-War Opinion Leaders, July 1965 and After ....................................................... 525
Chapter 10: Walter Lippmann and the Cold War:
Diplomacy, Public Dialogue, and Useful Patterns.................................................... 599
Selected Bibliography............................................................................................... 640
1
Chapter 1: 
Reconsidering Walter Lippmann
I.
I read my first Today and Tomorrow column in 1991, nearly twenty years after 
Walter Lippmann?s death, as the Cold War?the term Lippmann coined for the long 
Russo-American rivalry?ended.  For an aspiring journalist eager to craft sparkling 
sentences Lippmann proved an impossible model to resist.  His columns, some of 
them six decades old, jumped off the page.  They were engaging, vibrant, and 
supremely logical.  Lippmann possessed an uncanny ability to reduce a complex 
problem to its simplest form, to offer the range of reasonable options, and to propose 
a thoughtful solution.
1
  He arranged words to make arguments so convincing that they 
seemed at times like mathematical laws rather than the statements of opinion which 
they were.  If one accepted the premise from which he proceeded, his conclusions 
were hard to refute.  Lippmann?s mastery of the language seduced, and I was not 
immune?like so many before me, drawn like iron filings to a magnet.
Of course, Walter Lippmann was often wrong.  Anyone who wrote on average 
three times per week, for six decades was bound to make some gaffes and 
1
 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 
1980): especially, xvi; 201-202; Joseph Kraft, ?Lippmann: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,? 11 
September 1980, Washington Post: A19.  Louis Auchincloss?s novel, The House of the Prophet
(Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1980), based on Lippmann?s career and his character, celebrates his prose 
and its power to persuade. See especially, pp. 254-255; 274-275.  
2
contradictory statements.  Many of his missteps also derived from what was an 
essentially humanist philosophy, anchored to his faith in rationality.  At times, this 
approach led Lippmann to under-estimate the darker, irrational forces that influenced 
human actions.
2
In 1917, writing for The New Republic, Lippmann praised President 
Woodrow Wilson?s ?Peace without Victory? speech which set lofty, idealistic 
American objectives for the post-World War I peace.  He soon served as secretary of 
the Inquiry that helped draw up Wilson?s Fourteen Points.  Disillusioned with the 
Paris Peace and Wilson?s idealism, however, Lippmann backtracked in 1919 and 
opposed American entry into the League of Nations.  In 1932, he dismissed 
Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt as an ?amiable Boy Scout,? 
unprepared and unfit to face the problems of the Depression and foreign policy.  Four 
years later, thinking the New Deal reforms had gone a step too far, Lippmann 
supported GOP presidential candidate Alf Landon.  In 1940, on the eve of U.S. entry 
into World War II, he called for a smaller army and greater reliance on the navy and 
air force.  In 1943, Lippmann supposed that a postwar alliance with the USSR was 
possible and would be the basis for a lasting peace.  Facing an implacable challenge 
from Moscow in 1948, the columnist strongly advocated that the Allied nations 
splinter their occupation zones into a decentralized federation of historic German 
states?arguing that a unified West Germany would dominate Europe and soon cut a 
deal with the Soviets.  On it went.  Lippmann supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964 as 
?a man for this season.?  Less than two years later, Lippmann condemned Johnson as 
a pathological liar who had deceptively brought America into the Vietnam War.  In 
2
 Joseph Kraft perceptively noted just this point in a eulogy of Lippmann; see Kraft, ?A Courageous 
Voice of Reason,? 17 December 1974, Washington Post: A17.
3
1968, writing that the Democrats had become reckless and untrustworthy in office, he 
publicly endorsed Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon (whom he 
routinely castigated as vice-president in the 1950s) as the last best hope to bring 
stability and normalcy to national elective politics.
3
Despite these flaws and frequent reversals, there were powerful and 
persuasive consistencies that animated Lippmann?s writings on foreign policy and the 
Cold War.  Lippmann constructed a conceptual framework early in his career that 
eventually served as the centerpiece of his postwar analyses.  The historian?s curiosity 
which I soon cultivated for Lippmann was no less intense than my attraction to him as 
a journalist.  As I pursued graduate degrees in 20
th
 century political history and 
international affairs during the 1990s, the context of what was occurring around me 
imparted an entirely new dimension to Lippmann?s columns.  Sadly, straining to 
decipher 50-year-old Today and Tomorrow installments (on a microfilm reader of 
only slightly more recent vintage) proved a world more enlightening than the op-ed 
pages of most modern daily papers.  The decade after the Cold War, with all its 
promise, contradictions, and disappointments badly needed a Lippmann-esque 
figure?but one never materialized.  
The 1990s in America, to borrow one of Lippmann?s phrases, were years of 
drift rather than mastery.  Soviet power receded revealing long-neglected domestic 
institutions and concerns.  The Cold War, Americans realized, had been waged at 
significant social cost: crime-ridden and decaying inner cities, obsolete public 
transportation systems, declining schools, a compromised environment, and massive 
3
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century touches on each of these episodes.  For 
Lippmann?s inconsistencies and frequent reversals see also, Barry D. Riccio, Odyssey of a Liberal
4
national debts.  Americans gladly forfeited their global concerns for the pursuit of 
prosperity at home.  Televised popular culture and the news media?often 
indistinguishable enterprises?served as a potent opiate for a surprisingly eager 
audience.  The public knew more about the broken marriage of a football star accused 
of murdering his estranged wife, than it did about a Balkan war that killed thousands 
of civilians, threatened peace in Europe, and eventually required NATO?s first 
military offensive.  Americans gawked at presidential peccadilloes, but were blas? 
about the very same president?s failure to act upon horrific genocide on the African 
sub-continent.  American intellectuals fared little better, participating in their own 
myopic surfeit of ?irrational exuberance? spawned by post-Cold War triumphalism.
4
One prominent scholar-cum-policymaker even adopted Hegel?s line that history was 
politics and, that since democracy had vanquished its 20
th
century rivals, communism 
and fascism, that history itself was perhaps nearing an ?end.?
5
  Even those whose 
approach was more tempered, surveyed the ?American Century? and argued that the 
Wilsonian mission of creating stability by fostering democracy had been internalized 
implicitly?if not explicitly?by U.S. policymakers, and, moreover, was a successful 
program worth emulating in the 21
st
 Century.
6
Reading Lippmann?s columns closely for his perspective on a broad spectrum 
of Cold War crises, I discovered he had struggled with the same fundamental 
questions about American foreign policy debated in my classes, on the current op-ed 
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1994).
4
 The most triumphal of the lot was Francis Fukuyama?s The End of History and the Last Man (New 
York: Free Press, 1992).  For a rather triumphal spin on the ?necessity? and positive legacy of U.S. 
intervention in Vietnam, see Michael Lind, Vietnam, The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of 
America?s Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999).
5
 Fukuyama?s The End of History and the Last Man: especially, 39-51; 55-70; 338-339.
5
pages of the Washington Post, and, no doubt, in the councils of post-Cold War 
policymakers.  As Americans in the 1990s sought to adjust to a world scene stripped 
of all its familiar markers and guideposts, so did Lippmann during the early Cold War 
try to prepare the country for its new role in an equally murky future.  The questions 
he asked were eerily familiar ones:
 What constituted a sound foreign policy?  Absent the old threat, how should 
America plan for future threats?  Was preponderant power alone enough to 
enact Washington?s plans and to achieve its goals?
 Should Washington actively promote democracy abroad or simply, by 
whatever contrivances necessary, construct an international system stable 
enough to protect it at home?  Were these two courses compatible?
 Should the U.S. lead? Participate as one among equals? Or, go it alone?
 Finally, where in postwar modernity did America?the military, economic, 
and cultural superpower?end and the world begin?
If not uniformly practicable, Lippmann?s answers to these questions and his 
solutions to specific Cold War crises?taken in their totality?offered an important 
alternative to the policy of global containment Washington officials pursued and most 
leading opinion-makers in America and Western Europe endorsed.  Lippmann?s road, 
however, was repeatedly not taken.  
6
 Tony Smith, America?s Mission: The United States and the Struggle For Worldwide Democracy in 
the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996): especially, xiii-xv; 29-33.
6
Lippmann?s contemporaries? reactions to his analyses intrigued me equally.
My research revealed several audiences who attached different importance to certain 
aspects of his writing.  Some journalistic colleagues took their cue from him, as did 
many regular readers of Today and Tomorrow.  An influential few stridently 
denounced his ideas.  U.S. officials, by and large, discounted Lippmann?s proposals, 
though his arguments were often so grounded that he could not easily be dismissed.  
Forced to contend with Lippmann, they sometimes tried to co-opt him?never very 
successfully.  Foreign leaders, from France to India and China to Russia, closely 
monitored his analyses.  They judged Lippmann (correctly) as the voice of American 
moderation, though they often mistook Lippmann?s attitude for that of official 
Washington which, in the heat of virtually every superpower crisis, did not share the 
columnist?s emphasis on collaboration and diplomatic initiative.
Reading further into primary sources I, in turn, began asking questions about 
Walter Lippmann?this man who clearly played a significant part in the domestic, 
official, and even international discussion of the Cold War.  How did he develop his 
philosophy of international relations? What was this plan for American 
internationalism that he proposed, which historians and political scientists alternately 
have called ?realist? and ?cosmopolitan??
7
  How had so many of my contemporaries 
come to forget Walter Lippmann altogether?  More broadly still: How had Lippmann, 
as an unofficial public figure, acted to shape the Cold War dialogue and policy itself?   
7
 On ?realist,? see Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 486-490; and, for another 
conventional view, see Michael J. Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge, 
Louisiana State University Press, 1985): 175-176; 182-183.  On ?cosmopolitanism,? see D. Stephen 
7
II.
Looming beyond even these questions was one of vital significance for any 
diplomatic historian: Should one even attempt another study of Walter Lippmann?  At 
first examination, that might seem a daunting consideration.  I did not, however, 
determine it to be a prohibitive one.  Lippmann has been the subject of roughly a 
dozen biographical and political-philosophical monographs and a score of articles.  
The standard by which all others are measured is Ronald Steel?s award-winning 
biography, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980)?drawing heavily 
from the columnist?s papers and correspondence to which Steel was granted exclusive 
access.  In addition, Lippmann?s role in critiquing the early phases of U.S. 
containment policy is a favorite episode covered in a number of Cold War-related 
studies and history textbooks.  Though the public which once relied so much on 
Lippmann?s writings largely forgot him, scholars for five decades have found him 
intriguing if sometimes enigmatic.  Most often, he is portrayed as a detached 
spectator who struggled to graft a nineteenth-century worldview onto the twentieth-
century crises through which he lived.  Lippmann?s intellectual biographers suggest 
the protean nature of his ideas about twentieth-century liberalism.  Their title pages 
convey a theme of a shifting, often contradictory, intellectual journey: Odyssey of a 
Liberal, The Five Public Philosophies of Walter Lippmann, Twentieth Century 
Pilgrimage, Crossroads of Liberalism, and The Intellectual Odyssey of Walter 
Lippmann.
8
Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in the Century of Total War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 
University Press, 1984): especially, 9-18. 
8
Hari Dam, The Intellectual Odyssey of Walter Lippmann: A Study of His Protean Thought, 1910-
1960 (New York: Gordon Press, 1973); Benjamin Wright, The Five Public Philosophies of Walter 
8
Revisionist historians, of the William Appleman Williams school, largely won 
the battle to shape interpretations of Lippmann?s Cold War commentary.
9
  Chief 
among these scholars, who viewed Lippmann?s geopolitical orientation as a distinct 
liability, were Barton Bernstein and Ronald Steel.  These writers were vexed by 
Lippmann?s apparent blindness to non-colonial imperialism, rivalry for markets and 
raw materials, and conflict between competing economic systems.
10
  Viewing 
Lippmann through the lens of C. Wright Mills, they also expressed skepticism about 
his ability to be an independent and objective commentator because of his proximity 
to those in power.
11
Such approaches informed Bernstein?s analysis of Lippmann, the earliest such 
examination of the columnist.  Focusing on Lippmann?s criticisms of U.S. policies in 
the late 1940s, Bernstein found that though the columnist objected to the global 
Lippmann (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973); Charles Wellborn, Twentieth Century 
Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State 
University Press, 1969); Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and 
the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961); and Riccio, Walter 
Lippmann: Odyssey of a Liberal.
Other works on Lippmann include: David E. Weingast, Walter Lippmann: A Study in 
Personal Journalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949); Anwar Syed, Walter 
Lippmann?s Philosophy of International Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 
1963); Larry L. Adams, Walter Lippmann (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977); John Luskin, 
Lippmann, Liberty and the Press (Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1972); Francine 
Curro Cary, The Influence of War on Walter Lippmann, 1914-1944 (Madison, WI: State Historical 
Society of Wisconsin, 1967); and Edward L. Schapsmeier and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, Walter 
Lippmann: Philosopher-Journalist (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1969).
9
 By this ?school? of interpretation, I mean the economic determinist approach used by Williams in his 
Contours of American History (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1961) and in his classic The 
Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World Publishing, Company, 1959). Walter LeFeber, 
America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945 to 1991 (Boston: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992), is just one of 
Williams? notable cast of students and another adherent to the idea that American economic objectives 
drove Cold War policy.
10
See, for example, Barton Bernstein, ?Walter Lippmann and the Early Cold War,? in Cold War 
Critics, ed. Thomas G. Paterson (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971): 22-23.  This interpretation has 
proven remarkably powerful.  It persists through Steel?s biography and into the 1990s, shaping, for 
instance, Eric Alterman?s description of Lippmann as an ?ambivalent general? in the government?s 
effort to enlist Americans in the Cold War struggle for global supremacy.  See Alterman?s, Sound and 
Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1992): 37.
9
character of containment he largely shared in the liberal-capitalist ideology that 
guided planners in Washington.  His dissent, such as it was, was limited to strategy 
rather than objectives.  ?Like most Americans, Lippmann did not believe that 
American policy-makers had an ?ideology? and a well-defined conception of the 
national interest,? Bernstein explained.  ?Where he saw innocence there was often, in 
fact, design; where he saw ignorance or blundering there was often purpose.  In 
offering the counsel of realism, he failed to understand fully how much he ultimately 
shared of the vision of policy-makers and how much his dissent was limited to means 
and tactics, not goals and ends.?
12
  Contrary to Lippmann?s insistence that U.S. 
officials pursued poor policies out of inexperience and naivet?, they were instead, 
Bernstein believed, acting out of ideology?one rooted in a political economy that 
linked peace and prosperity with free trade and civil liberties.  Where Lippmann 
differed from officials, Bernstein observed, was not on the need to act in that national 
interest but on its applications.
13
  For Bernstein, Lippmann?s realism offered a 
blueprint for postwar American expansion.
Ronald Steel, Lippmann?s able biographer, amplified the New Left critique 
with the publication of his authorized biography, Walter Lippmann and the American 
Century.  Steel told the story of Lippmann?s life within the framework of the age of 
U.S. ascendancy and decline. In this account, Lippmann not only was present at the 
creation of the American superpower state, critiquing it at a distance, but he 
participated as one of its architects and goodwill ambassadors.  Parts of Steel?s book 
suggest Lippmann was independent, non-ideological, and?at times?an isolated 
11
 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
12
 Bernstein, ?Walter Lippmann and the Early Cold War,? 20.
10
critic.  Yet from his post-Vietnam perspective, Steel also chastised Lippmann for 
sharing many of the same internationalist assumptions as U.S. officials.  ?He 
critiqued policymakers, but rarely what lay behind their policies,? Steel wrote.  
Though he found Lippmann to be a critical observer of each postwar administration 
from Truman to Johnson, Steel judged that the columnist did little to challenge the 
accepted orthodoxy: global containment.  Tucked away in his fast-moving narrative 
were sharp revisionist asides.  ?Having only the guidepost of national interest, lacking 
a philosophical approach or ideological commitment, reluctant to accept the part that 
economic demands or imperial ambitions might ply in explaining American foreign 
policy, Lippmann was unable to take a consistent approach to this issues he wrote 
about,? Steel observed.  ?A critique so narrowly focused was not likely to threaten 
prevalent assumptions.?  Lippmann often went along with these assumptions because 
he shared the same goals as those on the inside, Steel added: ?He felt an insider?s 
responsibility for making the system work.  He never was alienated and was in no 
sense a radical.  He operated entirely within the system.?
14
Thus, when Steel discussed Lippmann?s objections to Vietnam he strained to 
make the facts fit his framework by arguing that the columnist experienced a 1960s 
epiphany: dropping realism and embracing a defense of American ?values.?  It is 
difficult to exaggerate how much the Vietnam experience shaped Steel?s account.  
For the American Left, long uncomfortable with what they perceived to be 
Lippmann?s power-oriented calculations of the national interest, his strong dissent 
from the war amounted to an act of contrition.  In this view, Steel agreed with fellow 
13
 Ibid., 45.
14
 All the foregoing quotes are from Steel?s, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 486-487.
11
revisionists.  He declares Vietnam to be Lippmann?s ?finest hour,? without 
satisfactorily elaborating on this pronouncement in his penultimate chapter.
15
  Later, 
however, Steel clarified some of the motives for his approach, suggesting that had 
Lippmann not opposed American intervention in Southeast Asia and waged his war 
of words on Lyndon Johnson, his long-running critique of global policies would have 
been insignificant.  Lippmann ?redeemed himself in the ?60s,? Steel said after the 
biography?s publication.  ?Here was Walter Lippmann, pillar of the establishment, 
writing against the war, arguing for values rather than power, attacking what he called 
Johnson?s ?messianic megalomania.?  I wouldn?t have written the book if he hadn?t 
done that.  He went out the way he came in, at Harvard, full of passion.?
16
Consequently, Steel?s biography minimized the realism underlying Lippmann?s long-
standing refusal to commitment American ground forces in Asia.  Nor did Steel 
demonstrate how Lippmann?s ?passion? in his later years made him any more 
effective or insightful a critic?indeed, Lippmann?s intensely personal 
characterization of the war tended to gloss over some of the hard questions about 
American globalism and imperialism which Steel credited him for raising.
Yet, as biography, Steel?s book accomplished a remarkable synthesis of 
Lippmann?s life?supplanting the old view of Lippmann as a detached Olympian 
figure with a more accurate account of his ceaseless activities to influence the 
powerful.  Lauded by peers, it won the Bancroft Prize and the National Book Critics 
Circle Award.  Former SHAFR president and prize-winning author Robert Dallek 
anointed it a model of the historical narrative ?forsaken? by modern academe.  So 
15
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: xvi.
16
 Henry Allen, ?Chronicling Walter Lippmann,? 11 September 1980, Washington Post: D13.
12
well-received was Steel?s book that the current of conventional wisdom ran strongly 
against new efforts to study Lippmann.  One reviewer surmised, ?it is safe to 
conclude that there be no more Lippmann biographies?not for a long time.?
17
But the end of the Cold War revitalized interest about Lippmann?s central role 
as a moderator of the debate about postwar American foreign policy.  By the 1990s, 
awash in an impoverished culture of political analysis, Washington commentators 
recalled their prime forbear in tones of reverence and with a yearning to relive the 
golden age of political analysis.  Lippmann?s example as a participant in the 
community of dialogue about foreign policy was deemed worthy of emulation.  The 
problem, as media critic Eric Alterman lamented, was that Lippmann?s heirs fell far 
short of the task because of institutional changes within the media business, the far 
more adversarial role between journalists and politicians, and, quite often, the 
personal foibles of leading pundits.
18
  On this subject, the standard literature also 
disappointed.  Steel?s Walter Lippmann and the American Century shattered the 
illusion?long held by Lippmann?s readers?that he was a detached outsider.  But 
having proven that Walter Lippmann moved among ?the men of action,? Steel failed 
to analyze systematically his subject?s many methods and roles for shaping the Cold 
War debate and policy.  Nor did he calculate how effective Lippmann was in these 
different roles.  Such tasks fell outside the scope of popular biography.
This dissertation aims at neither another intellectual history nor biographical 
reprise of Lippmann?s life.  Rather, the purpose of this project two-fold: 1) to offer a 
17
 Robert Dallek, quoted in The New Yorker, 9 March 1998: 24.  Interestingly Dallek found it to be a 
?non-polemic? treatment.  See also, Geoffrey Smith, ?Walter Lippmann, the Fourth Estate, and 
American Foreign Policy,? Queen?s Quarterly 89 (Spring 1982): 2-14.
13
more accurate account of the development of Lippmann?s approach to foreign 
relations, culminating in his writings on the Cold War and Vietnam particularly; and 
2) to offer a case study of Lippmann?s effort as a dialogue-shaper and quasi-
diplomatist during the Cold War.  If previous studies have not adequately analyzed 
Lippmann it may, in part, be due to the fact that it is so difficult to label him.  There 
are at least six discernable roles I have identified in which Lippmann, using a 
combination of intellect and personality, acted to shape American and Western 
Alliance Cold War policies. 
 First, Lippmann advanced a conceptual model with which to frame his 
discourse about the Cold War.  The standard literature describes this as 
being Lippmann?s practice of a rather mono-dimensional political 
realism.
19
  But building off the work of several political scientists I have 
18
 See especially, Alterman?s Sound and Fury: 1-18; see also his first chapter, ?The Road to 
Lippmanndom.?  For some of the ?yearning? for a Lippmann-like writer in the 1990s see, Philip 
Geyelin, ??Today and Tomorrow? in the Gulf,? Washington Post, 6 January 1991: C2.
19
 Steel is not alone in this assessment.  From a non-revisionist perspective, Kenneth Thompson 
described Lippmann as one of the ?four horsemen? of realism in postwar America?the other outriders 
being Reinhold Niebuhr, George F. Kennan, and Hans J. Morgenthau.  Lippmann popularized political 
rationalism, contributing to a deeper understanding of the Cold War as an independent observer, ?not 
through defending or condemning the United States nor by hewing to the official or revisionist line,? 
wrote Thompson.  Thus, Thompson observed, Lippmann and his ?realist? counterparts rarely 
represented the dominant policy viewpoint nor did they ever become the voice of any major school of 
criticism.  Realism, simply defined as the axiom that commitments must be balanced with available 
power, Thompson concluded, was the ?primary thesis running through [Lippmann?s] approach to 
every foreign policy problem.?  Lippmann?s unswerving devotion to that single formula, Thompson 
proclaimed, was at the center of his triumphs.  See Kenneth W. Thompson, Interpreters and Critics of 
the Cold War (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978): 61; 112-113; 80.  Thompson?s 
perspective was largely adopted by Michael J. Smith, a student of the political scientist Stanley 
Hoffman (a Raymond Aron student himself), in his book Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger: see 
175-176; 182-183.
14
come to describe his approach as ?strategic internationalism??a blending 
of great power politics, classical diplomacy, and ?cosmopolitan? goals.
20
 Second, using this analytical framework, Lippmann attempted to set an 
agenda about the topics of debate within the domestic and international 
dialogue about the Cold War?using his books and his widely-read 
column, ?Today and Tomorrow.?
 Third, Lippmann acted as an educator of both domestic and foreign 
public opinion about the Cold War conflict.
 Fourth, he sought access to decision-makers not merely for the vanity of 
being an insider or to produce journalistic ?scoops,? but rather because he 
aspired to be a participator and shaper of Cold War policy itself?to 
bend it toward his own construct of strategic internationalism.
 Fifth, Lippmann occasionally performed public relations tasks for U.S. 
leaders, using his column to rationalize their policies to domestic and 
foreign audiences.  Conversely, he popularized some of the ideas of 
leading foreign officials by facilitating debate about them in America and 
reporting conclusions from his private meetings to U.S. officials.
 Sixth, Lippmann worked as an unofficial liaison, a private minister 
without portfolio, who cultivated personal and professional relationships 
with foreign leaders and diplomats within the Western Alliance, among 
20
The most useful in this regard are: Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in the Century of 
Total War; Joel Rosenthal, Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American 
Culture in the Nuclear Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Greg Russell, Hans 
J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 
1990).
15
neutral nations, and inside the Soviet coalition, as well.  His primary tasks 
in this regard were to promote diplomatic discussion among these three 
Cold War communities and, particularly, to foster clear channels of 
communication in the alliance.
Despite a considerable extant literature on Walter Lippmann, I found five 
compelling reasons to re-examine his career as a Cold War interpreter and quasi-
diplomat.  Of these, four have their basis in scholarly concerns?owing to limitations 
and inadequacies in the standard works on Lippmann.  The final point touches on 
policy options in the 21
st
 Century; specifically, in what directions Lippmann?s work 
might orient Americans and their leaders when they think about the future of U.S. 
foreign relations.  
First, though Lippmann figured prominently for the American public, U.S. 
officials, and international leaders during the first two decades of the Cold War, no 
one has written a book-length study devoted solely to his commentary on foreign 
policy during this period. The biographical treatments of Lippmann tend to analyze 
his protean ideas about liberalism or the development of his philosophical works on 
democratic government.  Even Ronald Steel?s book, which devotes substantial 
coverage to Lippmann during the Cold War, leaves much undone in coming to terms 
with the corpus of his foreign policy writing during this period.  Steel offers a 
convincing and thoroughly readable biographical overview but fails to forward an 
analytical framework within which to better understand Lippmann.
16
Second, a massive amount of new archival evidence, particularly in the 
official records of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations 
(but also in foreign archives), has been opened after the last substantial studies of 
Lippmann were published.  Lippmann often wrote that knowledge is tentative and 
incomplete.  By that logic, new evidence compels us to revisit and to rethink past 
assumptions.  With the opening of Cold War archives around the world during the 
past two decades, there has been a bonanza of de-classifications relating to events 
central to this study, especially the Vietnam War.  Consider, for instance, the releases 
at the LBJ Library alone.  Since the late-1970s, more than 500 oral histories 
(approximately half the collection) and thousands of hours of the president?s taped 
phone conversations have become available.  Most of the national security files and 
the memoranda of McGeorge Bundy to Johnson were accessioned in the late-1980s 
and 1990s.  My search through these records produced many documents unavailable 
to earlier scholars.  At the JFK Library, in the last decade, more than 40 manuscript 
collections and 80 oral histories have been opened to researchers.  During my visit 
there I was able to utilize the previously unopened White House confidential file 
containing Lippmann?s correspondence with Bundy.  Hundreds of thousands of 
documents have been declassified at the National Archives and Records 
Administration, from Policy Planning Council papers to the Records of 
Undersecretary of State George Ball.  Nor had previous scholars had the benefit of 
searching in the papers of Joseph W. Alsop, one of Lippmann?s chief critics, which 
were opened in the early 1990s at the Library of Congress.  I also conducted 
interviews with several of Lippmann?s key associates including his primary research 
17
assistant during the 1960s, Elizabeth Farmer Midgley, who, in addition to providing 
many recollections about the process of Lippmann?s column-writing, also opened her 
personal diaries to me, revealing accounts of the columnist?s private meetings with 
and impressions of important American officials.  Finally, the Lippmann papers at 
Yale University?s Sterling Library constitute a treasure trove that stills yields many 
gems?particularly Lippmann?s correspondence with University of Chicago professor 
Quincy Wright, the diplomat George Kennan, and secretary of state John Foster 
Dulles, as well as Lippmann?s appointment diaries which cover decades of his 
professional life.  These untapped materials not only fill gaps in our knowledge about 
Lippmann, they reorient the way we should think about him.
Third, another historiographical motivation behind this dissertation seeks to 
reconsider the standard literature?s treatment of Lippmann?s ?realism.?  Historians 
have held Lippmann to a rigorous standard of ?realism? largely of their own 
construction, often to disparage him when he showed himself to be a great deal more 
practical than his abstract intellectual arguments might suggest.  What I discovered 
along the way was that Lippmann?s realism was not as static or simplistic as previous 
scholars have argued.  Neither was it devoid of values nor, for that matter, moral 
considerations.  Lippmann defied ready categorization.  He was an internationalist, 
but he disparaged globalism.  He was an American who supported his countrymen in 
their times of greatest crisis, but he also was a ?cosmopolitan? who perceived and 
respected the interests pursued by a variety of foreign capitals when many of his 
contemporaries did not.
21
  He understood great power politics and applications of 
military force, but argued almost exclusively for diplomatic solutions to crises.  Did 
18
these traits distinguish him from other ?realists??  Wasn?t his approach more complex 
than merely following ratios of power?  Is there a richer perspective on Lippmann 
than the standard one that views him as a simple geopolitician?
Fourth, the inclusion of a new aspect that the existing literature misses also 
seems in order: An analysis of Lippmann?s multi-faceted role-playing during the 
Cold War.  Based on the six categories of participation listed above, how should 
scholars treat Lippmann? As a journalist?  An educator?  A facilitator of dialogue or 
policies?  A private diplomat? Did his analytical framework for understanding the 
Cold War complement or contradict the ideas and policies of Western Alliance 
leaders?  How did decision-makers view him?  Was Lippmann ultimately successful 
in his endeavors?more so in some aspects than others?
Fifth, my analysis carries an implicit political consideration, too.  Simply 
put, it is that Lippmann?s Cold War writings are relevant for modern American 
policymakers and leaders, facing the most complex international scene in perhaps 
a century. Lippmann wrote when military and economic power was aligned in 
largely bipolar blocs dominated, if not always precisely directed, from Washington 
and Moscow. One might then be tempted to infer that in the unipolar early twenty-
first century with many competing second-tier powers, ?rogue states,? and dangerous 
non-state actors such as the al-Qaida terrorist network, that Lippmann?s analyses 
might be less useful.  Instead, his emphasis on the limits of U.S. power, warnings 
against Wilsonian temptations to remake the world in America?s image, and 
admonitions against abandoning allies to act unilaterally have peculiar resonance and 
21
 Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in the Century of Total War: 9-18; 104-140.
19
relevance when one considers the implications of the ?Bush Doctrine? of pre-emptive 
war or the prospects of an expansively-defined, global ?war on terror.?  
III.
The dissertation that follows is divided into nine additional chapters, arranged 
chronologically, and each deals with aspects raised in the points above.  The opening 
sections span broad periods of Lippmann?s career, but the interior chapters come to 
focus particularly on the columnist?s writings and activities pertaining to American 
Cold War policies in Vietnam.  There are several reasons for this emphasis.  First, the 
bulk of new archival evidence, opened in presidential and diplomatic archives, relates 
to this facet of Lippmann?s work.  Second, some of the greatest historiographical 
misconceptions about Lippmann?s career persist in the existing literature on his Cold 
War writings about Asia.  Third, Lippmann?s writings on Vietnam between 1947 and 
1967 provide a unique perspective from which to better understand his vision of 
American internationalism.
Chapter Two discusses the development of Lippmann?s analytical framework 
for international relations?from his earliest book on foreign policy, The Stakes of 
Diplomacy (1915) through his criticism of containment as expressed in The Cold War
(1947).  Lippmann stoked internationalist sentiment but also sought to contain 
unchecked American ambitions.  Three books, written between 1943 and 1947, 
applied his strategic internationalist approach to the emerging Russo-American 
conflict.  U.S. Foreign Policy (1943) and U.S. War Aims (1944) solidified 
Lippmann?s clout as a foreign policy analyst who advocated restrained 
20
internationalism.  His rejection of the administration?s containment policy in The 
Cold War, set Lippmann on a parallel but separate trajectory from American officials.  
Whereas U.S. officials pursued national security by projecting abroad a colossal 
combination of military and economic might??a preponderance of power? as one 
noted historian has described it?Walter Lippmann believed security derived from a 
balance between that power and enlightened diplomatic initiative.
22
  He took a long 
view of the Cold War, subordinating ideology and paranoia to explain the pragmatic 
mechanics of international relations. 
Armed with this analytical construct, Lippmann then tried to set the 
parameters of the debate about key Cold War policies.  He did this by being an 
educator of domestic and international opinion, a facilitator of trans-Atlantic 
dialogue, and a quasi-diplomat with key U.S. officials and foreign leaders.  It is 
significant that when he debated postwar U.S. containment strategies, two of his 
principal opponents were other prominent ?realists?: diplomat George F. Kennan and 
French commentator Raymond Aron. Chapter Three offers a comparative analysis of 
this trio?s writings on the partition of Germany and the disposition of West Berlin.  
As a U.S. official Kennan?s set of priorities initially was different from Lippmann the 
journalist, but after he left government he moved far closer to Lippmann?s vision of 
containment.  Lippmann and Aron particularly clashed over the implementation of 
Western Alliance policies in postwar Germany: Lippmann wanted a loose federation 
22
 Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the 
Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).  Leffler?s book is testament to the insights 
Lippmann raised in 1947 about the dangers of U.S. intervention in countries stretching from the 
Middle East to Asia.  See especially Leffler?s discussion in Preponderance: 289-98; 353-54.  
Interestingly, Lippmann receives little treatment either in Leffler?s work or in other seminal Cold War 
syntheses, such as John Lewis Gaddis?s Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar 
American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
21
of historic German states; Aron, believing such a weak contraption would be 
vulnerable to Soviet machinations, pushed for unifying the Anglo-American-French 
zones into what became Western Germany.  They disagreed about the importance of 
ideology in judging Soviet intentions and also about the prospects for reaching any 
kind of sustainable modus vivendi. How these ?realists? persisted in such different 
beliefs suggests something about the vagaries of what it means to be a ?realist? 
altogether.  If realism itself is not a contested term, then it is at least more complex 
than scholars usually treat it.
Chapter Four discusses Lippmann?s role in acting as both an unofficial 
diplomat and facilitator of U.S. policy within the Atlantic Alliance and between the 
alliance and Moscow.  New archival materials reveal Lippmann?s impact on U.S.-
Russian negotiations during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  This section also elaborates on 
the unique dialogue Lippmann opened with the Le Figaro columnist Raymond Aron 
over the issue of nuclear sharing and the French force de frappe.  It explores their 
roles as quasi-diplomats: Lippmann in Paris and Aron in Washington.  Lippmann?s 
developing relationship with National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy also 
receives treatment.
Chapter Five examines the development of the columnist?s opposition to 
American military intervention in Asia, focusing on U.S. policy toward postwar 
China and in the Korean War.  Unlike the standard interpretation of Lippmann?s 
commentary on this subject, which suggests that the columnist vacillated over time 
and geographical locations, my research concluded that he was remarkably consistent 
about U.S. intervention anywhere on or near mainland Asia from the Truman through 
22
Kennedy administrations: time and again he opposed it.  In Korea, particularly, the 
record demonstrates that the columnist bitterly criticized full-scale intervention and 
attempted to work with Indian diplomats to produce a settlement for the withdrawal 
of U.S. forces.  During this period he also rejected U.S. intervention on Quemoy and 
Matsu, called for Washington to replace the Nationalist regime in Taiwan with a 
U.N.-monitored ?internationalized? government, sought the end of U.S. military 
presence in Japan, and drew what he called a ?strategic line? that stretched from 
roughly the Aleutian Islands to the Philippines?suggesting that the U.S. deploy its 
forces forward of this line only at its own peril.  Lippmann?s later rejection of 
intervention in Vietnam fit this overall pattern.
Chapter Six argues that Lippmann was one of the earliest, most forceful, and 
most prescient opponents of an American military commitment in Southeast Asia.  
Indeed, more than two decades before Lyndon Johnson Americanized the war in 
Vietnam, Lippmann warned Washington policymakers not commit troops in 
Southeast Asia to contain Soviet or Chinese expansion.  Lippmann criticized initial 
American aid to French Indochina in 1947-48 as a policy of underwriting Paris?s 
postwar colonialism. While he supported U.S. efforts to extricate the French from 
their increasingly burdensome and bloody colonial war in Indochina, he did not 
believe Americans should replace them.  In 1954, he opposed Washington officials 
who sought direct military intervention at Dienbienphu, as well as those who 
proposed that the U.S. step in to relieve the French effort in South Vietnam afterward.  
In 1961, Lippmann advised a plan of ?neutralization? in Laos?similar to the plan 
Charles De Gaulle would advocate for all of Southeast Asia two years later?in 
23
which the U.S. and other concerned great powers and regional players work out a 
comprehensive peace settlement.  He personally advised President Kennedy not to 
intervene with U.S. forces in Laos and, later, South Vietnam. At that point he initiated 
a pointed public debate with the columnist Joe Alsop, who urged full-scale U.S. 
intervention on behalf of the Saigon regime. 
The next three chapters focus on the period from 1963 to 1967, providing a 
richer picture of Lippmann?s part in critiquing American intervention in the Vietnam 
War.  Chapter Seven details the Johnson administration?s efforts to pacify its most 
potent potential critic as it escalated U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.  I also 
reconstruct Lippmann?s role as an ?insider? with key U.S. officials?none more 
important, I argue, than his longtime friend and national security adviser McGeorge 
Bundy.  Their special relationship was vital to President Johnson?s success in 
preventing Lippmann?s open break with the administration until after key decisions 
were made to mobilize for war.  During this period Lippmann played dual roles.  As 
an insider, he vigorously debated U.S. officials about the perils of intervention in 
Vietnam.  His columns gave him a public platform to critique Vietnam policy based 
on the principles of strategic internationalism; although the criticisms during this 
period were couched to nudge gently the Johnson administration toward a diplomatic 
exit in Southeast Asia.  In a sense, Lippmann?s realpolitik convictions and his sense 
of classical diplomacy made him a prescient and feared (by U.S. officials) critic.  Yet, 
in another sense, he critically compromised his status as an impartial observer 
because he softened his public doubts about administration policies while privately 
attempting to persuade officials not to intervene in Vietnam.  
24
Chapter Eight extends the discussion from the previous chapter by focusing 
on U.S. officials? highly intensive efforts to court Lippmann and, finally, to counter 
him in the spring of 1965.  Of particular significance in this discussion are the efforts 
of McGeorge Bundy and Under Secretary of State George Ball to ease Lippmann?s 
concerns (if not to outright deceive him) about the administration?s intentions in 
Vietnam.  Lippmann?s own overblown sense of being able to talk administration 
officials off the Vietnam ledge (coupled with his deep reservations about waging a 
public opinion campaign), momentarily, but significantly, mitigated the power of his 
arguments against intervention.  This chapter challenges portrayals of Ball?s role as 
an ?in-house? critic of the war, primarily by demonstrating his efforts to convince 
Lippmann that the administration had chosen a moderate course.  Bundy?s pivotal 
role in keeping the columnist ?on the reservation? also receives additional 
treatment?focusing on his orchestration of a dialogue between president and 
journalist.  Lippmann?s continued contact with French sources, particularly De Gaulle 
and foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville, as well as his discussions with other 
prominent European statesmen, helped to counteract the administration?s 
disinformation efforts.  
Chapter Nine evaluates the consequences of Lippmann?s break with the 
Johnson administration over Vietnam as well as his sharp public disagreements with 
key opinion-shapers outside the administration: among them, Dean Acheson and Joe 
Alsop.  In the spring of 1966, when Walt Rostow succeeded McGeorge Bundy as 
national security adviser, the White House and the State Department Policy Planning 
Staff worked on the so-called ?Lippmann Project??an effort to cull through decades 
25
of Lippmann?s writings on the Cold War to retrieve inconsistencies and failed 
predictions to use against the columnist publicly.  Eventually, Johnson?s advisers 
persuaded him to halt the ?war on Walter Lippmann,? fearing that by making 
Lippmann a ?martyr? the administration jeopardized alienating press and public 
sentiment.  The chapter also discusses Lippmann?s tendency after 1965 to personalize 
the war to such an extent his extended character attacks on President Johnson and 
administration principals supplanted searching critiques of strategy.  In doing so, 
Lippmann became easier to cut-off and less relevant for readers?and eventually he 
left the capital altogether.  
Chapter Ten considers useful lessons from Lippmann?s legacy for modern 
U.S. officials, commentators, and the American public. An approach that analyzes 
Lippmann as a strategic internationalist?shaped in equal parts by a belief in great 
power politics, classical diplomacy, and also a compelling need to rid U.S. foreign 
policy of domestic parochialisms?provides a richer context in which to understand 
his work.  It also offers a corrective to the standard literature that both portrays 
Lippmann as a rather mono-dimensional realist and skews a proper understanding of 
the strengths of his Cold War criticisms.  Also analyzed in these closing pages are 
Lippmann?s various efforts at role-playing?as an agenda -setter, educator, publicist, 
and quasi-diplomat.  I suggest the strengths, weaknesses, and applications of 
Lippmann?s approach to shaping the dialogue about and policies of the Cold War.  
Finally, I discuss the utility of Lippmann?s approach in the post-September 11, 2001, 
world.  In his book America?s Mission (1996), historian Tony Smith, suggests that 
foreign policy planners, and Americans generally, might best be served by an outlook 
26
that couples the cautionary skepticism of the Cold War realists with the 
internationalist commitment of Wilsonian followers.  Lippmann?s career was, I argue, 
more a marriage of these competing (but not mutually exclusive concepts) than 
previous scholars have allowed.  Nor was his approach incompatible with 
practicing?as opposed to propagating?the best of American ideals when our 
nation?s leaders act beyond our borders.
27
Chapter 2: 
Walter Lippmann and Strategic Internationalism: Cosmopolitanism, 
Realpolitik, and the Education of ?Fully Enlightened American 
Nationalists,? 1915-1947
I.
The recurring themes of Walter Lippmann?s analyses of American Cold War policy 
were derived from some of his earliest writings.   Decades before developing his 
famous power-to-commitments ratio, the credo of postwar realists, he began to 
grapple with the problem which preoccupied him from his youthful days as a 
Greenwich Village Bohemian to his old age as a counselor to presidents: How to 
transform America from an isolationist, provincial power into a world leader guided 
by restrained, responsible internationalism.  
Lippmann?s pursuit of this objective is sometimes lost in the standard 
literature about him.  Most of the roughly dozen studies which analyze him group 
around two themes: (1) the protean nature of his political philosophy and public 
commentary; (2) his role as a leading proponent of twentieth-century political 
realism.
1
On the first count, Lippmann is a convenient archetype for the inception, 
1
For emphases on Lippmann?s evolving political liberalism, see Hari Dam, The Intellectual Odyssey 
of Walter Lippmann: A Study of His Protean Thought, 1910-1960 (New York: Gordon Press, 1973); 
Barry D. Riccio, Walter Lippmann: Odyssey of a Liberal (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 
1994); and Charles Wellborn, Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public 
28
maturation, splintering, and decline of twentieth-century liberalism.  Even his best 
biographer embraces this theme of change and constant adaptation, noting that 
Lippmann?s ?intellectual flexibility? accounted for his long-running success as a 
columnist.
2
Such emphases are perhaps appropriate, even insightful, in explaining 
Lippmann?s transition from the idealistic progressivism of his youth to the classic 
liberal-conservatism of his later years.  They also offer a window on his work as a 
columnist which daily required him to analyze fleeting, disconnected events and to 
impose a coherent, longer logic on them.   In explaining, Lippmann?s postwar 
commentary on foreign policy, scholars have adopted the opposite approach?
describing the columnist as a rather straightforward practitioner of realism.  In this 
argument, the central thread that held together Lippmann?s thousands of columns on 
the Cold War was his single-minded devotion to the guidepost of the balance of 
power.
3
Such analyses can distort our understanding of Lippmann, too.  By focusing 
on discontinuity in his career, previous scholars have devalued the long-held ideas 
that formed the basis of his writing on foreign affairs in the post-World War II period. 
Conversely, over-simplification of his approach to international relations contributes 
to a less-than-complete picture of his commentary.
While the goal here is not to impose an order to Lippmann?s thought where 
one does not emerge on its own (indeed, his inconsistencies are quite plain in this 
discussion), it is to suggest that several important components of his approach were 
Philosophy (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1969).  For an analysis of Lippmann 
as a realist, see Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown and 
Co., 1980); and Barton Bernstein, ?Walter Lippmann and the Early Cold War,? in Cold War Critics, 
ed. Thomas G. Paterson (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971). 
29
developed in the decades before World War II.  Moreover, this merger of influences 
on Lippmann contributed to an intellectual framework that I describe as his strategic 
internationalism?a combination of realism, ?cosmopolitanism,? and classical 
diplomacy.  While my study identifies Lippmann as taking part in the realist tradition, 
I argue that he was not fully immersed in it.  Those who would simply categorize him 
as a realist consign him to a rather sterile and unimaginative place in the annals of 
twentieth-century American foreign policy?one that belies his unique stature, 
contributions, and activities.  This chapter asks the reader to consider that Lippmann?s 
realism was a single component?though an important one, indeed?of the larger 
strategic internationalist framework that he advanced to promote U.S. participation in 
world affairs.    
Here, beginning with realism, several definitions are in order. Realists tend to 
have a rather pessimistic view of human nature.  They regard all human relations and 
politics particularly as being based on the struggle for power.  In the case of nations, 
this condition of rivalry is doubly inherent because no power exists above them to 
regulate their disputes.  Rather than recoil from these facts of life, realists devise ways 
to adjust to them.
4
While realists share this worldview, there are variants in the tradition?
European adherents of Machiavelli versus American pragmatists.
5
  American post-
2
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 77.
3
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 486-487.
4
 My understanding of the realist tradition has benefited from several books: Michael J. Smith, Realist 
Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986): 1-22; Greg 
Russell, Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State 
University Press, 1990): 9-55; and Joel Rosenthal, Righteous Realism: Political Realism, Responsible 
Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 
1991): 1-36.
5
 See for instance, Russell?s discussion in Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft.
30
World War II realists most often are portrayed as being preoccupied with identifying, 
calculating, preserving, and acting upon the balance of power.  Traditionally, their 
approach also has been described as being born in opposition to the American 
idealistic tradition.  A nation?s foreign policy?so the mythic average realist might 
argue?should be based solely upon vital national interests, shorn of ideological or 
moral considerations, and determined by the power available to achieve the desired 
ends.
6
There were even variations in the practice of American realism itself.
7
Lippmann belonged to a sub set of realists who were, to varying degrees, interpreters 
and critics of American Cold War policy: the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the 
political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau, and the historian Louis J. Halle.
8
  Not all 
realists were critics.  Indeed, many key Cold War policymakers have been described 
by contemporaries and later scholars as realist thinkers, among them: Dean Acheson, 
Paul Nitze, and Henry Kissinger.
9
  These officials were the prime architects and 
practitioners of containment?s various permutations: the Truman Doctrine, massive 
retaliation, rollback, brinksmanship, flexible response, and d?tente.  Some exponents 
purported realism to be a general theory of international politics.  Others trumpeted it 
6
 A classic statement of this definition may be found in Hans J. Morgenthau?s Politics Among Nations: 
The Struggle for Power and Peace, 6
th
 edition (New York, 1985; 1
st
 edition 1948).  Morgenthau?s 
thesis continues to be popularized by his students, including Kenneth Thompson, Interpreters and 
Critics of the Cold War (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978): especially, 1-13.  See 
also, Thompson?s Political Realism and the Crisis of World Politics: An American Approach to World 
Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960): especially Chapter One.
7
 Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger: 1-3.
8
 See, for example, Thompson, Interpreters and Critics of the Cold War; Rosenthal, Righteous 
Realists; Russell, Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft; and Richard Fox, 
Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography.  New York: Knopf, 1989).
9
 For biographies which consider their subjects as prominent realists, see James Chace, Acheson: The 
Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); and 
Robert D. Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University 
Press, 1989).
31
as a solution to the problem of morality in foreign policy.  Still others?such as 
Lippmann?were selective realists, using realpolitik to criticize specific official 
policies but sometimes straying from it as a general theory.
In addition to the influence of realpolitik, ?cosmopolitanism? and a belief in 
the practice of classical diplomacy informed Lippmann?s approach.  I borrow the 
term cosmopolitanism from D. Stephen Blum?s stimulating intellectual study of 
Lippmann.  It means, in Blum?s words, that Lippmann?s ?views were unconstrained 
by the preoccupations and prejudices of his homeland; that he was receptive to 
diverse currents of opinion from abroad; that the value, ideas, and interests of many 
societies were interwoven with his methods and conclusions.?
10
  But it also connotes 
more than cultural refinement and civilized tastes.  It suggests a worldview that 
implicitly recognized the inter-connectivity of domestic and foreign policies as well 
as the web of interests and institutions that had grown up between nations in the 
twentieth century.
11
Lippmann?s conception of classical diplomacy drew from his realpolitik
understanding of a world in constant conflict and his cosmopolite cognizance that 
each nation had unique interests and objectives.  For Lippmann, diplomacy was an 
active probing of a rival?s intentions, positions, strengths, and weaknesses.  As well, it 
was a process involving argument and persuasion, inquiry and explanation, the 
removal of misapprehensions, the suggestion of obstacles and advantages, and, 
ultimately, conciliation and concession.  At bottom, the method of diplomacy 
10
 D. Stephen Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in the Century of Total War (Ithaca, NY: 
Cornell University Press, 1983): 11.
11
 Blum, Cosmopolitanism in a Century of Total War: 12-14.
32
identified areas of mutual interest to promote a modus vivendi (a way of living 
together)?even if political intimacy was either impossible or undesirable.  
Between 1915 and 1947, as the U.S. assumed world power status, Lippmann 
shaped an approach designed to facilitate that process.  The first part of this chapter 
focuses on select events from which emerged the building blocks for Lippmann?s 
post-World War II writings?i.e., his first efforts to sketch American national 
interests, idea of an ?Atlantic Community,? criticisms of Woodrow Wilson?s 
diplomacy, and his attitude toward Russian Bolshevism and Communism generally.  
Subsequent sections describe his efforts to insert himself into the national dialogue 
about foreign policy in the 1930s and, in the 1940s, utilizing his books and columns 
to educate public opinion.
Strategic internationalism, which came to maturity with the publication of 
three books between 1943 and 1947, applied classical conceptions of great power 
politics to a dynamic world.  But Lippmann?s rendition of ?realism? was less 
nationalist than that of many of his contemporaries; it was more malleable than his 
formulaic axioms might indicate; and it was far less apt to employ American military 
force overseas than it was to ensure American diplomatic participation abroad.  Using 
this approach, Lippmann warned against U.S. unilateralism, disparaged the moralism 
and legalism to which Washington officials often resorted, recommended 
collaborative efforts at regional security, and emphasized diplomatic rather than 
military solutions to Cold War crisis.  He struck an essential balance.  In one sense, 
Lippmann offered Washington officials a blueprint with which to reorganize the 
postwar world, to employ sufficient power to achieve American security, and to 
33
advance U.S. interests.  Unlike so many of his contemporaries, however, Lippmann?s 
framework also aimed to contain America?s ambitions and to excise its vexingly 
parochial habits.  
II.
The theme of rejecting the provincial in pursuit of the cosmopolite life offers an 
important insight into the development of Lippmann?s approach to foreign affairs. 
Walter Lippmann was born on September 23, 1889, in New York City, in his parents? 
brownstone home on Lexington Avenue between 61
st
 and 62
nd
 streets.  Jacob 
Lippmann and his wife, Daisy Baum, were first generation German Jews, born and 
raised in the city amid modest circumstances.  Daisy graduated from Hunter College 
in Manhattan and Jacob began his career as a clothing manufacturer in his family?s 
garment shop.  They lived comfortably, but not elegantly, until Daisy?s father died 
and left the couple a considerable inheritance from his late-in-life real estate 
speculation.  The Lippmanns soon moved to a four-story brick home on East 79
th
Street and, eventually, resided in an even more upscale location at 46 East 80
th
Street.
12
Young Walter Lippmann was raised in a uniquely insular community.  The 
Lippmanns were part of a small universe of German-Jewish families of respectable 
means and a moderate level of success and accomplishment. They often toured 
12
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 1-11. Francis Bator, a friend of Lippmann?s and 
an advisor on European affairs to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, noted that 
Lippmann?s intellect propelled him into a social station that would otherwise have been unattainable.  
Compared to many of the men with whom he worked and socialized later in life, ?Lippmann really 
came from a very modest family himself,? Bator observed.  ?It was his extraordinary talent, brightness, 
34
Europe?taking young Walter to London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and, once, as far as 
Moscow and St. Petersburg.  Yet, the Lippmanns were not part of the social circle 
inhabited by Manhattan?s super-wealthy Jewish families like the Warburgs or the 
Loebs.  Nor did they associate with the recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern 
Europe who lived further south in the Greenwich and Bowery sections of the city.
13
According to biographer Ronald Steel, Lippmann?s assimilationist mentalite 
(held among many of his social peers, too) helped him breach the walls of his 
circumscribed ethnic station.
14
  Another powerful influence was his education at Dr. 
Sach?s School for Boys (later named the Sachs Collegiate Institute).  The Sachs 
Institute, opened in 1871, was one of the first modern high schools in terms of its 
curriculum.  Founder Julius Sachs adhered to a secular curriculum that integrated 
Classic languages with a core of courses that promoted the ?faculty of expression,? 
writing, literary studies, and history.  ?A continuous study of history . . . is in 
importance, second only to the power of expression in the vernacular, and it should be 
presented so that the progress of human endeavor is revealed in the various stages of 
the study, in the tendencies and dominating principles of successive periods,? Sachs 
wrote in 1912, then a professor at Columbia?s Teacher?s College.  ?A combination of 
cultural and social with political history is necessary if we are to understand and 
ability that led to Harvard and all that followed.?  Francis Bator, interview with author, 25 January 
2001, Cambridge, MA.
13
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 7-8. This comfortable but unremarkable 
upbringing left Walter resentful later in life.  James Reston, Lippmann?s prot?g?, was so struck by it 
that he noted in his memoirs the gulf between Lippmann?s writings about the importance of the family 
and the lack of affection he had for his own parents, ?describing his mother as ?a little too ambitious 
and worthy,? and his father as a successful businessman ?without much color or force.??  James Reston, 
Deadline: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991): 142-143.  Steel also makes this point in 
Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 5.
14
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 7, 9.
35
advance our own institutions.?
15
  Though Rankean in its concept and implementation 
of structured learning, and infused with a notion of Whiggish developmentalism, the 
Sachs School?s emphasis on understanding the past to think clearly about present 
problems and future solutions had a lasting and discernable influence on young 
Walter Lippmann.
Lippmann?s years as a Harvard undergraduate provided yet another 
cosmopolitan experience.  Among his more famous contemporaries in Cambridge 
were the poet Robert Frost, the writer T.S. Eliot, the socialist Max Eastman, and the 
radical journalist John Reed.  Two professors, in particular, expanded Lippmann?s 
philosophic pluralism and cultivated his internationalist orientation: the Spanish-born 
philosopher and author George Santayana and the psychologist-philosopher William 
James.  Each imparted to the young Lippmann innovative ideas and, each in his own 
measure, an outsider?s perspective on mainstream American culture.
Santayana?s political conservatism?the notion that freedom derived from 
order and not an excess of liberties?resonated with Lippmann.
16
  Lippmann enrolled 
in his undergraduate courses and, in 1911, began work on a graduate degree in 
philosophy as a teaching assistant to the great philosopher.  Santayana?s mistrust of 
the masses and the stultifying swell of public opinion in American life anticipated 
those of the more pessimistic Spanish writer, Ortega Y?Gasset.
17
  Santayana and 
15
 Julius Sachs, The American Secondary School and Some of Its Problems (New York: The Macmillan 
Company, 1912): 122; see also Harry A Passow, ?Julius Sachs,? American National Biography 19 
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 179.
16
 For the standard biography of Santayana, see John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography
(New York: Knopf, 1987).
17
Late in life, having long departed the U.S. for his native Europe, Santayana would write of American 
society, ?you must wave, you must cheer, you must push with the irresistible crowd; otherwise you 
will feel like a traitor, a soulless outcast, a deserted ship high and dry on the shore.?  Santayana, 
Character and Opinion (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1937): 211.
36
Lippmann shared outsiders? perspectives on American culture.  Having grown up in 
New England since his youth, Santayana?s Spanish roots nevertheless made him an 
odd fit in the Brahmin-Yankee city of Boston.  He remained deeply skeptical and 
suspicious of pervasive Anglo-Saxon political and religious ideas that he felt were too 
often foisted upon other cultures.  Likewise, Lippmann?s German-Jewish roots 
distinguished him in a dominant culture that valued conformity and homogeneity.  
Lippmann chose assimilation but he was not desensitized by that choice.  He later 
evinced a sensitivity to foreign cultures and interests that often contrasted with the 
caste of postwar Washington policymakers who, in their youths, had been raised in an 
environment of ?muscular Christianity.?
18
Santayana also imparted to his student an undercurrent of pessimism.  In his 
writings, the philosopher displayed the nervous tension of a nineteenth-century man 
contending with the rush of modernity,: urbanization, the growing pains of mass 
democracy, the rise of intense nationalism and totalitarian states, ?total? warfare, 
social civil rights movements, and unrelenting scientific challenges to religion and 
other accepted traditions.  Lippmann shared in this perspective, too, once referring to 
himself as an ?antediluvian,? coping with the tide of revolutions in twentieth-century 
life and trying to impose order and make sense of them.
19
After graduation, Lippmann?s decision to attach himself to the progressive 
journalist Lincoln Steffens and to apply the ideas he?d learned in the classroom to the 
larger world, had much to do with the influence of yet another profound thinker, the 
18
 Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy, graduates of Endicott Peabody?s Andover School, are 
examples.
19
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: xvii.
37
psychologist and philosopher William James.
20
  James was the son of Henry James, 
the philosopher and religious writer, and the brother of the novelist Henry James.  He 
had first sought Lippmann out after reading an article that the sophomore had written 
in the Harvard student newspaper.
21
  Subsequently, Lippmann was invited to informal 
discussions at James?s home.  Though the great philosopher died shortly after 
Lippmann?s graduation in 1910, his ideas stayed with his student for a lifetime.  
James?s humanism influenced Lippmann, the social activist and philosopher 
John Dewey, and other leading progressives.  It was anchored in the idea that 
humankind?s rationality and its development of science could be applied to solving 
social problems.  James theory of radical empiricalism held that reality is pluralistic 
and that the totality of existence cannot be explained by any kind of mono-causal 
theory.  His philosophy of pragmatism held that truths emerged only from human 
experience and could not exist outside of it as absolute, eternal, sacrosanct laws.  
Much like a scientist, James claimed that all propositions had to be tested and proven 
through experience.  These ideas suffused Lippmann?s early writings.  The Jamesian 
spirit is best captured in Lippmann?s A Preface to Politics (1914), in which he wrote 
that ?as there is no prospect of a time when our life will be immutably fixed, as we 
shall, therefore, have to go on inventing, it is fair to say that what the world is aching 
20
 For two reliable scholarly works on James see, Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), and Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and 
Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).  For a study that traces the effects of 
pragmatic thought in 20
th
 Century American social and political movements, see John Patrick Diggins,
The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 1994): for its effects on Lippmann, see especially 322-359. 
21
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 17.
38
for is not a special reform embodied in a particular statute, but a way of going at all 
problems.?
22
The confluence between Santayana?s pessimistic absolutism and James?s 
emphases on contingency and practical applications of learning and scientific method 
to affect change in the world pushed and pulled on Lippmann throughout his long 
life.  On the one hand, he believed firmly in the pre-eminence of order and stability in 
developing the good society.  In international affairs this impulse drove Lippmann 
toward a realpolitik outlook that anchored state relations in power structures and 
prioritized policies according to a state?s means to fulfill them.  Yet, echoes of James 
may be found in Lippmann?s commentary on Cold War crises, which repeatedly 
sought to implement expedient, inventive, and flexible solutions to superpower 
confrontations.
23
Finally, young Walter Lippmann?s political idol offers yet another example of 
his cosmopolitan orientation.  Throughout his life, Lippmann was drawn to statesmen 
whom he believed to be in tune with the needs and demands of 20
th
 century life.  
These were not enthusiasts for the old order but, rather, leaders who anticipated 
change and who made policy not just to satisfy immediate pressures but to prepare the 
22
 Lippmann, A Preface to Politics: 69; 201.  It should also be noted that the one-time English Fabian 
socialist, Graham Wallas, also held some fascination for Lippmann when Wallas passed through 
Harvard as a visiting professor.  His Human Nature in Politics (1908) pointed toward the irrational 
forces at work in shaping political attitudes and voter behavior.  It had a lasting influence on Lippmann 
who took that critique a step further by applying a Freudian analysis of participatory government in 
Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).  Despite his determination to demonstrate the 
weak links in the democratic process?to force progressives to think practically about reform 
methods?Wallas retained faith in democratic government.  The influence here was mutual.  So 
indebted did he feel to Lippmann for their discussions and correspondence on the subject of the 
achievement of liberal social policy that Wallas dedicated his follow-on work, The Great Society
(1914), to Lippmann.  See Steel?s discussion of Wallas: 26-28; for an intellectual biography of Wallas, 
see Martin J. Wiener?s Between Two Worlds: The Political Thought of Graham Wallas (Oxford: 
Clarendon Press, 1971).
39
way for further-reaching developments.  No American leader, the youthful Lippmann 
judged (and maintained as an old man) did these things quite so well as Theodore 
Roosevelt.  Lippmann?s enduring political infatuation with TR began in 1898, just 
months after his legendary charge up San Juan Hill, as candidate Roosevelt made 
speaking engagements in upstate New York during his gubernatorial campaign.  What 
Lippmann saw at the time and later as a commentator during the last years of 
Roosevelt?s political career, were his resolute spirit, his decisive call to action, his 
ability to lift a crowd to higher purpose, and to harness intellect in the service of 
skewering old, socially-constructed shibboleths.  Later in life he held onto his 
admiration for TR, noting, ?I have been less than just to his successors because they 
were not like him.?
24
  Roosevelt, Lippmann observed, was the first president ?who 
knew that the United States had come of age?that not only were they no longer 
colonies of Europe, and no longer an immature nation on the periphery of Western 
civilization, but that they had become a world power.  He was the first to realize what 
that means, its responsibilities and its dangers and its implications, and the first to 
prepare the country spiritually and physically for this inescapable destiny.?   Yet 
having recognized that America must lead, TR was careful to define objectives.  
Among his ?paramount political virtues? was the idea ?that means and ends must not 
23
Charles Tarlton, ?The Styles of American International Thought: Mahan, Bryan, and Lippmann,? 
World Politics XVI (October 1964-July 1965): 584-614.  Tarlton calls it ?pragmatic internationalism.?
24
 Walter Lippmann, ?A Tribute to Theodore Roosevelt,? 27 October 1935, speech to the Woman?s 
Roosevelt Memorial Association on the 77
th
 anniversary of Roosevelt?s birth; reprinted in The 
Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, edited by Clinton Rossiter and 
James Lare (New York: Random House, 1963): 487-489.  
40
be separated, that [Americans] must have no policy which they are not prepared for . . 
. [he] knew that wishful policies lead to disaster and humiliation.?
25
There also was a philosophical resonance that drew Lippmann to Theodore 
Roosevelt.  The 26
th
 President struck Hamiltonian chords in American life by 
embracing the interests and cause of a national society and by seeking to make 
democracy work and march with the pace of technological and social change.  Rather 
than a sea of Jeffersonian islands, TR envisioned a great society of these individual 
communities fused by national purpose.
26
  The Jeffersonian tradition violated 
Lippmann?s modernist inclinations.  Its preference for isolated, small, self-sustaining 
communities that shirked central government and valued local autonomy above all 
else, struck Lippmann as anti-modern and backward-looking.  TR?s Hamiltonian 
orientation, his intellectualism, his cosmopolitanism, and moderate progressivism had 
lasting appeal for Lippmann. Old and dying, he confided to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 
?Presidents in general are not loveable.  They?ve had to do too much to get where 
25
 Ibid., 488-489.  He added, ?Though [TR] did not see all that was in the world or its whole future, he 
was the first President to see that even for Americans the world is round and that even for them the 
future is not to be a repetition of the past.?  For Lippmann, the anti-thesis of TR was William Jennings 
Bryan, whom Lippmann took to task in A Preface to Politics as the embodiment of so many of the 
nation?s long-cherished and closely-held ideals.  The ?Great Commoner? merged Mid-Western 
anathema to entangling alliances with evangelical fervor and a deep-seated pacifism.  In Bryan, 
Lippmann found not a statesman but ?a voice crying in the wilderness.?  He continued, ?There is a 
vein of mysticism in American life, and Mr. Bryan is its uncritical prophet.  Bryan does not happen to 
have the naturalistic outlook, the complete humanity, or the deliberation of habit which modern 
statecraft requires.  He is the voice of a confused emotion.? See A Preface to Politics: 100-101.
26
 For more on this aspect of TR, see John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow 
Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1983): 115-117; 
217-219.  Cooper argues that TR?s ?New Nationalism? shared Hamilton?s mistrust of human nature 
and his doubts about the efficacy of harnessing individuals? self interests to achieve national 
objectives.  The Jeffersonian vision, held by Woodrow Wilson, was nearly the opposite?believing 
that through encouraging people to pursue freely their self-interests that the public good would be 
achieved.
41
they are.  But there was one President who was loveable?Teddy Roosevelt?and I 
loved him.?
27
III.
On August 5, 1914, the day England declared war on imperial Germany, Lippmann 
stood in the House of Commons listening to the debate.  ?My own part in this,? he 
recorded in his diary, ?is to understand world-politics, to be interested in National and 
Military affairs, and to get away from the old liberalism which concentrates entirely 
on liberal problems.  We cannot lose all that but see now that our really civilized 
effort is set in a structure of raw necessity.?
28
  Indeed, the great conflict forced 
Lippmann to think expansively and rigorously as an internationalist for the first time 
in his life.  He began collecting his thoughts for an extended essay.  In a letter to 
Graham Wallas marking the anniversary of Great Britain?s entry into the war, 
Lippmann explained, ?I feel now as if I had never before risen above the problems of 
a district nurse, a middle-western political reformer, and an amiable civic 
enthusiast.?
29
Working as a co-founder and editor of The New Republic magazine in New 
York City, Lippmann burrowed into the history of U.S., German, and Italian 
unification and early national periods.  He focused particularly on the writings of 
Alexander Hamilton, Otto von Bismarck, and Count Camillo di Cavour, whom, 
27
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 597.
28
 John Morton Blum, ?Walter Lippmann and the Problem of Order,? in Public Philosopher: Selected 
Letters of Walter Lippmann, edited by John Morton Blum (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985): xxi.  
Blum?s fine edited collection of letters draws on some correspondence that Lippmann?s principal 
biographers, including Steel, did not use.  When possible, I have tried to cite this published source 
42
Lippmann wrote, ?grasped the problem of constructive internationalism? as they 
?welded, and united, and submerged petty sovereignties? in their own fledgling states.  
He conclude that domestic and international politics were intertwined, ?phases and 
aspects of one another.?  In America?s case, states? rights, the settling of the frontier, 
and the problems of race, trade, immigration, and federal governance were all lesser 
versions of an ?infinitely complicated? world scene.  Organization and structure in 
the young American Republic had been achieved through programs and projects such 
as the Northwest Ordinance, the Erie Canal, and the construction of postal routes, 
turnpikes, and transcontinental railroads.  In international affairs, Lippmann came to 
understand that such developments would be achieved in the creation of multilateral 
commissions, webs of finance and capital, and, most importantly, in new alliances 
and communities of shared interests.
30
Lippmann also relied on ideas popularized by Alfred Thayer Mahan, the naval 
officer and promoter of sea power and Atlantic unity.  Mahan wrote the first in a 
series of influential volumes? The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-
1783?a year after Lippmann?s birth.
31
  During the next 23 years, through a 
combination of publishing and personal contact with leading U.S. politicians (most 
notably Teddy Roosevelt), Admiral Mahan exerted great influence over the 
development of U.S. strategic doctrine.  Most read Mahan as an unabashed apostle of 
rather than the originals in the Walter Lippmann Collection at Yale University?s Sterling Memorial 
Library.
29
 Lippmann to Graham Wallas, 5 August 1915, cited in Blum, Public Philosopher: 29.
30
 Hamilton had been an early American exponent of a strong, central national government.  Bismarck 
had unified Germany through a succession of wars and annexations in the 1860s and 1870s.  Similarly, 
Cavour who came to power in Sardinia in 1852, had (with the help of the French) fought Austria and 
unified the modern Italian state within the space of a decade.  Lippmann to Graham Wallas, 5 August 
1915, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 19.
43
constructing a dominant blue water navy to secure trade routes and project U.S. 
imperial power.  In one of his lesser works, The Problem of Asia (1900), Mahan 
focused on the competition for China?describing the world as an arena of contest 
between land and sea powers.  To counterbalance Russian influence in China, Mahan 
recommended that Washington partner with London.  Lippmann seems to have been 
drawn to what later scholars stressed was Mahan?s true aim: the creation of an Anglo-
American led consortium of naval power?a course Lippmann recommended shortly 
after World War I.
32
  Another chief corollary that Lippmann drew from Mahan and 
held into his old age, was that while the U.S. should project naval power in the 
Pacific region, it should not engage in military operations on the Asian mainland.
Lippmann?s musings found fuller expression in his first book on foreign 
relations?The Stakes of Diplomacy (1915).  Lippmann wrestled with three key 
questions: How to defuse imperial rivalry among the great powers in undeveloped, 
colonial regions?  How to educate the public and overcome its ?natural? inertia 
toward diplomacy?  Lastly, in offering an alternative to the pacifist movement (which 
Lippmann perceived as isolationism in disguise) how could U.S. leaders create a 
viable program for greater American participation in international affairs?one of 
restrained internationalism?  Years later, Lippmann told an interviewer, ?I had to find 
a solution to the wars, and I wrote a book . . . In fact, I knew what the trouble was 
31
 Standard biographies on Mahan include:  Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His 
Letters (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977); Richard W. Turk, The Ambiguous Relationship: 
Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).
32
 For the argument that Mahan was not pushing American naval supremacy but instead an integrated 
naval consortium with Great Britain, see Jon Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching 
Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered (Washington, DC: The 
Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997): especially 80-98.
44
with the world wars.  It was the third world.  The weak countries of the third world 
were the causes of the wars.?
33
For Lippmann, the drive for empire and the search for stability were symbiotic 
goals.  He attributed the origins of the World War to imperial rivalry in modernizing 
?weak states? in Africa, Asia and the Middle East?to make them suitable producers 
and consumers in the world marketplace.  ?Imperialism in our day begins generally as 
an attempt to police and pacify,? to smooth the way for orderly and stable trade.  
Lippmann assumed that nations would always compete for resources and wealth.  The 
problem, therefore, was not one of extinguishing their rivalry, so much as structuring 
it, offering an administrative framework, creating accepted rules for the game. The 
question was how to bring these regions into a ?framework of commercial 
administration . . . under which world-wide business can be conducted,? Lippmann 
wrote.  ?The pressure to organize the globe is enormous.?
34
Lippmann believed world organization required the acceptance of realpolitik
and recognition of spheres of influence, international conferences and commissions?
all the staples of classical diplomacy.  He recommended creating ?permanent 
international commissions? to oversee, manage, and administer on a continuing basis 
these places of market development and rivalry.  ?It is internationalism, not spread 
33
 Unpublished transcript of Lippmann?s interview with Henry W. Brandon, 1970, ?Walter Lippmann 
Interview File,? Box 17, Henry W. Brandon Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereinafter 
referred to as ?LC?).
34
 Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy: 98.  Lippmann drew upon domestic history to reinforce his 
point.  A protracted period of ?diplomatic struggle? between North and South, he noted, preceded the 
American Civil War.  For better than half a century, each section sought to tip the balance of power in 
the undeveloped Western territories in its favor.  Diplomatic maneuvering included the Constitution?s 
?three-fifth?s? clause, fugitive slave laws, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the 
Kansas-Nebraska Act.  The struggle itself was to determine the order of things; whether the West 
would be slave or free, an extension of the wage labor North or the plantation economy South.  ?Until 
the problem of organizing the West had been settled,? through diplomatic maneuverings and force of 
45
thin as a Parliament of Man, but sharply limited to those areas of friction where 
internationalism is most obviously needed,? Lippmann wrote.
35
  He pointed to the 
example of the Algeciras Conference which his political idol, Theodore Roosevelt, 
helped convene in 1905.
36
National governments must also ?excise? the ?central nerve of imperialism?: 
the accepted notion that a trader or company turned to the ?home government for 
protection in places of unorganized competition.?
37
  If trade and business interests 
were made to rely on an international administrator, they would be compelled to 
support and strengthen international government, to take an interest in making it 
efficient and useful: ?For the excuse, the power, the prestige of imperialism depended 
upon the theory that the flag covers its citizens in backward territory.?
38
  This would 
deprive nations of both the stimulus and justification for intervention, and also rob 
them of the impact of appeals to sovereignty and nationality.  In China, Turkey, 
Morocco, Mexico or Persia ?mere laissez faire is an invitation to the adventurer to let 
her rip,? Lippmann told readers.  ?There is no way in which we can dodge the fact 
arms, Lippmann wrote, ?peace and federal union were impossible . . . The world?s problem is the same 
problem tremendously magnified.?  Ibid., 109-110.
35
 Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy: 131-135; quote on 135.
36
Ibid., 144-149. The meeting defused tensions between Germany and France over access to, trade 
with, and administration of Morocco.  Lippmann claimed that Algeciras conformed to the basic 
principles of his thesis: international control in weak states should be in the form of a ?local 
government, with the power to legislate and to hold administrative officials accountable.?  See 
Frederick Mark?s account of the Algeciras Conference in Velvet on Iron: 67-69.  Lippmann?s 
specialized commissions would act as mini or ?local world governments.?  In areas of imperial 
friction, Lippmann argued, constructing the foundations of internationalism would be easier because it 
was here that trade and business would welcome the organizing principles of regional, multi-lateral 
administration.  Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy: 142; 155.
37
 Ibid., 159. 
38
 Ibid., 157-159.
46
that we are deeply involved in the fate of backward countries . . . How to organize 
[them] is the chief task of diplomacy.?
39
Lippmann?s program required not only adroit diplomacy and compliant 
business interests but broad public support.  Here, Lippmann addressed his second 
major problem?the task of enlisting enlightened nationalists and restrained patriots 
to enhance the cause of internationalism.  Lippmann recognized the inherent 
limitations of participatory democracy in the conduct of foreign affairs.  First, real 
power over diplomacy resided not in the ?democratic machinery? of government but 
in one man, the president.  With the ability to publicize his agenda, Lippmann noted, 
the president had enormous power to appeal to the public either through education or 
resort to patriotic sloganeering or jingoism.
40
  Where American public opinion 
considered foreign policy at all it did so within ?certain conventional ways of 
reacting, certain habitual associations about phrases, and a number of set loyalties 
which are easily aroused.?  These were familiar catch-phrases: no entangling 
alliances, the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, and the Open Door.  Beyond these 
the average American knew little.
41
   Mass democracy was not merely fickle or 
undiscerning, it was inflexible?hamstrung by its size, complexity, and 
cumbersomeness.  ?The very qualities which are needed for negotiation?quickness 
of mind, direct contact, adaptiveness, invention, the right proportions of give and 
take?are the very qualities which masses of people do not possess,? Lippmann 
39
 Ibid., 165-171.
40
 Ibid., 15-19.
41
 Ibid., 19-20.
47
wrote. ?This isn?t entirely due to the ignorance of the masses; it is a question of 
inertia.?
42
Such limitations abetted the ?invisible diplomacy? of imperialist ?interest 
groups.?  These small but powerful constituencies used ?modern methods of 
publicity? to create ?national interests? (which obscured their own special stakes) 
and, then, to ?educate? the public about them.  The imperialist class merged a variety 
of motives: diplomatists were concerned with prestige; militarists wanted the chance 
to fight; financiers sought to safeguard investments, just as traders needed to secure 
protection and privileges; religious groups hoped to evangelize and civilize; 
intellectuals aimed to fulfill their theories of expansion.
43
How, then, did one deprive the imperialist elite of the ability to win public 
support for foreign adventures by wrapping their own special interests in the 
American flag?  Lippmann hoped to de-couple trade interests from blind nationalism 
by stimulating a wider public awareness about foreign policy issues.  This could be 
achieved once the ?weak states? were organized and administered by international 
commissions, making them attractive to the managerial class of merchants, investors, 
and professionals who valued ?stable markets and orderly development,? Lippmann 
wrote.  ?This would have an enormous effect on conditions at home, for it would 
42
 Ibid., 28-29.
43
 Ibid., 105-106.  ?The main point,? Lippmann wrote to an English jurist based in Egypt, ?is that we 
have disputed and unorganized territories without some kind of authority in them which is strong 
enough to control the rights of traders and financiers and efficient enough to administer and police the 
territory so that riot and revolution cannot be made the excuse for intervention followed by commercial 
monopoly.?  Lippmann to Sir Maurice S. Amos, 24 July 1916, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 
55-56.
48
mean that foreign affairs became an interest . . . of the far more extended middle 
class, and even the working class.?
44
Lippmann maintained that from this process, ?Publicity, criticism, and 
discussion must follow.  From them education.?
45
  Public debate and discussion 
would reveal the realities of a given crisis or problem, making it much harder to 
exploit nationalism and jingoism.  ?The people will be less easily led by the nose; 
diplomacy will become more and more the bargaining of groups, and cease to be the 
touchy competition of ?national wills,?? he added.  ?The real effect of democracy on 
foreign affairs will be to make them no longer foreign.?
46
  His views grew more 
pessimistic over time, but he never stopped grappling with this central issue: How did 
one educate the public enough to validate and support foreign policies that promoted 
enlightened nationalism?
A major part of Lippmann?s agenda was to prepare Americans for postwar 
responsibilities?arising either from direct intervention or from the nation?s new 
status as a major creditor and industrial power.  The book?s central argument?that 
American officials must pursue an activist foreign policy?responded to the pacifist 
movement which enlisted domestic progressives such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, 
and others.  Whether their particular causes were anti-interventionism, disarmament, 
or outlawry of war, Lippmann linked pacifists to America?s isolationist past.  Rather 
than provide the framework for order, pacifism yanked the scaffolding out from under 
a potential solution, Lippmann argued.  It offered no method other than abstention.  In 
his penultimate chapter, he told readers that peace would not sprout from ?any policy 
44
 Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy: 187.
45
 Ibid., 194.  
49
so sterile as not fighting.  Peace is to be had as the result of wise organization.  It 
prevails not where men have failed to act, but in places where they have the sense and 
the power to legislate and administer well.?
47
  All the remedies of the pacifist 
movement were negative policies seeking either to limit American participation in 
world affairs or to deny the government the support and domestic resources required 
to act definitively abroad.  ?A war fought to preserve the fabric of international order 
would be worth fighting, for that order is the only approach we have to the permanent 
peace of mankind,? Lippmann wrote.  ?To refuse defense to the international society 
is not a way of avoiding war.  It is an invitation to many wars.?
48
Therefore, Lippmann prescribed American participation in the ?Balance of 
Power.?  By joining the concert of ?Great Powers,? he argued, the U.S. could enforce 
peace.  He outlined a four-step program: 1) enter into the theaters of trouble; 2) create 
domestic interests (trade/investment) to justify that participation; 3) bulk up its 
military, ?to make it heard by the Great Powers?; 4) and, abandon its instinctive 
mistrust of foreign alliances.
49
  Only through a ?positive programme, requiring power 
and ability and inventiveness for its realization? could the U.S. organize the backward 
areas of the globe against the kind of imperial rivalry that incited World War I.  ?For 
the supreme task of world politics is not the prevention of war, but a satisfactory 
organization of mankind,? Lippmann wrote.  ?Peace will follow from that.  That is, in 
fact, what peace is.?
50
46
 Ibid., 194.
47
 Ibid., 211.
48
 Ibid., 217.
49
 Ibid., 226.
50
 Ibid., 224.
50
There were pitfalls and risks to such an activist program that threatened 
democracy at home?not the least of which was the militarization of society.  ?To be 
sure, the mere fact that democrats possess force may destroy their democratic faith . . 
. Having tasted world power, we may go drunk with it,? Lippmann conceded.  ?But if 
that is the kind of people we are, how impudent of us to utter one word in criticism of 
military empires.  If experience of democracy, if a century of comparative order and 
prosperity and human equality have made no difference, if we are bound to act like all 
the rest as soon as we touch the world?s affairs, then we might as well humbly retire 
and cultivate our private gardens.?
51
  But, Lippmann believed, the basis for a world 
state lay in the example of democratic government ?as organs of leadership in world 
politics.?
52
  Isolationism no longer was an option; in fact it was but a ?myth.?  
Lippmann contended that the alternatives were stark: ?being the passive victim of 
international disorder? or taking a role as an ?active leader in ending it.?
53
IV.
Lippmann?s emphasis on the need to integrate the international community, described 
in The Stakes of Diplomacy, merged with his evolving concept of America?s primary 
strategic interests.  In 1917, he first proposed that the U.S. must participate in and 
defend something he called the ?Atlantic community? of nations along the rim of the 
Atlantic Ocean.  The nucleus of this community would be the combination of British 
and American naval power, he believed.  Lippmann?s strategic interpretation of the 
51
 Ibid., 223-224.
52
 Ibid., 228.
53
 Ibid., 227.
51
war proposed intervention based not on ?principles? and ?ideals? but upon 
fundamental national security interests.  From 1914 to 1919, his views on American 
participation in a proposed postwar governing body?the League of Nations?
underwent substantial revision.  However, his confirmed belief in American 
internationalism did not change.
As a New Republic editor, Lippmann was inclined from the start of the 
conflict to support Great Britain and France?particularly in terms of economic and 
moral aid.  But the magazine stopped short of advocating direct American military 
intervention on behalf of the Alliance nations.  When Harvard professor Ralph Barton 
Perry accused the New Republic editors of holding a pro-German bias and dodging 
the primary ?moral issue? of the war, Lippmann penned the publication?s reply.  
?There?s a moral issue, a supreme moral issue,? he wrote.  ?It turns on the question of 
whether this awful slaughter and waste is to help towards a just and lasting peace.  
The moral issue is whether we can make the war count for or against a civilized union 
of nations. . . . The question now is not who started the war, but to what end the 
fighting is to lead.?
54
Lippmann?s New Republic writings hewed to this long view, though the 
Wilson   administration?s avowed neutrality concerned him.  Privately, he wrote 
President Wilson ?impossible . . . He has no grasp of international affairs, and his 
pacifism is of precious little help to the peace of the world.?
55
  Only when President 
Wilson edged toward intervention on the side of the Allies did Lippmann?s evaluation 
54
 Lippmann, ?Are We Pro-German?? 18 December 1915, The New Republic; reprinted in Early 
Writings: Walter Lippmann, edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (New York: Liveright): 23 -25.
55
 For quote on Wilson, see Lippmann to Graham Wallas, 8 December 1915, reprinted in Blum, Public 
Philosopher: 31.
52
of his foreign policy (briefly) improve.  Wilson?s 22 January 1917 speech before the 
Senate?his so-called ?Peace Without Victory? address?presented the President?s 
vision of American participation in postwar peace.  ?Is the present war a struggle for 
a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power?? Wilson asked.  ?There 
must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power, not organized rivalries, 
but an organized common peace.? Wilson demanded ?a peace without victory . . . a 
peace between equals . . . Mankind is looking now for the freedom of life, not 
equipoises of power.?  Lippmann praised Wilson for framing the question correctly, 
as a choice between organized security and armed, ?grudging isolation.?
56
Eventually, however, Wilson?s vision of basing postwar peace on collective security 
clashed with Lippmann?s idea that peace must be structured on power realities.
The danger of Allied collapse on the Western Front and Germany?s 
resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917 brought Lippmann 
publicly into the pro-intervention camp.  His justification for coming into the war on 
the Allied side linked American national security to the vitality of something he 
called ?the Atlantic community??a network of nations that rimmed the Atlantic 
Ocean, joined by trade, common security interests, shared culture, and political 
traditions.  In advancing this strategic interpretation of the war, The New Republic
editor appealed to President Wilson to state the internationalist imperatives for 
intervention rather than justify entry into the war in legalistic ?technicalities,? 
moralistic aims, or thinly-veiled assertions of American exceptionalism in relation to 
Old World politics.  ?The safety of the Atlantic highway is something for which 
56
 Lippmann, ?America Speaks,? 27 January 1917, The New Republic; reprinted in Schlesinger, Early 
Writings: 63-68; quote on p. 68.  Wilson?s quotes are taken from Lippmann?s article.  See also, Steel, 
53
America should fight,? Lippmann declared.  ?Why?  Because on the two shores of the 
Atlantic Ocean there has grown up a profound web of interests which joins together 
the western world . . . [which is] in the main one community in their deepest needs 
and their deepest purposes.?
57
Prussian militarists, Lippmann observed, had ?carried war to the Atlantic? by 
violating Belgian neutrality, invading France, and attempting to isolate Great Britain 
through submarine warfare.  These threats jeopardized American economic and 
military security, he wrote, ?and by attempting to disrupt us, neutrality of spirit or 
action was out of the question.  And now that [Germany] is seeking to cut the vital 
highways of our world we can no longer stand by.  We cannot betray the Atlantic 
community by submitting.  If not civilization, at least our civilization is at stake.?
58
Lippmann demanded a candid acknowledgement of why America had engaged in a 
?neutral? policy that essentially supported Allied control of the seas in the preceding 
months.  ?It is because we cannot permit a German triumph that we have accepted the 
closure of the seas to Germany and the opening of them to the Allies,? Lippmann 
wrote.  ?That is the true justification of our policy, and the only one which will bear 
criticism.?  As Lippmann explained privately to a reader, the disruption of Anglo-
American sea-power posed an unprecedented threat to U.S. security: ?the moment 
England is in danger of actual defeat by starvation or the crippling of her sea power, 
the whole world order in which this nation has grown is imperiled.? Lippmann feared 
a German victory would draw Russia and Japan into an alliance with Berlin, posing a 
Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 109.
57
 Walter Lippmann, ?The Defense of the Atlantic World,? 17 February 1917, The New Republic,
reprinted in Schlesinger, Early Writings: 73.
58
 Ibid.
54
two-ocean threat, ?and imperil us as we have never been imperiled before.?
59
Lippmann hoped that intervention on behalf of the Atlantic Community would 
cement a union between national interests and international cooperation which could 
not easily be dissolved by the acids of isolationism and pacifism.
60
Like many liberals at the time, Lippmann hailed U.S. intervention as an end to 
isolationism and a decisive step toward world government.  The ?great end? and 
?great hope? of U.S. intervention in World War I ?is nothing less than the Federation 
of the world . . . The democracies, if they are to be safe, must cooperate,? Lippmann 
explained.  ?We can win nothing from this war unless it culminates in a union of 
liberal peoples pledged to cooperate in the settlement of all outstanding questions, 
sworn to turn against the aggressor, determined to erect a larger and more modern 
system of international law upon a federation of the world.?
61
  Swept up in these 
enthusiasms, Lippmann made a brief but spectacular foray into government work 
during the war.  From July to October 1917, he served as a special assistant to 
Secretary of War Newton D. Baker.  In the fall of 1917, Lippmann was appointed 
Secretary of the Inquiry answering directly to Colonel Edward M. House, the 
President?s chief war adviser, drafting the text for the nine territorial points of 
Wilson?s Fourteen Points proposal.  Much of his language survived the editing 
59
 Lippmann to Julius Kuttner, 19 February 1917, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 62.
60
 Lippmann to Norman Angell, 1 March 1917, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 65.  He set 
three definitive objectives for the declaration of war, outlining them for Norman Angell, a contributing 
writer for The New Republic who advocated economic aid to Britain and France: 1) to repulse the 
German threat to freedom of the seas; 2) to commit America permanently to world affairs; and, 3) to 
ensure that Washington would have a touchstone role in the peace settlement, acting as a stabilizing 
force in the system that emerged.  See also, Lippmann, ?The Defense of the Atlantic World,? 75.
61
 Walter Lippmann, ?The World Conflict In Its Relation to American Democracy,? The Annals of the 
American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1917, Pub. No. 1130 (reprint): 1-10; quote on 
p. 8; 9-10.
55
process and made the final draft.
62
  Lippmann then was commissioned as a captain in 
the Military Intelligence Division (MID) in June 1918?recommended by Colonel 
House, Herbert Hoover (who noted Lippmann?s ?marked executive ability and 
general all round fitness?), and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, F.H. Rowe, who 
wrote that Lippmann was ?one of the clearest headed men of the younger 
generation.?
63
  For four months he worked in MID propaganda and also was House?s 
representative to Allied intelligence officers and Secretary of State Robert Lansing?s 
envoy to make special economic and political studies.  He returned to the Inquiry 
after October 1918 and traveled to the Paris peace conference late in the year.  
Effectively frozen out of the Inquiry by its director, Isaiah Bowman, Lippmann left 
Paris in February 1919 and returned to The New Republic.  By that time he largely 
had come to repudiate the postwar world federation he had heralded in the spring of 
1917.
Why did Walter Lippmann?member of the Inquiry, enthusiast for Woodrow 
Wilson?s re-election in 1916, and associate of Colonel Edward House?turn on the 
President and his League?  In part, Lippmann believed that Wilson had sold out his 
program at Versailles by acceding to the territorial demands and harsh reparations 
sought by the victorious powers?France, Italy, and Britain.  Wilson, Lippmann 
thought, also had failed to educate U.S. public opinion about the national security 
issues that ultimately compelled American intervention.  Having justified entry into 
the war with rhetorical flourishes about making the world safe for democracy, Wilson 
62
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 128-140. President Wilson inserted the first five 
universalist points.
63
 Major Gilbert Marshall, ?Walter Lippmann, File No. 10039-426,?Box 3055, Military Intelligence 
Division (MID), 10322-259/2, RG 165, National Archives, Washington, DC.
56
only magnified public and congressional disillusionment when?to salvage his 
League plan?he was forced to bow to the imperatives of power politics.  At its root, 
however, Lippmann?s critique was neither a personal vilification of Wilson or a 
repudiation of his internationalism.  Rather, Lippmann?s reversal on the League was 
based on his conviction that the articles of the League failed to provide the order and 
structure necessary to achieve Wilson?s dream of collective security.
64
V.
In the years after World War I, Lippmann castigated President Wilson for failing to 
state American reasons for intervention in terms of national security and instead
substituting democratic rhetoric as a kind of moral justification.  Wilson, Lippmann 
wrote, had provided no course of action with which to take Americans beyond their 
isolationist past.  ?Having learned that we must ?participate,? we are forgetting to 
specify,? Lippmann explained in September 1919.  ?We are resolved to take part in 
world affairs, but in our exhilaration we?re inclined to omit the inquiry as to what 
part.?
65
  As for the Fourteen Points, Lippmann described them as ?a vague attempt? to 
define the American role in the postwar world.  Wilson had repeatedly stated but 
never himself ?digested the idea, that a stable peace in Europe is the first and most 
important line of defense for the American democracy, that a democratic settlement 
there meant more to the security and prosperity of Americans than anything else in 
the world.?
66
64
 Blum, ?Walter Lippmann and the Problem of Order,? xxiii-xxv.
65
 Lippmann, ?Assuming We Join,? 3 September 1919, The New Republic: 145-146; reprinted in 
Schlesinger, 86-89.
66
 Ibid.
57
As the peace negotiations took shape, Lippmann described proceedings in 
Paris as ?profoundly discouraging.?
67
  Some of that disillusionment was due to the 
fact that the Allied governments imposed harsh peace terms of Germany and that 
Wilson?s European counterparts simply outmaneuvered him.  But here, Lippmann 
pointed out, Wilson?s high-flown rhetoric came home to roost.  For in having to 
adjust to the realities of peacemaking, it appeared that Wilson had abandoned his 
principles.  Lippmann particularly objected to the cordon sanitaire of nations, carved 
out of central Europe and meant to insulate German revolutionaries from the Russian 
Bolshevists, describing it as a ?very dangerous bit of fooling.?  He feared that the 
League of Nations would become the center of ?anti-Soviet intrigue,? employed to 
promote counter-revolutionary actions.  He strenuously objected to the Allied 
intervention in the Russian civil war.
68
  Further, territorial and political concessions 
exacted in the treaty not only violated the spirit of Wilson?s Fourteen Points, they 
seemed likely to produce instability in Europe: French occupation of the Saar with its 
critical coal fields; the drawing of the Danzig-Polish corridor that put two million 
German nationals under Warsaw?s control; enforced separatism in Austria; and the 
decision to bar demilitarized Germany?s entrance into the League.  ?It seems to me,? 
Lippmann wrote Secretary of War Newton D. Baker on 9 June 1919, ?to stand the 
world on its head to assume that a timid legal document can master and control the 
appetites and the national wills before which this Treaty puts such immense prizes.?
69
67
 Lippmann to Ray Stannard Baker, 15 May 1919, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 114.  See 
also, Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 155-166.
68
 Lippmann, The Political Scene: An Essay on the Victory of 1918 (New York: Henry Holt and 
Company, 1919): 70; 78-79.
69
 Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, 9 June 1919, WLC; reprinted in Blum, 117-119.
58
Having concluded that the Versailles Treaty was irrevocably flawed, 
Lippmann chose to scuttle the League of Nations unless major modifications were 
made.  He published his argument in The Political Scene, a slim volume compiled 
from his New Republic commentary in the spring and summer of 1919.  He made a 
temporary alliance with California Senator Hiram Johnson and Senator William 
Borah of Idaho in which all three men opposed entry into the League.  This was not a 
matter of political convergence but rather a momentary coincidence.  Lippmann 
objected to Article Ten of the League because he believed that it committed the U.S. 
to enforce an unworkable guarantee to preserve the deeply-flawed territorial demands 
imposed at Versailles.  In short, Lippmann argued, it put Washington in a position 
whereby it must uphold the current balance of power in Europe.
70
  For Johnson, 
Borah, and their like-minded colleagues, Article Ten threatened to deprive the Senate 
of its constitutional prerogatives to determine such basic foreign policy maters as 
treaties and the deployment of the American military.  The issue of usurpation of 
sovereign powers also cloaked core isolationist impulses which guided the basic 
approach of these western politicians, but that Lippmann did not share.
71
While the Wilson administration and progressive pacifists had ?entered a 
monastery where they contemplate ecstatically the beatitudes? of the League, the New 
Republic editor busied himself at tearing away at the covenant?s veneer.
72
  Collective 
70
 Lippmann, The Political Scene: especially 54-65.
71
 For a study of Borah?s approach to foreign policy see Robert J. Maddox, William E. Borah and 
American Foreign Policy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1969): especially 3-27; 50-72.
72
 Lippmann to Felix Frankfurter, 28 July 1919, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 123.  
Lippmann told Frankfurter that there were three central problems with Wilson?s program: 1) the 
administration had never clarified its vital interest before intervening in the war; 2) Washington?s 
diplomacy suffered from an ill-informed and inadequate diplomatic corps that misread European 
developments (Lippmann expressed additional concern that Colonel House may have shielded Wilson 
59
security most worried Lippmann.  Article Ten pledged the signatory nations ?to 
respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial and existing political 
independence of all State members of the League.  In case of any such aggression or 
in case of any threat or danger of any such aggression the Executive Council shall 
advise upon the means by which the obligation should be fulfilled.?
73
  Lippmann 
argued that the provision failed to protect smaller nations against ?economic 
penetration,? could not compel a repressive regime to change its domestic practices, 
did not protect the right of ethnic minorities, and permitted the development of 
militaristic states.  ?Article X is one of those grand generalizations,? Lippmann told 
readers, ?behind which every opponent of change can barricade himself.?
74
  Writing 
privately to Secretary of War Baker, Lippmann was even blunter.  The treaty 
provisions set the stage for another European war: ?We?ve got no business taking part 
in an authorized civil war in Europe.?
75
  The only way in which Lippmann would 
consent to joining the League was ?subject to reservations which release us from any 
automatic commitment to the present arrangement of power in Europe.?
76
to such an extent that he was deprived of even this flawed information); and 3) that President 
enunciated more than he negotiated.
73
 Text of the League Covenant in The Political Scene, appendix, pp, 110-111.
74
 Lippmann, The Political Scene: 56; 59.  Lippmann added, ?No printed text can govern the energies 
of a generation,? he wrote, ?but it can stifle the more inventive but scrupulous minds.?
75
 Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, 19 July 1919, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 121-122.  In a 
letter to Norman Hapgood, Lippmann wrote, ?[Wilson?s] real politics should have been to purchase the 
renunciation of the Imperial program with the American guarantee.  He saw all that clearly enough 
before we entered the war and he said many times that we could not guarantee the kind of peace that 
had not the elements of a real equilibrium.  When he got to Paris, he seemed to forget that the character 
of the League is not something independent of the terms of peace, but a direct product of those terms 
and that the League at present is fundamentally diseased because it is designed to administer an 
impossible settlement.? Lippmann to Norman Hapgood, 28 July 1919, reprinted in Blum, Public 
Philosopher: 122-123.
76
 Lippmann to Norman Hapgood, 28 July 1919, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 122-123.  The 
treaty, Lippmann argued, must provide for such ?flexibility and the possibilities of growth,? and, in 
this respect, he far preferred the language of Article Eleven which created a forum before which to 
bring not only territorial disputes but a host of political issues.  It provided flexibility to discuss crises 
and formulate solutions.  It was the ?friendly right? of League members, the text read, ?to draw the 
60
Lippmann renewed his advocacy for a formal Atlantic Alliance as the 
keystone for international organization.  He specifically linked American and British 
naval power to create a combination of military force sufficient to impose League 
decisions?a ?world pool? of power to serve as a ?nucleus? around which might 
coalesce a stable postwar international structure.  ?If Britain and America work out 
their common purposes, then such a preponderance of power is created as to make all 
notion of a balance impossible,? Lippmann wrote.  ?An Anglo-American entente 
means the substitution of a pool for a balance, and in that pool will be found the 
ultimate force upon which rests the League of Nations.?
77
While both Washington 
and London would retain command and operational control over their forces, the 
conditions for their deployment would be dictated within the League covenant itself.  
?Anglo-American sea power, fortified by the abolition of neutrality, becomes the 
ultimate guarantor of the world?s affairs,? he explained.  ?It is the force by which 
such liberties as we may devise are finally secured.?
78
Lippmann also challenged the Wilson administration?s preoccupation with 
containing Bolshevism.  Communism?Soviet or otherwise?Lippmann discounted 
as a form of despotism that thrived in politically-weak areas.  ?Bolshevism is 
extraordinarily easy to combat in a well-fed country,? he intoned, ?and its existence is 
attention of the body of delegates or of the Executive Council to any circumstances affecting 
international intercourse which threatens to disturb international peace or the good understanding 
between the nations upon which peace depends.? Lippmann, The Political Scene, appendix with text of 
the League Covenant: p. 111.
77
 Lippmann, The Political Scene: 41; my italics.  This was not to be, he continued, a ?policy of 
imperial alliance,? a bilateral agreement in which the foreign policies and economic ambitions of either 
country would whet ?the worst appetites of each? and commit ?both to all the troublesomeness of 
either.?  Sea power, Lippmann judged, is ?irresistible in conflict and yet cannot be used permanently to 
conscript and enslave alien peoples . . . Sea power can be all powerful without destroying the liberties 
of the nation which exercises it, and only free peoples can be trusted with great power.?  Lippmann, 
The Political Scene: 50-51; 42.
78
 Lippmann, The Political Scene: 51-52.
61
a sign of disgraceful incompetence in the governing circles . . . Bolshevism arises 
only when rulers have made a botch of their duties.?
79
  He had no empathy for 
Marxist ideologues, but neither did he harbor irrational fears of them.  If the Soviet-
American Cold War rivalry had its roots in the aftermath of World War I?as 
scholars have persuasively argued
80
?then it is clear that from the start Lippmann saw 
it as primarily a conflict based upon national security imperatives and historical 
interests rather than political ideologies.  Lippmann never succumbed to fears of 
Bolshevist expansion as did many of his contemporaries in the late-Wilson 
administration?and, as well, 30 years later during the era of HUAC and Joe 
McCarthy.
In the immediate post-World War I period, Lippmann was concerned with the 
manner in which the anti-Bolshevist obsession skewed Washington?s foreign 
policies.
81
  With Charles Merz, a future colleague on the staff of the New York 
World, Lippmann authored a study of the New York Times? coverage of the Bolshevik 
79
 Lippmann, The Political Scene: 65.
80
 For the earliest and still best study of this subject, see Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of 
Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (New York: Knopf, 
1967).  A more recent survey which links post-World War I anti-Bolshevism with American Cold War 
policy is Melvyn Leffler?s The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold 
War, 1917-1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).
81
 Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, 17 January 1920, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 133-134. 
Lippmann contrasted President Wilson? democratic rhetoric with the administration?s draconian 
domestic policies?in the wake of the Red Scare of 1919, the Palmer raids, and the government 
clampdown against dissent, particularly in labor affairs.  For The New Republic editor it represented 
yet another manifestation of the xenophobia that had long checkered American history.  ?It is forever 
incredible that an administration announcing the most specious ideals in our history should have done 
more to endanger fundamental American liberty than any group of men? since the John Adams 
administration, Lippmann told Newton Baker.  Harsh sentences for political offenses, censorship, the 
Justice Department?s sedition bill, and the hysterical fear and summary deportations of immigrants 
which arose out of the fear of Bolshevism, were among the developments that most concerned 
Lippmann.  It was a ?determined . . . dangerous . . . attack upon the constitutional liberties of the 
country,? he added.  ?These are dreadful things and they will have dreadful consequences.  They have 
instituted a reign of terror in which honest thought is impossible, in which moderation is 
discountenanced, in which panic supplants reason.  It was the solemn duty of this administration to 
62
revolution during a three-year period from 1917 to 1920.  Their final report, ?A Test 
of the News,? convincingly demonstrated the Times? journalistic sloppiness but also 
showed a clear bias toward the ?Whites.?  Lippmann and Merz found that on at least 
91 occasions the Times had enthusiastically forecast the fall of the Bolshevist 
regime.
82
  When Allied leaders were concerned that Russia would precipitously leave 
the war in early 1918 and allow the German army to shift its focus to the Western 
Front, Lippmann counseled patience with the new Bolshevik regime.  He explained to 
Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, ?we must beyond question, I think, maintain as 
friendly as possible an attitude towards the Russian revolution.  We should not scold 
the Russians, no matter what peace they make.  We ought to make it as clear as 
possible to them that we have not lost faith in the revolution, even though it is costing 
us so much.  We ought to continue to speak to the Russians with charity and 
understanding, and let them know that we see that they are acting under duress, and 
that we mean if possible at the settlement to safeguard Russia?s interests as much as 
those of anyone else.?
83
  Two weeks later, on 3 March 1918, the Russians signed the 
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, yielding Poland and large swaths of the Ukraine to Germany.  
Meanwhile, Lippmann worked quietly behind the scenes to set up diplomatic 
channels between President Wilson and the new Russian government.
84
  He bitterly 
opposed Allied intervention in that civil conflict, particularly the British and French 
occupations in Siberia and Murmansk and the American deployment of 14,000 troops 
to Archangel in 1919.  Lippmann described it to Secretary of War Baker as ?one of 
allay fear and restore sanity.  It has instead done everything humanely possible to add fresh excitement 
to an overexcited community.?
82
 Lippmann and Charles Merz, ?A Test of the News ,? 4 August 1920, New Republic.  The episode is 
evaluated in Philip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt, 1975): 138-170.
63
the least gratifying episodes in our history . . . We?ve got no business taking part in an 
unauthorized civil war in Russia.?
85
  During his final year in office, Wilson instructed 
Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby to announce a policy of non-recognition of the 
Bolshevist regime because it had subverted popular government?a policy as near-
sighted as it was preposterous, Lippmann believed.
Lippmann also dismissed speculation about Bolshevist expansion into the 
Western Hemisphere.  In the mid-1920s, when U.S. oil companies feared that the 
Mexican revolution would jeopardize their holdings and market access south of the 
Rio Grande, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg alleged that Mexico was ripe for a 
Communist revolution?a charge that Lippmann viewed as a pretext for American 
intervention.  As executive editor of the New York World, Lippmann worked 
feverishly behind the scenes to prevent military action?first writing editorials to 
promote the Morgan partner and his friend Dwight Morrow as ambassador to Mexico 
and then, once Morrow was installed in Mexico City, suggesting to him strategies and 
traveling there to conduct secret peace negotiations.
86
  On the World?s editorial page 
Lippmann dismissed the argument that the Mexican revolutionaries planned a 
subversive strategy to bolshevize Latin America.  He wrote, ?the thing which the 
ignoramuses call bolshevism in these countries is in essence nationalism, and the 
whole world is in ferment with it.?
87
  In a public debate on intervention he described 
the posturing of the Coolidge administration as ?vicious.  It represents the most 
disreputable and discarded practice of an old diplomacy.?  He added that Kellogg?s 
83
 Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, 26 February 1918, Box 2, Newton D. Baker Papers, LC.
84
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 137-138.
85
 Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, 19 July 1919, Box 4, Newton D. Baker Papers, LC.
64
press release which made the Communist charge ?was one of the most absurd 
documents ever issued by an American official.?
88
  He struck a theme he repeated in 
later decades: the need for American maturity in foreign affairs writing, ?the task of 
statesmanship is to avert irreconcilable collisions and to find ways of adjusting 
conflicting interests.?  He insisted in a ?modus vivendi??a solution ?respecting the 
national pride of sensitive peoples, and refraining, so far as it is humanely possible to 
avoid so great a temptation, from enunciating great general principles.?
89
  Lippmann 
deeply regretted even the implied threat of U.S. unilateral action in Mexico on such 
flimsy evidence.
In the late-1920s Lippmann also supported normalization of relations with the 
Soviet Union.  In 1929, he used the occasion of fighting between Chinese and 
Russian nationalists in Manchuria to prompt Senator William Borah to begin a 
campaign for recognition of Moscow; Borah complied but President Herbert Hoover 
could not be swayed.
90
  Four years later, when President Franklin Roosevelt did 
normalize relations with the Soviet Union, Lippmann welcomed it as a long overdue 
development.  The Russia of Stalin, he told Today and Tomorrow readers, was not 
that of Trotsky.  With Joseph Stalin?s consolidation of domestic power, the columnist 
degraded the role of Marxist ideology in determining Soviet foreign policy. ?While 
86
 See Steel?s account that uncovered what had up until its publication been an unknown facet of 
Lippmann?s career at the World: Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 238-243.
87
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 238.
88
 ?Kellogg?s Course in Caribbean Assailed,? 27 March 1927, New York Times: E7.
89
 Walter Lippmann, ?The Kellogg Doctrine: Vested Rights and Nationalism,? in Lippmann?s Men of 
Destiny (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2003; first edition 1927): 213.  Americans, Lippmann 
concluded, must ?recognize the fact that they are no longer a virginal republic in a wicked world, but 
they are themselves a world power, and one of the most portentous which have appeared in the history 
of mankind . . . [then] they will cast aside the old phrases which conceal the reality, and as a fully adult 
nation, they will begin to prepare themselves for the part that their power and their position compel 
them to play.?  Quoted in Men of Destiny, 222.
90
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 255.
65
the Bolsheviks cannot formally renounce their revolutionary rhetoric, to the present 
rulers of Russia, the doctrine of world revolution is a sentimental memory, a 
considerable embarrassment and in practice a dead letter,? Lippmann wrote on 25 
October 1933.
91
  The benefits of recognition, he added, far out-weighed the risks.  
?Russia is the great power which lies between the two danger spots of the modern 
world?in Eastern Asia and in Central Europe,? he explained.  ?If Russia wants 
peace, and it is plain that she does, then it is of great advantage to the world that she 
should be encouraged to act as a responsible world power interested in the 
maintenance of peace.  American recognition can have no direct influence upon 
Russian policy, but it would undoubtedly add some reinforcement to those who, like 
Stalin and Litvinoff, are interested in socialism for Russia, in peace and trade outside 
of Russia.?
92
  In these views he would remain consistent for decades.
Though thoroughly disillusioned with the League of Nations as it evolved 
from the Paris Peace Treaty, Lippmann did not surrender the idea of international 
cooperation.  In tandem with his refusal to interpret Russian foreign policy as 
primarily the product of Bolshevik ideology, Lippmann pressed for an internationalist 
agenda?supporting the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference, the reduction 
of German war debts (the Young Plan), and the refinancing of Germany?s reparation 
payments through U.S. loans (the Dawes Plan).  Lippmann also criticized the 
Coolidge and Hover administrations for their restrictive tariff policies which, he 
91
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Relations with Russia,? 25 October 1933, Los Angeles Times: A4.
92
 Ibid.  Interestingly, Lippmann did not emphasize the benefits of opening up a new trade market?as 
did some administration officials eager to stress the economic opportunities of recognition for the 
Depression-beleaguered American economy.
66
believed, ultimately hurt the U.S. economy by slowing the recovery of European 
economies.
93
Lippmann reacted acidly in the early 1920s when ?irreconcilables? and 
?isolationists,? particularly Senator Philander Knox of Pennsylvania and Senator 
Borah, appropriated arguments for creating international legal mechanisms to keep 
the peace: such as the World Court and the ?outlawry of war? movement.  Lippmann 
believed that these were thinly-veiled efforts to maintain isolationism by making 
paper pledges rather than by participating fully in world affairs.  He interpreted the 
outlawry of war movement as yet another combination of pacifist-isolationist interests 
which sought to exclude America from the vital conduct of classical diplomacy.  ?The 
genius of civilization has invented . . . diplomacy, representative government, 
federalism, mediation, conciliation, friendly intervention, compromise and 
conference? to settle international disputes, Lippmann wrote.  ?For as long a future as 
we can foresee, there will remain whole classes of the most dangerous disputes which 
no code and no court can deal with.  For them diplomacy is required, diplomacy 
working by conference, compromise, bargaining, good offices, and, also, in the last 
analysis, I believe, by the threat of force.?
94
  Here, Lippmann was combating two 
tendencies: first, the American resort to legalisms?the notion that paper agreements 
could tame geopolitical necessities and ambitions; and, second, the residue of 19
th
century political immaturity, i.e., that Americans had enjoyed relative domestic peace 
and prosperity for so long without having to engage the world, that they did not know 
93
 See Steel?s account of Lippmann?s various foreign policy positions in the 1920s, Walter Lippmann 
and the American Century: 252-256.
94
 Walter Lippmann, ?The Outlawry of War,? Atlantic Monthly 123 (August 1923): 245-253; quote on 
pp. 251-252.
67
the rudiments of diplomacy.  As Lippmann saw it in the 1920s, ?the reform of that 
[diplomatic] method is one of the most urgent of human needs.?
95
In an August 1928 essay titled ?The Political Equivalent of War,? Lippmann 
again challenged the pacifist and isolationist supporters within the outlawry of war 
movement?the same month that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed.  What had 
been an effort by French foreign minister Aristide Briand to lock the U.S. into a bi-
lateral agreement to renounce either country declaring war upon the other, would also 
have compelled the U.S. to uphold the European security system in the event that 
Germany declared war on France.  Secretary Kellogg outmaneuvered Briand by 
pressing for a multi-lateral treaty. Embarrassed, Briand could not decline.  When 
dozens of nations signed on, the pact became so watered-down as to be completely 
meaningless.
96
Lippmann understood that any viable international organization must be born 
of the cooperation and consent of the great powers.  World government would follow 
geopolitical alignments of power, Lippmann explained. Any workable League must 
?command the assent of those who have the power to enforce it and have an interest 
in enforcing it,? he wrote.  ?It must appeal to those governments which are strong 
because they enjoy the advantages of the status quo.  Only when the support of these 
governments is assured does there exist any guaranty of order in international affairs.  
95
 Ibid., 252.  
96
 The classic on the subject of Kellogg-Briand is still, Robert Ferrell, Peace in Their Time (New 
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952).
68
Only when there is order can any pacific method of effective change be successfully 
introduced.?
97
What Lippmann was calling for, then, was not really a system to abolish war 
at all, but a working international organization to mediate disputes and to seek 
solutions to specific crises that would?because of the condition of permanent rivalry 
that existed between nations?always arise between them.  ?It might be truer to say 
that we should have a modus vivendi which will for a time postpone war,? Lippmann 
explained to Atlantic readers.  ?For war will not be abolished between nations until its 
political equivalent has been created, until there is an international government strong 
enough to preserve order and wise enough to welcome changes in that order.?
98
VI.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Lippmann engaged the problem of educating public 
opinion about foreign relations?at times with greater analytical rigor than the foreign 
policy issues themselves.  He served as executive editor of the New York World in the 
1920s, developing the first modern opinion-editorial page.  He also published three 
books on the role of media in mass democracy: Liberty and the News (1920), Public 
Opinion (1922), and The Phantom Public (1925).  In 1931, when Scripps-Howard 
bought the bankrupt World, Lippmann transferred to the conservative daily New York 
Herald-Tribune, to write the signed column Today and Tomorrow?which would 
97
 Lippmann, ?The Political Equivalent of War,? Atlantic Monthly 142 (August 1928): 181-187; quote 
on p. 186.  He added, ?I cannot take seriously any project of peace which does not rest upon a clear 
acceptance of the premise that the establishment of order in international society depends upon the 
development of agencies of international government.?  Lippmann?s essay was an answer to an 
argument advanced by his mentor William James in ?The Moral Equivalent of War,? American 
Association for International Conciliation, 1910): 20 pp.
69
appear uninterrupted for 36 years.  By the time of the Second World War, through a 
combination of philosophical inquiry, self-positioning within the profession, and 
syndication, Walter Lippmann had transformed political analysis into an art form
peculiarly his own.
Lippmann? brief experience with the American propaganda machine during 
World War I, clarified for him the problems that he first raised in The Stakes of 
Diplomacy.  In that book, one of his chief tasks had been to inform otherwise 
disengaged and ignorant Americans about the conduct of foreign affairs.  Wartime 
information controls, propaganda, and overt manipulations of public opinion by 
isolationists and League supporters alike cast further doubt on whether the public 
could be trusted with deciding national policies.  In 1919, Lippmann wrote an 
Atlantic Monthly article describing a ?pseudo-environment? in which the public acted 
on information drawn from shadowy ?reports, rumors, and guesses? rather than 
established facts.  How could voters be asked to decide issues at the ballot box if they 
were ill informed?  ?Not what somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, 
but what is so beyond all our opining, constitutes the touchstone of our sanity,? 
Lippmann told readers.  ?And a society which lives at second-hand will commit 
incredible follies and countenance inconceivable brutalities if that contact is 
intermittent and untrustworthy.?
99
  His Liberty and the News, published shortly 
afterward, diagnosed the shortcomings of journalism and the need to professionalize 
the trade.  Lippmann knew, however, that the problem was not confined to sloppy 
journalism itself.  
98
 Ibid., 187.
70
Public Opinion challenged Americans? mystical faith in the ?omnicompetent 
citizen? and the absolute rule of the majority.  Its fusion of institutional controls on 
information, with a Freudian interpretation that stressed irrationality in human 
decision-making, produced a book that John Dewey called the most damning 
indictment of democracy ever penned.
100
  Lippmann elaborated on his idea of the 
?pseudo-environment??the forum in which political decisions were most often 
made?which was constructed from crude prejudices, ?stereotypes,? and incorrect 
?pictures in our heads.?  Human distortions of reality were exacerbated by a variety 
of external pressures, among them: censorship and propaganda, time restrictions, 
culture (?social set?), moral codes, the crush of new international responsibilities, 
misperceptions of overseas events, the cumbersome mechanisms of democratic 
government, and imperfect media coverage.
101
Complicating the problem of public ignorance were the institutional flaws in 
the press, the outlet to which the public so often turned to inform itself.  Americans 
too often regarded the press as ?an organ of direct democracy,? a surrogate for ?the 
initiative, referendum, and recall.?  Yet it was, Lippmann explained, inherently 
incapable of producing truths or deciding policy.  ?News? concerned only ?an aspect 
that has obtruded itself??treaties, wars, birth, death, marriage, crimes, and accidents.  
Without providing a synthesis of events, the modern newspaper presented little more 
than a menagerie of disconnected events.  The press, Lippmann wrote in a memorable 
99
 Walter Lippmann, ?The Basic Problem of Democracy: I. What Liberty Means,? Atlantic Monthly
124 (November 1919): 625.
100
 John Dewey, Review of Public Opinion, The New Republic 30 (3 May 1922): 286-288.  Dewey?s 
response to the book and its sequel, The Phantom Public, can be found in The Public and Its Problems 
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927).  For more on the Lippmann-Dewey debate, see Robert 
B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1991); James 
Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin-Hyman, 1989).
71
analogy, acted ?like a beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one 
episode and then another out of darkness into vision.?
102
Lippmann?s remedy aimed to create a government for the people to replace 
government by the people.
103
  His first solution was the development of government 
?intelligence bureaus? of experts drawn from academia to study policy issues; to 
collect, process, and analyze information; and to distribute those findings to the 
government and the press.
104
  He later dropped that idea, however, believing that as 
government-funded entities, they would be prone to propaganda and official controls.
Lippmann eventually settled on a second method of improving the flow of 
information both to the rulers and the governed masses: the political commentator.  
Writing for a newspaper, the commentator functioned as a one-man intelligence 
bureau, providing disinterested and unbiased information to both government officials 
and the public and fulfill one of the central reforms Lippmann believed necessary.  
?My conclusion is that public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to 
be sound,? he wrote in Public Opinion, ?not by the press as is the case today.?  A 
commentator might not steer public opinion to a pre-determined destination, 
Lippmann realized, but could shape the analytical itinerary, determining the topics 
and parameters of public dialogue.  Sans the intelligence bureaus, Lippmann opted to 
offer his own services?advising policy and educating public opinion in equal doses.  
In doing so, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once observed, Lippmann crafted a 
niche for the intellectual in modern society.  ?Whereas the role of the intellectual had 
101
 See Lippmann, Public Opinion: especially the first chapter.
102
 Lippmann, Public Opinion: 341; 362-364.
72
once been to declare the constitutional pattern of the universe to all mankind, now it 
was to serve up neutral facts to the ruling elite,? Schlesinger wrote.
105
Lippmann?s decision to initiate a signed column in 1931 profoundly changed 
his career.  It was the key move that positioned him in the role of the political 
commentator that he had invented in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public.  
Writing for the Herald-Tribune, with its sizeable and growing syndication net, also 
expanded Lippmann?s reach.  In 1931, he became a coast-to-coast phenomenon, read 
in New York City and Los Angeles and, eventually, in hundreds of cities and towns 
in between.
Contingency also shaped Lippmann?s career late in the decade.  In 1938, 
following a love affair with Helen Byrne Armstrong, wife of his best friend and the 
publisher of Foreign Affairs, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Lippmann left New York 
City to escape the scandal which had beset him in his old social circles.
106
  The affair 
resulted in divorce from his wife of 20 years, Faye Albertson Lippmann, and ruined 
the Armstrongs? marriage.  Within a year Walter and Helen were married, and sought 
to make a new life in neutral territory.  They settled in northwest Washington, D.C., 
in the former rectory across from the National Cathedral along Woodley Road.
This change of venue powerfully altered Lippmann?s career.  That, at first, 
seemed an improbable outcome.  In the late-1930s, the nation?s capital was still a 
103
 See for example Roderick Nash?s thoughtful analysis of Lippmann?s writings on democracy in the 
1920s, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 
1990): 57-61; see also, Carey, Communication as Culture: 89-91.
104
 See Public Opinion: especially, 392-393.
105
 Lippmann, Public Opinion: 32; 401; Arthur Schlesigner, Jr., ?Walter Lippmann: The Intellectual v. 
Politics,? in Walter Lippmann and His Times: 203-204.  For an overview of Lippmann?s role in 
shaping political commentary see, Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and 
the Collapse of American Politics (New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1992): 31-47; 300; 308-309.
73
provincial Southern town, lacking the social amenities of New York City, including a 
selection of restaurants, vibrant theater, or museums.  To compensate for the 
deficiencies of their adopted city, Walter and Helen became supreme entertainers on 
the Washington dinner party circuit.  Two or three time per week, the Lippmanns 
entertained the city?s elite politicians, officials, journalists, academics, and, most 
importantly, foreign diplomats.  Other evenings, they attended social gatherings and 
private dinner parties elsewhere in the city, often at foreign embassies.  A quiet 
evening at home was a rare occurrence.  Lippmann?s research assistant, Elizabeth 
Midgley, recalled that well into their seventies, the couple kept up a dizzying 
schedule.
107
For Lippmann, these gatherings were a form of work?where he culled 
information that filled his columns.  His rival, Joe Alsop, observed that working 
pattern and, despite the perpetual tension that existed between he and Lippmann, 
admired the columnist?s commitment to it.
108
  The move to Washington brought 
Lippmann into a new world of sources?one with a perspective distinct from 
Washington officialdom.   He had long been granted access to primary Washington 
policymakers?Wilson, Baker, House, Hughes, and Stimson.  But the new 
arrangements in Washington exposed him to foreign diplomatists in a way that, 
except for his trips abroad, Lippmann had never been.  Foreign diplomats?in the 
British and French embassies, the Indian embassy, and the Soviet and Polish 
embassies?became primary sources.  As a nexus point for so many diplomatic 
106
 See Steel? account, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 354-356.  Steel focused on the 
affair itself?little of which was known prior to publication of his book.  He spends less time 
discussing the practical ramifications on Lippmann?s career.
107
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley, interview with author, 28 February 2000, Washington, DC.
74
contacts, Lippmann not only advocated international participation, his writing took an 
internationalist perspective and his reach was greatly magnified.  His columns, which 
began appearing regularly on the op-ed page of the Washington Post at about the time 
of Munich crisis in 1938, became the staple of the embassies along Massachusetts 
Avenue.  His opinions, expressed in person and in print to scores of foreign 
diplomats, were the subject of innumerable dispatches back to capitals around the 
world.
The move to Washington also put him at the geographic center of national 
affairs in the 1930s, as the capital city took on unprecedented significance in the 
everyday lives of Americans ?with the Federal Government?s New Deal programs to 
combat the economic problems of the Great Depression and its response to the 
increasingly foreboding international scene.  Lippmann was cognizant of the 
historical forces at play.  ?The kind of journalism we practice today was born out of 
the needs of our age?out of the need of our people to make momentous decisions 
about the worldwide revolutions among backward peoples, decisions about the 
consequences of technological transformations of our own way of life right here in 
this country,? Lippmann told a gathering of journalists at the National Press Club on 
his 70
th
 birthday in 1959.
109
  In the early 1930s, he had joined other capital 
columnists?David Lawrence, Joe Alsop, and Robert Kintner?in explaining to 
108
 Interview with Joseph Alsop (1979), Box 1, Kern-Levering Papers, John F. Kennedy Library, 
Boston, MA.
109
 Lippmann, Address to the National Press Club, 23 September 1959, Washington, DC, WLC, Series 
VI, Box 231, Folder 491.  A decade earlier he had explained to a gathering of the American Society of 
Newspaper Editors that he had been compelled to write columns because ?by and large the news 
stories do not, and I think cannot, alone present intelligible pictures of events.  If the picture is to be 
intelligible, what happened yesterday has to be fit in with what happened last week and long before 
that, and with what could happen, and what may happen tomorrow and in the future.?  Lippmann, 
Speech to the ASNE, Washington, DC, 16 April 1948, WLC, Series VI, Box 227, Folder 367.
75
readers how Washington?s policies affected them and the world.  Fortified by his new 
sources and the growing relevance of the issues he was writing about, Lippmann 
gained ?an authority, a confidence? that his writing had sometimes lacked before.
110
Increasingly, he came to focus on the subject to which he had been drawn repeatedly 
for a quarter century?foreign affairs.
On his writing days, Lippmann retreated to his study ritualistically to compose 
a draft for the following morning?s paper.
111
  He went to it as a scientist 
experimenting in a laboratory?with patience, precision, and discipline.   Asked 
which aspect of his career he considered more important?his books or his 
columns?Lippmann chose the books.  These he described as the distillation of his 
journalistic inquiries.  ?I always viewed journalism as the place where I accumulated 
facts and information that I used for my books,? Lippmann told Ronald Steel.  ?Being 
a journalist was rather like being a doctor, you know, one has to go and practice.?
112
No less, however, were the columns authoritative sources for the reading public and, 
indeed, the author himself.  The art critic Bernard Berenson, one of Lippmann?s 
closest friends, told the story of one bright morning asking Lippmann his opinion on a 
current problem.  ?I don?t know yet,? Lippmann replied.  ?But I am going to write my 
column about it this morning and I will be able to tell you after I have finished it.?  
110
 Marquis Childs in Walter Lippmann and His Times 16.
111
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley, interview with author, 28 February 2001, Washington, DC; James 
Reston, ?The Mockingbird and the Taxi Cab,? in Walter Lippmann and His Times.  See also an article 
by Lippmann?s friend, Alfred Friendly, ?Lippmann?s Legmen Are Legion,? 23 January 1951, 
Washington Post: C22, for information on his work habits and his assistants.  
112
 ?Walter Lippmann at 83: An Interview with Ronald Steel,? 25 March 1973, Washington Post: C4.  
A second part to this interview (the last before Lippmann suffered a series of debilitating strokes) was 
published in the Post a week later, on 1 April 1973.
76
There was, noted the journalist Henry W. Brandon, a ?single-minded sureness of 
purpose? to Lippmann?s work.
113
Today and Tomorrow, or simply T&T as it became known in the newspaper 
trade, ruminated about the choices confronting policymakers.  It had a rhythmic 
quality, dissecting the most difficult issues of the day in about 1,000 words.  Reduced 
to outline form, a typical Lippmann column stood as a model of pragmatic analysis.  
It opened with an objective, succinct statement of the problem; moved to a section 
drawing on lessons of the past to provide historical context; offered a recitation of the 
choices available to U.S. officials, followed by a dispassionate analysis of the 
consequences; and, finally, the suggestion of a solution that?weighed against the 
alternatives?would produce more positive than negative results. 
Thus did Today and Tomorrow come to compose a virtual insider?s diary of 
the Cold War?representing not only Washington?s perspectives but those of the 
larger Atlantic Alliance as well.  Three times per week (until he cut back to twice 
weekly in the 1960s) Lippmann wrote principally about foreign relations, critiquing 
the policies of five administrations and analyzing the central events of the Cold War: 
the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, creation of NATO, Korean War, H-Bomb, 
Hungarian Uprising, Berlin crises, Sputnik and the spac e race, Bay of Pigs, Cuban 
Missile Crisis, and Vietnam War.  Between January 1945?on the eve of the Yalta 
Conference?and the time he retired the column in May 1967, Lippmann produced 
more than 2,200 installments.  At the peak of its syndication, his column appeared in 
113
 Henry W. Brandon,? On Walter Lippmann, The European Statesman,? delivered at the 1990 
conference on the occasion of the 101
st
 anniversary of Lippmann?s birth, Bard College, NYC, Box 27, 
Henry W. Brandon Papers, LC, Washington, DC.
77
nearly 300 newspapers and directly reached an international audience through 
publication in the International New York Herald-Tribune. 
More than mere chronicler, Lippmann scrutinized Cold War policies.  ?The 
sense of alternatives, a feel for the available choices, for the open options, the shots 
on the board, was for Lippmann the beginning of a formal, almost Euclidean, process 
of reasoning,? columnist Joseph Kraft observed.  ?He worked hard to make out what 
he really thought.  He tried hard to examine the unforeseen bad consequences of pure 
intentions.?
114
  James Reston, the New York Times columnist and editor and 
Lippmann?s prot?g?, observed that Lippmann?s central achievement was that he 
?provoked thought, encouraged debate, forced definition, and often revision, of 
policies, and nourished the national dialogue on great subjects for over half a 
century.?
115
Lippmann?s nearly single-minded focus on foreign policy after 1945, his free 
access to leaders at home and (more often) abroad, and his powers of observation 
powerfully crystallized the core issues of the Soviet-American conflict and, more 
broadly still, outlined the contours of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy.  Several 
times each week he opened a dialogue with an educated and engaged public in 
capitals around the world?a readership that included diplomats, government 
bureaucrats, businessmen, and, quite often, world leaders.  His first intent was to 
instruct readers on how to be ?fully enlightened nationalists,? who learned from the 
mistakes of Wilsonian policies, could calculate the nation?s primary interests, and 
114
 Joseph Kraft, ?Lippmann: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,? 11 September 1980, Washington Post: 
A19.
115
 Lippmann?s acid observations about the coda to Kennan?s ?X-Article? come first to mind; Reston 
and Childs, Walter Lippmann and His Times: 235.
78
pursue them through diplomatic engagement.  The distinguished newsman Eric 
Sevaried once told Lippmann, ?you?re a power in the land, like no other journalist, a 
kind of fourth branch of government.? Reston put it simply: Lippmann ?was the most 
influential columnist of his day, or any other day I knew anything about.?  He hardly 
exaggerated.
116
  That influence began during World War II with the publication of a 
remarkable set of books which, in turn, led the public and leading diplomatists to pay 
even greater attention to his columns.
VII.
Three volumes, published between 1943 and 1947, framed Lippmann?s position on 
the Cold War and, in particular, American intervention in Asia: U.S. Foreign Policy: 
Shield of the Republic (1943), U.S. War Aims (1944), and The Cold War: A Study in 
U.S. Foreign Policy (1947).  In rapid succession Lippmann outlined the core beliefs 
that informed his unique assessment of containment in Today and Tomorrow, as it 
applied in places from Germany to Indochina.  Much more, these books brought 
Lippmann to a conception of foreign policy that differed substantially from the 
orthodoxy of Washington officials and set him on a collision course with officials 
from four successive administrations.
U.S. Foreign Policy firmly rejected isolationism?a parochialism which 
Lippmann had attacked since The Stakes of Diplomacy.
117
  Portraying the American 
116
 Eric Sevaried to Walter Lippmann, 22 May 1962, Folder 1923, Box 19 (101), Series III, WLC; 
James Reston, Deadline: A Memoir: 137.
117
 In the book?s preface, Lippmann disarmingly identified himself as one who also had lived through 
and, to a degree, participated in the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson?s foreign policies.  Much of the book 
is an implicit, and at times quite explicit, rejection of Wilsonian themes, expressed in a forceful and 
disdainful voice belonging to one who?d once embraced the faith but then lost it.  
79
founders as sure-handed geo-politicians who skillfully navigated a series of European 
conflicts, Lippmann maintained that American foreign policy had gone astray in the 
long inter-regnum in which the British navy commanded the world?s oceans.  In this 
unique period America was able to accomplish its chief foreign policy goal of
expanding its contiguous territory with little or no interference from outside powers.  
That long era, which lasted roughly from the end of the War of 1812 to the Spanish-
American War of 1898, had produced a series of unexamined assumptions that 
formed the basis of American foreign policy.  ?The habits of a century have fostered 
prejudices and illusions that vitiate our capacity to think effectively about foreign 
relations,? Lippmann explained to readers.  
Those false assumptions, Lippmann called them ?mirages,? in America?s 
approach to foreign relations included pacifism, isolationism, and one-worldism.  He 
explained that nineteenth-century American security derived from none of these 
things but instead was based on the power of the British navy and a temporarily 
favorable alignment of power in Europe.  Peace, Lippmann explained, was not the 
ultimate end of foreign policy, but instead a condition that existed only when a nation 
possessed security.  ?A nation has security,? he wrote, ?only when it does not have to 
sacrifice its legitimate interests to avoid a war and is able, if challenged, to maintain 
them by war.?
118
   He attacked the American attraction to disarmament, the notion 
that U.S. must avoid alliances, and the Wilsonian ideal of collective security.  All 
three of these habits of thinking about foreign policy ultimately ?disorganized? and 
worked to undermine the very things that nations always did to protect themselves: 
such as arming for defense and negotiating bilateral security alliances.  Wilsonian 
80
collective security, Lippmann found particularly damaging because it rejected the 
necessity of groupings of power around which peace was actually organized.  In the 
1930s, the impotent League of Nations would have been able to enforce peace, 
Lippmann wrote in an argument that echoed The Political Scene, had it been based 
upon ?a strong combination of powers.?
119
Lippmann proceeded to outline the areas of vital American defense including 
the North American continent, the Western Hemisphere, and the approaches to them.  
The primary interest of U.S. policymakers since the republic?s founding had been the 
defense of ?the continental homeland . . . against foreign powers.?  By the early 
nineteenth century, the Monroe Doctrine had extended that defensive perimeter to 
?the whole of the Western Hemisphere.?
120
  Then, as in the twentieth century, 
Lippmann argued, it was the determination of U.S. leaders that that sphere must ?be 
defended against the invasion, intrusion, and absorption by conspiracy within; and, if 
lost, would have to be liberated.?  Especially with technological developments in the 
twentieth century such a protective plan required a forward-deployed defense 
structure.  Washington could not defend the homeland ?by waiting to repel an attack 
by a formidable enemy.?
121
  Instead, strategic defense demanded that America extend 
its reach ?across both oceans to all trans-oceanic lands from which an attack by sea or 
by air can be launched.?  Thus, Great Britain, Japan, and Russia were three principal 
countries that had a direct impact on American security.  A fourth country, Germany, 
had played a unique role in the twentieth century because it affected the balance of 
118
 Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: 51.
119
 Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: 74.
120
 Ibid., 88-89.  
121
 Ibid., 92, 95.
81
power by allying itself or confronting as a rival these three nations.  Therefore, 
Lippmann wrote, looking to the postwar world, American policymakers must ?with 
cold calculation organize and regulate the politics of power? among these key 
nations.
122
As one of the ?three great military states? that would emerge after the war?
Lippmann included Russia and Great Britain in this triumvirate?America would 
have a vested interest in ensuring that the arrangement of power did not threaten the 
Atlantic Community.  Most importantly, it was vital that the wartime alliances remain 
intact, he wrote, because if one of the three powers sought to realign itself with either 
Germany or Japan it could radically changed the balance of power.  Thus, as 
Lippmann had in The Political Scene, he pushed for an Anglo-American entente that 
would serve as ?the nucleus of force around which the security of the whole [Atlantic 
community] must be organized.?  He described an enlarged ?nuclear alliance,? 
composed of the Big Three wartime allies plus, potentially, China.
123
  Lippmann 
described the British-American relationship as a ?natural? alliance forged by the 
?facts of geography? and ?historic experience.?  So vital was this partnership that it 
had in fact become symbiotic: ?the overthrow of the American position in the world 
would mean the break-up of the British community of nations,? Lippmann wrote, just 
as the destruction of British power ?would mean a revolutionary change in the system 
of defense within which the American republics have lived for more than a 
century.?
124
122
 Ibid., 95, 100.
123
 Ibid., 136; 161-177; for ?nuclear alliance? quote, see p. 168.
124
 Ibid., 127, 129.
82
Though the Soviet Union clearly fell outside this special community, 
Lippmann nevertheless believed that a mutually agreeable European settlement was a 
primary interest for both Moscow and Washington, and one that he optimistically 
hoped would compel cooperation.  Geopolitics would override ideological disparities, 
Lippmann wrote, just as it had in previous Russo-American encounters.  ?The story 
of Russian-American relations is an impressive demonstration of how unimportant in 
the determination of policy is ideology, how compelling is the national interest,? he 
added.
125
 He briefly sketched the need for a neutralization of Germany and the 
nations that lay on the borderland between the Atlantic community and the Russian 
sphere.
126
  These were Lippmann?s broad outlines for a postwar arrangement of 
power?ideas that he would refine in U.S. War Aims a year later.  But already it was 
clear that, at its base, this arrangement would have a classical division of the world 
into spheres of influence controlled by great powers.
127
U.S. Foreign Policy provided not just a sketch of likely alliances and interests 
but a powerful theory for determining them.  Lippmann believed the U.S. would have 
a successful foreign policy only when ?we can become fully enlightened American 
125
 Ibid., 101.
126
 Ibid., 143-152.
127
 Lippmann was influenced by the work of Yale strategic theorist Nicholas J. Spykman who, just a 
year earlier had published America?s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of 
Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1942).  In his preface, Spykman posed the central 
problem of American participation in international politics which Lippmann directed himself to in U.S. 
Foreign Policy.  ?International society is . . . a society without central authority to preserve law and 
order, and without an official agency to protect its members in the enjoyment of their rights,? Spkyman 
explained.  ?The result is that individual states must make the preservation and improvement of their 
power position a primary objective of their foreign policy.  A sound foreign policy for the United 
States must accept this basic reality of international society and develop a grand strategy for both war 
and peace based on the implications of its geographical location in the world.?  See pp. 7-8.  Spykman 
died in 1943; there is no correspondence between the two men on Lippmann?s U.S. Foreign Policy, 
published in the summer of that year.
127
 Lippmann T&T, ?On ?Power Politics?? 18 December 1943.
83
nationalists.?
128
  What he offered was a formula of the national interest that was clear, 
compelling, and crafted in prose that even the lay person could understand.  It 
seemed, upon quick examination, to subordinate all other considerations?including 
economic, ideological, and moral factors?to the equation of power: Who had it?  
How much did they have?  Was it enough to achieve a goal?  As Lippmann 
explained, ?in foreign relations, as in all other relations, a policy has been formed 
only when commitments and power have been brought into balance.?  He elaborated:
Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives 
and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means 
equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its 
resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about 
foreign affairs . . . The constant preoccupation of the true statesman is to 
achieve and maintain this balance.  Having determined the foreign 
commitments which are vitally necessary to his people, he will never rest 
until he has mustered the force to cover them.  In assaying ideals, interests, 
and ambitions which are to be asserted abroad, his measure of their validity 
will be the force he can muster at home combined with the support he can 
find abroad among other nations which have similar ideals, interests, and 
ambitions.
129
This thesis shaped Lippmann?s commentary on foreign affairs for the rest of 
his life and provided insights into the limits of American power and its frequent 
misapplications.  It is no small irony that in the hands of U.S. officials, Lippmann?s 
stratagem for the ?national interest? provided an expedient rationale for an expansive 
national security program.  It fitted precisely the ideas they needed to circulate about 
America?s expanded postwar responsibilities to justify the financial outlays that the 
American taxpayer would be asked to bear.  Not surprisingly, they were enthusiastic 
about the book.  John McCloy, then the assistant secretary of war and soon-to-be high 
128
 Ibid., 137.
84
commissioner of occupied Germany, thought Lippmann?s look forward into the 
political reconstruction of Western Europe an ?enlightening? and ?excellent? 
discussion.  Assistant Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote the columnist that 
U.S. Foreign Policy deserved ?as wide [a] circulation as possible and I shall, 
therefore, do my best to see that it is a best-seller.?  The future first secretary of 
defense made Lippmann?s book required reading for a class of businessmen he taught 
in a course at Columbia University.
130
U.S. Foreign Policy, a ?Book-of-the-Month-
Club? selection, sold nearly half a million copies and was, by far, Lippmann?s largest 
commercial publication success.  Within months, the book was serialized in Readers? 
Digest and The Ladies? Home Journal.  Large portions were reprinted in the 
Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Sunday Times of London.
131
Washington officials embraced U.S. Foreign Policy for its emphasis on 
America?s leading part in the future of power politics.  In fact, they would read into 
this book?as they would later read into George F. Kennan?s ?The Sources of Soviet 
Conduct??a militarized worldview, a justification for constructing an insuperable 
ring of military bases and an air and naval umbrella to protect the American mainland 
and key allies.  But Lippmann? intent?indeed the book?s very title?made an 
important distinction here.  U.S. Foreign Policy reminded those same officials of the 
primary importance of setting a sound diplomatic strategy.
132
  Lippmann?s vision for 
129
 Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: 7; 9-10.
130
 McCloy was responding to Lippmann?s columns and both U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims.  
See John McCloy to Walter Lippmann, 30 June 1944 and 28 September 1944, Folder 326, Box 98, 
Series III, Walter Lippmann Collection (WLC), Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New 
Haven, CT.  James Forrestal to Lippmann, 16 May 1943, Folder 794, Box 71, Series III, WLC.
131
 R. Van G., ?Books and Authors,? 15 August 1943, New York Times: BR8.
132
The standard work on the subject of postwar U.S. national security planning is Melvyn Leffler, A 
Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: 
Stanford University Press, 1992).
85
postwar U.S. foreign policy was not exclusively a militarized one.  Planes, ships, and 
guns were ancillary parts of a national strategy within which military, economic, and 
diplomatic assets could be operationalized.  How American planners chose to use 
their power, where they projected it, for what ends they employed it, and whether it 
was used in cooperation and consultation with U.S. allies mattered as much as the 
number of bombers in the Air Force and the number of carrier battle groups in the 
Navy.  Lippmann?s approach called for an appraisal of new responsibilities from a 
classical conception of alliances and diplomacy.  
Lippmann?s correspondence with one of the country?s prominent Wilsonians 
elaborated on some of the arguments he made in U.S. Foreign Policy.  Lippmann and 
Quincy Wright, the University of Chicago professor of international relations (and, 
later, distinguished professor at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Foreign Affairs 
at the University of Virginia), had known one another since the late-1920s.  In a 
warm correspondence, they exchanged views on U.S. foreign affairs for forty 
years.
133
In July 1943, Wright told Lippmann that he agreed with U.S. Foreign Policy?s
argument that the postwar peace would be fundamentally shaped by the Big Four 
alliance?s ability to cohere.  As Wright put it, the alliance must ?manifest a degree of 
solidarity which will lead them actually to make the nuclear pooling of forces or we 
can?t begin to build? a workable postwar international structure. Yet, he added, that 
power must be accompanied by political and judicial organizations?which 
Lippmann seemed less inclined to support initially.  ?If we have nothing but a 
133
 Lippmann?s correspondence with Wright spanned a period from 1936 to 1966: Series III, Box 111, 
Folder 2280, WLC.
86
?nuclear alliance? among the big four without any political or legal guaranty as to how 
the alliance will be used, it will look to the little powers like imperialism,? Professor 
Wright insisted.  If the alliance and the postwar organizations it forged failed ?to 
command general confidence,? Wright feared, a ?counter-power? would likely arise 
and create yet another balance of power system.  Such an arrangement, with so many 
vacuums of power in world politics, would be highly unstable, he concluded.
134
Wright, moreover, was confused about Lippmann?s definition of the ?Wilsonian 
conception? he had attacked.  Hadn?t, Wright asked, Wilson ?insisted strongly on the 
need of a ?foundation of power,?? and that the League of Nations had been designed 
to sell the powerful combination of Anglo-American sea power to the world?  
Wright?s implication being?wasn?t Lippmann really doing the same in his book?
In his reply Lippmann professed that he and Wright were in agreement on all 
except the critical issue of collective security.  By ?Wilsonian conception,? Lippmann 
wrote, he meant ?an organization of the nations more or less led by the Big Four, 
committed to suppressing aggression, no matter by whom.?  The columnist intended 
no such arrangement himself.  The ?great object of international organization in the 
next generation is to hold together the alliance and to hold it together at almost any 
cost . . . so as to ensure us against another great war within the next thirty years and in 
order to give us . . . a period of grace in which to do a lot of things that need doing to 
make the world more peaceable.  Therefore, I want to find ways of binding together 
the Allies which are sure to bind them, and I do not believe they will be successfully 
bound together by any general covenant.?
135
  Though he did not state it explicitly to 
134
 Wright to Lippmann, 13 July 1943, Box 111, Folder 2280, WLC.
135
 Lippmann to Wright, 22 July 1943, Box 111, Folder 2280, WLC.
87
Wright, Lippmann?s corollary concern was that a postwar reprise of the League of 
Nations would too quickly become bogged down in specific political and economic 
disputes over which it would have dubious jurisdiction and virtually no power with 
which to enforce its decisions.  Rather, Lippmann proposed to Wright a common 
project, working toward an outcome in which all the major powers had a vested 
interest?preventing Germany and Japan from reviving themselves as dominant 
military powers.
Wright agreed that it was of the ?utmost importance? to keep the wartime 
alliance together as the ?nucleus of a world order.?
136
  But he rejected the proposition 
that the pacification of the Axis Powers should be the core project around which to 
build such an organization of power.  Wright estimated that the memory of fascist 
aggression would soon fade and, that in any case, Berlin and Tokyo would be too 
weak to provoke the fear necessary to focus world opinion on such a program.  ?It 
seems to me there is more hope in keeping [the Alliance] together through the 
influence of customs, developing an institution, through the habits of continuous 
discussion in an institution, and through common interest in stability,? Wright replied.  
This proposition, after all, was not far different from what Lippmann had envisioned 
in U.S. Foreign Policy?although Lippmann saw it as the outcome, not the origin, of 
a stable world order.  ?I believe a ?general covenant? facilitating continuous 
collaboration in leadership among the Great Four for the purpose of maintaining 
certain generally accepted principles essential for stability is the only thing that can 
136
 Wright to Lippmann, 18 August 1943, Box 111, Folder 2280, WLC.
88
keep them together,? Wright concluded.  ?As long as Germany and Japan are 
dangerous, those countries will keep the allies together, but no longer.?
137
The Wilsonian scholar proved far more prescient than Lippmann regarding the 
time frame in which the wartime alliance could convert a military victory into a 
diplomatic program for lasting peace.  Lippmann seemed to imply that the powers 
would have a generation to organize the peace.  Wright disagreed: ?I estimate the 
political memory much shorter and doubt whether it will be over two or three years 
after the fighting stops in which that new order must be organized.?
138
  Lippmann?s 
reply to that note was short, but got to the essence of his differences with Wright.  
Simply put, Lippmann mistrusted America?s frequent resort to legal mechanism in 
international affairs.  ?I not only do not object to a general organization,? Lippmann 
countered, ?but favor it provided our own people enter it with come clearer 
conception than most of them now have of the power politics involved in it.  One of 
our national vices is an undue trust in mechanical legal forms.?
139
  Indeed, 
Lippmann?s supported the internationalist agenda pursued by the Franklin Roosevelt 
administration during World War II: including the creation of the United Nations 
Organization (UNO) and its controversial relief and rehabilitation administrative arm 
(UNRRA), the Bretton Woods agreements including the establishment of the World 
Bank and U.S. participation in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), direct loans to 
allies, and the implementation of a foreign aid program.
140
137
 Wright to Lippmann, 18 August 1943, Box 111, Folder 2280, WLC, Wright?s emphasis; see 
Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: 174-175.
138
 Ibid.
139
 Lippmann to Wright, 3 September 1943, Box 111, Folder 2280, WLC.
140
 For two appraisals of the Roosevelt administration?s role in creating the UNO, see Townshend 
Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the U.N. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1997); and, Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder, 
89
The Lippmann-Wright conversation was prompted, in part, when freshman 
U.S. Representative J. William Fulbright of Arkansas introduced a resolution to 
commit America to a postwar international organization in the summer of 1943.  
Lippmann endorsed Fulbright?s plan, telling readers that its ?substance . . . is a 
pronouncement in favor of a foreign policy which is neither isolationist nor conducted 
on the theory of the balance of power, but rests upon the concentration under rules of 
law and morals of the power of the great nations guaranteeing the peace.?
141
Lippmann believed that Washington and London were in accord on postwar planning 
and that U.S. officials should seek a similar agreement with Moscow.  In much the 
same way as he explained in private to Quincy Wright, Lippmann told Today and 
Tomorrow readers, ?A perfunctory agreement made up our of high sounding 
generalities would not be too difficult to get . . . But we need something much better 
than that, and it is better to be thorough . . . than to be impatient and superficial.?
142
As it developed, Lippmann came to support the creation of the UNO, managed 
largely by a ?security council? composed of the primary world powers.  But he never 
saw the UNO as an instrument to enforce the peace.  It has ?a very important role, 
which is the role it?s always had, as a place where people can meet and talk to each 
CO: Westview Press, 2003).  FDR, so long an object of scorn for Lippmann because of his domestic 
policies, had gone at least part of the way for creating the mechanisms to make America?s participation 
in international affairs permanent.  For this reason and FDR?s near evisceration of the isolationists 
during the war, Lippmann heaped praise on him.  One week before Roosevelt?s sudden death in April 
1945, Lippmann wrote.  ?For cool, objective realism about what matters most, the President has been 
quite the equal,? of Churchill and Stalin.  ?The President has his failings as an organizer and 
administrator of his policies, and he has made mistakes of judgment, and has listened to poor advice, 
and has indulged his temperament.  But taken all in all, and measured by the results achieved, since the 
summer of 1940 his estimate of the vital interests of the United States has been accurate and far-
sighted.  He has served these interests with audacity and patience, shrewdly and with calculation, and 
he has led this country out of the greatest peril in which it has ever been to the highest point of 
security, influence, and respect which has ever attained.  If we do not recognize that he is a great war 
President, history will.?   Lippmann, ?The President as Strategist,? T&T, 7 April 1945.
141
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Fulbright Resolution,? 25 September 1943, Washington Post: 9.
90
other both privately and publicly,? Lippmann observed nearly three decades after its 
establishment in 1945.  In the sense that the UNO could ever intervene with force to 
settle a dispute between the great powers, Lippmann was far less certain.  ?Once in a 
while when conditions are very favorable and most of the big powers want it 
anyway,? then it could play a role by dispatching peace-keeping forces.  ?But the 
U.N. is not a great power in itself,? he added. ?For it to do any more would be to 
approach world government, which is an absolute fantasy, absolute nonsense.?
143
VIII.
U.S. War Aims (1944) was a slender volume with big ideas, which Lippmann meant 
to write as a continuation of the dialogue he had begun in U.S. Foreign Policy.  He 
dedicated the book to William Allen White who reviewed the proofs of U.S. Foreign 
Policy and urged Lippmann to write an additional chapter ?stating more positively 
and at greater length a positive program for keeping the peace after the war.?
144
  The 
suggestion came too late for the first volume, and White died in January 1944 while 
Lippmann was expanding that chapter into a second book.  U.S. War Aims is his most 
interesting effort of the three foreign policy books he published during this period?
but one that Lippmann scholars least acknowledge.
145
  At the time, it was somewhat 
lost in commotion over Sumner Welles?s controversial book, Time for Decision, 
which revived the Wilsonian notion of a League of Nations.  Consequently, its sales 
142
 Ibid.
143
 ?Walter Lippmann: America?s Role,? part two of an interview with Ronald Steel, 1 April 1973, 
Washington Post: C1.
144
 Lippmann to Sallie L. White, 27 April 1944, cited in Blum, Public Philosopher: 451.
145
 For instance, Steel devotes four pages of text to discuss U.S. Foreign Policy, but less than one page 
to U.S. War Aims.  See, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 405-408; 409-410.
91
were not nearly as brisk as U.S. Foreign Policy.  But in many respects, this volume, 
more than its predecessor, set the tone for the 2,300 installments of Today and 
Tomorrow that followed.  While U.S. War Aims hewed to the great power concepts 
Lippmann outlined in the first book, it offered a strikingly less strident approach to 
the question of merging core ideals and interests.  There was something of a slight of 
hand occurring here, although Lippmann was certainly not yielding to Wilsonian core 
values.  In a deft move, he substituted parochial American values with internationalist 
aspirations.  On this basis, years later Walter Lippmann would recall U.S. War Aims
as his favorite work on foreign relations.
146
The principal critique of Wilsonian diplomacy remained: that peace could 
only be had through organized power produced by a combination of regional 
alliances.  It could not, Lippmann argued, be accomplished in a world organization to 
establish peace?along the lines of a League of Nations.  The failure of Wilsonian 
principles and the Fourteen Points, Lippmann contended, was that they disorganized 
power.  He described the Fourteen Points as a ?series of prohibitions? which 
prevented nation states from doing those things necessary to defend themselves and 
preserve their viability.  ?The Wilsonian principles are negative rules which, though 
meant to prohibit aggression and tyranny, in fact prohibit national states from making 
the provisions which will ensure their own survival against aggression and tyranny,? 
he wrote.  Here again, Lippmann maintained, that meant creating a security structure 
that made lesser states dependent upon regional great powers.  In short, Lippmann 
146
 Lippmann?s reminiscences subject of author?s discussion with Ronald Steel, June 2002, 
Washington, DC.
92
called for arresting the Wilsonian trend toward a world state that would have each 
nation be the theoretical equal of any other:
We should seek to conserve the existing political states, rather than 
dismember them on the ground of self-determination, and that we should 
approve, not forbid, should protect and not dissolve, the regional groupings 
of national states.  The true constituents of the universal society would not 
then be seventy-three political molecules, likely to split up into no one knows 
how many atoms; the universal society would be the association of the great 
communities of mankind.
We have to reverse the Wilsonian pattern of collective security.  We cannot 
build a universal society from the top downwards.  We must build up to it 
from the existing national states and historical communities.
147
Lippmann did not object to Wilsonian goals per say, though he rejected any 
attempt to actuate them that ignored the proper power structure necessary to support 
them.  To the prominent New York lawyer Grenville Clarke, a proponent for creating 
a constitutionally-based world government, Lippmann put it succinctly: ?the principal 
conclusion which I reached was that the world could not be pacified and united by a 
constitution but had to be pacified and united in order that a constitution could be 
made operative.  I believe this to be the critical lesson of the Wilsonian effort.?
148
In large measure, however, Lippmann softened his rather axiomatic treatment 
of the national interest which he laid out so forcefully in U.S. Foreign Policy.  While 
not a full retreat from his earlier position, this ?realist? made the startling concession 
early in the book that Americans could not divorce core values from their calculations 
of the national interest.  But it would have to be for something larger than previous 
nationalistic ideologies that motivated American actions abroad.  ?The persistent 
evangel of Americanism in the outer world must reflect something more than 
147
 Lippmann, U.S. War Aims: 191-192; 195.
93
meddlesome self-righteousness,? he wrote.  ?It does.  It reflects the fact that no 
nation, and certainly not this nation, can endure in a politically alien and morally 
hostile environment; and the profound and abiding truth that a people which does not 
advance its faith has already begun to abandon it.?
149
  What then would be the new 
American faith?  Lippmann?s answer was to link American core values to the 
?Western tradition.?  Here existed a fusion between values and realities, Lippmann 
conceded, for a properly functioning democracy ?is nothing if it is not a positive faith 
and a way of life.  It has the right and the duty, and it must have the energetic will, to 
defend itself against all its enemies.?  Looking to the history of American foreign 
relations, Lippmann believed that the unifying factor behind U.S. commitments 
overseas was the fact that they ?enlist the American democracy as the champion of 
democracy.?  But it was when that impulse, that sense of mission became ?separated 
from the strategic and economic realities of the world? that the nation began to move 
down the path of ?quixotic and sentimental interventions, to disappointment, 
frustration, and cynicism, and into grave trouble.?
150
In a concluding chapter, with a title (?The American Destiny?) one would not 
associate readily with a practitioner of classic realpolitik, Lippmann coupled the 
defense of America from totalitarian dangers to the protection of Western culture 
from those same threats. In effect, he swapped out the nationalistic and peculiarly 
American notions of Manifest Destiny, innocence, and exceptionalism and substituted 
the more cosmopolite, civilizational notions in the Western political tradition?the 
148
 Lippmann to Grenville Clark, 19 September 1944, cited in Blum, Public Philosopher: 453-456; 
quote on page 454.
149
 Lippmann, U.S. War Aims: 40.
150
 Ibid., 154.
94
reason of man, natural law, minority rights, and civil liberties.  ?For America is now 
called to do what the founders and pioneers always believed was the American task: 
to make the New World a place where the ancient faith can flourish anew and its 
eternal promise at last be redeemed,? Lippmann explained.  ?To ask whether the 
American nation will use this occasion and be equal to its destiny is to ask whether 
Americans have the will to live. . . . The American idea is not an eccentricity in the 
history of mankind.  It is a hope and a pledge of fulfillment . . . it is indeed historic 
and providential.?
151
  As political scientist D. Stephen Blum has pointed out, this 
facet of Lippmann?s argument rendered ineffective those criticisms that he simply 
was propagating a version of realpolitik whereby might (i.e., American postwar 
power) made right?or, in this case, that these books created a permissive rationale 
for pursuing U.S. ambitions in a world diminished by war.
152
In mid-1944 Lippmann still had reason to be optimistic about the development 
of Soviet-American relations, though he understood clearly that the structure of 
postwar peace depended in equal parts on self-restraint in Washington and Moscow.  
Here, he saw the essential problem as being the disposition of both Germany and 
Japan.  ?Russia and America can have peace,? Lippmann forecast, ?if they use their 
alliances to stabilize the foreign policy of their allies.  They will have war if either of 
them reaches out for allies within the orbit of the other, and if either of them seeks to 
incorporate Germany or Japan within its own strategical system.?  Notably, 
Lippmann backed away (momentarily) from the notion of a neutralized buffer belt of 
states in Eastern Europe such as he had envisioned a year earlier.  He was prepared to 
151
 Lippmann, U.S. War Aims: 208-209.
152
 See Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in a Century of Total War: 130-131.
95
concede that this lay in the Russian sphere of influence. His vision of America?s role 
was more or less to hold the balance of power between Europe and Russian and to 
play a circumscribed role in reconstruction.  Lippmann argued America must yield to 
the European countries to reconstruct and rehabilitate postwar Nazi Germany, while 
China should play the primary role in the reformation of Imperial Japan.  Just how the 
prostrate nations of Western Europe and a China divided by a civil conflict were to 
manage and mediate such monumental projects, Lippmann did not say.
153
  He also 
believed that competition in former colonial regions also could lead to breakdown of 
the wartime alliance.  ?It will disrupt the peace of the world if the Soviet Union and 
the Atlantic nations become rivals and potential enemies in respect to China, India, 
and the Middle East,? he wrote.
154
  In much the same way as President Roosevelt, he 
viewed colonialism as obsolete.  ?Colonial policy,? he wrote, ?can no longer be the 
sole prerogative of the imperial state, and will have to be set by consultation and 
agreement.?
155
Conflicting political ideologies?like geopolitical priorities?Lippmann 
perceived, also could undermine postwar peace.  Here his optimism overrode the 
realities.  True collaboration, he maintained, could exist only when the Soviets and 
Americans agreed on a set of basic political and human liberties.  That agreement, he 
wrote, would have to be forged in the postwar world organization which would be the 
guarantor of national sovereignty, and the ?protector and active champion of 
democracy and freedom.? Lippmann continued, ?If it is not that, it will be a mere 
mechanism and procedure, divorced from the vital realities of the world, and without 
153
 See for example, U.S. War Aims: 105; 116.
154
 Lippmann, U.S. War Aims: 95.
96
a living faith which enlists the devotion of mankind.  It will be a mere forum for 
contention, an arena of conflict and maneuver.?  This muddied his argument.  For, in 
essence, what Lippmann was saying was that the Soviets must be asked candidly to 
embrace what were perceived as democratic values but might, more properly, be 
identified as Western values.  Failing that, he wrote, there would be rivalry and only a 
modicum of cooperation.  ?Only the inviolability of the human spirit can ever be the 
criterion of a universal standard,? Lippmann wrote.  ?Nothing else unites men 
beneath their differences.  The outward and visible sign of faith in this inviolability is, 
in the realm of politics, to guarantee freedom of thought and expression, and thus to 
found government upon the continuing consent of the governed.  When these 
guarantees are effective, a national state is affirming its adherence to the only 
conceivable standard of morals which can be universal.?
156
  If the Soviet Union did 
not liberalize, however, repression and authoritarianism would take hold and make 
relations with democratic governments, fearful of domestic subversion, nearly 
impossible.  Structured peace would not follow, ?only a modus vivendi, only 
compromises, bargains, specific agreements, only a diplomacy of checks and counter-
checks.? 
157
 In short, what Lippmann was describing came to pass?a cold war based 
on mutual suspicions.
155
 Ibid.
156
 Lippmann, U.S. War Aims: 152.
157
 Ibid., 141; see pp. 136-141.
97
IX.
U.S. War Aims and U.S. Foreign Policy made Lippmann the authoritative American 
foreign policy commentator.
158
  From the summer of 1945 into the spring of 1947, 
Lippmann believed that the U.S.?s role was to act as the mediator and counter-balance 
between Moscow and London.  He viewed these two as the primary rivals in the 
wartime alliance because their interests in the Balkans and the Middle East brought 
them into direct conflict.  He was fearful, for a time, that British officials would align 
the U.S. against the Soviets to protect their interests. Lippmann grew increasingly 
frustrated with Harry S. Truman?s confrontational style with the Soviets, believing 
that the President?s inexperience and impulsive style unsuited to the kind of personal 
diplomacy that FDR had crafted to hold together the fragile wartime alliance.  The 
columnist was critical of Anglo-American efforts to isolate the Soviets at the May 
1945 UNO meeting in San Francisco.  He believed that the German occupation zones 
should be reunited, economically de-centralized, and demilitarized even as U.S. and 
British officials were consolidating power in the Western zones.  He dismissed 
158
 In this respect, Lippmann was a moderate around whom like-minded domestic politicians rallied.  J. 
William Fulbright, who was elected to the Senate in 1944, would become one of Lippmann?s 
confidants on Vietnam.  He was but one a number of the columnist?s Capitol Hill admirers who 
regularly read Today and Tomorrow installments into the Congressional Record.  In 1945, making the 
case for international control of atomic energy, Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas of 
California?another stalwart internationalist?quoted whole sections of Lippmann?s columns which 
outlined a plan for a United Nation?s nuclear regulatory council.  Lippmann called for a wide 
dissemination of atomic information among the international scientific community, so as ?to prevent 
the secret use of [nuclear] knowledge as a military surprise.?  He outlined a program of oversight, 
inspections, and international monitors, insisting that the pretense that atomic energy could be kept 
?secret . . . could only give us, as it has already given many, a false sense of security and a false sense 
of our own power.?  Congresswoman Douglas worked straight from these premises in sponsoring a 
plan for an international atomic agency with California colleague Jerry Voorhis.  ?This false sense of 
power could lead us straight into the old isolationism,? Douglas told colleagues in a floor speech.  
?Our faith in the future cannot be built upon the sands of isolationism or in the false security of any 
secret weapons.?  Lippmann, T&T, ?The Atomic Secret,? 2 October 1945. See also, Congressional 
Record, House, 4 October 1945, 79
th
 Congress, 1
st
 Session: 9460-9461.  During her six years in the 
98
Churchill?s ?Iron Curtain? speech in March 1946, as a ?counsel of despair? and a bald 
attempt to bring the U.S. into an Anglo-American front to protect British imperial 
interests.
159
  Lippmann further insisted that Europe could not be divided indefinitely 
into two armed camps.  He feared by late 1946 that Washington was inclined toward 
a ?policy of lend-leasing American power and influence to an anti-Soviet coalition . . 
. a heterogeneous collection of unstable governments and contending parties and 
factions? which would pull the U.S. into conflicts with the Russians.
160
  While he 
supported economic and some military aid to Greece and Turkey the following year, 
when Britain revealed it could no longer afford to support anti-insurgent programs, 
Lippmann lambasted President Truman?s policy of protecting free peoples across the 
globe from communist subversion as an ill-advised, anti-communist crusade.
161
In July 1947 the journal Foreign Affairs published an anonymous article, 
written by ?X,? titled ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct.?  Shortly thereafter New York 
Times columnist Arthur Krock identified the author as George F. Kennan, an upper-
level, career U.S. diplomat who had just concluded a long tour of duty in Soviet 
Russia.  A year before, Kennan had written the unpublished ?Long Telegram? 
warning his Washington superiors of imminent conflict with Moscow.  In 1946, 
Kennan was appointed as an instructor at the Army War College.  In May 1947, 
Secretary of State George Marshall named him the director of the State Department?s 
newly-created Policy Planning Staff.  James Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense, 
prodded Kennan to publish his ideas in a public format that might explain the 
House Douglas read dozens of Lippmann?s columns into the Record and incorporated them into her 
addresses.
159
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Mr. Churchill?s Speech,? 7 March 1946; Lippmann, T&T, ?The U.S..S. 
Missouri,? 9 March 1946. 
99
American rationale for dealing with the Soviets.  ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct? 
was that product. Coming when it did?on the heels of the Truman Doctrine?and 
considering the position and intellectual gravitas of its author, the article had a 
sensational effect on public opinion and was taken, both in the U.S. and abroad, as an 
official explication of American policy.
162
The picture Kennan conjured of Kremlin leaders was bleak: an oppressive 
central regime that subordinated all facets of society to party; a paranoid leadership, 
informed by the darker lessons of Russian history and driven by an overly-determined 
view of world history, that had as its central thesis the inevitable conflict with and 
collapse of capitalism; and a plodding but unrelenting bureaucratic, political, and 
military machine bent on world domination.  Soviet power, Kennan explained, 
exploited vacuums of power.  ?Its political action is a fluid stream which moves 
constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal,? he wrote.  ?Its 
main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in 
the basin of world power.?  The only thing the Russians understood and respected, he 
added, was sheer, raw, undiluted power.  This created a unique challenge for 
American leaders since the ?patient persistence? which animated Soviet foreign 
policy precluded ?sporadic acts? of resistance which one might expect to be mounted 
by unfocused democratic governments and, instead, demanded ?intelligent long-range 
policies on the part of Russia?s adversaries.?
163
160
 Lippmann, T&T, ?For America to Decide,? 7 September 1946.
161
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Policy or Crusade?? 15 March 1947.
162
 Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950: 64-70.
163
 George F. Kennan, ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct,? Foreign Affairs 25 (No. 4, July 1947): 574-
575.
100
Kennan proposed that the primary element of American policy toward Russia 
?must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian 
expansive tendencies.?
164
  The diplomat, in effect, gave a name to a policy which 
American leaders had been developing since 1946.  There was little specificity as to 
what form containment would take: military, political, and/or economic.  Years later 
Kennan regretted that he had been so vague on this point.
165
  But he was preparing 
fellow citizens for a long, twilight struggle of a minimum of 10 to 15 years, wherein 
vigilant resistance to Soviet encroachments would gradually mellow and disperse 
Soviet power and promote its destruction through the intensification of its own 
internal contradictions.
In 14 Today and Tomorrow columns published over the course of September 
1947, Lippmann probed Kennan?s argument, found its inherent contradictions, and 
judged it supremely troubling.  The serial installments began in early September, and 
were compiled and published as The Cold War in November.  Lippmann mounted a 
three-pronged attack on the X-Article questioning its analysis of Kremlin intentions; 
its strategic conception and soundness; and, most significantly, its tone of resignation 
to the task which, as Kennan concluded in his coda, ?history had so plainly intended 
164
 Kennan, ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct,? 574-575.  Kennan added, ?the Soviet pressure against 
the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant 
application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, 
corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy.?  See, ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct,? 
576.
165
 George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1963): 357-359.  See also 
Kennan, ?Containment Then and Now,? Foreign Affairs, 65 (No. 4, Spring 1987): 885-890.  Kennan 
explained that he did not see the Soviet Union as a military threat at the time but rather as an 
?ideological-political threat.?  The point of the X-Article, Kennan claimed, ?was simply this: ?Don?t 
make any more unnecessary concessions to these people.  Make it clear to them that they are not going 
to be allowed to establish any dominant influence in Western Europe and in Japan if there is anything 
we can do to prevent it.  When we have stabilized the situation in this way, then perhaps we will be 
able to talk with them bout some sort of a general political and military disengagement in Europe and 
in the Far East?not before.?
101
the American people to bear.?
166
  Politically, militarily, and diplomatically Lippmann 
found that analysis wanting.
Lippmann first addressed himself to the optimistic assumption upon which 
Kennan based his argument: that Soviet power would collapse from within because 
?it bears within itself the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds
is well advanced.?  Lippmann, who was not a Sovietologist, could not evaluate that 
claim entirely.  But, he pointed out, neither could Mr. X who admitted that this 
central conviction around which containment was constructed: ?cannot be proved.  
And it cannot be disproved.?
167
  This assumption was too great a gamble, Lippmann 
objected, especially in that, if enacted, it would fundamentally reorient American 
foreign policy.  Containment was not prudently constructed on a worst-case scenario; 
even its author presumed it unworkable ?unless there are miracles and we get all the 
breaks.?
168
  Therefore, Lippmann set himself to answering the question which 
Kennan ignored: Could the Western Alliance bear the strain of containment?  Or, to 
phrase it slightly differently, Lippmann asked not what the Russians were capable of 
achieving but what the U.S. had the power to withhold from them.
Kennan?s containment, Lippmann argued, was not suited to the American 
system of government or any government which operated under the constraints of 
democratic machinery, a Constitution, and checks and balances.  Mr. X failed to 
address the means to secure the two vital components that a successful policy of 
containment demanded: money and political authority.  ?How, for example, under the 
166
 For Kennan?s distinctly un-realist coda, see, ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct,? 582
167
 Kennan, ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct,? 580.
168
 Walter Lippmann: The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers 
Publishers, 1947): 11-12.
102
Constitution of the United States is Mr. X going to work out an arrangement by which 
the Department of State has the money and the military power always available in 
sufficient amounts to apply ?counterforce? at constantly shifting points all over the 
world?? Lippmann asked.  ?Is he going to ask Congress for a blank check in the 
Treasury and for a blank authorization to use the armed forces?  Not if the American 
constitutional system is to be maintained.?
169
  Moreover, how would the undirected 
and unplanned American economy adjust to the ebb and flow of demand from those 
countries ?containing? the Soviet Union?s constantly shifting probes?  Lippmann 
projected that it could not.  If containment was intended to try Russia?s patience, he 
countered, it would be more likely to frustrate the American taxpayer and soldier far 
sooner than it did their Soviet counterparts.
Studying its military aspects, Lippmann declared containment to be a 
?strategic monstrosity.?
170
  Severe domestic political constraints existed.  The 
American system was woefully inadequate to react quickly to Russian provocations at 
a series of constantly shifting points around the globe.  Authorization for the use of 
military force would not be readily forthcoming.  Soviet troops would already be 
consolidating their positions in those places they chose to attack or invade, before 
Congress had even begun committee hearings on whether to send U.S. forces in 
response.  More significantly, containment misrepresented the real sources of 
American military power which were its air and naval forces.  Whereas to meet 
Soviet probes all along the borderlands in Europe and Asia, as Kennan envisioned it, 
American sea and air power would be impotent and ground forces would be required.  
169
 Lippmann, The Cold War: 15.
170
 Ibid., 18.
103
Here, the Soviets who still fielded the world?s largest army had a dramatic advantage, 
while the Western Alliance nations, which were in the midst of demobilization and 
already demographically disadvantaged, were at their weakest.  ?American military 
power is distinguished by its mobility, its speed, its range and its offensive striking 
force,? Lippmann wrote.  ?But it is not designed for, or adapted to, a strategy of 
containing, waiting, countering, blocking, with no more specific objective than the 
eventual ?frustration? of the opponent.?  Finally, containment ceded strategic initiative 
to the Soviets who could pick and choose places to test the military power of the 
Western alliance, for the policy of containment required the United States ?to 
confront the Russians with counterforce ?at every point? along the line, instead of at 
those points which we have selected because . . . our kind of sea and air power can 
best be exerted.?
171
Lacking the ground forces to check Soviet moves on a global front, 
Washington policymakers would be tempted to wage proxy wars by drawing on the 
reserves of infantry forces from an unstable conglomerate of developing nations and 
countries bordering the U.S.S.R.  Here, Lippmann found appalling military and 
diplomatic consequences.  First, the creation and support of such containing ring of 
alliances would be a Herculean task.  He reminded readers of the prodigious effort it 
took to assemble and then preserve the United Nations alliance during World War 
II?and that was between well-developed and mostly homogeneous nations.  Even if 
patched together, Kennan?s containment required alliances of warlords, tribal chiefs, 
strongmen, and petty dictators along the Russian periphery.  It would be inherently 
unstable, lacking many modern institutions, and still dragging under the weight of the 
171
 Lippmann, The Cold War: 18-20.
104
legacy of colonial rule.  It would be a prime arena in which the Soviet Union could 
disrupt Western programs with a modicum of effort.  The greatest single liability, 
however, would be the tendency of these minor players to draw the superpowers into 
their own regional rivalries and civil conflicts.  
Lippmann perceived just how easily the proxy players could co-opt 
superpower strategy to pursue their own ends.  With uncanny accuracy he predicted 
the pitfalls that awaited American policymakers in places like Korea, Taiwan, and, 
especially, South Vietnam?where they were out-maneuvered and entangled by the 
authoritarians whom they under-wrote: Syngman Rhee, Chiang Kai-shek, and Ngo 
Dinh Diem.  Lippmann warned, 
A diplomatic war conducted as this policy demands, that is to say conducted 
indirectly, means that we must stake our own security and the peace of the 
world upon satellites, puppets, clients, agents about whom we can know very 
little.  Frequently they will act for their own reasons, and on their own 
judgments, presenting us with accomplished facts that we did not intend, and 
with crises for which we are unready.  The ?unassailable barriers? will 
present us with an unending series of insoluble dilemmas.  We shall have 
either to disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement 
and defeat and the loss of face, or must support them at an incalculable cost 
on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue.
172
Lippmann also perceived the diplomatic travails that the containment policy 
would cause within the Western Alliance.  The orthodoxy of containment, he said, 
offered American allies in Western Europe ?intolerable alternatives.?  Either the 
Western nations would fall under indirect Russian domination or the whole of Europe 
would become, at best, a military redoubt or, at worst, the principal battlefield of a 
Russian-American war.  The inclination of these lesser powers would be to extricate 
themselves from the Soviet-American conflict.  They might, Lippmann speculated, 
105
seek to act as mediators and, thus, balance off Moscow and Washington; but they 
might also, and here the prospects were bleak, move toward an isolating neutrality in 
order to avoid the dual catastrophe of being invaded by the Red Army and bombed by 
the American Air Force.  An element of benign neglect also was at work in 
containment in that it assumed that Washington would dictate policy to the allies 
rather than consult with them about it.  To illustrate this point, Lippmann drew a stark 
comparison between the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.  The former ?treats 
those who are supposed to benefit by it as dependents of the United States, as 
instruments of the American policy of ?containing? Russia,? Lippmann explained.  
Conversely, the Marshall Plan treated the European governments ?as independent 
powers, whom we must help but cannot presume to govern, or to use as instruments 
of an American policy.?
173
Moreover, Lippmann warned against the temptation to use the newly-
organized UNO as a proxy arena for waging the Cold War?particularly by using the 
veto on the Security Council or by creating voting blocks within the General 
Assembly.  The UNO could not be given the task of making the peace, Lippmann 
wrote; that would come about only when the great powers had made their own peace 
treaties.  A Cold War, carried out by means of containment, Lippmann was 
convinced, would either kill or permanently cripple the functions and authority of the 
United Nations.
174
Underlying this analysis of the effects of containment upon America?s 
relations with its friends and with the wider community of nations, was an insightful 
172
 Lippmann, The Cold War: 23.
173
 Ibid., 54.
106
criticism that Kennan?s policy, did ?not have as its objective a settlement of the 
conflict with Russia.?
175
  Lippmann bristled at containment?s subtle implication that 
diplomacy was not a viable pursuit between Washington and Moscow. He tweaked 
the career diplomat for attempting to rationalize a policy that, if followed to its logical 
conclusion, would have ignored the fundamental facts of life about relations between 
nations.  ?The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, 
which did not enjoy political intimacy, and did not respond to appeals to common 
purposes,? Lippmann wrote.  ?Nevertheless, there have been settlements. . . . For a
diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is 
to forget what diplomacy is about.  There would be little for diplomats to do if the 
world consisted of partners, enjoying political intimacy, and responding to common
appeals.?
176
Lippmann already had outlined in U.S. War Aims the challenge of maintaining 
the wartime partnership between the authoritarian Moscow regime and the American 
democracy.  He agreed with Kennan that these differing political systems would 
circumscribe the relationship: that there would, in Kennan?s words, be ?no political 
174
 Ibid., 58.
175
 Ibid., 59.
176
 Ibid., 60.  This was not the last time Lippmann offered such advice to Kennan.  After his brief stint 
as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Kennan wrote to McGeorge Bundy that diplomatic 
recognition of the Soviets had been a mistake, Lippmann gently prodded his friend to rethink his 
position.  Kennan?s ?doctrine about de jure recognition of a government contains within it the 
implication of sufficient ideological harmony between the two governments to rule out any 
fundamental conflict of ultimate purpose.?  Lippmann preferred that recognition signify only the 
?pragmatic rule that the government governs the area under a certain jurisdiction and that it wishes to 
establish diplomatic intercourse.?  By attaching moral and political preconditions to establishing 
diplomatic contact, America complicated, indeed subverted, the relationship.  ?May I raise the question 
of whether the position you are taking here is not a throw-back to the kind of moralistic, legalistic 
thinking which your book [American Diplomacy] attacks?? Lippmann concluded.  ?I think that if we 
reduce the act of recognition by eliminating moral implications to its pragmatic core, we can in 
perfectly good conscience take the attitude towards the Soviet Government which you describe in your 
letter.?   Kennan to McGeorge Bundy, 11 February 1953, as attachment to Walter Lippmann, 11 
107
intimacy,? that they would be ?rivals not partners,? and that they would have few, if 
any, ?common purposes.?
177
  However, there was still room for diplomacy between 
the Soviets and Americans.  It was simple but vital.  The diplomat?s ultimate role in 
this superpower stare-down was to construct a balance of power that did not hold for 
one or the other power an opportunity for geopolitical aggrandizement.  That was it.  
Diplomacy would not end all rivalry, it would not spread American democracy to 
implacable communist rivals, but it would maintain order, stability, and peace.  
The implicit message in The Cold War reinforced Lippmann?s earlier 
warnings against a Wilsonian sense of mission.  The U.S. should meet the Soviet 
challenge as it would any other great power rivalry, he wrote, balancing it off with 
appropriate counter-force and resourceful diplomacy.  At all costs American leaders 
must avoid the habit of transforming such power contests into ideological conflicts or 
crusades bent on universalizing democratic ideals.  ?The method by which diplomacy 
deals with a world where there are rival powers is to organize a balance of power 
which deprives the rivals, however lacking in intimacy and however unresponsive to 
common appeals, of a good prospect of successful aggression,? Lippmann concluded.  
?That is what a diplomat means by the settlement of a conflict among rival powers.  
He does not mean that they will cease to be rivals.  He does not mean that they will 
all be converted to thinking and wanting the same thing.  He means that, whatever 
they think, whatever they want, whatever their ideological purposes, the balance of 
February 1953, WLC, Box 81, Folder 1201, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale.  Lippmann to Kennan, 
12 February 1953, WLC, Box 81, folder 1201.  
177
 Kennan, ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct,? 580-581.
108
power is such that they cannot afford to commit aggression.?
178
 Lippmann, in 
essence, called for an offensive diplomacy in the sense that it was to be a continual, 
active probing of Soviet intentions and security concerns.
What Lippmann instantly perceived in Kennan?s essay, and that deeply 
disturbed that core of him that was a cosmopolitan internationalist, was the 
implication that Washington officials were prepared to defer diplomacy indefinitely.  
The entire subtext for Lippmann?s reply came precisely on the grounds that in 
Kennan?s version of containing Soviet ambitions there was a decision to suspend 
diplomacy?a conviction that neither cooperation, nor coexistence itself, were any 
longer options.  The central danger of containment, Lippmann warned in The Cold 
War and in thousands of columns thereafter, was that diplomacy?in the regular 
sense of dialogue, constructive initiatives, and negotiation on issues of mutual 
interest?would vanish.  As containment evolved, military options displaced 
diplomatic options in a preponderant fashion.  To his credit, Lippmann perceived in 
1947, how this process might unfold.  He understood, moreover, that this tendency 
would be repeated in American relations with other emerging Communist 
governments.  Without diplomacy?without the mechanisms to resolve crises?
containment perforce would become globalized as the U.S. moved to meet 
178
 Lippmann, The Cold War: 60-61.  My italics for emphasis. There were problems with Lippmann?s 
analysis.  He over-stated the case that Kennan had neglected the material and historical motivations of 
Russian foreign policy and that the diplomat had over-emphasized the role Marxist ideology played in 
directing Moscow?s hand. See for example, Kennan, ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct,? 568-569; 575.  
In fact, Kennan evinced a sound appreciation for the lessons of Russian history on Moscow?s security 
concerns.  Also, revisionist historians have quibbled with the fact that Lippmann did not challenge 
Kennan?s basic assumption that Soviet expansion should be checked aggressively; strictly speaking 
they are right.  Lippmann did not object to Kennan?s central assumption which was that Russian 
expansion should be confronted; indeed, as a geopolitician, Lippmann was undeniably sympathetic on 
this count.  See also, Lippmann, The Cold War: 29.  But revisionists conflate their disappointment 
109
Communist expansion at all points all over the map.  What became apparent by the 
Eisenhower years was that in meeting that challenge, U.S. officials had created a 
series of stalemates?some stable, some fluid, some provocative, some not?which 
became increasingly burdensome because the U.S., in the absence of a meaningful 
diplomatic program, had no way to disengage.  Washington did not have to like the 
Soviets, Lippmann said, just talk about their differences and negotiate about the vital 
issues of Germany and Central Europe.
179
  As a political analysis by one of the 
nation?s most astute commentators, the publication of the collection of columns, titled 
The Cold War in the fall of 1947, gave a name to the nascent Soviet- American 
struggle.  In retrospect, it also marked the point at which Washington suspended its 
efforts to talk out its differences with the Kremlin and prepared for a long, armed 
struggle.
180
regarding Lippmann?s geopolitical disposition with their more fervent dispassion for American 
globalism?which Lippmann himself clearly rejected.
179
 Lippmann, T&T, 31 October 1939, no title, Washington Post: 11.  Lippmann wrote this column in 
reference to retaining diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the months 
after the Second World War broke out in Europe.  ?For an Ambassador is not a certificate of our 
admiration for the government to which he is accredited,? Lippmann once wrote.  ?An Ambassador is 
an agent for communicating our views to the head of a foreign state.  And the more difficult our 
relations with that state, the more desirable it is to have an Ambassador.?  In making essentially the 
same argument in 1947, Lippmann merely continued his long effort to educate U.S. government 
officials and public opinion about the conduct of classical diplomacy.  He did not interpret the failure 
of U.S. officials to conduct diplomacy as an aberration peculiar to the Cold War.  Rather, with 
considerable justification, he feared that once the World War II alliance slackened that Washington 
officials would revert to old practices, treating diplomatic contact as a sign that they conferred 
approval upon the government with whom they were engaged in diplomatic negotiations.
180
 Historian Anders Stephanson has acknowledged an implied rejection of diplomacy such as I discuss 
here; he writes that an ?essential aspect? of Lippmann?s book was that it found in Kennan?s argument a 
?certain gesture of diplomatic refusal vis-?-vis the U.S.S.R.?  See his essay, ?Fourteen Notes on the 
Very Concept of the Cold War, H-Diplo (1996), http://www2h-net.msu.edu/~diplo/stephanson.html .  
Lippmann?s critique of the X-Article casts doubt on the charge made by some scholars that 
practitioners of realpolitik ignore the domestic motivations and consequences of foreign policy.  Not 
only did Lippmann point out the home-front causes and costs of the Cold War but he proved 
exceedingly prescient in this regard.  He touched on the constitutional problems of waging 
containment in a state of permanent mobilization, the centralization of executive powers, the impact on 
the economy, and the price Americans would pay for racing off to all corners of the globe to meet the 
Communist challenge?social, cultural, institutional, industrial, and technological.  Few at the time 
fully appreciated that a prolonged and extravagant concern with Communism overseas might erode the 
110
Rivalry and conflict among nations, Lippmann believed, was the normal 
condition of humanity. The ?American ideology,? however, rejected that worldview; 
strife among nations, according to Wilsonianism, was ?wrong, abnormal, and 
transitory.?  That approach to world affairs, Lippmann wrote, produced a predictable 
pattern of behavior: either the U.S. sought to abstain from the struggle, to abolish it 
immediately and unconditionally, or to conduct crusades against those nations that 
most actively engaged in that struggle.  A nation?s ability to learn to navigate the 
rivalry of nations, he argued, marked its maturity.  In 1948, delivering a Phi Beta 
Kappa Address as the College of William and Mary, he employed a metaphor he 
often used in his columns.  ?Our aim is not to marry the Russians and then to live 
with them happily ever after,? he told the audience, ?nor is it to fight them and let the 
whole world be devastated.  Our aim is to transact our necessary business with the 
Russians, at arm?s length, coolly, shrewdly, without fear and without extravagant 
hope, and with as much justice as may be possible where there is as yet no agreement 
on first principles and where the rivals do not live in the same moral order.?
181
pillars of the good society at home.  He also presaged Kennan?s arguments of the 1950s, 1960s and 
1970s?insisting (often) that there was an overriding need for U.S. officials to legitimate the exercise 
of such vast powers abroad by projecting ?a vision of the good society? at home?and by moving 
toward its fulfillment.  ?The costs of the prolonged political- military struggle that Lippmann called the 
Cold War can be counted not only in the neglect and deterioration of domestic institutions but also in 
the loss of American capacity to exercise constructive influence abroad,? remarked Richard Barnet 
shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  ?The world?s only global military superpower lacks the 
material resources to maintain a competitive industrial base, the infrastructure on which a strong 
economy depends, or even the necessities, much less the amenities, of a good society.?  See, Richard J. 
Barnet, ?A Balance Sheet: Lippmann, Kennan, and the Cold War,? in Michael Hogan, ed. The End of 
the Cold War (New York: Oxford, 1994): 113-126.  Barnet?s observations are all the more interesting 
because he is a principal member of the ?revisionist? grouping.  His Roots of War is a classic critique 
of the foreign policy elite that led America into the Vietnam War.
181
 Walter Lippmann, ?The Rivalry of Nations,? Atlantic Monthly 181, no. 2 (February 1948): 17-20; 
quote on page 20.  The magazine reprinted his address.  Italics are mine?stressing Lippmann?s belief 
that the Soviet-American conflict was not irretrievably irreconcilable.  It would not be a settlement that 
?aims at unanimity, not at ideological harmony, not at the abolition of all our differences and 
disagreements, but at a truce in the cold war, a modus vivendi during which the nations can recover 
111
The realist calculation of the national interest, stated so forcefully in U.S. 
Foreign Policy, was adapted to fit new international developments?as we have 
seen?in U.S. War Aims and in portions of The Cold War.  What resulted when 
Lippmann applied these ideas in his many columns over the course of the next two 
decades, was a uniquely internationalist perspective.  Lippmann put particular 
emphasis on diplomatic engagement, negotiation, multi-lateral cooperation rather 
than unilateral intervention, mediation through extra-national institutions, and 
sensitivity to the values and interests of many other nations as they navigated the 
superpower struggle.  At the pinnacle of American influence, he not only set limits to 
that power but warned against militarizing foreign policy in place of a more 
constructive diplomatic approach designed to resolve the strategic and political 
conflicts central to the Soviet-American rivalry.  When Russians broke the U.S. 
monopoly on the atomic bomb and ?massive retaliation? became doctrine in the 
1950s, Lippmann redoubled his commitment to this approach.  From Taiwan to 
Berlin to Cuba, his form of crisis management and conflict resolution stood out?not 
from World War II, at treaties which end in the withdrawal of the armies of occupation of Europe, and 
the restoration of Europe to the Europeans.?
American officials, both Wilsonians and isolationists, often presented issues to the American 
public ?not as relative but as absolute? choices, thus, reinforcing the old habits of thinking.  Lippmann 
wrote, ?We are disposed to think that the issue is either this or that, either all or nothing, either 
isolationism or globalism, either total peace or total war, either one world or no world, either 
disarmament or absolute weapons, either pious resolutions or atomic bombs, either disarmament or 
military supremacy, either non-intervention or a crusade, either democracy or tyranny, either the 
abolition of war or a preventative war, either appeasement or unconditional surrender, either non-
resistance or a strategy of annihilation.  There is no place in this ideological pattern of the world for 
adoption of limited ends or limited means, for the use of checks and balances among contending 
forces, for the demarcation of spheres of influence and of power and of interest, for accommodation 
and compromise and adjustment, for the stabilization of the status quo, for the restoration of an 
equilibrium.  Yet this is the field of diplomacy.  These are the substance and matter of an efficient 
diplomacy . . . A diplomacy for the world as it is, which is not to expend itself in verbal declarations on 
the one hand, and on crusades of annihilation on the other, must deal with the balance of power and the 
determination of spheres of influence.?  Lippmann, ?The Rivalry of Nations,? 19.
112
because his solutions were uniformly practicable (for they were not), but for the fact 
that no other powerful voice offered an alternative to military confrontation.
X.
Strategic internationalism?which fused Lippmann?s realism with a devotion to 
classical diplomacy and a cosmopolitan perspective?emerged as the centerpiece of 
Walter Lippmann?s commentary in the immediate postwar years.  It certainly had 
strategic implications in the military sense of the word, for part of what Lippmann 
was trying to achieve was the fulfillment of basic national security imperatives.  But 
in this usage, the adjective strategic is meant to convey the broader meaning of the 
word: a plan or method to achieve a goal.  Lippmann?s goal was to provide a 
framework to achieve full U.S. participation in world affairs.  At bottom, strategic 
internationalism sought to engage America?with permanence, responsibility, and 
restraint?in foreign affairs.  It had five key principles that Lippmann had developed 
in the period between 1915 and 1947 and repeatedly returned to in his post-Second 
World War writing.
First, the permanent participation of the U.S. in postwar international 
politics, commensurate with its relative power and influence.  Lippmann built on the 
lessons of the failed Wilsonian effort to bring America out of its isolationist past, 
prioritizing U.S. goals, demonstrating the inter-connectivity of domestic and foreign 
policies, and attacking entrenched notions ranging from pacifism to manifest destiny.  
All the other points that flowed from his objective of enlightened internationalism 
113
were subsidiary but vital to making the transition from the old American diplomacy 
to the new a stable, orderly, and responsible one.
Second, an acute awareness of the limits of American power.  In military 
terms Lippmann understood American strength to be based on its mobility and 
firepower rather than its ability to wage a sustained, virtually indefinite, siege action 
as prescribed by containment.  American power also was based on its air and naval 
forces, not land forces need to contain Communist advances in peripheral countries.  
Thus, American strategists would, he believed, have to prioritize their geo-strategic 
interests?pick specific, vital points of defense?rather than disperse their limited 
forces along a global containment front.  Whereas U.S. officials believed they could 
enlist the help of indigenous factions to offset their shortfall in ground troops, 
Lippmann, for political and military reasons, believed this to be an ultimately self-
defeating exercise.
Third, an insistence that the U.S. conduct Cold War international relations 
within a collaborationist framework.  Lippmann?s writings are replete with this 
theme: America?s best interests were to be served by cooperative, alliance-building 
and should avoid?at almost all costs?unilateralism.  Lippmann was, at his core, a 
diplomatist.  His unusually intimate relations with the foreign diplomatic corps in 
Washington, DC, shaped this perspective.  These contacts were his most important 
sources and helped him both to gauge international reaction to U.S. policy and to 
develop policy alternatives.  Chief among his objectives was the cultivation and 
preservation of what he first called the ?Atlantic Community? during World War I.  
So important was this principle to Lippmann that he acted as a private diplomat 
114
during the Cold War, shaping the trans-Atlantic dialogue and even facilitating 
communication between the superpowers.  His column was his medium, fortified by 
personal discussions with De Gaulle in Paris, Macmillan in London, Adenauer in 
Bonn, Nehru in India, Khrushchev in Moscow, and scores of second-tier officials in 
these capitals.
Fourth, the rejection of anti-Communist ideology and its parochial 
perspective.  Here there were foreign and domestic emphases.  As regards the former, 
Lippmann demanded that Washington officials set clear, concrete objectives when 
they employed American power abroad.  That power, he believed, as it related to 
containment, should be used to precipitate great power agreements in contested places 
such as Germany or Japan?but it should not be used in the service of ideology.  U.S. 
officials, he warned as early as 1945, should not assemble an anti-Communist 
?crusade? in the hopes of vanquishing Marxism and spreading liberal capitalist 
ideology.  Dismissive of these particularly Wilsonian goals abroad, Lippmann 
disparaged domestic anti-Communism and the destructive influence of the activities 
of HUAC or the McCarthyite purges.  He sought, instead, to elevate the Cold War 
conversation above and beyond the politics of domestic fear and subversion.  He 
chose to frame the issues within a larger context?one in which nationalist zeal was 
restrained, indeed, subsumed by an internationalist cognizance.
Fifth, an explicit emphasis on using diplomacy?not military confrontation 
or stockpiles of ever more terrifying weapons?to resolve core and long-term 
tensions between the Cold War?s principal antagonists?the U.S., U.S.S.R., and, 
later, the Peoples Republic of China.  Since Lippmann viewed the Cold War as 
115
primarily a great power struggle, he did not object to the necessity of balancing off 
Russian and Chinese expansion with American power.  He believed, however, that 
there were legitimate interests upon which U.S. diplomats and those from both 
Communist powers could?and must?agree.  This final point truly distinguished 
Walter Lippmann from his contemporaries: More than any other public opinion 
leader?certainly far more than any Washington columnist?Lippmann advocated 
diplomatic solutions at key crises points around the globe from Berlin to Cuba, but 
especially in Southeast Asia.  His vision contrasted vividly with the militarized global 
containment policy that U.S. officials chose.
These principles underlay a conceptual framework of American foreign policy 
that set Lippmann on a parallel but separate track from U.S. officials.  Lippmann did 
not deviate from his strategic internationalist principles, particularly in his 
determination to avoid military confrontation and to define narrowly vital U.S. 
interests.  Washington leaders were disinclined to give such counsel a full hearing, 
much less follow it.  In the immediate postwar years, flush (temporarily) with a 
monopoly on the atomic bomb and a vastly expanded, indeed, dominant industrial 
capacity, American officials sought to create a situation of preponderant military, 
economic, and political power with global reach.  In administration after 
administration, Washington policymakers expressed ambivalence or outright 
impatience toward Lippmann?s steady emphasis on accommodating Communist 
powers.  What they found more troubling, perhaps, was that the columnist?s ability to 
shape the public debate about Cold War programs was disproportionately great 
116
compared to his direct knowledge of events on the ground and, even, the validity of 
his past predictions. 
Frustration and resentment flowed in both directions.  Lippmann wrote with 
mounting incredulity as successive waves of twentieth-century American leaders 
embraced the 28
th
 President?s agenda for advancing liberal-capitalist democracy.
182
Indeed, the American Cold War presidents and their principal advisors imbibed freely 
from Wilson?s cup.
183
  They usually conceived of their rivalry with the Soviet Union 
as a global struggle between a ?free society? and a ?slave society.?  They too often 
failed to distinguish between Communists (and their various nationalist cadres) in 
Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, or Pyongyang.  Believing in the inherent virtue and 
superiority of American political culture, they also chose to project democratic ideals 
upon faraway places as the basis for building nations in their image.  Finally, they 
shared a hubris?not only in their sublime faith in American moral authority?but in 
their expectations for American power and what they perceived to be its nearly 
inexhaustible reserves.  These chimeras had no hold on Lippmann.  And, it is within 
the context of his rejecting Wilsonian parochialisms as the basis for Cold War policy, 
that the continuity in his writings between 1947 and 1967 becomes readily apparent: 
the rebuke of the Truman Doctrine and its avowed purpose to aid any government 
182
 For a scholarly evaluation critical of the origins and tradition of Wilsonian foreign policy, see Lloyd 
E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism During World 
War I (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1991: especially, 125-144.  Conversely, one of 
Wilson?s defenders, historian Thomas J. Knock, maintains that while President Wilson ?was the father 
of internationalism? but that ?his children?those who fashioned Cold War globalism, as distinct from 
internationalism?were, in the main, illegitimate.  What triumphed in the postwar period was at best a 
mutant form of Wilson?s internationalism, and Wilson almost certainly would have denied paternity.?  
See Knock?s To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1992): especially, 271-276.  
183
 For a favorable assessment of Wilson?s ?liberal democratic internationalism,? which makes 
precisely this argument, see Tony Smith?s America?s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide 
Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
117
anywhere against external and even internal subversion; his sharp dissection of Dean 
Acheson?s equivocal China and Korea policies; his repudiation of John Foster 
Dulles?s moral streak and his resort to legalisms and defense pacts; and his deep 
misgivings about John F. Kennedy?s rhetoric and brinksmanship in Berlin, Laos, and 
Cuba.  Lippmann?s strategic internationalism also placed him on a collision course 
with President Lyndon Johnson over his decision to ?Americanize? the Vietnamese 
civil war in the 1960s?for that commitment magnified all the most disruptive 
Wilsonian traits: moralism, exceptionalism, and hubris.
118
Chapter 3: 
Conflict and Convergence: Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, 
Raymond Aron, and the Problem of German Partition, 1947-1962
I.
The struggle for control over postwar Germany was the pre-eminent stake of the Cold 
War.  It was primarily?if not exclusively?a contest waged for national security 
imperatives on both sides of the Iron Curtain.  For the Western Alliance, particularly 
France and Britain, the first order of business was to dismantle German war-making 
potential and, thus, prevent Berlin from assaulting Western Europe for a third time in 
the twentieth century.  Second, the economic rehabilitation and integration of 
Germany into a postwar European system of trade was deemed essential for recovery 
and sustainable prosperity on the continent.  Finally, it also was a central geo-
strategic imperative that Germany not be incorporated into the Soviet sphere of 
influence?for the specter of German industry and technology, coupled with the 
manpower of Soviet Russia, menaced European security.
1
From the Kremlin?s vantage point the stakes were no less enormous, though 
they were nearly the mirror opposite of those imperatives that drove policy in Paris, 
1
 Caroline Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949 (New 
York: Cambridge University Press, 1966).  See also, Melvyn Leffler, The Struggle for Germany and 
the Origins of the Cold War, Alois Mertes Memorial Lecture (Washington, DC: German Historical 
Institute, 1996): especially, 71-77.
119
London, and Washington.  German militarism, responsible for the deaths of some 
25.5 million Russians and the devastation of much of the western part of the country, 
had to be crushed definitively.  Stalin also was determined to control the land 
approaches in Eastern Europe through which the Wehrmacht  had invaded the 
homeland.  With the Russian industrial base decimated by Hitler?s armies, Moscow 
also viewed the expropriation of industrial equipment and facilities from eastern 
Germany as vital to the rejuvenation of the Soviet economy; a unified, independent 
Germany would thus hinder Soviet economic recovery.  Lastly, from Moscow?s 
perspective, the integration of the whole or part (the three western zones) of Germany 
into the Western Alliance would be an intolerable development since the Germans 
would perforce anchor a European military alliance and, perhaps, act as a springboard 
for a Western military attack.
2
In seeking to understand Lippmann?s approach to international relations, the 
previous chapter isolated and amplified his work.  Realizing that it also is incumbent 
upon the historian to determine how Lippmann fit into the larger realist dialogue 
about the Cold War, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of Lippmann position 
on Germany as opposed to those of prominent U.S. officials, such as Dean Acheson 
and Paul Nitze, as well as key realists such as the American diplomat and scholar 
George Kennan and the French sociologist and political commentator Raymond 
Aron.  In the decade after the X-Article, Kennan?s gradual alignment with Lippmann 
as an articulate critic of global containment offers a perspective on the convergence 
2
William I. Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-
2002 (New York: Doubleday, 2003): 19-30. See also, Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in 
Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge: Harvard University 
Press, 1995).
120
points of postwar realism.  This chapter also focuses attention on a less-explored 
subject: the American columnist?s trans-Atlantic dialogue with Aron, the noted Le 
Figaro writer.  That emphasis reveals a more conflicted aspect of inter-alliance 
realism over the long term of the Cold War.  Among the central questions with which 
Lippmann and his contemporaries contended were these: Should Germany be 
integrated into the Western Alliance?  Could it be partitioned indefinitely?  How 
should the problem of administering Berlin?deep inside the Russian zone?be 
resolved?  Could, in fact, the Western Alliance (Washington particularly) negotiate 
with the Kremlin on any of these points without weakening the bonds of their own 
partnership?  Could negotiations address genuine security concerns on both sides of 
the Iron Curtain?  Or, were ideological divisions so deep as to prevent any 
meaningful dialogue?  The positions of each of these men on the German question 
demonstrate that realists could markedly disagreed about even the core concerns of 
Cold War strategy.
II.
Walter Lippmann?s diplomacy-oriented approach toward the Cold War often 
paralleled, but at times conflicted with, George Kennan?s ideas as the diplomat made 
a decade-long, gradual but steady public drift toward many of Lippmann?s core 
assumptions.  By the time Kennan published his Reith Lectures on ?disengagement,? 
he and Lippmann shared fundamental beliefs about the weaknesses of containment, 
particularly in Germany, but also in its global context.  From the perspective of the 
late-1950s, Lippmann appeared more a mentor than famous detractor of Kennan.  
121
Their public dialogue on Western European issues and their considerable 
correspondence also suggests the gradations, subtleties, convergence points, and 
contradictions of postwar realism.  
The most curious aspect of the Lippmann-Kennan relationship was that it not 
only survived the X-Article episode but that it flourished for more than two decades 
afterward.
3
  This alone suggests that philosophically they were perhaps not as far 
apart as Lippmann?s rejoinder to ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct? suggested.  And, 
indeed, Kennan himself?as well as at least one of his biographers?maintains that 
the misunderstanding was more of Lippmann?s invention (and of Kennan?s loosely 
worded article) than any significant divergence of opinion.  They had collaborated on 
aspects of the Marshall Plan as it was being formulated during the spring of 1947.  
State Department speechwriter Joseph W. Jones maintained that Lippmann had a 
profound impact on internal discussions about the Marshall Plan.  Lippmann?s 
3
In early 1965, as his first act presiding over the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Kennan 
conferred on Lippmann the gold medal for essays and criticism.  See the correspondence in the WLC, 
Box 92, folder 1585.   Kennan?s meteoric rise to prominence, based on his sharp powers of observation 
and Russian expertise, obscured other elusive character traits.  He proved to be something of a 
contrarian.  He was given to long periods of introspection, sometimes debilitatingly so.  Kennan, 
recalled the columnist Joe Alsop, was ?an emotional man and not above self pity. Often his moods 
were linked to his status at the department, real or imagined, or to the seriousness or lack thereof with 
which he felt his views were being received.? See, Joseph Alsop with Adam Platt, I?ve Seen the Best of 
It?Memoirs (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992): 306-307.  One also is impressed with the sense that 
Kennan felt like an outsider in his own culture?a function of his long absences abroad and his 
habitually elitist views.  His ideas, moreover, were protean and evolved with developments in the 
postwar years.  His career spanned a long, gradual transition from the 1946-47 period, when he was 
concerned chiefly with the exercise of U.S. military power to check Soviet advances, to an emphasis 
on diplomacy and disengagement a decade later, and finally, to a position in the 1970s in which he 
repudiated much of the original containment policy and assigned responsibility for the Cold War in 
equal parts to Moscow and Washington.  By that juncture, as a scholar and elder statesman, he had 
come to believe that the best way to win the Cold War was through improving the good society at 
home and addressing corrosive internal problems: race relations, urban decay, adequate transportation 
and infrastructure, environmental degradation and, in the field of foreign affairs, nuclear disarmament.  
But in 1947, Kennan had not yet traversed this long path and his authorship of the ?X-Article? alerted 
Lippmann to the possibility that official Washington was floating a policy trial balloon?or, worse 
still, announcing a de facto policy shift.
122
appointment diaries show that he and Kennan met on at least three occasions in the 
spring of 1947?once at the War College and twice after George Marshall appointed 
Kennan as the first director of the newly-created Policy Planning Staff.
4
Kennan later recounted in his memoirs that the ?egregious? errors he made in 
the X-Article created in the columnist?s mind the ?most unfortunate of 
4
 Wilson Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 65-68.  For a similar assessment see, Walter Hixson, 
George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989): 73-74. For 
Lippmann?s impact on the thinking of Kennan and other officials at the time of the Marshall Plan see, 
Joseph W. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: Viking Press, 1955): 224-227; 155.  Jones writes 
particularly about Lippmann?s 5 April 1947 ?Cassandra Speaking? column which spelled out the case 
for large-scale economic aid to Britain and Western Europe: ?The effects of such a statement . . . are 
several: it makes top officials feel they are in the spot and challenges or encourages them to broader 
thinking and speedier and more effective action; it gives lesser officials arguments with which to 
convince their colleagues and a lever with which to prod their superiors on specific approaches; and it 
enlarges the realm of what men are inclined to regard as possible.  Such were the effects of 
Lippmann?s column of April 5.  For example, when Acheson was considering what he should say to 
the Delta Council, the April 5 column specifically came up.?  Others disputed Lippmann?s effect on 
official thinking.  In drawing up an internal State Department history of the Marshall Plan, Charles P. 
Kindleberger believed that New York Times writer James Reston had more influence on inside 
developments.  ?Walter Lippmann, without claiming credit for the origin of the Marshall Plan, has told 
me that he wrote a series of columns (not the one on the cold war) setting forth the necessity for a plan 
of European reconstruction.  This I do not recall and didn?t when he told me.?  See, Kindleberger, 
?Memorandum for the Files: Origins of the Marshall Plan,? Foreign Relations of the United States, 
Volume 3, 1947 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office): 241-247.  Hereinafter referred to as 
?FRUS.?
Lippmann and Kennan collaborated in the spring of 1947, before the X-Article episode, to 
push the Marshall Plan.  The parallel?s between Lippmann?s columns of that period and Kennan?s 
proposals in the Policy Planning Staff?s first paper of 23 May 1947 (Kennan had been appointed 
director only on May 5) were striking.  Among the paper?s major points, several sought clarification of 
the Truman Doctrine that Lippmann had publicly demanded in his column.  The PPS requested that: 
?Steps should be taken to clarify what the press has unfortunately come to identify as the ?Truman 
Doctrine,? and to remove in particular two damaging impressions which are current in large sections of 
American public opinion . . . . 1.) That the United States? approach to world problems is a defensive 
reaction to communist pressures . . . 2.) That the Truman Doctrine is a blank check to give economic 
and military aid to any area in the world where the communists show signs of being successful.?  The 
State Department Policy Planning Papers, 1947-1949, Volume 1, edited by Anna Kasten Nelson, with 
a foreword by George F. Kennan (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983): 11.  
According to Lippmann?s appointment diaries from the spring of 1947 he met at least three 
times with Kennan as the Marshall Plan was being considered in the State Department.  The meetings 
coincided with the height of Kennan?s influence over the plan and, also, Lippmann?s public campaign 
on behalf of an economic aid package for European reconstruction.  The entries read as follow: 22 
April??Lunch?Mr. George Kennan at the Army War College and discussed at length his assignment 
to be announced in a few days as head of the Planning Dir. in Secy. Marshall?s office.?  16 May?
?Lunch with George Kennan at the Metropolitan Club and discussed formation of American policy for 
a united union in Europe.? 19 June??Lunch with George Kennan at Club, re: diplomatic aspects of 
Marshall Plan.?  See the Lippmann Appointment Diaries, Series XII, Box 237, Folder 10, Walter 
Lippmann Collection, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (hereinafter 
referred to as ?WLC?).
123
misunderstandings . . . almost tragic in its dimensions.?
5
  Kennan explained that 
Lippmann imparted to containment the ?military sense? which the author had never 
intended.  ?And, on the basis of these misimpressions he proceeded to set forth,? the 
diplomat wrote, ?as an alternative to what I had lead him to think my views were, a 
concept of American policy so similar to that which I was to hold and advance in 
coming years that one could only assume I was subconsciously inspired by the 
statement of it?as perhaps, in part, I was.?
6
  With customary candor, former 
Secretary of State Dean Acheson confirmed this process.  ?The ?X? article was a 
perfectly fine article,? Acheson told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in a 
1970 interview.  ?Then Walter Lippmann decided he didn?t like it; well, it was as if 
God had looked over George?s shoulder and said, ?George, you shouldn?t have 
written such a bad article.??  Acheson maintained that ?The Sources of Soviet 
Conduct,? in fact summarized what American policy was at the time rather than lay 
out a new concept of it.  Lippmann and others, he maintained, ?thought that 
containment applied everywhere, but it was nothing of the kind.?
7
Kennan privately fumed about Lippmann?s response.  Stress sent him to a 
hospital bed the following spring from where he wrote a scathing letter to Lippmann 
which he never sent.  The diplomat?s ire was somewhat justified, for he and 
Lippmann had shared such similar views on the pitfalls of the Truman Doctrine. 
5
 George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967): 359-363.  
Kennan?s understated point, magnified by his biographer Wilson D. Miscamble, was that in doing so 
Lippmann contributed to the impression that containment was principally conceived in a military 
sense?thus exacerbating the problem.  See Miscamble?s George F. Kennan and the Making of 
American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950: 66-68.
6
 Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950: 360.  See Lippmann?s note regarding Kennan?s memoirs: Lippmann to 
Kennan, 2 November 1967, Box 81, Folder 1202, WLC.  Lippmann wrote: ?What you say about X . . . 
is the most generous and high-minded account of our misunderstanding that I could have imagined.?
124
Kennan?s sensitivity was made more acute because he was at a loss for explaining the 
magnitude of Lippmann?s response?14 closely-argued installments of the nationally-
syndicated column.  ?I am a little non-plussed to find myself sternly rebuked as the 
author of the ?Truman Doctrine? and confronted with the Marshall Plan as an example 
of constructive statesmanship from which I might derive a useful lesson and improve 
my way,? Kennan vented in his unsent missive.
8
  After Kennan cornered Lippmann 
and exacted verbal revenge on a long train ride from Washington to New York City a 
year later, the men patched up their differences.  Still, Kennan grasped for a rationale 
to the response.  Years after Lippmann?s death, the diplomat suggested to biographer 
Wilson Miscamble that perhaps the columnist had been motivated by his resentment 
of Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, who enjoyed greater prestige 
after the containment thesis was published in his journal.
9
  Nevertheless, Kennan and 
Lippmann increasingly were drawn together by similar views on the disposition of 
occupied Germany
III.
7
 Quoted in Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945-1973, 
translated by Frank Jellinek (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1974): 298; originally 
published in Foreign Policy, No. 7 (Summer 1972) in a series of articles titled ?X Plus 25.?
8
 George F. Kennan to Walter Lippmann, 6 April 1948, unsent, Box 17, George F. Kennan Papers, 
Mudd Library, Princeton University.  
9
 Lippmann had an affair with Armstrong?s wife in 1937, breaking up his own marriage and that of the 
Armstrongs.  Helen Byrne Armstrong and Lippmann then married causing a social stir in New York 
City elite circles.  It was an act of betrayal for which Armstrong forever banished Lippmann from the 
pages of Foreign Affairs?even going so far as to strike out any reference to Lippmann in articles 
submitted to the journal.  Steel?s account discusses the falling out between the two men, see especially 
pp. 361-363.  See also, Miscamble, George F. Kennan: 67.
125
Even while the war still raged against the Third Reich, Lippmann opposed proposals 
for a long-term Allied military occupation of postwar Germany.  In U.S. Foreign 
Policy, Lippmann conceived of a ?buffer belt? of states, running roughly from the 
Baltic to the Adriatic, which would be neutral and detached from any potential 
conflict between Moscow and the Western Alliance.  Germany, he believed, should 
be the anchor in this neutral zone.  After occupation became a reality in May 1945, 
Lippmann repeatedly pressed U.S. policymakers to forge a European peace settlement 
that would provide for the timely withdrawal of the Soviet, British, and American 
armies from the continent.  
Lippmann also vigorously opposed the merger of the three Western zones into 
a unified West Germany administered from Bonn, on the basis that such a move 
would be provocative towards Moscow and that it would provide West German 
leaders with a mechanism for making a deal with their countrymen to the East.  As 
early as May 1946, he proposed breaking Germany into decentralized confederation 
of 10 to 12 historic states.
10
  A rearmed Germany?either in its entirety or the merged 
Western zones?he warned, could not be drawn into the Western Alliance without 
violating Russian security interests.  This was a major point of Lippmann?s attack 
against Kennan?s containment thesis in 1947.  ?The idea that we can foster the 
sentiment of German unity, and make her a truncated Germany economically strong, 
can keep her disarmed, and can use her in the anti-Soviet coalition is like trying to 
square the circle,? he wrote.  ?Applied to Germany, the policy of containment is a 
10
 Lippmann, Today and Tomorrow, 9 May 1946, ?America in Germany.?  Hereinafter Lippmann?s 
column is referred to as ?T&T.?
126
booby-trap, constructed by men who do not understand the politics of power.?
11
Above all else, he argued that West Germany should not be drawn into the Western 
Alliance.  Germany, he insisted, must remain ?disarmed and demilitarized? to ensure 
that ?the door is still open to a peaceable settlement.?
12
  Even as Western diplomats 
negotiated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Lippmann recycled his earlier idea 
of a ?buffer belt? of nations that would separate the Soviets and the West.  He 
believed that there was ?no tolerable line of policy for Germany except that agreed on 
during the war: that Germany shall be for this generation a neutralized and 
demilitarized nation.  That solution, and there is no other, is possible only if Germany 
is not morally and politically isolated?if Germany, that is to say, is invited to take 
her place in a widening zone of buffer nations not actually participating in the world-
wide conflict of the great powers.?
13
In 1946-1947, George F. Kennan had hoped that by creating a unified, pro-
Western German state from the American, British, and French occupation zones that 
the Western Alliance would have a magnet with which to lure countries from Eastern 
Europe.  Like Aron, he saw German industrial recovery as the key to the economic 
rehabilitation of Europe generally.  He considered it an absolute necessity to keep the 
bulk of German industrial potential (centered in the western zones) out of Soviet 
control.
14
11
 Lippmann, The Cold War: 47.
12
 Lippmann, T&T, 3 January 1949, ?On the Projected Alliance.?
13
 Lippmann, T&T, 15 January 1949, ?The Buffer Belt.?
14
 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: 38.  See also Kennan?s Memoirs, 1925-1950: 332 -
334.  During a May 6, 1947 lecture at the War College, Kennan told his audience, ?In my opinion it is 
imperatively urgent today that the improvement of economic conditions an the revival of productive 
capacity in the west of Germany be made the primary object of our policy in that area and must be 
given top priority in all our occupation policies and that this principle be adopted as a general line of 
procedure of this government, binding on all of its departments and agencies.?
127
But by 1948, Kennan had begun to shift his position on Germany.  In part, this 
was due to his approach to resolving the conflict with Moscow, which differed from 
that of other U.S. officials.  Kennan came to believe that long-term tensions with the 
Soviets could be resolved only through a process of ?behavior modification?: reacting 
positively to the Moscow?s substantive proposals, while firmly dismissing 
unacceptable actions.  Kennan insisted that to effect change in Soviet foreign policy, 
the U.S. must be willing to acknowledge positive Russian actions with as much 
alacrity as it condemned aggressive actions.  In practice this meant engaging the 
Russians in negotiations that held out some hope of addressing both sides? security 
interests.
15
  Most principal U.S. policymakers did not share that viewpoint.  Unlike 
Kennan, the principal decision-makers in the Truman administration far preferred the 
stick to the carrot.  Kennan, in turn, grew increasingly alarmed that the Western 
policies of 1948-1950 would provoke the Russians and exacerbate their security 
concerns and mistrust of the West: the creation of NATO, development of the 
hydrogen bomb, the continued occupation of Japan and, most importantly, the 
creation of a West German state anchored in the Western Alliance.  The net result 
(one which Lippmann feared as well) would be a narrowing, if not full foreclosure, of 
avenues to bargain and negotiate with the Soviets.
16
In response to plans at the spring 1948 London Conference to unify the three 
western zones of occupation, Kennan countered with a Policy Planning Staff (PPS) 
proposal.  Dubbed ?Program A,? it set forth the basis for a four-power settlement in 
Germany that, not coincidentally, would have met all of the conditions that Lippmann 
15
 Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: 71.
16
 Ibid.
128
had been proposing in his columns: the military neutralization of Germany with the 
evacuation of all occupying armies; the eradication of zonal boundaries; the creation 
of a unified provisional government representing all four zones; international 
supervision of general elections; and the promotion of economic revival through free 
trade between East and West.
17
  Importantly, like Lippmann, Kennan believed that 
even though chances were slim that the Soviet Union would accept ?Program A,? at 
least the proposal would provide the U.S. with diplomatic initiative and would 
squarely place the moral onus of rejection on the Kremlin.
18
  This was an argument 
similar to the one that both Lippmann and Kennan advanced in support of the 
Marshall Plan.  So close was Kennan?s position to that of the columnist by the fall of 
1948 that one can draw the inference that Lippmann contributed at least partially to 
turning Kennan away from a policy of division in Europe toward one of 
disengagement.
19
17
 For Kennan?s account of his shift on the German problem see his chapter titled ?Germany? in 
volume 1 of his Memoirs, 1925-1950: 415-448; for ?Plan A? see especially, pp. 422-426.  Reprinted as 
Policy Planning Staff Paper #37/1, 12 November 1948, FRUS, Volume II, 1948: 1287-1297. See also, 
Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: 75.  
18
 Lippmann and Kennan by late 1948 and early 1949 were communicating regularly about the German 
problem.  For instance, see Lippmann?s letter to Kennan of 1 February 1949, WLC, Box 81, Folder 
1201?all emphasis are his.  Lippmann laid out ?an unequivocal set of principles? which, he told 
Kennan, should guide State Department policy in Germany: ?(1) That the German problem is soluble 
only (as per your memorandum) within the framework of a European (not a west European) system . . . 
It is a positive and constructive way of refusing to recognize the permanence of the Iron Curtain.  We 
should never be in the position of accepting the Iron Curtain, always in the position of insisting that it 
must be lifted. (2) That the partition of Germany and of Europe is, therefore, transitory.  We must 
never allow the Russians to be the champions of German unity.  We must be the champions, and put 
them in the position of preventing it. (3) That the liquidation of military government and the scheduled, 
though gradual withdrawal of occupation troops is a real and present objective, not a remote and 
theoretical one.  We must put the Russians in the position of being the power that won?t evacuate 
Germany, and therefore won?t liberate eastern Europe from the grip of the Red Army.  (The western 
anxiety about our leaving Europe and withdrawing across the Atlantic can be met by the North 
Atlantic Security Pact.  In fact that is its chief advantage, that it supplies a juridical basis for remaining 
in Europe.?   
19
 Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast: 74.
129
Writing from Paris, Raymond Aron, the noted French sociologist and political 
commentator for the Paris daily Le Figaro, saw matters far differently from 
Lippmann and Kennan in 1948.  In essence, the French columnist believed that 
European reconstruction depended on a stable German state being reincorporated 
economically and, eventually, militarily into the Western European community.  
Whereas Lippmann saw such as development as provocation, Aron regarded 
Germany?s temporary prostration as an opportunity to end decades of Berlin?s 
expansionism which had pitched his country into war three times in 80 years.  
Writing in January 1949, Aron noted ?never have circumstances been so propitious 
for putting an end to a century-long conflict.?
20
  His ultimate goal was to create a 
democratic German state, anchor it within the Western Alliance, and then allow it the 
means to play a defensive role within the alliance.
21
Aron had paid close attention to the Lippmann-Kennan debate in 1947.  In Le 
Grand Schisme (1948), he weighed in on the plausibility of containment largely on 
the side of the Policy Planning Staff director.  In a chapter entitled ?The Alternatives 
to Belligerent Peace,? the French commentator attacked several underlying 
assumptions, which framed Lippmann?s The Cold War.
22
  Notably, Aron disagreed 
with the American columnist?s contention that containment, as Kennan defined it, 
exceeded American capabilities; that it was a waste of valuable resources; and that 
the true path to a peace settlement for Europe should be based on the simultaneous 
20
Aron, ?L?Echec des Negotiations Franco-Brittaniques sur l?Assemblee Europeane,? 26 January 
1949, Le Figaro; quoted in Judt, 160-161.  See also, Aron, ?Staline et la Revolution (Stalin and the 
Revolution),? 29 January 1949, Les Articles des Politiques Internationale Du Figaro, Volume I: Le 
Guerre Froide, 1947-1955, edited by Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1990-1993): 
167-170.
21
 Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century
(Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998: 161.
130
evacuation of Germany by both superpower armies.  In attacking Lippmann?s core 
assumptions, Aron was challenging several basic ?realist? principles.
23
First, Aron rejected Lippmann?s assertion that Eastern Europe belonged 
within the Soviet sphere of influence, noting that it was the abnormal extension of the 
Soviet Army into the west that allowed Communist ?minorities? to set up 
governments obedient to Moscow.  Aron argued that a true great power ?determines 
its policies on the importance of the issues, not according to some anachronistic 
conception? of geographic spheres.  He determined that Lippmann and American 
policymakers had adopted the sphere-of-influence approach ?to appease Soviet fears 
and ambitions, without changing the global balance of forces, or opening the way for 
later [Soviet] expansion.?  Aron labeled it as a Munich-like gambit, for by yielding 
Poland and the other Eastern European countries on the basis of a ?realist? calculation 
of power, the U.S. merely had whet the Kremlin?s appetite.  ?The pseudo-realist 
reasoning that invokes the balance of local forces results inevitably in defeatism,? 
Aron wrote.  ?How many times has one heard the same kind of reasoning, from the 
era when Hitler realized his first conquests!?
24
Turning to Lippmann?s contention that American policymakers must pace 
themselves and be selective about applying U.S. power, Aron confronted yet another 
22
 Raymond Aron, Le Grand Schisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948): 32-51.
23
 A useful analysis of Aron?s particular version of ?realism? is found in Stanley Hoffman, Janus and 
Minerva: Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 
1987): 52-69.  Hoffmann, an Aron student, suggests ?four series of differences? separated the French 
realist and his American counterparts: (1) his rejection of the idea that the central purpose of politics 
was a quest for power; (2) his critique of abstract realism and refusal to accept ?normative? approach 
of those who use realism to predict events; (3) a keen appreciation for the domestic influences of 
foreign policy and a corollary belief that power ratios alone do not determine the external behavior of 
nations; and (4) a keen appreciation autonomy of the ?world economic system? separate from the 
interstate system and diplomatic-strategic maneuvering.  See especially, Hoffmann, Janus and 
Minerva: 55-57.
24
 Aron, Le Grand Schisme: 47.
131
?realist? axiom.  True enough, he conceded, the American economy was not 
?inexhaustible? and U.S. resources and surplus food supplies ?are not sufficient to 
feed the remainder of the world.?  Aron also acknowledged the danger of runaway 
inflation in the American economy and, as well, that the U.S. taxpayer might be over-
burdened with global responsibilities.  But, he countered, the Cold War would be no 
less expensive to wage from successively weaker geo-strategic positions.  ?Ask 
yourself, at which points in Europe the State Department could tolerate Soviet 
progress without suffering a resounding defeat with incalculable consequences?? 
Aron wrote, sketching a version of the domino theory, later widely accepted by 
Washington officials.  Prestige was a key factor for Aron, too.  One Communist 
success would breed another.  ?If [Greece and Turkey] fell, the Soviet Union would 
not stop in the Mediterranean, the Arabic countries would be subjected to increased 
pressure and would have to pullback behind a barrier that would cost no less in dear 
dollars.?
25
At the core of his critique of The Cold War, was Aron?s conviction that 
Lippmann?s prescription for evacuating all foreign armies from Germany would not 
provide the basis for a peace settlement.  Rather, he argued, the removal of military 
forces would incite chaos and provide Moscow a pretext for reinserting its forces to 
restore order?perhaps into a unified Germany with an East-leaning government.  
Aron maintained (incorrectly) that Lippmann did not understand the ?symbolic value? 
behind stationing U.S. troops in Germany?that they acted as a tripwire since ?the 
advance of the Russian army [against them] would constitute a cause for war? and 
25
 Aron, Le Grand Schisme: 47-48.
132
involve the Americans in hostilities from the outset.
26
  If the withdrawal took place, 
Aron wrote, Europeans ?would be inclined to think that the Americans would leave 
definitively and that the Russians will only withdraw provisionally.?  With no troops 
in place, Washington?s loud declarations that it would not tolerate Soviet military 
initiatives west of the Iron Curtain would carry no weight.  What Lippmann
?considers an advance of progress on the road to peace is, in the eyes of Europeans, a 
step towards capitulation,? Aron proclaimed.
27
Moreover, the Frenchman challenged Lippmann?s implication that the 
evacuation of the Red Army from its German zone, Poland, and the rest of Central 
Europe would restore self-sovereignty to the eastern capitals.  The Soviets already 
had installed their own political parties and would certainly leave behind a network of 
secret police and partisans.  The Czechs, Aron pointed out, had capitulated to the 
Communists and installed a puppet government without one Soviet troop based on 
their soil.  In Germany particularly Aron worried that the withdrawal of the 
occupation forces would lead to disorder which the entrenched Communists in the 
east would manipulate to their advantage.  In the three years of occupation both 
Germanys had been transformed politically and economically and Aron saw little 
hope that their rulers could share power or work from common ground.  ?The 
Germans themselves are inclined to believe that they would sink into civil war 
without the occupation armies,? he observed.  ?Certain authoritarian practices are 
inevitable when millions no longer have a roof, when misery holds sway, when the 
26
 Ibid., 49.
27
 Aron, Le Grand Schisme: 49.
133
ruling class has disappeared and discredited itself.  If the occupying armies left, 
which German government would be able to master the chaos??
28
Taking these factors into account, Aron judged Kennan?s containment 
program to be a sound, prudent, and necessary policy to achieve the prime requisite of 
Western European rehabilitation: halting Soviet expansion.  ?The political truth is that 
in Europe America began the fight already cornered to the wall because she lost the 
first battles at Tehran and Yalta,? he wrote.  ?When Europe east of the Stettin-Trieste 
line belongs alone to a tremendous military power, there are no more concessions that 
remain [to be given], unless one plans to yield all and withdraw from Europe.  The 
strategy of containment marks a final and reasonable attempt to save the part of the 
continent that has not yet been swallowed up.?
29
  Ultimately, Aron observed, 
Lippmann?s reservations had validity according to the rules of classical great power 
politics.  However, they did not take into account the unusual circumstances posed by 
the Soviet threat against the Western nations.  Aron believed that Lippmann had 
failed to offer a viable alternative; though, he conceded, this was not because the 
American had overlooked an obvious solution.  ?Let us say it brutally: for the 
moment, there is not one,? he concluded.  European unity and the withdrawal of the 
armies of occupation were secondary objectives.  The paramount goal ?is to stop the 
expansion of the Soviets, to put back on its feet the economy of the countries west of 
the Iron Curtain. We must not compromise the accomplishment of this task while 
dreaming momentarily of an unachievable peace.?
30
  Thus, as did leading Western 
28
 Ibid., 49-50.
29
 Ibid., 47-48.  My italics.
30
 Ibid., 50.
134
policymakers, Aron believed that there was virtually no room for diplomatic 
negotiations with Moscow.
In 1949 Lippmann and Aron offered starkly contrasting interpretations when 
the three powers merged their zones and created the Federal Republic of Germany.  
Lippmann?s criticisms of U.S. policy derived from De Gaulle?s own reservations 
about centralizing power in Bonn.  Lippmann wrote that the end of military 
governance surely foreshadowed the end of allied occupation.  ?Self-government and 
military occupation are like oil and water, and they cannot be mixed,? Lippmann told 
Today and Tomorrow readers.  ?We must not expect to see a German federal republic 
governing Western Germany while we occupy it.  We must expect the parliaments 
and the parties which we have authorized to become the organizers of a German 
movement to end the occupation, and to negotiate a settlement with Eastern Germany 
if we are not able to negotiate it . . . That should surprise no one who is not beguiled 
by the notion that the postwar Germans are less nationalistic and less patriotic than 
any other people would be in their circumstances.?  Allied military occupation, he 
declared, was ?a rapidly wasting asset.?
31
Lippmann was willing to commit American troops to Western Europe with 
the caveat that they not be stationed in Western Germany, which he believed ought to 
be neutralized and outside of the NATO Alliance.  He understood perfectly well the 
significance?or, as he wrote, the ?token? nature?of such a commitment of 
American forces; that, in fact, the presence of U.S. armed forces in Europe was for 
political rather than strategic reasons.  He knew that the view from Paris, for instance, 
31
 Lippmann, T&T, ?End of Military Control in Germany Foretells the End of Occupation,? 15 April 
1949, Los Angeles Times: A4.
135
comprehended that the commitment of these troops provided relief from renewed 
German militarism and domestic political chaos which allowed a focus on economic 
recovery.  ?The American guaranty, decisive as it is against Russia and against 
Germany, will not carry any conviction unless the western Europeans know that it 
will come into effect ?automatically,?? Lippmann told readers.  ?It will come into 
effect automatically if . . . there remain on the frontiers of western Europe some 
Americans?it does not really matter how many?who will be involved in war the 
first day that war breaks out.  Under the pact it should be quite feasible to work out 
arrangements for a permanent screen of American troops, however thin, as tangible 
proof of the reality of the American guaranty.?
32
  The real weight behind the 
American guaranty, Lippmann believed, lay in the threat of retaliatory nuclear and 
conventional air strikes against the Soviet heartland rather than a defensive action 
against the invading Red Army.
Further, Lippmann maintained that West German leaders would move swiftly 
to seek an accommodation with the Soviets and reunification with East Germany.  
?The Germans,? he wrote, ?do not believe in our conception of the western German 
state.  They would rather not have it.  But if we insist that they have it, they will make 
the most of it, using the machinery of government to liquidate or nullify our controls 
and to work out their own terms of settlement? with the Moscow.
33
 He reminded 
readers that the Kremlin possessed all the geographic enticements to lure the West 
Germans into an agreement?particularly the Danzig corridor.  In making this 
argument, the columnist specifically raised the specter of a modern adaptation of the 
32
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Russians, Germans, and the Pact,? 3 May 1949, Washington Post: 11.  Lippmann 
still held this position even after the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb later that year.
136
Rapallo Treaty or a new kind of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that could fuse Russian 
manpower with German industrial might.  As American, British, and French foreign 
ministers prepared to meet with the Soviets on the German issue, Lippmann warned 
that the proposed Bonn government would be but a ?transitory phase . . . on the way 
to a much more radical settlement.?
34
  He later explained that ?the Bonn constitution 
is manifestly an ambiguous document, designed for negotiation with the Russians . . . 
That does not mean that [the Germans] intend to become a Soviet satellite.  [They] 
have bigger idea than that.  But it does mean that they have, with our approval, put 
themselves in a position to negotiate with the Russians while we negotiate with the 
Russians.?
35
Aron interpreted the German situation in precisely the opposite manner.  
Partition with the development of a unified, economically revived western zone, 
fulfilled Paris?s two principal strategic objectives.  First, a divided Germany posed a 
minimal military threat to France.  Aron differed with Lippmann in this aspect, 
insisting that troops must be stationed in Germany proper as the best means both to 
demonstrate resolve to the Soviets and the East Germans and to provide security for 
Western Europe against potential future German aggression.  Second, the integration 
of Western Germany into a pacific, Western European economic community, Aron 
believed, was essential to ensure full economic recovery on the continent.  The true 
threat would be a united Germany dominated by Communists?a prospect he 
33
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Soviet Feelers,? 21 April 1949.
34
 Lippmann, T&T, ?End of Military Control in Germany Foretells the End of Occupation,? 15 April 
1949.
35
 Lippmann, T&T, ?From Bonn to Berlin,? 17 May 1949, Washington Post: 11.
137
believed to be very real.  He concluded that ?without Germany the West is 
indefensible.?
36
Moreover, the French columnist doubted Lippmann?s primary strategic 
assumption: that if the Soviets ever fully evacuated East Germany (a prospect he 
found unlikely) that they would honor an agreement not to intervene, especially if the 
political situation turned against Moscow?s favor.
37
  At length, Aron described the 
transformation that had occurred in the Soviet zone of occupation between 1945 and 
1948.  Moscow, he explained, had created a dependency in both an economic and 
political sense.  ?At present we believe that the policy of the Kremlin aims to 
Sovietize Germany, in order to integrate it into the empire that Stalin is in the process 
of erecting in Europe,? Aron wrote.  The ?collective and authoritarian? economy of 
the East, contrasting as it did with the free market structure of the western zones, 
precluded a merger he argued.
38
Years later the French commentator recalled in his memoirs Lippmann?s 
?unbelievable confidence? and ?intellectual arrogance? in advancing these arguments.  
36
 Raymond Aron, ?Politique Allemande (German Politics),? Le Figaro 30 March 1949; Aron, ?La 
Reconstruction des Zones Occidentales (The Reconstruction of the Western Zones),? part two of ?Les 
Deux Allegmanes (The Two Germanys),? in Le Figaro 31 August 1948.  These articles are from 
Soutou?s collection of Aron columns in Volume I: Le Guerre Froide: 195-199; 138-141.
37
 Nor did Lippmann?s idea resonate with U.S. officials who, like Aron, deeply mistrusted Soviet 
intentions.  John Foster Dulles, in particular, later claimed to be perplexed by it.  In April 1950, for 
example, as U.S. officials briefed Dulles in his law office as he prepared to become the Truman 
administration?s top negotiator for the Japanese peace treaty, the Sullivan & Cromwell attorney made 
the unsolicited observation that Lippmann?s ?neutralization arrangement? in the case of Germany ?did 
not make sense? and that it seemed inappropriate in Japan as well.  The problem wasn?t necessarily 
with rehabilitating the internal political systems in either country; rather, it lay with Moscow?s Marxist 
viewpoint.  ?Neutrality [has] no meaning for the Russians,? Dulles told his State Department briefers.  
Dulles?s appraisal of Lippmann was widely-held in U.S. government from the Truman years through 
the Johnson years.  Lippmann?s writing on postwar Germany did much to discredit his analyses in the 
eyes of American officials.  See, ?Memorandum of Conversation: Japanese Peace Settlement,? 7 April 
1950, 694.001/4-750, FRUS, Volume 6, 1950: 1161-1162.
38
 Aron, ?La Sovietisation de la Zone Orientale (The Sovietization of the Eastern Zone),? part 1 of ?Les 
Deux Allegmanes (The Two Germanys),? Le Figaro 25 August 1948, in Soutou, Volume I: Le Guerre 
Froide: 134-136.
138
?Since the Federal Republic of Germany insisted on being born, despite the 
prophecies of the master thinker,? Aron wrote, Lippmann ?found in his imagination 
secret causes . . . for the reality which was incompatible with the representation he 
made of it.?
39
  Why, Aron asked incredulously, would Lippmann suspect that Konrad 
Adenauer would conduct secret reunification negotiations with a man as ideologically
incompatible with him as East German Chancellor Walter Ulbricht?a hypothesis 
that, Aron wrote, ?anyone with a little knowledge? of either man would recognize as 
implausible.  ?The reason seems simple to me: Lippmann refused to recognize the 
facts and the men, because neither acted according to his global conception of history, 
with his theory of the primacy of nation over ideology,? Aron judged.  He admitted, 
however, that such an emphasis, so ill-suited to events in Germany, could offer 
insights elsewhere.  Aron?s own predilection to ?the force of ideological bond in 
communism? caused him to come late to awareness of the depth of the Sino-Soviet 
split?a condition Lippmann recognized as early as 1949.
40
IV.
Despite his abiding doubts about reaching any settlement with the masters of the 
Kremlin, Kennan moved further toward Lippmann?s position during the 1950s.  In 
December 1957, on the eve of NATO?s decision to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in 
Western Europe, Kennan delivered the Reith Lectures in a series of radio talks on the 
British Broadcasting Corporation.  Believing the military alliance itself, but especially 
39
Raymond Aron, Memoires (Paris: Julliard, 1983): 351.
40
 Ibid.  The English translation of Aron?s memoirs omits much of his most pointed criticism of 
Lippmann on these points.  See Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection, 
translated by George Holoch (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990): 184.
139
the placement of such nuclear weapons at the center of the great power standoff, 
impeded a negotiated settlement, Kennan made public the case for disengagement 
which he had privately argued for within the four walls of the Truman administration 
in 1948.  Later published as, Russia, the Atom, and the West (1958), the Reith 
Lectures ignited a spirited debate on both sides of the Atlantic.  Kennan proposed a 
program based on withdrawal, neutralization, and the preservation of a nuclear-free 
zone in Central Europe, the first two points closely paralleling what Lippmann had 
been writing in Today and Tomorrow for much of the decade.  Kennan?s plan 
featured four principle parts: (1) the removal of all foreign armies from Germany and 
the establishment of a large demilitarized zone around central Europe; (2) the 
unification and neutralization of Germany?most significantly that it would not be 
integrated into NATO; (3) the removal of nuclear weapons from continental Europe; 
(4) a recognition that Germany was the center of the Cold War conflict and that 
interests in Asia and Africa should, at most, take secondary precedence.
41
Raymond Aron, one of the earliest and most perceptive critics of Kennan?s 
Reith Lecture thesis, delivered powerful commentary at the January 1958 meeting of 
the Congress of Cultural Freedom in Paris which Kennan also attended.  Aron 
attacked Kennan?s central argument which, in Kennan?s words, was that ?the existing 
division of Europe was unsound, intolerable, and had to be changed.?  Without 
challenging the truth of that statement, Aron confined himself to discussing its 
practicality.  In fact, the Le Figaro columnist argued, Western Alliance leaders and 
the men in the Kremlin rather valued the stability that inhered in partition.  He 
explained, ?the present partition of Europe has been held to be less dangerous than 
41
 George F. Kennan, Russia, the Atom, and the West (New York: Harper and Company, 1958): 32-82.
140
any other solution.  Why? Because if we try to change it, we have to restore the 
fluidity to the European situation.?  Admitting that the division of Germany was 
?abnormal,? even ?absurd,? Aron nevertheless maintained that ?it is a clear-cut? 
situation ?and everybody knows where the demarcation line is and nobody is very 
much afraid of what could happen . . . So a clear partition of Europe is considered, 
rightly or wrongly, to be less dangerous than any other arrangement.?
42
  Aron also 
argued that mutual disengagement was liable to Soviet a reinsertion of military forces 
into Eastern European nations in which internal political conditions did not meet the 
Kremlin?s expectations.  He explained that the Soviets ?have formulated a new 
doctrine of what I call la Sainte Alliance.  It is the right of ?disinterested help? to any 
Communist government threatened by ?counterrevolution.??  Kennan, who at the time 
thought this the weaker of the Frenchman?s objections later admitted, ?in retrospect, 
[I] give Aron credit for a most remarkable prophetic insight, because in making this 
point he offered, ten years in advance of the event, a classic formulation of the so-
called Brezhnev doctrine.?
43
42
 George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1950-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1972): 252-253.
43
 Kennan, Memoirs: 1950-1963: 254.  Reflecting on the Reith Lectures 25 years later, Aron was most 
struck by Kennan?s naivete about Western statements calling for German reunification.  ?Even today, 
Kennan?s indignation astonishes me,? Aron wrote.  The Frenchman maintained that Kennan (like 
Lippmann) had badly under-estimated the political support for the partition of Germany.  The West 
was at a completely disadvantageous position: possessing no means to enforce free elections in the 
GDR; unable to accept ?legally or politically? the status quo, e.g., Soviet troops stationed 250 
kilometers from the Rhine.  Partition suited their purposes so long as they did not formally endorse it 
with a settlement.  Western leaders, Aron recalled, ?rejected in principle the division of Germany and 
Europe, realizing that this rejection helped to maintain it.? Aron was at a loss to explain Kennan?s 
?confidence in a Russo-American disengagement agreement,? since the lesson of Hungary was that an 
Eastern European communist government would invoke the Warsaw Pact to bring help from their 
Soviet allies.  
On Kennan?s move away from containment generally, Aron wrote perceptively of the 
diplomat.  ?Reserved almost to the point of being cold, a profound moralist, an ?elitist? perhaps without 
knowing it, he was less and less fond of an America that was becoming more and more populist,? Aron 
observed.  ?His evolution, from the article he signed as X to his current positions, can probably be 
explained by his growing detachment from his own country . . . Since [his X-Article] he  has 
141
The Reith Lectures also elicited a flurry of editorial commentary in the U.S.?
much of it negative.  Washington commentator Joe Alsop, who generally took a hard 
line position toward the Berlin problem in his ?Matter of Fact? column, gave Kennan 
a respectful hearing as a Soviet expert.  But Alsop believed that Kennan also ?suffers 
from an almost neurotic horror of military power in all its modern forms? and that 
that ?weakness led him into patches of plain silliness? such as his call to pull strategic 
nuclear forces off the continent.  Alsop also believed that American troops must 
remain in the former German capital and that any negotiations with the Soviets or 
East Germans would be a form of appeasement.  While taking a fairly gentle line 
toward the diplomat, Alsop told readers that Kennan?s Reith lectures, whether or not 
he intended it, fed ?a hunger for cozy self-delusion? among those who were firm 
proponents of accommodation with Soviets.
44
James B. Conant, then head of the American Council on Germany (a group 
that counted among its leadership Mrs. Ellen Zinsser McCloy, wife of former High 
Commissioner John McCloy) rallied Dean Acheson and other prominent foreign 
policy official to debunk Kennan?s claims.  The American Council on Germany drew 
up a press release and statement for Acheson in which Kennan?s old boss and 
erstwhile defender of the postwar world he?d done so much to shape, denounced his 
former subordinate.  Acheson complained of Kennan?s fuzzy thinking and insisting 
that his former PPS director had ?never . . . grasped the realities of power 
constantly repented his ?finest hour,? expatiated his historical role.?  See Raymond Aron, Memoirs: 
Fifty Years of Political Reflection: 195-196; 175.
44
 Joseph Alsop, ?A Hunger for Self-Delusion,? Matter of Fact, 19 January 1958, Washington Post: E5.
142
relationships but takes a rather mystical attitude toward them.?
45
  The Washington 
Post wrote that Acheson had ?gone a lot further than necessary? in differentiating the 
views of the Democratic Party foreign-policy- makers from Kennan?s disengagement 
thesis.  ?To characterize Mr. Kennan?s views as ?mystical? and his statements as 
?almost Messianic,?? the Post editors observed, ?is to engage in the same sort of 
unfair attack of which Mr. Acheson himself was so often the target.?  Columnist 
James Reston described the Achesonian assault as a ?murderous haymaker.?
46
  A few 
months later, this time with his own pen, Acheson attacked Kennan?s plan as a form 
of ?new isolationism,? a ?timid and defeatist policy of retreat,? and a return to ?the 
old yearnings and errors? of the interwar years.  Acheson?s gift for invective, so often 
aimed at Lippmann, now trained on the diplomat.  ??Disengagement? it is called now; 
but it is the same futile?and lethal?attempt to crawl back into the cocoon of 
history,? Acheson declared in a Foreign Affairs article in the spring of 1958.
47
The episode marked one of the strange role reversals of the intellectual feud 
over containment.  Kennan, the architect, simultaneously was excoriated by one of 
the principal developers of the policy he had hatched a decade earlier and defended 
by the man who had inspected and failed that same articulation of containment.  
Kennan forwarded a copy of the Reith Lectures to Lippmann, lamenting that his BBC 
broadcasts had been ?widely misinterpreted.?  Lippmann replied, ?I need hardly tell 
45
 See ?Acheson Rebuffs Kennan on Withdrawal of Troops,? 12 January 1958, New York Times: 1, 25.  
See also Hixon?s capable account of the Reith Lecture episode in George F. Kennan: Cold War 
Iconoclast: 171-193.  For a recent overview of the Acheson-Kennan dynamic see, Robert L. Beisner, 
?The Secretary, the Spy, and the Sage: Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, and George Kennan,? Diplomatic 
History  27 (No. 1, January 2003): 1-14.
46
 ?Kennan in the Cold,? 14 January 1958, Washington Post: A14; James Reston, ?Washington: 
Elevate Them Guns a Little Lower,? 19 January 1958, New York Times: E10.
47
 See Dean G. Acheson, ?The Illusion of Disengagement,? April 1958, Foreign Affairs 36 (No. 3): 
371-382.  
143
you how much I am in sympathy with the general line.?
48
  He wrote an April 1958 
Atlantic Monthly article ?supporting the central thesis? of the Reith Lectures as he 
told Kennan weeks before publication.
49
  Lippmann?s examination of disengagement 
was equal parts defense of Kennan and attack on Acheson.  In Western Europe, he 
explained, ?the Western allies have come to a dead end in the road which they had 
been following in the postwar years.  The road which Mr. Kennan pointed out is the 
only alternative which has some promise of leading to the reunification of Germany 
and to the national independence of the East European states.?  
Lippmann had been writing about alternatives to European occupation for 15 
years and, to highlight the point, quoted at length from a 5 October 1943 Today and 
Tomorrow column, written at the start of Allied deliberation over the postwar German 
state.  Lippmann had favored sending Allied armies into Germany ?for the purpose of 
disarming her, of arresting the criminals, of recovering the loot, and of making visible 
the reality of her defeat, and then to retire outside the frontiers, except perhaps to hold 
the strategic gateways and certain strategic economic resources such as the Ruhr and 
Silesia.?
50
  To do otherwise, to conduct a prolonged occupation would create such a 
stilted European reliance on the presence of armed forces that ?as soon as the 
occupying powers leave, all of Europe will tremble at what may happen, and the 
whole artificial settlement will be in turmoil after ten or fifteen years hence.?  
Lippmann would find confirmation for these ideas in General Charles De Gaulle?s 
48
 Kennan to Lippmann, 4 December 1957, WLC, Box 81, folder 1202; Lippmann to Kennan, 10 
December 1957, WLC, Box 81, folder 1202.  Kennan would again write Lippmann to complain of the 
?malice and irresponsibility of some of the attacks on me at home. . . .?  See Kennan to Lippmann, 10 
February 1958, WLC, Box 81, folder 1202.
49
 Lippmann to Kennan, 1 February 1958, WLC, Box 81, folder 1202.  Walter Lippmann, ?Mr. Kennan 
and Reappraisal in Europe,? Atlantic Monthly 201 (No. 4, April 1958): 33-37.
50
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Occupying Germany?? 5 October 1943.
144
own opinions?which the French leader would express to the columnist later in the 
1940s.  Kennan?s notion of disengagement, of course, had set off European fears of 
American withdrawal within Lippmann?s time frame.
51
Thus, disengagement was hardly a ?newfangled theory, the pipe dream of a 
mystic, the imagining of an unworldly scholar, or worse still, the design of an 
appeaser of Communism.?  It represented an ?alternative? road the Allies may have 
chosen were it not for their ?war psychosis? and ?had they been lucid and realistic 
about Stalin.?  The policies of Truman and Acheson, followed by Eisenhower and 
Dulles, ?combine advocacy of unification and liberation with a stern opposition to 
military evacuation.?  These ?great realists,? Lippmann wrote, based their foreign 
policy on an ?extraordinarily na?ve notion . . . that the Western power is paramount 
and that Soviet power is certain to decline.?  Sputnik and the robust expansion of the 
Russian economy, Lippmann noted, suggested otherwise.
Although ?an old believer in Mr. Kennan?s side of the argument,? Lippmann 
had reservations.  Disengagement was a good starting point for the ?process of 
reappraisal, reorientation, and re-education? of policy.  But he did not agree with 
three of Kennan?s points: 1) a neutral Germany should remain completely disarmed 
of its own conventional forces; 2) continental Western Europe should be entirely free 
of nuclear weapons; and 3) the U.S. should not be required to assist developing 
countries through an enhanced foreign aid program.
52
Despite these differences, Lippmann momentarily shared Kennan?s core 
contention that foreign troops should be removed from Germany as the basis upon 
51
 Lippmann, ?Mr. Kennan and Reappraisal in Europe,? 33-34.
52
 Ibid., 35-36.
145
which to move toward a political settlement.  In early 1959, he made just that point to 
Netherlands Ambassador to the U.S., J. Herman Van Roijen.  ?I am sure you cannot 
suspect me of denigrating the NATO guarantee, which is something I have advocated 
continuously since before the First World War, and about which I have written 
innumerable articles and several books,? Lippmann explained to Van Roijen, in a 
letter which followed a spirited face-to-face exchange.  ?My point about the NATO 
guarantee is that it will be in effect even if there are no United States ground forces of 
German soil, and that U.S. involvement in a war would be as automatic as anything 
can be, once a Soviet missile or a bomb were launched against any NATO country.  I 
do not believe that the United States guarantee depends upon the five divisions on 
German soil.?
53
  Kennan, he argued publicly, had demonstrated ?that the Acheson-
Dulles-Adenauer policy is at a dead end, and that it has become necessary for the 
Western allies to reorient themselves from a policy based on a military occupation to 
a policy directed toward military disengagement.?  In conclusion, Lippmann wrote, 
the ?principle of disengagement? acknowledged ?that we are dealing with an equal 
power, not an inferior one, and that a settlement must therefore be based on 
bargaining.?  He added, such a settlement is ?designed not only to protect our own 
vital interests.  It must respect the vital interests of the Russians.?
54
The disengagement debate lingered into 1959 when Lippmann abruptly 
modified his position?accepting the semi-permanent partition of Germany on much 
the same basis that Raymond Aron had argued for a year earlier.  In a four-part series 
of Today and Tomorrow in April 1959, Lippmann explained that he had now shifted 
53
 Lippmann to J. Herman Van Roijen, 9 January 1959, reprinted in John Morton Blum, Public
Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985): 593.
146
from advocacy of reunification to a settlement over the status of West Berlin.  ?I 
belong to the minority who have argued that German national feeling will not accept 
the partition of Germany, that some day and somehow the West Germans will come 
to terms with East Germany and the Soviet Union in order to reunite their country,? 
Lippmann told readers.  ?The case for a politically neutral Germany and the 
disengagement of non-German troops has been inspired by an attempt to find an 
orderly settlement of the problem of German reunification?to avert a disorderly deal 
brought about by an explosion of frustrated national German patriotism.?
55
  But 
Lippmann?s sources?particularly those within the new government of French 
president Charles De Gaulle?were telling him that this position contradicted the 
political realities.  His side of the argument, he admitted, failed principally because 
both Western and Soviet leaders valued the relative stability that partition 
engendered.  The rhetoric of re-unification, Lippmann explained, had been 
superceded by this practical effect; in short, there was no political will to reunite 
Germany.  Western leaders ?do not say it but they have come to know that the two 
Germanys cannot be ?reunited in freedom,? that is to say by liquidating the 
Communist regime in East Germany,? he wrote in Today and Tomorrow.  ?There are 
now two German states, and every respectable European statesman realizes that they 
cannot be united within any foreseeable future and under any conditions which are 
now conceivable.?
56
Lippmann adjusted his position in part because Nikita Khrushchev had raised 
tensions over Berlin in late-1958, demanding a final settlement for the status of the 
54
 Lippmann, ?Mr. Kennan and Reappraisal in Europe,? 37.
55
 Lippmann, T&T, 9 April 1959, ?The Two Germanys and Berlin, III: The Berlin Crisis.?
147
city and postwar Germany.  In October 1958, Lippmann interviewed the Soviet 
premier in Moscow.  Khrushchev?s belligerence and the depth of his paranoia about 
Western efforts to re-arm Germany disturbed Lippmann who thought that the 
Kremlin had crawled back into a ?cocoon of pre-1941? fears.
57
  Khrushchev pressed 
for a resolution of the German peace treaty and a new status for Berlin.  He expressed 
fears that Washington was preparing to furnish West Germany with nuclear weapons 
and turn it eastward toward Russia.  The Soviet leader described Chancellor 
Adenauer as ?belligerent? and equated him with Paul von Hindenburg, the man who 
helped elevate Hitler to power.  Khrushchev read developments in Germany to be 
?much like the eve of the Second World War,? and accused Washington officials of 
?actually contributing to the remilitarization? of West Germany.  ?Americans seem 
not to realize the dangers that may come to themselves,? Khrushchev warned 
Lippmann.  ?The U.S. may someday pay with her blood for having encouraged such 
people.?
58
  Lippmann?s book which recounted that interview, The Communist World 
and Ours (1958), forecast the difficulties that lay ahead on the German issue and 
suggested possible avenues for negotiations on Berlin that would meet some of 
Khrushchev?s security concerns.
59
By April 1959, Kennan had quietly scuttled his disengagement thesis and, like 
Lippmann, had come to accept the permanent division of Germany.  Also, like 
Lippmann he was beginning to look for a settlement on Berlin?the flash point that 
56
 Lippmann, T&T, 6 April 1959, ?The Two Germanys and Berlin, I: The Berlin Crisis.?
57
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 510-511.  For the reference to ?cocoon,? see also 
Vladislav Zubok, ?Working Paper No. 6: Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis, 1958-1962,? Cold War 
International History Project, Virtual Archive, available on-line at:  http://www.wwics.si.edu  .
58
 Helen B. Lippmann, ?Notes on conversation with Khrushchev,? 24 October 1958, Moscow, WLC, 
Box 238, Folder 27, Series VII.
59
 Walter Lippmann, The Communist World and Ours (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1958).
148
might upend that tenuous division.  Reading several installments of Today and 
Tomorrow, Kennan sent Lippmann an advance copy of a speech he delivered before 
the Executives? Club in Chicago. ?I am greatly encouraged to know that our thoughts 
are running along lines so similar but fearful that if I do not show you this draft, as it 
stood when I finished it yesterday, you will suspect me of plagiarism.?
60
  In his ?The 
Two Germanys and Berlin? series Lippmann had counseled that policymakers 
negotiate a three-part program for the withdrawal of all foreign armies from Berlin, 
de facto recognition of East Germany, and international city status for the historic 
German capital.
61
  ?If we could bring the two German states into a legal relationship 
with each other, there would be a chance that the movement toward Germany unity, 
which is certain to grow, would be open and visible rather than clandestine and 
conspiratorial,? Lippmann told readers.  The plan aimed ?to buy a temporary 
standstill at the risk that at some later date there will be an explosion of pent-up 
popular feelings which we have managed to frustrate.?
62
  Kennan largely agreed on 
this course as a basis to proceed with negotiations.
Exasperated with Washington?s diplomatic intransigence, Lippmann lashed 
out at Dean Acheson and others who were publicly propagating a hard-line stance in 
Berlin.  In his 22 October 1959 installment of Today and Tomorrow the columnist 
criticized the ?old soldiers? of the Truman administration?naming Acheson, the 
former president, and former PPS director Paul Nitze, the chief author of NSC-68?
for leading the chorus against a diplomatic settlement.  ?Their thesis is that the status 
60
 Kennan to Lippmann, 8 April 1959, WLC, Box 81, folder 1202.  See Lippmann?s brief reply of 9 
April 1959 in the same folder.
61
 See, Lippmann, T&T, ?The Berlin Crisis (Part 3 of 4), 8 April 1959; Lippmann, T&T, ?The Berlin 
Crisis (Part 4 of 4), 9 April 1959.
149
of West Berlin is not a negotiable question; that the right policy for this country is to 
refuse to discuss the status of West Berlin; and to defy the Soviets to do anything 
about West Berlin,? Lippmann explained.
63
  Either Moscow would be ?overawed by 
our firmness? or the U.S. would be prepared to wage a ?limited? war over access to 
the city.  Lippmann dismissed these officials as intent on trying ?to relive the battles 
in which they won their fame and glory.?  They practiced, he wrote, a form of 
?negativism? that ?compels the country to oppose all moves toward accommodation . 
. . an impossible platform from which to exercise world leadership.?  His harshest 
assessment, a familiar one stated more bluntly, was that they were scaring public 
opinion into supporting ?a rigid and unchanging diplomacy.?  As they had done to 
win public sanction for the Marshall Plan, NATO, and vast defense expenditures, 
Acheson and company were now acting on the ?belief that without perpetual tension 
and fear the democracies cannot be induced to support the necessary armaments, or 
trusted not to appease the adversary and to sink into cowardice and lethargy.  What 
lies at the root of this thing is the belief that democracies cannot be led and that they 
must be terrorized.?  American officials must ?learn how to persuade and convince . . 
. not merely [how] to frighten and stampede? the public, Lippmann concluded.
64
Nitze, in answering Lippmann?s column, dismissed the option of bargaining 
with the Soviets.  ?The main questions for us about Berlin are two: (a) Shall we 
venture war rather than yield? (b) If not, shall we acquiesce through a negotiation?? 
Nitze replied in a personal letter on 26 October 1959.  ?My answer to each is 
62
 Lippmann, T&T, 9 April 1959, ?The Two Germanys and Berlin, IV: The Berlin Crisis.?
63
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Choppy Waters,? 22 October 1959.
64
 Ibid.  Lippmann?s description of the state of perpetual tension that U.S. officials believed that they 
must create to carry forward their policies, resembled the political philosophy which Nitze expressed 
150
negative.  We should not venture a war.  If we are to be routed out of a rightful 
position, we should not legitimate the act through a negotiated agreement.?
65
Furthermore, Nitze disputed Lippmann?s solution that a phased withdrawal of allied 
and Soviet forces over a five-year period, followed by emplacement of United 
Nations observers, would provide sufficient assurances for the political autonomy of 
the city.  ?With the emergence of a clear prospect that the legitimacy of the East 
German regime was to be conceded at some further date and the protection of allied 
forces withdrawn from West Berlin, the West Berliners would perforce feel 
compelled to accommodate as best they could with the surrounding superior power,? 
Nitze insisted.  ?The result?however the language of the agreement might tend to 
obscure it?would be a defeat for us and an overturning of our rights.?  Lippmann?s 
reply cut quick to the heart of the difference between he and the principal Washington 
architects of cold war policy.  ?As far as I can see, in your mind negotiating means 
yielding,? Lippmann wrote Nitze.  ?That I do not believe.  I am looking for a 
settlement in Berlin which will last for a long period of time, if necessary for a 
generation if it is going to take that long before Germany is reunified.  I am 
unprepared to believe that any negotiation means acquiescence in abandoning 
Berlin.?
66
V.
years later.  See Nitze?s Tension Between Opposites: Reflections on the Practice and Theory of Politics
(New York: Scribners, 1993): especially pp. 7-21.
151
?Choppy Waters? also produced a spirited defense from Dean Acheson who drafted a 
blustery letter to the Washington Post, which had printed Lippmann?s column.  
Unsurprisingly, he also rejected Lippmann?s contention that the status of West Berlin 
was negotiable.  Acheson, the brilliant, blunt, at times bullying, secretary of state was 
one of the prime architects of the postwar world.  His biographer, James Chace, noted 
with admiration that Acheson was ?the quintessential American realist? in the later 
half of the 20
th
 Century and the most influential foreign policy shaper since John 
Quincy Adams.  Acheson, Chace judges, knew the uses and possibilities of applying 
American power better than any of his contemporaries.
67
  Nevertheless, Lippmann 
hotly contested Acheson?s Cold War strategies for more than two decades.  On this 
point of dramatizing and exaggerating the ideological dimensions of the Cold War?
and in no small measure because Acheson helped globalize the containment policy?
the columnist and secretary of state famously and angrily parted.  Their division 
widened after Acheson left office.
Acheson and Lippmann clashed over the scope, definition, and various 
incarnations of the containment strategy.  Acheson, though not an ideologue, took a 
hard-line, militarist approach to containing the Soviet Union and, later, China.  Where 
Lippmann was likely to counsel negotiation, Acheson was equally likely to 
recommend force and intimidation?especially in the years after he left 
government.
68
  The Truman Doctrine, which Acheson helped craft during his term as 
65
 Paul Nitze to Lippmann, 26 October 1959, Box 32, Folder 5, Nitze Papers, Library of Congress, 
Washington, D.C.
66
 Lippmann to Paul Nitze, 27 October, Nitze Papers, Box 32, folder 5, LC.  My italics.
67
 James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York: Simon 
and Schuster, 1998): 12; and see especially, 439-442.
68
Douglas Brinkley?s Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 
1992).
152
undersecretary of state, was the first point of contention.  Lippmann supported the bill 
to aid Greece and Turkey against Communist-led insurgencies.  But he warned 
readers in March 1947 that in practice the Truman Doctrine was open-ended, that it 
dispersed American power, and transformed the Soviet-American power struggle in 
Europe into a global ?ideological crusade.?
69
  Acheson retaliated at an April 1947 
dinner party, accusing the columnist of ?sabotaging? U.S. foreign policy.  They 
almost came to blows?as Lippmann?s protective wife, Helen, kept a careful eye on 
the combatants.
70
  From that episode forward neither man would agreed on the basic 
goals of U.S. containment strategy: Acheson, the unilateralist, pushing an expansive 
policy and Lippmann, the collaborationist, countering with limits and reservations.
Acheson had a long memory about Lippmann?s attacks during his term as 
secretary of state.
71
  At the end of the McCarthy period, Lippmann published a 
gloomy book on the failures of democratic government, The Public Philosophy, for 
which Acheson gave a stormy private review.  Lippmann ?makes the amazing 
discovery,? Acheson wrote Harry Truman, that a principal defect of modern 
democracies was the encroachment on executive power by legislative bodies 
?pandering to an ignorant and volatile public? through mass media.  ?If he had known 
this and used his power?which isn?t much but something?to support the executive 
when we really had one instead of joining the chorus of misrepresentation, I could 
read him with more patience,? he concluded.
72
   James Chace notes that much of the 
69
 See, for example, Lippmann, T&T, ?Policy or Crusade?? 18 March 1947; Lippmann, T&T, ?Outline 
of a Working Policy,? 25 March 1947.
70
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 439-440.
71
 A subject covered in Chapter Five.
72
 Dean G. Acheson to Harry S. Truman, 20 January 1955, Papers of Dean G. Acheson, Harry S. 
Truman Presidential Library, Independence, MO (hereinafter referred to as ?HSTL?).
153
diplomat?s deep resentment was due to Lippmann?s peer status within the same 
establishment circles; that, in fact, both men shared so many mutual friends.  Yet, 
?Lippmann rarely hesitated to attack Acheson frontally when he disagreed with him,? 
Chace writes.  ?Precisely because of Lippmann?s brilliance and authority, Acheson 
found his attacks particularly galling.?
73
Out of power, Acheson showed less restraint when it came to using military 
muscle to confront the Soviets.
74
  This further drove a wedge between he and 
Lippmann.  Their fundamental differences on containment resurfaced along those 
fault lines during the Berlin crises in 1959 and 1961.  Acheson felt Eisenhower 
should have been more assertive in the face of Khrushchev?s threats in 1959 and, 
during a trip to Berlin that fall, he told German officials as much and issued hard-line 
public statements.  When Lippmann rebuked him in a column, Acheson expressed 
impatience with those who ?call a retreat a negotiation? in the hope that ?the element 
of consent prevents it from being a defeat and a loss.?  He told Manlio Brosso, Italy?s 
ambassador to the U.S., ?I am most unsympathetic to this sort of self-deception.?
75
Acheson advised Kennedy that he must be ?willing to fight for Berlin? and advised a 
military buildup in Europe to the exclusion of economic or diplomatic initiatives.  If 
the Russians or East Germans cut off access to Berlin, he told Kennedy, then NATO 
should send an armored division eastward on the autobahn to see how serious they 
were.
76
   By contrast, the columnist counseled the administration to avoid a direct 
confrontation with Khrushchev by offering de facto recognition of East Germany in 
73
 Chace, Acheson: 199.
74
A theme stressed in Brinkley?s Dean Acheson.
75
 David McLellan and David Acheson, eds., Among Friends: Personal Letters of Dean Acheson (New 
York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980): 173.
154
exchange for unfettered access to Berlin.  ?Walter Lippmann is the archangel of 
appeasement,? Acheson thundered in another letter to Truman.
77
   ?The negotiation 
would provide some decent covering for the nakedness of the submission,? he 
sneered, analyzing Lippmann?s position in a letter to Eelco Van Kleffens, the former 
Netherlands ambassador to the U.S. from 1947-1950.
78
  He continued to push his case 
for bold action partly because he was concerned that Lippmann might influence the 
impressionable and inexperienced New Frontiersmen with his message of 
accommodating the Soviets.  So stark was the division between the two men on the 
Berlin issue that national security adviser McGeorge Bundy coined the terms 
?Achesonians? and the ?Lippmanns? for the firm and soft approaches, respectively.  
Both wanted to preserve Western access to Berlin, Bundy explained to President 
Kennedy, but they diverged ?on whether there is any legitimate Soviet interest to 
which we can give some reassurance . . . At one extreme are those who feel that the 
[Soviets?] central purpose is to drive us out of Berlin and destroy the European 
alliance as a consequence. On the other extreme are those who feel that if we think in 
terms of accommodation, we should be able to avoid a real crisis.?
79
Acheson?s unpublished reply to ?Choppy Waters? fit the pattern.  He wrote, 
?Mr. Lippmann is a master of words and can use the nicest words to cover the ugliest 
76
 Chace, Acheson: 385-386.
77
 Acheson to Harry S. Truman, 21 September 1961, Box 166 (1961), Dean G. Acheson Papers, HSTL.
78
 McLellan and Acheson, Among Friends: 211.
79
 McGeorge Bundy to President Kennedy, ?Specific answers to your questions of May 29
th
 relating to 
the USSR,? 29 May 1961, President?s Office Files, USSR-Vienna Meeting, Background Documents, 
1961 (A), John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA, (hereinafter referred to as ?JFKL?).  For Acheson?s 
aggressive advice for handling the Berlin Crisis see, Chace, Acheson: 383-394. One NSC staff member 
from the period seemed to sum up Kennedy administration perceptions of Acheson.  ?He was a great 
man,? recalled Francis Bator, a European specialist.  ?But his judgment by then, on a lot of things, was, 
I think, in error.  And I think it was in error in the Cuban Missile Crisis and was in error when he said, 
?Put tanks in Berlin.?  My own guess is that during any of those incidents, if he had been Secretary of 
155
situations.?
80
  To illustrate that claim, Acheson referenced the 19 May 1933 Today 
and Tomorrow column (a favorite for the Lippmann?s detractors) in which he had 
described a moderate speech by Adolf Hitler as representing ?the authentic voice of a 
genuinely civilized people.? 
81
 From there, Acheson proceeded to argue that 
negotiating on West Berlin was not a ?coming to terms? with the Russians so much as 
it was a capitulation, a decision to abandon Western interests and the city?s populace.  
?It?s my view that to sell West Berlin would not only be beneath contempt but would 
justifiably destroy all confidence which others nations have in the United States and 
dissolve our alliances,? Acheson wrote.  Khrushchev?s proposal?mirroring 
Lippmann?s?to create a free city and evacuate foreign troops was mitigated, 
Acheson argued, by the fact the Kremlin?s ?East German puppets? already were on 
the record as saying that Allied withdrawal would be a prologue to Berlin?s 
incorporation into East Germany.  
Further, Acheson rejected the notion that U.N. forces could guarantee the free 
status of the city.  ?All such formulae ignore the basic reality that the security of West 
Berlin depends upon the presence of the allied troops now there and the readiness of 
the three governments to defend their rights by force if they have to,? he wrote.  
Under present circumstances, the former secretary of state concluded, negotiations 
were tantamount to ?concession and retreat.?  He added, ?To this I am completely 
opposed and I am not deceived by calling a retreat a negotiation.  On this point I am, 
as Mr. Lippmann charges, ?rigid,? and I believe any man of honor and sense should be 
State, his own decisions would have been very different than the advice that he gave.?  Francis Bator, 
interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, MA.
80
 Dean Acheson, Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post (unsent), 26 October 1959, Box 32, 
folder5, Nitze Papers, LC.
156
. . . and to do so requires steady nerves.  To lack them is not a disgrace; but it is a 
handicap which unfits one for the role.  Perhaps one thing can be said for old soldiers; 
it is generally known what sort of nerves they have.?
82
  Acheson, like Nitze, preferred 
to focus on the mechanics of negotiating over West Berlin.  Neither man challenged 
Lippmann?s under-girding criticism that in order to win public support for their 
policies they had promoted public fears of Soviet aggression by inflating the 
Kremlin?s relative power and speculating wildly about Russian intentions.
83
VI.
Lippmann clearly preferred diplomacy and accommodation to military confrontation 
as he continued to write during the Kennedy administration about the contentious 
issue of access to West Berlin.  Worrying about the potential for minor superpower 
infractions there to spiral into a nuclear confrontation, he repeatedly counseled 
administration officials to negotiate a new status for the city that would preserve 
Western freedom and access but also recognize the permanent division of Germany.  
In addition, he urged calm in the wake of the Vienna meeting during which Soviet 
premier Nikita Khrushchev ratcheted up the pressure by demanding that a solution to 
the division of Germany be reached by the end of 1961.  ?The wave of the future is 
not Communist domination of the world . . . [but it] is social reform and social 
81
 See Lippmann, T&T, ?Hitler?s Speech,? 19 May 1933, Los Angeles Times: A4.
82
 Ibid.
83
 Lippmann had been troubled by the Truman administration?s tendency to stoke fears in Congress and 
the public to win support for its programs.  In 1948, he wrote, in order to justify the Truman Doctrine 
?it has been necessary to argue ourselves into the assumption that nothing can be settled.  From that it 
is a small step to the view that nothing ought to be settled since any settlement requires concessions 
and compromises, and thus to acquire the habit of not looking for, of not trying to think out, ways and 
means of breaking the stalemate.?  Lippmann, T&T, ?The Costs of Containment,? 10 February 1948.
157
revolution driving towards the goal of national independence and equality of personal 
status,? Lippmann comforted readers.  ?In this historical tendency, Mr. Khrushchev 
will be . . . ?the locomotive of history? only if we set ourselves up to be the road 
blocks of history.?
84
Neither President Kennedy nor his advisors shared Lippmann?s emphasis on 
accommodating Soviet interests in Germany.  Berlin was one of the Cold War crises 
points that was of minimal strategic importance to Washington but was of 
incalculable value because of its symbolism and the American prestige invested in its 
independent status.  The Kennedy administration believed it could not consider 
Khrushchev?s demands, nor even negotiate with East German officials to preserve 
access to the city, lest it cause the West German government in Bonn to become 
disillusioned with the Western Alliance and move toward a closer accommodation 
with the East.  Above all else, they feared the destabilizing effect upon their alliance 
and the existing power structure for, if nationalists came to power in Bonn, West 
Germany might as easily strike off on its own and seek to reunify Germany forcibly.
85
The columnist, however, believed Kennedy could not ?stand pat? on the issue of the 
future of Berlin, continuing to rely on a policy based upon Western threats of waging 
a thermonuclear war to preserve freedom in West Berlin.  
Having met again with Khrushchev in April 1961, Lippmann was convinced 
of the Soviet premier?s resolve to stem the flow of East Germans and to limit the 
84
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Folly of Despair,? 13 June 1961.
85
 Frank Costigliola, ?The Pursuit of Atlantic Community: Nuclear Arms, Dollars and Berlin,? in 
Thomas G. Paterson ,ed., Kennedy?s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (New 
York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 37-47.
158
impressive Western spy apparatus in the city.
86
  At that meeting in Sochi on the 
Crimean, Khrushchev told Lippmann that the Soviets wanted a decisive settlement on 
the status of West Berlin and Western de facto recognition of the East German 
regime.  He described these outstanding issues as the ?last piece of shrapnel? left in 
the flesh of Europe.  ?If none of this is acceptable, we will sign [a separate peace 
treat] with East Germany, refuse to recognize the status of West Berlin, and then all 
contact with West Berlin will have to be [through] East Germany.?  He added that in 
the event of a Western Alliance dispute with the East Germans over access to the city, 
that Moscow ?would stop by force? access to Berlin ?in support of our allies.?  The 
Soviet premier seemed eager to make Washington officials live up to their bellicose 
rhetoric.  ?Will the West really start a war over West Berlin?  I answer, ?No, no, no!?? 
Khrushchev shouted at his guest.  ?I can?t believe western statesmen are so insane as 
to go to war over 2.5 million people in West Berlin who are threatened by no one.?  
But, Khrushchev observed, ?better [that it be] done now before the former Hitler 
officials in the West [German] government receive atomic arms.?
87
  Lippmann, in 
several columns after that meeting, described Berlin as a pressure point where the 
Soviets could, with minimal effort??simply by closing a bridge or losing some 
papers??exert great pressure upon the West.  Accordingly, Lippmann counseled 
Kennedy to disregard his advisors who recommended that Russia ?could be driven 
86
 See for example Lippmann?s account in his book, The Coming Tests with Russia (Boston: Little, 
Brown and Company, 1961).
87
 Helen B. Lippmann, ?Notes of Meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, 10 April 1961, Sochi, Crimea, 
WLC, Box 239, Folder 31, Series VII.
159
into a corner, that it can be intimidated, and that it does not have to be listened to.?
88
It was time to negotiate, Lippmann wrote.
By publicly renouncing the fiction that the ultimate objective was to reunify 
East and West Germany, Lippmann believed Kennedy could win points by taking the 
initiative.  In a 29 May 1961 memorandum preparing the president for the Vienna 
meeting, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy outlined Lippmann?s three-part 
recommendation.  According to Bundy, the columnist encouraged Kennedy to ?stand 
absolutely firm? on Western right of access to Berlin while pointing out the ?extreme 
danger? of interfering with that right.  Lippmann also suggested Kennedy defer 
negotiations on the Berlin question until after the German elections in September 
1961.  Most significantly, he raised the possibility of offering ?de facto acceptance? 
of the East German Republic in exchange for Soviet guarantees of Western access to 
Berlin.  ?Lippmann thinks that without recognizing the GDR in formal terms, we can 
yet find ways of meeting what he thinks may be the fundamental Soviet impulse,? 
Bundy explained, ??a need for security in Eastern Europe and the fear of what the 
post-Adenauer Germany may look like.?
89
  This put Lippmann at odds with 
prominent members of the Washington intelligentsia.  ?[Joe] Alsop is for a strong and 
essentially unyielding position, carried all the way to war,? Bundy pointed out in the 
days after the Vienna Summit.  ?Lippmann is for a negotiated solution . . . he would
like to have us to propose measures looking toward the genuine neutralization of 
West Berlin, in return for guarantees spelled out in detail by all parties, along the 
88
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Vienna,? 6 June 1961; ?The President?s Report,? 8 June 1961.
89
 Bundy to President Kennedy, ?Specific answers to your questions of May 29
th
 relating to the 
USSR,? 29 May 1961, President?s Office Files, Box 126, ?Countries: USSR-Vienna Meeting,? JFKL.
160
lines of the Lateran Treaty.?
90
  Lippmann ratcheted up the pressure on Kennedy to 
open discussions with the Soviets, telling his readers soon after seeing Bundy, ?If 
there is nothing he wants to do in Germany except to do nothing, the President will 
have lost the power to direct and control the struggle, and to use force and the threat 
of force intelligently to achieve real results.?
91
Aron?s position on the Berlin Crisis and negotiating with Soviets was just as 
firm as, if less strident than, Joe Alsop?s counsel.  In mid-July 1961, the Le Figaro
columnist sketched for his readers ?three schools? which had emerged to answer 
Khrushchev?s demand for a settlement: ?pure and simple rejection,? ?partial 
concessions,? and ?fundamental concessions.?  Aron placed Lippmann in the second 
grouping.  He accurately sketched Lippmann?s position on the Berlin problem.  While 
the American commentator maintained that the U.S. could not abandon two million 
West Berliners, he nevertheless proposed that their freedom should rest on some kind 
of guarantee other than ?the right of conquest.  What remains in Berlin of the 
quadripartite is a holdover from the time when it was hoped to re-establish a united 
Germany,? Aron continued.  Since, as Lippmann argued, the division would last for a 
long period, ?To preserve the freedom of West Berlin, it is necessary to give it a new 
juridical foundation.?
92
  Of the three proposed courses, Aron did not immediately 
dismiss this option, though his inclinations against it later became clearer.  He did 
90
 Memorandum from the President?s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to 
President Kennedy (?Subject: Berlin?) 10 June 1961, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. XIV: 107-109.  The 
Lateran Treaty of 1929 was an accord between the Holy See and Benito Mussolini?s Italy which 
recognized the new state of Vatican City as a fully sovereign and independent entity.  In addition, the 
treaty gave Italy the responsibility to provide public services and to prosecute crimes committed inside 
Vatican City.
91
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Problem of Berlin,? 29 June 1961.
161
reject the ?third school? which offered to extend de jure recognition to the 
Democratic Republic of Germany.  Such a concession, Aron pointed out, would give 
Khrushchev more than he asked.  Any legitimization of the Pankow government, he 
feared, would embolden it to ?be even less tolerant of the present occupation regime 
in one part of its capital; the recognition would not give an additional assurance that 
the status of the free city would long be respected.?  Aron described this path as 
acquiescence to a ?limited defeat.?
93
Aron clearly valued more than Lippmann the fact that Western firmness in 
West Berlin would serve as a symbol of its resolution against the Soviets elsewhere?
a determination that he, like many American policymakers, thought critical in the 
battle for European public opinion.  In the sense that Lippmann?s proposal tended 
only to answer the local problems occasioned by the division of Berlin, Aron could 
not completely accept it.  He wrote that ?the stakes interest the whole of both 
[superpower] blocks and the solution must not be determined by the local situation 
alone.?  As Aron viewed it, Premier Khrushchev had three objectives in forcing a 
showdown in Berlin: 1) to bolster and legitimize the Pankow regime; 2) to close the 
routes by which East Germans fled to the West; and 3) to demonstrate the weakness 
of the Western Alliance.  ?Those who imagine that in consecrating the territorial 
status of Europe, the West would insure a stable peace don?t understand anything 
about Soviet strategy,? he concluded.  ?Beyond the two million Berliners, it is the fate 
92
 Aron, ?L?Enjeu de la Crise de Berlin (The Stakes of the Berlin Crisis),? 19 July 1961, Le Figaro, 
reprinted in Soutou, Volume II, La Coexistence: Les Articles de Politique Internationale Dans Le 
Figaro (Paris, Editions de Fallois: 1993): 882-885
93
 Ibid.
162
of Germany and of Western Europe that threatens to be in play.?
94
  The notion of 
?free city? status (an idea that Lippmann supported as ?international city? status) 
would, Aron argued, have cut off East Germans from their primary escape route.  
Though he held back from attacking Lippmann?s position frontally, by Aron?s logic 
any settlement that would have recognized the legitimacy of East Germany?in 
formal practice or in fact?would have weakened the Western position and 
contributed to Khrushchev?s attainment of his goals.  
President Kennedy reacted boldly to the Kremlin?s challenge, linking the 
defense of West Berlin to America?s larger commitments to NATO and Western 
Europe and threatening military confrontation.  In late-July 1961, he requested from 
Congress an additional $3.2 billion in military appropriations, tripled draft calls, 
mobilized more than 150,000 reserves, and sent 40,000 more troops to Europe.
95
  On 
the evening of July 25, 1961, Kennedy spoke to the nation on television from the 
Oval Office with grim determination about the Berlin Crisis.  He described the old 
German capital as a symbol of freedom, a source of hope behind the Iron Curtain, and 
a window of escape for East Berliners.  ?West Berlin is all of that,? Kennedy told 
viewers.  ?But above all it has now become?as never before?the great testing place 
of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments stretching 
back over the years since 1945, and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation 
. . . we cannot separate its safety from our own.?
96
  The President also laid out the 
94
 Ibid.
95
 Stephen Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (New York: Penguin 
Books, 1991): 189-191.
96
 John F. Kennedy, ?Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Berlin Crisis,? 25 
July 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1961, item #302 Washington, DC.  
Available on-line at: 
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/site/docs/pppus.php?admin=035&year=1961&id=302 .  
163
rationale for the military alert as deriving from the administration?s policy of flexible 
response.  American policymakers were intent on developing a strategy ?to meet all 
levels of aggressor pressure with whatever levels of force are required.  We intend to 
have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear war.?  Kennedy, however, 
urged American to contemplate how they might best prepare for that latter scenario.
97
There was, much to Lippmann?s dismay, little diplomatic effort to complement the 
resolute military display. 
Just days after President Kennedy?s decision to move U.S. forces in West 
Berlin closer to a war footing, Aron wrote an approving column in which he 
described the administration?s diplomacy as ?firm and measured.?
98
  At this point, the 
Le Figaro columnist was much less reserved in his criticism of the proposal for an 
internationalized status for Berlin.  ?The transformation of the whole of Berlin into a 
free city runs into obstacles nearly as difficult to surmount as the unification of 
Germany,? Aron wrote.  What kind of coalition regime would run the city?  West or 
East in its orientation?  ?In the first case Pankow would lose its old sector of the 
capital,? he added.  ?In the second, it is the West which would abandon what is the 
stake of the crisis.?
99
  Dismissing this idea as one of several ?frivolous? proposals, 
Aron argued that Western leaders should not be forthcoming with any plan based on 
the aim of persuading the Kremlin to tolerate the Western presence in Berlin.  Aron 
feared that any Western concession would provoke bolder demands from 
Khrushchev.  ?The error is to believe that we can satisfy so easily the appetite of the 
97
 Ibid.
98
 Aron, ?Jeux de Strategie (Strategic Games),? 28 July 1961, Le Figaro, reprinted in Soutou, Volume 
II: La Coexistence: 885-887.
99
 Ibid.  My italics.
164
Soviet Premier,? he told readers.  Western leaders must recall that any diplomat ?is 
always ready, in certain circumstances, to bring the desirable down to the level of the 
possible.  In other words, it is our reaction or challenge on which will depend, in part, 
the goals of M. Khrushchev.?  In the contest for Berlin, Aron admitted, Khrushchev 
might settle for the free city proposal or a pledge to remove nuclear weapons from 
Germany and Europe to create a ?denuclearized? zone.  ?It is perfectly possible that 
M. Khrushchev will be provisionally happy with a Berlin status which is not 
unacceptable to the West,? Aron concluded, ?but he will not be content if we go 
beyond what he wants and offer to capitulate before there is even a test of wills.?
100
On 13 August 1961, Khrushchev broke the impasse, erecting a wall that 
divided the city and powerfully symbolized German partition and the Cold War 
division of Europe.  Lippmann rebuked the Kennedy administration for its singular 
reliance on a military buildup in response to Khrushchev?s provocations.  The 
?excessive preoccupation? with proving its will to fight a Stalin-like blockade left the 
West completely unprepared to deal with a deft move that stopped short of war.  De 
Gaulle, Adenauer, and advisers within the administration had told Kennedy that if he 
?stood pat? he could call the Russians? bluff and they would back down.  Lippmann 
wrote sharply, ?this pipe dream clouded the vision and narcotized the will to face the 
realities of the German situation.?
101
Aron?s inclination toward a firm U.S. stand in West Berlin was conveyed in a 
remarkable column, which McGeorge Bundy personally brought to President 
Kennedy?s attention later that fall.  The Le Figaro commentator?s article, which 
100
 Ibid.
101
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Since Vienna,? 7 September 1961.
165
addressed Kennedy directly, taking the tone of a private conversation, was, in equal 
parts, criticism of the administration?s policymaking process and encouragement 
toward a decisive policy of avoiding or, at the very least, forestalling negotiations 
with the Soviets.  ?The attached excerpts from a column by Raymond Aron seem to 
me so precisely pertinent to our Berlin problem that I venture to call them to your 
attention,? the national security adviser told the president.  ?Aron is one of your real 
supporters . . . and his worry is not expressed out of anything but the deepest desire 
for your success.?
102
Aron commented first on the Kennedy administration?s reliance on a host of 
advisors drawn from academic and intellectual circles.  Such an organization, Aron 
wrote, had built-in advantages.  For instance, the President would receive counsel that 
approached a problem from many angles and he was ?not in danger of ignorance of 
one of the possible choices.?  This process, however, also suffered from a ?terrible 
danger: a man like yourself in a situation in which you are, with the crushing 
responsibilities to which you are condemned, is inevitably tempted not to go right to 
the end of any one of the available policies,? Aron wrote.  ?On all subjects you hear 
men who tell you black and others tell you white: so far your choices have been gray.  
Now in foreign policy the half measure and the compromise generally combine the 
disadvantages of the two possible policies.?
103
Aron pointed to the Bay of Pigs fiasco as the result of such a half-measure, 
gently reminding Kennedy that Nikita Khrushchev would see in that failed policy a 
?proof of weakness.?  That, he implied, had profound implications for the Berlin 
102
 Bundy to President Kennedy, 20 October 1961, NSF, Bundy Correspondence, Box 405, JFKL.
103
 Ibid., as attachment to Bundy?s memorandum.
166
standoff.  ?I am afraid that you may be on the way to a repetition of the Cuban error, 
that is to say the adoption of a middle line,? Aron observed.  ?I do not know whether 
you ought to ?negotiate,? but if you are ready today to recognize the government of 
East Germany, it would have been better to do it earlier, or it would be better to wait 
several months than to do it now, because what is at stake today, in the eyes of the 
world, is not simply the fate of two million Berliners: it is your capacity and the 
capacity of the United States to convince Khrushchev that you have the nerve not to 
give in to blackmail.?
104
  While Aron, again avoided directly embracing one line of 
action over the other, it was clear that he was inclined toward the firm approach upon 
which Kennedy eventually settled.  As the columnist concluded, with such a decision 
?inspired with one conception?and one alone?hope will be reborn that we may 
preserve peace, Berlin, and the future of Europe?all three.?
105
During the fall of 1961, Lippmann told readers that the construction of the 
wall gave the Soviets what they would have gotten out of a peace treaty.  Khrushchev 
read those remarks with approval, noting later to Averell Harriman that Lippmann?s 
position demonstrated Washington?s ?acceptance of the two Germanies [sic] as they 
now exist.?
106
  In September 1961, Khrushchev ordered that a key Today and 
Tomorrow installment be reprinted when he read and agreed with two of Lippmann?s 
assertions in the column, ?After the German Elections.?
107
  The Soviet leader agreed 
with Lippmann?s statement that ?the physical partition of Germany has become a 
fully accomplished fact and this fact has been acquiesced in by the whole NATO 
104
 Ibid.
105
 Ibid.
106
 Harriman, Memorandum of Conversation with President Kennedy re: Harriman?s trip to Soviet 
Union, 10 July 1963, Box 587, Averell Harriman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
167
alliance.?  Similarly, he shared the columnist?s observation that ?for ten years or 
more, the Western powers have built their whole German policy on the partition of 
Germany.  NATO is based on the partition of Germany.  The Common Market is 
based on the partition of Germany.?
108
  Llewellyn Thompson, U.S. Ambassador to 
Moscow, reported back to Washington that when Khrushchev read the Lippmann 
piece, he ?underlined two passages with which he particularly agreed, and handed the 
translation to his son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, the editor of Izvestiya, with the order 
that the article be published.?
109
  It was published in its entirety in both Izvestiya and 
Pravda, despite the fact that Lippmann also made statements that no doubt met with 
official Soviet disapproval, particularly his prediction that once the Germans 
officially recognized partition, the effect would loosen the reliance of Eastern 
European satellites on Moscow because the fear of revived German power would be 
removed.  ?Presumably only a direct order from Khrushchev could cause the Soviet 
press to carry such a paragraph in full and honest translation,? Thompson 
concluded.
110
Khrushchev?s remark to Harriman and his repeated attention to Lippmann?s 
columns confirmed one of Kennedy?s nagging apprehensions.  Though ready to use 
Lippmann as a domestic spokesman to blunt the rhetoric of hawks in the Congress 
and Pentagon, the president could not associate himself too closely with the columnist 
unless foreign powers read into the softer tones of Today and Tomorrow a preview of 
107
 Lippmann, T&T, 19 September 1961, ?After the German Elections.?
108
 Ibid.
109
 Thompson to Secretary of State, 26 September 1961, ?Khrushchev Orders Reprinting of Lippmann 
Article,? RG 59, decimal files 911.61/9-2661, TS, National Archives and Records Administration II, 
College Park, MD.
110
 Ibid.
168
administration policy.
111
  In the summer of 1961, while he built up the U.S. military 
presence in Germany, Kennedy worried that Lippmann?s call for negotiations would 
undermine his brinksmanship.  At about that time two prominent correspondents, the 
Chicago Daily News? bureau chief Peter Lisagor and European correspondent 
William Stoneman, visited the president to discuss Berlin policy.  Kennedy laid out 
his general approach to which Stoneman interjected, ?Why that?s wonderful Mr. 
President.  That?s exactly what I think ought to be done.?  Kennedy shrugged off the 
compliment.  ?You know what our policy is but the Russians read Walter Lippmann.  
They read Walter Lippmann and Khrushchev reads him,? he remarked.  ?I know 
Khrushchev reads him, and he thinks that Walter Lippmann is representing American 
policy.  Now how do I get over that problem?  It?s a problem that?s been in this town 
for many years, of course.?
112
  That Kennedy at least partly blamed Lippmann for his 
problems in dealing firmly with Khrushchev points to the power of Lippmann?s 
writing and the danger of too closely associating with opinion leaders.  But it also 
reveals a unique side to a president who often is celebrated as a master of media 
manipulation and whose few anxieties about press coverage are usually perceived as 
having been directed at conservative elements in the press, not liberal quarters.
113
111
 Ronald Steel?s treatment of Lippmann in this respect is vague?alternately treating Lippmann as an 
independent commentator during the Kennedy years and then as a willing mouthpiece.  There is no 
sense in his account of Kennedy?s conflicting desire to secure Lippmann?s approval for certain policies 
while, at the same time, distancing himself from Lippmann?s inclination to seek accommodation with 
the Soviets.  He also over-states Lippmann?s direct access to Kennedy. See, Steel, Walter Lippmann 
and the American Century: 524-538. For a more balanced treatment of Kennedy?s press relations, 
including his views on Lippmann, see Montague Kern, Patricia Levering, and Ralph Levering, The 
Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill: University of North 
Carolina Press, 1983): especially, 71-72.
112
 Peter Lisagor, Oral History, JFKL. 
113
 John Tebbel and Sarah Watts, The Press and the Presidency: From George Washington to Ronald 
Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 476-489.
169
Kennedy ultimately thought Lippmann?s emphasis on accommodation to be 
incompatible with the brinksmanship he preferred.
German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer read Lippmann?s columns on the Berlin 
Crisis with incredulity.  Adenauer and his Social Democratic Party had pursued 
Westpolitik?the integration of the western German zones into the Western 
Alliance?as their primary policy.  Reunification with East Germany was a secondary 
priority at best.  Adenauer?s first objective was ?the protection of the Federal 
Republic?s freedom . . . our main goal must be to secure irrevocably the liberty of our 
fifty-two million people.?  Only when that was achieved, the pragmatic German 
leader would turn his sights toward ?the liberty of the seventeen million on the other 
side of the Iron Curtain.?
114
  Adenauer also feared, however, (and here is where 
Lippmann?s columns played a part) that the U.S. might negotiate with Premier 
Khrushchev?that the Atlantic Alliance might yield to the inducements of 
disengagement by seeking to end the division of Europe, reduce nuclear arms 
deployed on the continent, and seek the reunification of a neutralized Germany.  That 
outcome would rob Westpolitik of its meaning, and scotch the Social Democrats? 
political platform.  Konrad Adenauer had no intent?political, ideological, or in terms 
of national security?to cut a bargain with Walter Ulbricht regime in Pankow.
115
In November 1961, when Chancellor Adenauer met with President Kennedy 
in Washington, Kennedy opened a discussion on the Berlin Crisis by citing a 
Lippmann column that warned of the dangers of a West German-Soviet 
114
 Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe: 224-227.
115
 Ibid.  Hitchcock maintains that Adenauer nevertheless sought to ?prepare for this eventuality by 
making West Germany as strong as possible both economically and militarily so that unification, if it 
ever took place, would be on Western terms.?
170
rapprochement.  Lippmann suggested that Bonn might adopt a policy of neutrality in 
the U.S.-Soviet dispute in order to extract a reunification pledge from Moscow and 
the East Germans.  JFK asked Adenauer for his evaluation of ?Lippmann?s view.?  
Admitting that he once became ?excited? by the proposals contained in Lippmann 
columns (that they might indicate a desire on the part of U.S. officials to negotiate 
with the Kremlin), the Chancellor told the President that he now shared John J. 
McCloy?s evaluation of Lippmann?s prognostications: ?They always prove false.?
For emphasis, he added, that ?he would wager his head? that this latest prophecy 
would prove false, too.
116
Not only foreign leaders but also the foreign press paid close attention to 
Lippmann?s position in the Berlin situation.  With the American commentator 
advocating negotiations, French and German correspondents believed that the 
Kennedy administration also was leaning in that direction.  Jean Knecht, Le Monde?s
Washington correspondent, reported that the anti-German core of JFK?s advisors 
were ?following Walter Lippmann?s line.?  He included Bundy, Rostow, Kennan, 
Charles Bohlen, and Foy Kohler.  The Die Welt writer Peter von Zahn went a step 
further.  Lippmann, Zahn told German readers, was a ?sophisticated isolationist who 
is masterminding a German Munich.?  New York Times bureau chief James Reston 
quickly challenged those assertions.  As a frequent resource for Mac Bundy, one can 
justifiably infer that he did so primarily to refute the idea that Lippmann was speaking 
116
 Memorandum of Conversation?President Kennedy and Chancellor Adenauer, Washington, DC, 21 
November 1961, FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume 14, Berlin Crisis, Nov-Dec 1961: 614-616.  In his role as 
High Commissioner of Germany, McCloy would counsel a sometimes agitated Adenauer that 
Lippmann?s views on German reunification were not synonymous with those of official Washington.  
Adenauer recalled McCloy?s words: ?Do not worry about Lippmann?s prophecies because they always 
prove false.?
171
on behalf of key administration sources and only secondarily to deflect unfounded 
accusations and defend Lippmann.
117
Lippmann continued to push Kennedy to reject the ?narrow? objective of 
preserving access to West Berlin in favor of a comprehensive settlement.  A 
perpetually divided Berlin would be a ?doomed and dying city,? he wrote.  On 12 
September 1961, Lippmann publicly proposed the program he had been advising to 
Mac Bundy for months: (1) offer de facto recognition of East Germany; (2) change 
Berlin?s status to that of an international city, to be ?held in trust? unless and until 
German partition ended; and (3) seek an agreement for controlled nuclear 
disarmament and reduction of conventional forces in a wide area of central Europe.
118
Throughout the fall he pressed his plan to internationalize Berlin?making it a site for 
United Nations agencies and a center for science, the arts, and sports.  Though 
?utopian and idealistic??by his own admission?such a proposal offered a far better 
future than to mortgage Berlin?s freedom with American subsidies and the West?s 
willingness to live on the brink of nuclear war.
119
  Even after tensions eased late in 
the year, Lippmann continued to advocate the plan.
At the height of tensions, when West Berlin was the fulcrum for a possible 
thermonuclear showdown, Lippmann observed that there was little precedent for 
conducting diplomacy in the nuclear age.  ?There is a line of intolerable provocation 
beyond which the reactions are uncontrollable,? he warned.  ?The governments must 
know where that line is and they must stay well back of it.?  The only way to decrease 
117
 James Reston, ?Washington: How To Make Things Worse Than They Really Are,? 27 October 
1961, New York Times: 32.  Bundy?s role as an adept press handler is discussed in greater detail in 
Chapter Seven.
172
tensions was to broker an ?honorable and tolerable accommodation.?  The first rule of 
international politics in the nuclear era, he wrote, is that a ?great nuclear power must 
not put another great nuclear power in a position where it must choose between 
suicide and surrender.?
120
  Kennedy was not pleased with that analysis.  At a White 
House dinner for the Sudanese president, Kennedy called Lippmann to the head of the 
table and began debating him about Berlin policy: ?You were wrong, Walter!?  The 
columnist?s claim that Washington had been caught off guard by the construction of 
the Berlin Wall, especially irked the president.  ?He didn?t like that, I know, but he 
wasn?t angry,? Lippmann recalled.  ?He just didn?t like to have it shown that we had 
missed the point.  And he argued a good deal about that . . . He didn?t convince me 
anyway that we really had anticipated what the Russians really did.?  Reflecting on 
the more troubling moments of the Kennedy administration, Lippmann singled out 
JFK?s brinksmanship in Berlin.  ?I was disturbed by the way Berlin was handled,? he 
added.  ?I didn?t think [Kennedy] had really grasped the realities of the thing.  And 
my proof of it was that the Russians did the opposite of what he expected them to 
do??building a wall rather than sending in tanks.
121
  His grave doubts about the 
president?s diplomacy repeatedly resurfaced.    
VII.
118
 Lippmann, T&T, ?On Negotiating About Berlin,? 12 September 1961; see also Lippmann, T&T, 
?After the German Elections, 19 September 1961.
119
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Berlin Talks,? 10 October 1961.
120
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Nuclear Diplomacy,? 14 September 1961.
121
 Walter Lippmann, Oral History Interview (April 1964): pp. 11, 18, 22 JFKL.  Portions of the 
interview are still closed in accordance with Lippmann?s deed of gift.  
173
The outcome of the disengagement debate and Berlin quarrel suggested Lippmann?s 
marginalization far from the levers of Western security policy planning?a position 
the columnist had occupied since 1947.  By the late-1940s, Lippmann and Kennan 
viewed the Cold War in Europe through a similar lens?one that clashed with the 
belief of ?realist? policymakers like Acheson and Nitze that the division of Europe 
was essential to stability and a long peace.  Lippmann and Kennan believed that the 
Cold War division in Germany represented an impermanent and abnormal 
configuration that posed problems of rapid destabilization and nuclear confrontation.  
Both advocated a flexible diplomatic component to a sharply curtailed containment 
strategy.  But, in the final analysis, their solutions for settling the German problem 
proved unsuited to the task because they for so long underestimated the reality that 
Western leaders valued the stability that inhered in that division.  
Conversely, Aron, who tended to view the struggle through the prism of 
ideology, minimized the possibility that either side might find much room for 
accommodation.  Aron?s views, while not fixed, were most consistent.  From an early 
point, he realized that the division of Germany (and of Europe) ultimately conferred a 
measure of stability.  In 1959, contributing to a collection of essays commemorating 
Lippmann?s 70
th
 birthday, Aron used the occasion to strike at Lippmann?s de-
emphasis of the importance of ideology in explaining Soviet foreign policy.
122
  The 
columnist, Aron wrote, believed that ?the rulers of the Soviet Union . . . are, in the 
final analysis, in the long view, first Russians . . . not communists.?  Thus, his 
122
 See Aron?s, ?The Columnist as Teacher and Historian,? in Walter Lippmann and His Times, 
Marquis Childs and James Reston, eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1959): 111-125.  
My italics are added for emphasis.  The essay is striking for its critical tone which contrasted sharply 
with the roughly dozen other contributors.
174
prescription for Germany was based on the belief that for both the Soviet bloc and the 
Atlantic Alliance the neutralization of a unified Germany secured core national 
security objectives that outweighed all other factors.  Aron did not agree.  ?Is a 
liquidation of the Communist zone compatible with the interests not of eternal Russia, 
but of a Russia whose leaders consider themselves interpreters of a revolutionary 
movement with universal aspirations?? Aron asked.  Simple disengagement raises a 
world of problems.?  Would the West accept German military neutralization at the 
price of a Communist political system remaining in Pankow?  Could Soviet 
diplomacy accept political liberalization in Germany as the cost for meeting its own 
security concerns?  None of these scenarios seemed remotely possible to Aron.  
?Following this line of thought, one would oppose the buffer-zone (neutralization) 
theory of Walter Lippmann with the idea of the division of the contested countries,? 
Aron concluded, ?the division being a substitute for the buffer zone when the conflict 
is ideological as well as military.?
123
Lippmann?s public part in the debate about German partition was but a 
prelude to his maneuverings as an insider during another momentous Cold War 
episode: the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It is within the context of that event that 
Lippmann can be seen to move beyond his attempts to shape the public dialogue 
about policy and to act as a quasi-diplomat, policy broker, and public relations 
spokesman for American policy.  It is in this respect, too, that Lippmann continued 
his trans-Atlantic dialogue with Aron, French officials, Soviet diplomats, and 
Washington policymakers.
123
 Aron, ?The Columnist as Teacher and Historian,? 123-124.  It is interesting to note that Aron 
believed Lippmann already had answer these questions when, in U.S. War Aims, he argued that a 
175
country which does not advance its political faith already has abandoned it.
176
Chapter 4: 
Trans-Atlantic Brokering: Walter Lippmann, Raymond Aron, the 
Cuban Missile Crisis and Nuclear Sharing, 1962-1963
I.
Walter Lippmann?s participation as a public figure in the Cold War debate extended 
beyond his efforts to shape an abstract conceptual framework for Washington?s 
postwar foreign policy.  Lippmann also actively sought to shape policy both by 
interjecting himself as a facilitator in the public and private dialogue process and, on 
occasion, by performing public relations duties for American officials. 
Two primary examples of his efforts to mediate among Washington, its 
Alliance partners, and Moscow, occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 
1962 and, in its aftermath, the reinvigorated debate about nuclear sharing within the 
Alliance?particularly between the U.S. and France.  During these episodes, 
Lippmann played a variety of roles.  Critical of the Kennedy administration?s 
brinksmanship at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he publicly and 
independently proposed a ?missile base trade? to end the nuclear confrontation in the 
Caribbean.  That proposal carried weight with the Russians since Premier Nikita 
Khrushchev, who had met twice with the columnist, respected his judgments and, 
further, knew that Lippmann was close to key Kennedy administration officials.  
177
Indeed, even though Lippmann was not personally close to the President, he enjoyed 
enhanced access to his principal advisors, particularly National Security Adviser 
McGeorge Bundy.  The columnist had opposed French plans for an independent 
European nuclear force in early 1962 and, that November, accepted the White 
House?s invitation to act as a public spokesman on behalf of the American position of 
retaining unified nuclear command under Washington?s aegis.  This chapter 
highlights Lippmann?s complex efforts to steer the Cold War policy and the Trans-
Atlantic debate.
In this process, Lippmann and the French commentator Raymond Aron acted 
as principal interpreters of the nuclear debate within the Western Alliance.   There 
were apparent parallels between them in that they were arbiters of the Cold War 
dialogue and opinion shapers who had access to the political elite on both sides of the 
Atlantic.  Aron met with Kennedy administration officials; Lippmann enjoyed 
unprecedented access to French President Charles De Gaulle.  For decades, Lippmann 
facilitated the spread of General De Gaulle?s ideas in America?though he firmly 
disagreed with French President?s pressures for nuclear sharing.  Aron, served as a 
publicist for the Kennedy administration?s policies in Europe and its strategy of 
?flexible response.?  National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy once described the 
Le Figaro columnist to President Kennedy as ?the most perceptive political observer 
in France and perhaps on the continent.?
1
  Over the subsequent decades, Aron?s 
reputation grew among the American policymaking elite, with whom he often agreed 
on Cold War policy.  At Aron?s death in October 1983?an event that received 
1
 McGeorge Bundy to Kennedy, 30 April 1963, Bundy Correspondence, National Security Files (NSF), 
Box 405, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA (hereinafter referred to as ?JFKL?).
178
significant press coverage in America?observers described him as ?the Walter
Lippmann of France.?
2
  It is not evident, however, that Aron would have received 
comparisons to Lippmann as compliments.
Though they have both been described as prominent realists, Lippmann and 
Aron came to very different conclusions about some of the core issues and persons 
who shaped the Atlantic Alliance between 1945 and 1967.  They not only disagreed 
over Alliance policy in Germany they also disagreed about French efforts to secure an 
independent nuclear strike force.  But the differences between the Le Figaro 
commentator and the syndicated American columnist ran deeper than the shallows of 
the policy debate de jure.  Theirs also was a conflict about the fundamental 
motivations that lay behind leaders? foreign policy decisions.  Should they properly?
as Lippmann seemed to argue?derive solely from a desire to fulfill vital national 
security objectives?  Or?as Aron believed?did domestic ideologies (in both 
positive and negative aspects) fundamentally shape the way nations acted abroad?  By 
using the Lippmann-Aron dispute as a case study, this chapter also highlights some of 
variance between American realists and their Alliance brethren.  
II.
Lippmann and Aron had known each other since before the Second World War, 
having met at a Paris gathering in honor of the American columnist?the ?Walter 
2
 See for example, William Echikson, ?Raymond Aron Saw His Liberal Pluralism Triumph Over 
Marx,? 18 October 1983, Christian Science Monitor: 1; ?Raymond Aron,? 19 October 1983, Wall 
Street Journal: 30 (op-ed piece).
179
Lippmann Colloquium? in 1939.
3
  For the next three decades they met occasionally 
during Lippmann?s biannual visits to Western Europe or Aron?s frequent trips to the 
U.S. East Coast.  In 1959, Aron wrote a contribution to a book commemorating 
Lippmann?s 70
th
 birthday, Walter Lippmann and His Times.  In that essay, the French 
commentator with customary graciousness, described Lippmann as ?a political 
teacher, inspired by a certain philosophy of diplomatic history.?  Aron admired 
Lippmann?s effort to educate Americans about foreign policy as well as his emphasis 
on the necessity of developing the Atlantic Alliance.
4
There indeed were a number of parallels between these men which at least 
suggested the possibility for congruent outlooks on the Cold War and, as well, a 
similarity of purpose in their respective efforts to explain that conflict to their 
countrymen.  These commonalities are worth stating here if, for no other reason, than 
that no published account previously has explored them.
5
Both Lippmann and Aron were among the most brilliant intellectuals of their 
generations, rising to prominence not through family connections or inherited wealth 
but by dint of intellect and their talent as writers.  Lippmann studied with William 
3
 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980): 
368.
4
 Raymond Aron, ?The Columnist as Teacher and Historian,? in Walter Lippmann and His Times, 
Marquis Childs and James Reston, eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1959): 115. 
5
Here I must state my great debt and gratitude toward my friend and colleague, Carl Ashley of 
Catholic University, who defended his dissertation ?Raymond Aron: International Politics and the 
Transatlantic Dialogue During the Cold War,? in 2003.  My knowledge of Raymond Aron has been 
augmented by our frequent discussions and our sharing of both men?s correspondence from their 
respective manuscript collections.  Little has been published on Aron in English.  His memoirs have 
been translated: Aron, Raymond.  Fifty Years of Political Reflection, translated by George Holoch New 
York: Holmes and Meier, 1990.  Two useful essays on Aron also contributed to the foregoing analysis: 
Tony Judt?s ?The Peripheral Insider: Raymond Aron and the Wages of Reason,? in Judt?s The Burden 
of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University Press 
of Chicago, 1998): 137-182; and Stanley Hoffman?s ?Raymond Aron and the Theory of International 
Relations,? in Hoffmann?s Janus and Minerva: Essays in the Theory and Practice of International 
Politics (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1987): 207-223.  
180
James, George Santayana, and Graham Wallas at Harvard.  Aron, was educated at the 
Lycee Condorcet before enrolling at the elite Ecole Normale Superieure.  He wrote a 
dissertation that marked him as a leading philosopher and sociologist, taking the 
agregation in philosophy and finishing first-place nationally in 1928.  Both men had 
their choice of academic appointments.  Lippmann was Santayana?s teaching assistant 
and for years was pursued by elite institutions, the University of Chicago among 
them, to teach political science and international relations.  Lippmann resisted that 
career path, however.  Aron immersed himself in it, as a distinguished professor at the 
Sorbonne.  Neither man, however, would have been content to participate exclusively 
in academe.
As well, Lippmann and Aron were assimilated, non-practicing Jews who 
sought to mitigate their Jewish-ness by refusing to make parochial ties to distinctive 
communities within their larger cultures.
6
  Their experiences as men from an un-
favored ethnic minority who, nevertheless, excelled in their respective mainstream 
cultures, likely added to their unique abilities to dissect events as detached outsiders.  
The middle ground both occupied was not an especially comfortable place.  Both 
were roundly criticized for perceived insensitivity toward Jews in 1930s Nazi 
Germany and, as well, for their tendency to avoid writing about Israel in the post-
World War II period (a more pronounced aversion on Lippmann?s part).
7
6
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 3-9; 186-196.  For Aron, see Judt, The Burden of 
Responsibility: 174-177.
7
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 188-189; 453-454.  Lippmann?s research 
assistant, Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley, recalled that Lippmann often was approached by French and 
Middle Eastern diplomats to write on the subject Israeli statehood, especially in the 1960s, though he 
consistently demurred.  She believed that Lippmann though his Jewish ancestry Elizabeth (Farmer) 
Midgley, interview with author, 28 February 2001, Washington, DC.  For Aron?s position on writing 
about Israel, see Judt, The Burden of Responsibility:  175.
181
Their choice of career?both became prominent political commentators?also 
invites comparison.  Both men were political liberals who wrote for conservative 
newspapers: for much of his career Lippmann?s column was based in the New York 
Herald Tribune syndicate; Aron?s ran for decades in Le Figaro.  They focused 
primarily on international relations and particularly Cold War developments.  
Moreover, they wrote prolifically.  Between 1931 and 1967, the span of Lippmann?s 
Today and Tomorrow, he wrote approximately 4,000 installments.  During Aron?s 
tenure as a public commentator, from 1947 to 1983, he, too, amassed an opus of 
about 4,000 columns.
In choosing to be interpreters of events, Aron and Lippmann occupied that 
strange gray area between officialdom and the public.  For a brief time, during 
moments of national crisis, each worked as an official within his respective 
government in jobs closely aligned with official propaganda organs.  During World 
War I, Lippmann worked in a series of jobs ranging from policy development on the 
Inquiry to military intelligence and propaganda.  Aron joined the Free French during 
the Second World War and later served for a short term as chef de cabinet in the 
Ministry of Information in 1946.  Neither Lippmann nor Aron was drawn to a long 
government career, though these experiences provided them many important future 
contacts.  In moving into their roles as opinion shapers, they both had access to, but 
never really were a part of, their respective political establishments.  Tony Judt has 
observed of Aron: ?He thus wrote from the outside, but with an insider?s sense of 
realities and limits.?
8
  That analysis may be applied in equal measure to Lippmann.
8
 Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 139.
182
Each enjoyed privileged access to the powerful?perhaps most remarkably 
within the other?s country.  Lippmann and Aron maintained high-level contacts with 
the political classes in Washington, London, Bonn, and Paris.  In France, particularly 
with respect to Charles De Gaulle and other prominent Gaullists, like Maurice Couve 
de Murville, Lippmann acted as a virtual ambassador?bringing De Gaulle?s ideas 
across the Atlantic to discuss them with American leaders and using his column to 
give them a respectful and, quite often, endorsing boost.  Aron often framed 
American Cold War policy for his fellow Frenchmen as a kind of necessary power 
politics rather than the imperial aggrandizement condemned by many on the French 
Left.  This opened many doors in Washington for him since, as U.S. Ambassador to 
France David K.E. Bruce once put it in understated fashion, Aron was the ?most 
sympathetic of all French writers? to U.S. policy.
9
  By the Kennedy years, he had 
established several enduring personal relationships with several high-ranking U.S. 
officials?Bundy, Undersecretary of State George Ball, and presidential adviser 
Arthur Schlesigner, Jr.  If in a somewhat more disinterested vein than Lippmann, 
Aron tended to explain with both sympathy and objectivity the motivations behind 
much of JFK?s foreign policy?particularly regarding the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and 
the topic of nuclear sharing within the Alliance.  Again, Bundy described him as 
?very cordial to the administration? even in 1963 after considerable tension arose
9
Quoted in Nelson D. Lankford, The Last American Aristocrat: The Biography of Ambassador David 
K.E. Bruce (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1996): 231.  Bruce?s private diaries indicate that he 
socialized often with Aron and was likely the source for some of his columns.  Personal Diaries of 
David K.E. Bruce, Bruce Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, VA.
183
between Paris and Washington over French officials? plans for an independent 
nuclear striking force.
10
While acting as private diplomats within the Alliance, both Lippmann and 
Aron resisted, within their own respective nations, the dominant intellectual and elite 
opinion currents during the Cold War.  Aron firmly supported the Western Alliance at 
a time when most of the French intelligentsia were drawn to Marxism or to Gaullist 
visions of a neutral ?third way? that rejected U.S. leadership.
11
  Lippmann, too, 
championed the Alliance?a vision he had developed in 1917 and one which, 
admittedly, he shared with many figures in the U.S. establishment.  Significantly, 
however, he rejected using that Alliance as chiefly an anti-Soviet instrument and also 
dismissed the ideological obsession of Washington officials who tended to view the 
Cold War as a crusade to spread democratic values.  Indeed, Lippmann and Aron 
were among the most cosmopolitan-oriented intellectuals within their respective 
capitals.
In both cases, the tendency of these commentators to push enlightened 
nationalism rather than parochial interests or antiquated visions of national 
exceptionalism or grandeur, derived from their early insights into the 
interconnectivity of foreign and domestic policy.  As discussed in the previous 
chapter, Lippmann recognized this fact as early as 1915 with the publication of The 
Stakes of Diplomacy.  His cognizance is especially apparent in the discussion of how 
imperial interests routinely appealed to democratic ideology to win support for 
10
 Bundy to the President, 30 April 1963, NSF, Box 405, JFKL.
11
 Aron made this point clear in his book The Century of Total War (New York: Doubleday, 1954).  He 
advocated an Atlantic Community rather than a federal Europe because he believed that there was a 
184
foreign programs.  Aron was one of the early post-World War II Frenchmen to 
perceive the vital link between domestic politics and international affairs?in his case 
because of the rise of the communist party in national politics.  ?The truth is that in 
our times, for individuals as for nations, the choice that determines all else is a global 
one, in effect a geographic choice? Aron wrote.  ?One is in the universe of free 
countries or else in that of lands place under harsh Soviet rule.  From now on 
everyone in France will have to state his choice.?
12
Lippmann and Aron both saw the U.S. as far preferable to the Soviet system 
because it was the final guarantor of Western ideals of liberty?even if, as both men 
often wrote, it was an imperfect guardian of those values.  Neither had much patience 
for Marxist fellow-travelers or, on the opposite pole, the anti-Communist demagogues 
whose methods directly threatened the civil society both men cherished.  Similarly, 
both Lippmann and Aron possessed a level of detachment?a ?cool realism? as Judt 
wrote of Aron; an ?Olympian? remove as Alistair Cooke once wrote of Lippmann?
that insulated them from the disillusionment with the Soviet Union that often 
enveloped Western Alliance leaders and public opinion.
13
  Finally, both men tended 
to view the maturation of the Western Alliance as primarily political in nature, not 
military.  After the late-1940s, neither Lippmann nor Aron ever seriously believed 
that Kremlin leaders would move to the brink of war in Europe and, in this respect, 
place for Great Britain in the former but not the latter.  See also, Max Freedman?s review of The 
Century of Total War in ?A Realist Looks at European Unity,? 21 March 1954, Washington Post: B6.
12
 Aron, ?La Fin des Illusions,? 5 July 1947, Le Figaro, in Raymond Aron: Les Articles de Politique 
Internationale dans Le Figaro de 1947 a 1977, Volume 1, La Guerre Froide (Juin 1947 a Mai 1955) 
edited by Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1990).
13
 Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 157; Alistair Cooke, America Observed: From the 1940s to the 
1980s (New York: Collier Books, 1989): 79-82.  Cooke?s original radio essay was broadcast on 8 May 
1956.
185
they agreed with Kennan who argued that Moscow would seek to achieve its 
objectives through long-term, subtle pressure.
Lippmann and Aron?like Kennan?also were prominent popularizers and 
devotees of realpolitik from very early points in their public careers?and they never 
retreated from the centrality of these beliefs.  Tony Judt has explained that Aron?s 
?fundamentally tragic vision?the belief that there can be no end to the conflict 
among states and the best that could be hoped for was a constant vigilance to limit the 
risks and damage of confrontations? pervaded his writings.  Likewise, as described in 
Chapter Two, Lippmann ascribed to a similar view?arguing that the basis for 
diplomacy was not to achieve perpetual peace but to structure a modus vivendi
between nations whose interests would forever conflict.  Judt has written that Aron?s 
espousal of realism ?placed him at odds with the dominant sensibility of his era: the 
view, held by many on both sides, that the object of international relations was 
somehow to put an end to all wars; whether through nuclear stalemate, the negotiation 
of a definitive ?peace settlement,? or else a final victory by one side or the other.?
14
In working against Wilsonian internationalism in America, Walter Lippmann shared 
Aron?s foundational view of state-to-state relations.
Frenchman and American also shared a yearning for order and stability that 
shaped not only their view on foreign affairs but which inhered in their commentary 
on developments within their own countries.  Their responses to student protests, the 
anti-war movement, and counter-cultural spasms of the late-1960s, offer an 
interesting parallel.  Aron, despite sympathy with students? criticisms of higher 
education and his deep disapproval of Gaullist authoritarianism at home (and grand 
186
designs abroad) refused to support student radicals and repeatedly worried about the 
disruption and social chaos they engendered.  Likewise, Lippmann empathized with 
some aspects of the campus protests in America?particularly their anger at LBJ?s 
Vietnam policies.  Yet, he, too, withheld his endorsement.  The violence, vulgarity, 
and rejection of authority violated his sense of order and civility.
15
Finally, both men displayed independence of mind, revealing intellectual and, 
at times, physical courage.  One observer noted Aron?s ability to withstand ?the 
provocations of the powerful.?
16
 Lippmann?s ultimate refusal to support Lyndon 
Johnson?s escalation of the Vietnam War demonstrated a fidelity to personal 
convictions sorely lacking in most Washington circles in the 1960s?political and 
intellectual.
III.
What makes the palette of similarities between Lippmann and Aron all the more 
remarkable is that in spite of these shared traits that afforded them much common 
ground, they diverged on the core issues confronting the Atlantic Alliance.  The 
Lippmann-Aron conversation of the late-1940s to the mid-1960s, carried on largely 
14
 Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 158.
15
 See, for example, Lippmann, ?The Gaullist Question,? 17 June 1968, Newsweek: 62.  ?The active 
student leaders in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and New York are not acting in order to bring about reform and 
the redress of grievances in existing institutions,? Lippmann wrote.  ?They are acting in order to ignite 
insurrectionary violence.  For they believe that out of this violence itself a new society will be born . . . 
The active student leaders are not progressive or leftist, or socialist or Communist.  They are in literal 
truth nihilists.?  For an interesting recent discussion of the protest movements of the 1960s and early 
1970s and their impact on superpower foreign policy, see Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global 
Revolution and the Rise of D?tente (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
16
 Manes Sperber, Until My Eyes Are Closed with Shards (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994): 137, 
234; cited in Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 174.
187
through their columns, focused exclusively on trans-Atlantic issues.
17
  In particular, 
three salient, contested points emerge from their long dialogue: (1) the problem of 
postwar Germany and how it should fit into Europe?a subject both men debated for 
20 years; (2) the question of nuclear control and command within the Alliance, 
particularly as it came to a head in the early 1960s as part of the repercussions 
emanating from the Cuban Missile Crisis and De Gaulle?s proposal for an 
independent French atomic striking force; and (3) interpreting the foreign policies and 
significance of De Gaulle within the Alliance generally.
Chapter Two discussed how Aron and Lippmann conflicted over the 
disposition of postwar Germany, the necessity of partition, and a solution to tensions 
in West Berlin from 1958 to 1961.  As late as 1966, Aron tweaked Lippmann on his 
German predictions from two decades before.  The Le Figaro columnist was worried 
about two outcomes at that juncture: 1) that the Western Alliance had so successfully 
waged the Cold War up until that point that it might be lured into complacency and 
acquiesce to divisions then arising?particularly between De Gaulle and the Anglo-
Americans; 2) this at a time when the American commitment in Vietnam threatened 
to siphon off resources from the defense of Western Europe.  Lippmann, who at the 
time was publicly questioning the necessity of maintaining the NATO organization, 
seemed to embody these threats for Aron.  The Frenchman voiced his worries in a 
Herald Tribune article in late 1966.  ?Our friend Walter Lippmann is now 
proclaiming the bankruptcy of Western policies,? Aron wrote.  ?He should re-read the 
17
 There exists very little correspondence between the men though, from Lippmann?s appointment 
diaries, it is clear that they met on a fairly regular basis.  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., confirmed that 
Lippmann and Aron had virtually no personal relationship.  Based on their commonalities, 
?[Lippmann] should have known Aron better,? added Schlesinger, who maintained a cordial 
188
articles he wrote when the Americans and the British created the German Federal 
Republic.  He then affirmed that the men in power in Bonn would have no concern 
more immediate than negotiating reunification with their countrymen on the other 
side of the demarcation line.  The events contradicted those forecasts.  What actually 
took place was the exact opposite of what our colleague forecast: The Germans have 
accommodated themselves to their country?s partition in the last 15 years.?
18
  When 
the vigilant Helen Byrne Lippmann wrote Aron asking for the exact column citations 
upon which Aron based his criticisms, the Le Figaro writer responded with a subtly 
cutting reply.  ?Allow me to add that Walter finds himself in excellent company since 
General De Gaulle made the same predictions at the time,? Aron wrote.
19
  Implied in 
that comment was Aron?s similar disapproval of Lippmann?s enthusiasm for 
dismantling NATO, another issue on which the columnist closely aligned with De 
Gaulle, who eventually withdrew from the organization in 1966.
In fact, one of the most interesting of Lippmann?s Cold War ideas was the 
evolution of his position on the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance.  While he applauded 
the NATO alliance as confirmation of the historic and cultural ties between the 
community of nations that rimmed the Atlantic Ocean, Lippmann feared it would be
contrived into a ?temporary diplomatic and strategic contraption? for containing 
Russia.  In the months preceding the U.S. Senate debate and ratification of the 
Brussels Pact (roughly from November 1948 to the spring of 1949), he wrote 
correspondence with the Le Figaro columnist for several decades.  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., interview 
with author, 12 March 2002, New York City.
18
 Raymond Aron, ?Winning the Cold War Has Deprived the West of Its Sense of Danger That 
Maintained Its Unity,? 11 December 1966, Washington Post: 104.
19
 Raymond Aron to Helen Lippmann, 20 December 1966, Archives Personnelle Raymond Aron 
(hereinafter cited as APRA), COTE, AP 126, Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron, at 
189
frequently about the dangers of using NATO to divide Europe into two armed camps.  
He believed the odds that the Red Army would invade Western Europe?seemingly 
so imminent in the spring of 1948?had become by that fall rather remote.
Repeating his argument from U.S. War Aims, Lippmann opposed German, 
Italian, and Scandinavian membership in the NATO alliance and military structure.  
He insisted that these nations belonged in a ?buffer belt? of central European 
countries.  Drawing them into the defenses of the Western Alliance would make 
NATO ?weaker and more provocative,? he wrote.  Instead, Western Germany should 
be demilitarized and the other countries be encouraged to sit out the Soviet-American 
conflict as neutrals, committed only to their self-defense.
20
  ?Since our real purpose in 
Europe is not to create a satellite system of our own but to dissolve the Soviet satellite 
system, there are immense diplomatic and moral advantages to be had by making it 
respectable for nations to become part of the buffer belt,? Lippmann told readers.  
?For then the satellites have some place to go as they detach themselves.?
He also warned against selling the program to the public based solely on its 
military merits.  European security was guaranteed by the threat of full American 
intervention in any potential war initiated by the Soviets, not through a grand alliance 
composed of a weak array of recovering European nations.  In this sense, NATO 
would act as a tripwire that would bring American power to bear directly against 
Soviet power.  Concerned that it might become a mechanism for enlisting countries in 
an expansive?and again provocative?anti- Soviet coalition, Lippmann opposed the 
NATO pact?s linkage to the U.S. military aid bill.  The alliance would not work, 
L?Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France.  For more on the Aron papers, visit 
http://www.ehess.fr/centres/crpra/pages/archives.html .
190
Lippmann wrote, if it were based on ?strategic boondoggling on the part of military 
theorists . . . [who would] pepper the earth with military missions, and would 
develop, if the Treasury did not go bankrupt, three omnipotent forces, each capable 
all by itself of winning not only a war but any war anywhere anytime.?
21
  NATO 
provided a legal and practical basis for stationing American power in Europe?albeit 
a symbolic force?to discourage a Russian advance; Lippmann believed a token force 
to be plenty.
22
De-emphasizing an overly militarized conception of NATO, Lippmann 
pointed out the diplomatic benefits that would accrue from coordination of allied 
policy?especially toward the three zones of occupation in Western Germany.  
Further, the pact enhanced diplomatic engagement.  The management of NATO 
would demand more frequent consultation between the signatories.  No member 
could act unilaterally.  War would have to be a collaborative act and not an accident 
precipitated by a rogue decision.  As Lippmann put it, ?a collective system of defense 
cannot be created unless there is a collective policy.?
23
Nevertheless, Lippmann sharply criticized the military institution that came to 
dominate the NATO alliance.  Increasingly he viewed it as an instrument for 
American domination of the Western Alliance?leveraged by its overwhelming 
monetary and material contributions, as well as its firm grasp on the command 
structure.  It also proved costly because the debate about its leadership and structure 
in the 1960s worsened an already bad rift between the U.S. and France.  In late-1966, 
20
 Lippmann, T&T ?On the Projected Alliance,? 3 January 1949; ?The Buffer Belt,? 15 February 1949.
21
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Background of the Pact,? 31 January 1949.
22
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The North Atlantic Pact,? 28 October 1948.
23
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Pact Before the U.N.,? 11 April 1949.
191
at a private lunch at St. James Court, Lippmann told the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, 
David K. Bruce, that NATO had out-lived its purpose.  When Bruce pressed him to 
elaborate, Lippmann explained, as he told readers shortly after, that the military 
organization was ?obsolete and superfluous? because of the greatly diminished threat 
of a Soviet invasion, the burden of the war in Vietnam, and France?s withdrawal from 
NATO.  The true issue?as it had been all along for Lippmann?was how to preserve 
the Atlantic Alliance while de-linking and retiring the military machine from it.  
NATO was ?no longer a genuine military investment but an expensive and 
deteriorating ruin,? Lippmann concluded in December 1966.  ?It is a mansion, once 
the pride of the neighborhood, from which the tenants have moved away, for which 
no new tenants can be found.  There is no use cutting the grass and mending a few 
window panes if nobody will live in the mansion.?
24
IV.
On NATO, as he had on Germany, Lippmann?s views were heavily influenced by 
French President Charles de Gaulle?and that relationship bears explaining.  The 
columnist?s attachment to De Gaulle extended to World War II when Lippmann 
began to promote the General as a leader of Free France.  This was at a time when 
Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull would not even speak to 
the General.
25
  In October 1942, at a dinner talk commemorating the World War I 
exploits of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Lippmann urged the Roosevelt administration to 
24
 Lippmann, T&T, ?NATO and Its Future,? 12 December 1966.  See also David K.E. Bruce Diaries, 3 
November 1966, Mss1B8303:58, page 32, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, VA.
25
 For Roosevelt?s frustrations with De Gaulle see, Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American 
Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979): 376-379; 406-409; 458-463.
192
recognize De Gaulle as an ally and to permit him to participate in the strategic 
planning of the war.
26
  He used his column to criticize the President and State 
Department officials?Charles Murphy among them?of under- cutting De Gaulle?s 
organization in Allied-liberated North Africa.  By late-1944, after the liberation of 
Paris, Lippmann met with De Gaulle and began urging (at De Gaulle?s personal 
prompting) that certain U.S. embassy staff in Paris, including Murphy, be removed.  
?It is a capital error not to staff the embassy with men who have no prejudices from 
the bad past, against whom Frenchmen hold no prejudices from the bad past,? 
Lippmann told readers in a Paris dispatch.
27
Lippmann tended to be enamored of leaders whom he believed to possess a 
historical ?long view? or ?second sight,? as he sometimes described it.
28
  He often 
cited Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as leaders who displayed this quality.  
But, for Lippmann, no figure had it in such quantity or utilized it so well for so long 
as De Gaulle.  In making this claim, the columnist was fond of repeating De Gaulle?s 
wartime remarks to a U.S. diplomat.  The diplomat had just finished telling De Gaulle 
his expectations for the structure of postwar France; the General disagreed.  ?But, I 
am sure I am right,? the diplomat protested.  ?I know France well?I lived there 
thirteen years.?  De Gaulle countered, ?Ah, you forget that I have lived in France for 
two thousand years.?  U.S. officials took this statement as proof of De Gaulle?s 
grandiose, almost delusional, sense of self.  Lippmann interpreted it as confirmation 
of De Gaulle?s greatness.  He explained, the General ?feels the historic destiny of his 
people and therefore he knows what in the end they respond to and will do.  Ordinary 
26
 ?Lippmann Urges U.S. Recognize De Gaulle,? 29 October 1942, New York Times: 2.
27
 Lippmann, ?Report from France,? T&T, 2 December 1944, Washington Post: 5.
193
politicians who practice what might be called Gallup poll democracy find such a man 
impossible to understand and exasperatingly difficult to get on with.  For he 
disregards the appearance of things, the immediate preoccupations on the surface, the 
practical difficulties of the moment.  Yet his prophecies come true . . . in General De 
Gaulle the French have found a leader who acts in the present on what he knows will 
happen in the future.?
29
It is not difficult to understand, then, why Lippmann was one of the few 
journalists to whom De Gaulle regularly made himself available.  In 1945, when the 
columnist initiated his regimen of twice-yearly trips to Western Europe, the General 
was one of Lippmann?s regular hosts and a principal source on a range of issues.  
That the Lippmann-De Gaulle meetings became matter-of-fact over the years was 
revealed in an anecdote told by the longtime French ambassador, Herve Alphand.  
Only once during his many visits to Paris?in 1963 specifically?had Lippmann not
requested an audience with the French leader.  Discovering that the columnist had 
avoided a personal call, De Gaulle instructed Alphand ?to find out why [Lippmann] 
had not asked to see him.?  Lippmann?s explanation, which he later shared with the 
journalist Henry W. Brandon, was that he had ignored De Gaulle because ?he had 
such disagreements with him currently that he did not think it would have been 
convenient to meet with him.?
30
  It was not the response of a newspaperman who 
looked to capitalize on the revelations that might be made in an important interview.  
28
 See, for instance, Lippmann, T&T, 7 June 1960, ?Listen to De Gaulle,? Washington Post: A15.
29
 Lippmann, T&T, 2 December 1944, ?Report From France,? Washington Post: 5.
30
 Henry W. Brandon, ?On Walter Lippmann, European Statesman,? delivered at a 1990 conference on 
the occasion of the 101
st
 anniversary of Lippmann?s birth, Bard College, NYC, Box 27, Henry W. 
Brandon Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
194
Rather, it reflected the attitude of a seasoned diplomat who, realizing that relations 
were strained, preferred to postpone discussions until a more propitious moment.  
With his wife, Helen (a zealous Francophile herself), Lippmann hosted in 
Washington a series of French officials aligned with De Gaulle from the 1940s 
through the 1960s.
31
  For instance, as early as 1945 he entertained Maurice Couve de 
Murville, a promising young diplomat.  When De Gaulle named Couve de Murville 
his foreign minister in 1958, Lippmann described it in his column as a ?most 
gratifying and reassuring? development and lauded the General?s consul ?as 
penetrating a judge of international affairs, as any Western diplomat now in active 
service.?
32
  He regularly lunched at the French ambassador?s residence as the guest of 
a series of Paris?s envoys: Henri Bonnet, Alphand (who served as Ambassador to the 
U.S. from the critical 1955 to 1965 period), and Charles Lucet.  When he left town in 
1967, the French embassy threw Lippmann a bash at a time when most of official 
Washington ignored him completely.
But it was for De Gaulle that Lippmann prepared some of his most gratuitous 
prose.  By the early 1960s, Lippmann believed the French president to be ?the chief 
spokesman of the Western alliance,? and the man who had earned ?the first position 
in the intellectual and moral leadership of the West.?
33
  What qualities could elicit 
such praise from such a supposedly detached observer as Lippmann?  Two 
considerations were paramount in Lippmann?s judgment of De Gaulle.  First, the 
31
 According to Francis Bator, Helen Lippmann may actually have ?imposed? some of her enthusiasms 
for the French on her husband.  Francis Bator, interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, 
MA.
32
 Eva Hinton, ?Town Talk,? 21 November 1945, Washington Post: 16; Lippmann, T&T, 3 June 1958, 
?The Task of De Gaulle,? Washington Post: A17.
33
 Lippmann, T&T, 26 April 1960, ?The New Leadership,? Washington Post: A13; Lippmann, 7 June 
1960, Washington Post: A15.
195
General tended to stress the primacy of nationalism over ideology in the affairs of 
nations?a worldview that Lippmann shared.  Moreover, Lippmann detected in De 
Gaulle a kindred realist spirit.  ?Perhaps the greatest difference between General De 
Gaulle?s way of thinking and the conventional thinking of the day is that he sees and 
treats the Soviet Union as primarily a European great power, and only incidentally as 
the headquarters of world communism,? Lippmann explained on 26 April 1960.   
?For him Russia existed long before Lenin and will exist long after Khrushchev.  
Russia is a European nation with national interests in Europe, and the central clue to 
policy in dealing with Russia is to be found not in the writings of Marx and Lenin but 
in the history of Russia.?  De Gaulle had shunted aside ideology and rhetoric, 
Lippmann wrote, and ?has given the Alliance a new lead in how to think and how to 
talk about the Cold War and about Germany.?  
Moreover, Lippmann identified with the General?s cosmopolitan 
sensibilities?his ability to calculate French interests and to oppose Soviet 
aggrandizement without resorting to anti-Communist demagoguery.  ?When he 
speaks of the Soviet Union, he does it with cool and impeccable courtesy,? Lippmann 
wrote on 31 January 1963.  ?He does not stoop to the vulgar epithets which the ghost 
writers feel they must sprinkle through almost every official utterance.  This courtesy 
comes from the fact that General de Gaulle sees France and he sees Russia as 
perennial nations within a European society.?  Even when Lippmann disagreed with 
the French leader, as with De Gaulle?s insistence on an independent French nuclear 
force (the so-called force de frappe) in 1962-1963, he still looked to the General?s 
far-reaching grasp of European affairs.  ?We shall delude ourselves also if we regard 
196
the General as a relic of the past, say as an imitation of Napoleon,? he explained to 
readers at a time when Franco-American relations were at a nadir.  ?For however 
irritating he may be, General De Gaulle is not and never has been a fool, and though 
his roots are deep in the past, again and again it has been shown that he is endowed 
with second-sight about the future.?
34
Certainly, Lippmann agreed with De Gaulle?s views on European affairs far 
more than he opposed them.  In the late-1940s, Lippmann?s writings on Germany, 
particularly his emphasis on the need to keep Germany politically decentralized, de-
militarized, and neutral, took their cue from the General?s views and many public 
speeches.  It was only when De Gaulle came to power and himself dropped the 
rhetoric of German reunification that Lippmann publicly ditched his own long-
standing position on the necessity of ?disengagement? from Germany.  There is good 
reason to believe that Lippmann was following De Gaulle?s lead in this regard as 
well.  For it was after successive trips to Europe in 1959 and 1960 that Lippmann 
acquiesced to permanent German partition, citing among other things the imperatives 
of French national interests to promote that division.  Having just returned from a trip 
that included stops in Paris, Bonn, Rome, and London, Lippmann informed readers 
that reunification ?no longer represents the real expectations and practical hopes of 
the principal Western governments.  After another visit to Western Europe in spring 
1960, Lippmann declared German reunification a ?dead? policy goal: ?It has been 
dead not only because the Russians would have none of it but because so many in the 
34
 Lippmann, T&T, 31 January 1963, ?The General as Prophet,? Washington Post: A19.
197
West never wanted it at all.?
35
  This shift is all the more curious because only a year 
earlier, in 1958, Lippmann had come to the defense of George Kennan during the 
?disengagement? debate occasioned by the diplomat?s Reith Lectures.
De Gaulle and a string of French ambassadors to Washington also exercised 
considerable influence on Lippmann?s conception of Western policy in Southeast 
Asia.  In 1961, the columnist embraced the French leader?s notion of neutralization in 
Laos and welcomed France?s return to a position of political leadership in Asia.  Two 
years later he applied the same neutralization plan in recommending the creation of a 
coalition government to unite North and South Vietnam.  These were views largely 
adumbrated by De Gaulle and actively pursued by French diplomats in Saigon and 
Hanoi.  When De Gaulle publicized this plan in August 1963 (much to the anger of 
JFK administration officials) and, then, just four months later followed it up by 
extending Paris?s formal diplomatic recognition of the PRC (to the great discomfort 
of the Johnson administration), it was Walter Lippmann who was left to offer a 
rationale that tried to make the General?s action as non-threatening and logical-
sounding as possible.  ?Far from being arbitrary, personal gestures, the major French 
policies are widely prepared, long-range diplomatic operations,? Lippmann assured 
readers at the highest levels of the U.S. Government.  ?We are missing the main point 
and we are stultifying our influence when we miss the French policies as not really 
35
 Lippmann, T&T, 6 April 1959, ?The Two Germanys and Berlin?I?; Lippmann, T&T, 26 April 
1960, ?The New Leadership.?
198
serious, as expressions of personal pique or personal vanity on the part of General de 
Gaulle, as inspired by ?anti-Americanism? and a wish to embarrass us.?
36
Whereas Lippmann practically idolized De Gaulle for his historical vision, 
Raymond Aron perceived in many of the General?s actions a distressing pattern of 
irresponsibility.  Although Aron had participated in the Free France movement during 
World War II, his support for De Gaulle in the postwar period, and especially after 
the General came to power in 1958, was rather lukewarm.  It was based more on 
Aron?s identification with the interest of France, rather than any deep affinity with 
Gaullist visions.  The Le Figaro columnist, like many Frenchmen in 1958, welcomed 
De Gaulle?s ascendancy to power in large measure because he believed the General?s 
military experience would help resolve the longstanding Algerian conflict (at the 
time, Lippmann compared that sentiment with the election of Eisenhower in 1952 to 
resolve the Korean War).  Aron supported aspects of De Gaulle?s foreign policy?
making a strong argument for the utility of an independent French nuclear program 
and arsenal within the NATO alliance.
37
  But the commentator never shared the grand 
design of the General?s foreign policy?the creation of a front-rank role for France in 
the superpower struggle.  As Tony Judt observes, ?Aron regarded the Gaullist 
approach to foreign policy, nuclear arms, and the Atlantic Alliance as cavalier, 
contradictory, and at times irresponsible.?
38
Aron?s estimates of De Gaulle shaped the views of key officials within the 
Kennedy and Johnson administrations?McGeorge Bundy, George Ball, Arthur 
36
 Lippmann, T&T, 21 January 1964, ?Red China and the General,? Washington Post: A13; T&T, 4 
February 1964, ?The French-American Argument,? Washington Post: 13; T&T, 21 May 1964, ?III?
France and America in Asia,? Washington Post: A23.
199
Schlesinger, Jr., and Ambassador to France Charles Bohlen.  Part of De Gaulle?s 
belligerence had to do with his relishing the role of saying something outrageous and 
then relegating himself to watching people react to his statements.  Aron described 
these provocations as little more than the ?temporary instruments of his acts.?
39
 Much 
of the time, Aron maintained, De Gaulle did not take half of what he said seriously.  
When McGeorge Bundy prepared President Kennedy for a meeting with Aron in 
1963, he noted the columnist?s advice ?that absolutely nothing is gained by criticism 
of de Gaulle in public?it simply builds him up.?  Aron believed that Kennedy 
showed ?great restraint? in that regard and Bundy replied that the commentator ought 
?to make the same argument with George Ball,? who was less circumspect in his 
public assessments of the General.
40
  Interestingly, Ball in making criticisms of De 
Gaulle in his memoirs chose to quote from Aron.  In Peace and War, Aron had noted 
the obsolescence of the idea that any single state within the Western Alliance could 
act independently without serious impairing the balance of power with the Soviet
bloc.  A foreign policy such as De Gaulle?s, the notion of a Europe from the Atlantic 
to the Urals, ?assumes, in our period, the appearance of an irrevocable destiny.  The 
approximate proportionality between force and resources, between resources and the 
number of men and the amount of raw materials, between mobilizable force and 
power, does not permit any hope that the leader?s genius or the people?s virtue might 
37
 Raymond Aron, The Great Debate: Theories of Nuclear Strategy, translated by Ernest Pawel (New 
York: Doubleday, 1965).
38
 Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 179.
39
 Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 179; see also, Aron?s Memoires (Paris: Julliard, 1983): 286-300.
40
 Bundy to the President, 30 April 1963, NSF, McGeorge Bundy Correspondence, Box 405, JFKL.
200
reverse the verdict of number.?
41
  In making such criticisms of De Gaulle, Aron no 
doubt regretted the tendency of the General?s enthusiasts, such as Lippmann, to 
accept his statements at face value and sometimes compound the misunderstanding 
and contribute to the mischief that the French leader sometimes clearly meant to 
inspire.
V.
Lippmann and Aron acted as unofficial ambassadors by explaining the policies of 
their respective nations to leaders on the opposite side of the Atlantic, a dynamic 
mostly clearly demonstrated in the dialogue that developed in the early 1960s on 
nuclear policy within the Western Alliance.  That debate was intensified by the Cuban 
missile crisis in October 1962.  Lippmann?s role during and immediately after the 
Cuban missile crisis warrants close analysis.  His actions both as an independent 
observer, public broker, and unofficial diplomat shaped perceptions in Moscow and 
impacted negotiations in Washington.  Kennedy administration officials reacted 
sharply to his efforts at facilitation.  Nevertheless, in the wake of the crisis, Lippmann 
was amenable to taking their message on the dangers of nuclear sharing to De Gaulle 
in a public forum?an action that precipitated yet another debate with Aron, this time 
over the issue of nuclear command and control.  
Historians now know that Lippmann acted as a public broker in the Cuban
Missile Crisis of October 1962, but the full extent and effect of his participation 
41
 George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982): 96; 
quoted from Aron?s Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, translated by Richard 
Howard and Annette Baker Fox, (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday and Company, 1966): 18-19.
201
became clear only with the publication of Soviet and U.S. documents in the 1990s.
42
Because of Lippmann?s White House access and Nikita Khrushchev?s respect for 
him, this was a Cold War crisis in which he played a direct role?at a critical stage, 
proposing the idea of a ?missile swap? to defuse the crisis.  Nevertheless, this was an 
exceptional instance of Lippmann?s ability to shape events.  It was, however, typical 
in one aspect: Lippmann surpassed the administration?s lead on negotiations with the 
Soviets, causing discomfort at the highest levels in Washington.  He was less critical 
of Kennedy than he had been during the Berlin Crisis, giving him high marks for 
deflecting the more militant advice of his advisers.  But Lippmann also published his 
estimate that the American and Soviet brinksmanship that precipitated the crisis was 
needlessly provocative.
During September and early October 1962, U.S. intelligence monitored a
large conventional military buildup in Cuba, assisted by the Soviets.  It had become a 
mid-term election issue in Congress, where Senator Kenneth Keating, a New York 
Republican, had held hearings into the buildup which were intended to embarrass the 
Kennedy administration by showing it was not firm enough with the Soviets.  On 9 
October, Lippmann responded, by writing that Russian weapons shipments to Cuba?
mostly defensive arms according to Undersecretary of State George Ball?s testimony 
before Congress?were probably meant to fend off another Bay-of-Pigs-style 
invasion.  Lippmann also perceived that the situation was shaped more by Castro?s 
42
 See, for instance, Steel?s account in Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 534-537.  The 
Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, 
has done much to fill out the Soviet side of the crisis.  For a book that utilizes both sides? perspective 
see Timothy Naftali and Alexander Fursenko, ?One Hell of a Gamble?: Khrushchev, Castro, and 
Kennedy, 1958-1964 (New York: Norton, 1997).  See also Ned Lebow and Janet Stein, We All Lost the 
Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993): 19-145; and, for a more recent 
202
cunning manipulation of the superpower rivalry than any insidious design on the 
Kremlin?s part to establish a beachhead in the Western Hemisphere.  ?Mr. 
Khrushchev is in Cuba because he has talked so loudly about helping revolutions,? 
Lippmann told readers.  ?Castro has thrown himself into Khrushchev?s arms, and is 
blackmailing him.  The Castro regime has made itself the prime and public test of 
whether international communism is a real force or a lot of words.?
43
  The evidence 
simply did not support the contention that the U.S. should launch a pre-emptive 
attack, he added.  Lippmann counseled patience and caution recalling the words of 
Winston Churchill, whom he was fond of quoting in such situations: ??How many 
wars have been averted by patience and persisting good will?  How many wars have 
been precipitated by firebrands???
44
Five days later, American U-2 spy planes photographed long-range missile 
sites in Cuba that Russian technicians were constructing.  When complete the 
facilities would be able to launch nuclear missiles more than 1,000 miles?
threatening much of the U.S. East Coast and the Mid-West.  Kennedy set up a special 
White House group, Ex-Comm, to meet several goals: get the missiles out of Cuba; 
avoid a nuclear war; prepare for a Soviet countermove in Berlin; and settle on a 
policy that would not jeopardize American credibility.  Despite Ex-Comm?s range of 
more militant suggestions, including preemptive air strikes and an outright invasion 
of the island, Kennedy decided to impose a naval ?quarantine? on Soviet cargo ships 
bound for Cuba.  With U.S. forces on full alert, the president spoke to the American 
assessment, see, John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1997): 260-280.
43
 Lippmann, T&T, ?On War Over Cuba,? 9 October 1962.
44
 Ibid.
203
public on the evening of 22 October.  He warned that any missile launched from Cuba 
would be considered an attack by the Soviet Union and that it would require a full 
U.S. retaliatory response against Russia.  Kennedy requested the Soviets remove the 
missiles under U.N. supervision.
45
  With Soviet supply ships sailing westward toward 
the island, both sides readied for a tense showdown.
On 25 October, Lippmann published a column that caught the attention of 
leaders in Washington and Moscow.  Despite the standoff?s rapidity, he warned that 
the U.S. should not abandon diplomatic initiatives toward the Kremlin.  In both world 
wars, Lippmann recalled, ?we made the same tragic mistake.  We suspended 
diplomacy when the guns began to shoot.?
46
  Lippmann criticized Kennedy for not 
confronting Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko during a private meeting days 
after the president had first learned about the missiles.  Instead, the columnist wrote, 
the president spurned private talks in favor of a public confrontation.  He committed, 
Lippmann explained, one of the cardinal mistakes of diplomacy: delivering an 
ultimatum without first attempting to negotiate the issue.  Kennedy should have given 
the Russians, ?what all wise statesmen give their adversaries?the chance to save 
face.?  Moreover, though the quarantine stopped the flow of offensive weapons onto 
the island, Lippmann wrote, it could not resolve the question of how to dismantle the 
existing missiles.  ?It is here,? he proclaimed, ?that diplomacy must not abdicate.?
47
He proposed a horse-trade, a quid pro quo: removal of the launch sites and Soviet 
45
 ?Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba,? 22 
October 1962, item #485 Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy (1962).  Available on-line 
at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/site/docs/pppus.php?admin=035&year=1962&id=485 .
46
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Blockade Proclaimed,? 25 October 1962.
47
 One may only speculate why Lippmann chose to lead a column proposing a solution to the dramatic 
crisis with sharp criticisms of Kennedy?s diplomacy.  These admonishments may have been included 
204
missiles in Cuba for the dismantling of an American Jupiter missiles and their bases 
in Turkey.  These were two locales where each of the superpowers placed strategic 
missiles on one another?s frontiers.  ?The Soviet missile base in Cuba, like the U.S.-
NATO base in Turkey is of little military value,? Lippmann wrote.  ?The Soviet 
military base in Cuba is defenseless, and the base in Turkey is all but obsolete.  The 
two bases could be dismantled without altering the world balance of power.?  Such an 
agreement, Lippmann added, could provide a first step to removing offensive 
weapons from other secondary countries.  He concluded, a Cuba-Turkey trade was 
the only way to get out of the ?tyranny of automatic and uncontrollable events.?
48
The genesis of Lippmann?s idea of a missile swap is disputable, though the 
newly-released Kennedy tapes and Lippmann?s rigorously-kept appointment diaries 
suggest a likely source.
49
  The columnist knew about the positioning of U.S. Jupiter 
missiles in Turkey from earlier research on the subject of nuclear disarmament.  
During his first meeting with Khrushchev in 1958, the topic of forward-arrayed 
American missiles in Turkey recurred throughout their conversation with the Soviet 
leader expressing deep frustration about their existence; the missiles, after great 
delay, had finally been fully deployed by March 1962.
50
  Lippmann may have 
by design to demonstrate to Kremlin leaders that he was not writing with administration sanction.  If 
so, this was a signal that Kremlin leaders missed.
48
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Blockade Proclaimed,? 25 October 1962.
49
 Dino Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: 
Random House, 1991): 421-422. Brugioni implies that Lippmann?s column of 25 October echoes 
Kennedy?s emphasis on the lessons of World War I?that is, how the allied nations stumbled into war.  
On several occasions during the crisis Kennedy mentioned Barbara Tuchman?s The Guns of August.  
Brugioni speculates?without any evidence?that intelligence officers or even Kennedy had broached 
this idea with Lippmann personally. The evidence does not support that conclusion.
50
Helen B. Lippmann, ?Notes on conversation with Khrushchev,? 24 October 1958, Moscow, Series 
VII, Box 238, Folder 27, Walter Lippmann Collection, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, 
New Haven, CT (hereinafter referred to as ?WLC?).  Khrushchev told Lippmann that the U.S. missiles 
in Turkey made the proposals for international inspection and control of nuclear arms seem 
?ridiculous.?  See Lippmann?s The Communist World and Ours (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 
205
conceived of the offer based on these prior discussions alone.  Yet another theory is 
that a well-connected official in the Atomic Energy Commission, perhaps even John 
McCloy, may have alerted Lippmann that the administration was considering such a 
missile swap?though the columnist?s scrupulous appointment diaries do not bear out 
this theory.
51
  According to those diaries, however, Lippmann did meet with 
Undersecretary of State George Ball and Assistant Secretary of State for Latin 
American Affairs Edward Martin, hours after filing the 25 October column; both men 
participated in the high-level ExComm meetings.
52
  That appointment appears highly 
suggestive in retrospect.  It is not implausible that Ball, who attended the ExComm 
meetings on 16 and 18 October in which a Cuba-Turkey missile trade was discussed, 
earlier had leaked the idea to Lippmann thus inspiring him to pen the column.
53
  A 
longtime friend and neighbor of Lippmann?s, the undersecretary was one of the 
1958): 28.  Lippmann was sympathetic.  He wrote that the American ?policy of military containment 
with its forward positions on [Soviet] borders is in their minds conclusive proof that Lenin was right? 
about an inevitable war provoked by capitalist encirclement of the USSR.  Ibid., 38.  Broadly, 
Lippmann called for a policy that preserved America?s defensive capabilities without provoking undo 
fear of the Soviet threat; diplomacy that realized the US could make friends in the world without 
signing them on as military allies; and a foreign aid program premised on development and 
modernization rather than subsidization of governments threatened by the rise of Communist 
movements in their own countries.  Americans, Lippmann wrote, must ?relax their fears in order to 
fortify and clarify their purposes.  But we do not live and cannot live in the same intellectual and 
political world [as the Soviets] . . . formidable as the Communists are, they are not ten feet tall, and the 
less we plunge ourselves in hysterics, the more likely we are to take good care of our affairs.?  Ibid., 
56.
51
 Naftali and Fursenko, ?One Hell of a Gamble?: 273, 394-395.  Indeed, the McCloy connection?a 
man with whom Lippmann had no close association and who had little respect for the columnist?fails 
under scrutiny.  Moreover, McCloy was an organization man and it seems unlikely that he would have 
approached Lippmann on his own initiative.  Nor is there supporting evidence that John Kennedy or 
his key subordinates asked McCloy to speak to Lippmann about such a trade.  Moreover, Lippmann?s 
meticulous records do not mention such a meeting. See Lippmann?s Appointment Diaries, Series VII, 
Box 240, WLC.  
52
 Lippmann?s biographer noted that meeting, too, adding that Ball did not object to the basic thrust of 
the column.  But Steel does not consider that Ball may have been the actual source for the idea.  See, 
Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 535.  
53
 See, for instance, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy?The Great Crises, Volume II, 
September-October 21, 1962, Timothy Naftali and Philip Zelikow, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton and 
Company, 2001): 397-468; 518-572.  A private meeting at Lippmann?s or Ball?s home is something 
that likely would not have been recorded in Lippmann?s appointment diaries.
206
columnist?s most intimate and discreet sources. Since the column already had been 
submitted, Lippmann?s visit to the State Department probably meant to confirm key 
points he had made rather than?as Lippmann?s biographer suggests?to seek 
approval from officials of what would appear the following morning. Though 
inconclusive the Ball connection offers the most likely scenario for the origins of the 
25 October column.  
Proof for the assertion that Kennedy and Bundy did not approach Lippmann to 
write such a column, is found in the Kennedy tapes?where U.S. officials, including 
the president, reacted to the column with surprise and some anxiety about its effect on 
the bargaining process.  On 26 October, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a rambling, 
disjointed letter in which he made an offer to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba in 
exchange for an American pledge not to invade the island.  When Attorney General 
Robert Kennedy met with Anatoly Dobrynin later that evening to discuss the 
proposal, the Soviet ambassador, echoing Lippmann?s column which he?d read in the 
Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune, suggested that the crisis might 
be resolved if the Americans pledged to dismantle the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.  
After a brief phone call to the president, the attorney general (apparently unaware of 
Lippmann?s public suggestion of such a trade) gave that assurance to Dobrynin.  The 
next morning, Saturday 27 October?before ExComm had been able to debate the 
offer in Khrushchev?s first letter?a second note arrived from the Soviet premier.  
Taking a firm line, Khrushchev demanded that the missiles be removed from Turkey.  
It further implied?echoing the language of the Lippmann column?that the Turkish 
207
bases also be removed in an exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet military advisors 
and hardware from their Cuban outposts.  
In a late-afternoon meeting on 27 October, several members of ExComm, 
debated the meaning behind Khrushchev?s shift.  ?I think they?ve been put off by the 
Lippmann piece,? U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewylln Thompson said, 
??encouraged to think that we really are prepared to swap Turkey for Cuba.?
54
Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon interjected that the idea had been broached a 
week before in ExComm debates.  Thompson clarified, however, that that discussion 
had been about missiles not bases.  Vice President Lyndon Johnson asked the Soviet 
expert why he thought Khrushchev sent the second letter, to which Thompson replied 
that the premier may have been ?overruled.?  He thought it more likely however that 
?Khrushchev and his colleagues were deceived by the Lippmann piece? and a 26 
October speech by Austrian foreign minister Bruno Kreisky which proposed a similar 
trade.  These public proposals ?made [Khrushchev] think that we were putting this 
out?that we were willing to make a trade. . . And, too, [Lippmann] has a close 
relationship with Mac [Bundy].  [Khrushchev must be thinking]: ?These boys are 
beginning to give way.  Let?s push harder.??  A few minutes later, when the president 
entered the room, Thompson recapitulated this analysis for Kennedy: ?The Lippmann 
article and maybe the Kreisky speech has made them think they can get more and 
they backed away? from the 26 October offer.  Kennedy, apparently unaware of 
54
 I take this quote not from the Zelikow and May translation but from a review article by former JFK 
Library historian Sheldon M Stern, which is highly critical of the editing and transcribing job in the 
Zelikow-May publication.  Their version of that line version did not ring true to the context of what 
Thompson was talking about which was, in fact, centered on the terms of Khrushchev?s contradictory 
offers, not terms proposed by the U.S.  The Zelikow-May version reads, the Soviets have ?been put up 
by the Lippmann piece.  It occurs to me that we really weren?t prepared to talk Turkey for Cuba.?  See 
208
Lippmann?s 25 October column, inquired when the Lippmann proposal appeared and 
Bundy replied it had been published two days prior.  ?Two days ago?? Kennedy shot 
back.  ?Shit!? the president exclaimed. An unidentified subordinate offered 
consolation, ?It?s been around; [we] can?t avoid it.?
55
Days after the crisis was resolved, Lippmann told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly 
Dobrynin that he ?caught it hot? from administration officials for publishing the 
column.  ?A lot of people here,? Lippmann told Dobrynin at a diplomatic reception, 
?considered [the 25 October] article had suggested to N.S. Khrushchev the idea of 
raising such a question.?
56
  The Soviet diplomat reported back to Moscow that as the 
basis for his column Lippmann claimed to have used data provided by members of 
the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.  Whatever its source, the exchange 
idea elicited White House displeasure.  As Walt Rostow recalls, the Ex Comm 
reaction was one of shock.  Lippmann?s lecture on diplomacy, coupled with his 
public exposition of sensitive initiatives the administration was then contemplating, 
infuriated Kennedy.  Privately, he complained that Lippmann ?almost blew it.?
57
Administration officials also took the unusual step of warning Soviet diplomats 
directly that they must not regard Lippmann as a voice of administration thinking.
58
Stern?s essay ?The JFK Tapes: Round Two,? Reviews in American History 30 (2002): 680-688; quote 
on p. 684.
55
The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, The Great Crises, Vol. III, October 22-28, Philip 
Zelikow and Ernest May, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001): 470-472; 478-479.  See 
also Richard Reeves President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993): 
405.
56
 Cable from Soviet Ambassador to the U.S.A., Anatoly Dobrynin, to Soviet Foreign Ministry, 1 
November 1962, [translated by Vladimir Zaemsky], Cold War International History Project 
(hereinafter cited as CWIHP), Washington, D.C.  Available on-line at: 
http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=library.document&topic_id=1409&id=763 .
57
 Walt Rostow, interview with author, 26 March 1998, Austin, TX.
58
 Days after the passing of the crisis, Kennedy?s press secretary Pierre Salinger told Russian embassy 
official Aleksander Fomin that ?everything Mr. Lippmann writes does not come straight from the 
White House, that he is frequently wrong, and that if the Soviets were going to seek to judge 
209
Lippmann?s column also surprised Soviet diplomats who, nevertheless, 
attached great significance to its publication.  The Soviet embassy carefully 
monitored administration reaction to the 25 October column.  The day it was 
published in the Washington Post, Dobrynin cabled the Soviet Foreign Ministry that 
the column was a trial balloon.  He noted, however, that when probed, Secretary of 
State Dean Rusk ?refuted? Lippmann?s suggestion about American ?readiness to 
?exchange? Soviet bases in Cuba for American bases in other countries, for example 
in Turkey.?
59
  On 26 October 1962, at a meeting of Eastern European diplomats at the 
Soviet Embassy in Washington, Dobrynin put the question to his colleagues about 
whether Lippmann?s 25 October column ?should be regarded as an indirect 
suggestion on the part of the White House.?  The consensus, apparently, was that it 
was indeed just that.
60
The best evidence for the column?s influence, however, appears in a 
memorandum of conversation in Havana on 4 November 1962 between Soviet envoy 
A.I. Mikoyan and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.  During the discussions, as Mikoyan 
explained to Castro why ?it was necessary to use the art of diplomacy? rather than 
continue to face down Washington, he admitted that the Lippmann column provided a 
solution at a critical impasse.  ?Speaking frankly, we were not thinking about bases in
Turkey at all,? Mikoyan told Castro.  ?But during discussion of the dangerous 
administration intentions by following the words of reporters, they should back-read or listen to 
different reporters than the ones they have been following.?  See Salinger?s With Kennedy (New York: 
Doubleday, 1966): 279.
59
 CWIHP, Cable from Soviet Ambassador to the U.S.A., Anatoly Dobrynin, to Soviet Foreign 
Ministry, 25 October 1962, Bulletin 8-9: Cold War in the Third World and the Collapse of D?tente.
60
 Janos Radvanyi, Hungary and the Superpowers: The 1956 Revolution and Realpolitik (Stanford, CA: 
Hoover Institution Press, 1972): 130-131. According to Radvanyi, Hungary?s Ambassador to the U.S. 
at the time of the missile crisis, the Rumanian ambassador announced that a ?reliable source? had told 
210
situation we received information from the United States of America, including an 
article by Lippmann, where it was said that the Russians could raise the question of 
liquidating the USA bases in Turkey.?  This indicated to Kremlin leaders that U.S. 
officials ?were speaking about the possibility of such a demand inside American 
circles.?
61
  Because they were uniquely attentive to the columnist, Soviet officials 
also tended to overestimate Lippmann?s role as a spokesman for administration 
policy?evidently relying on their own perspective of the press as an instrument of 
the government.  This assumption precluded the possibility that Lippmann might hold 
forth on such a sensitive topic without the sanction of high U.S. officials.  This seems 
to be precisely what he did?in a column that somewhat muddied the negotiations 
because it substituted the proposal of a missile swap for the dismantling of entire 
bases.
Ultimately, the administration ignored Khrushchev?s 27 October letter, 
responding instead to the 26 October communication that had indicated the Kremlin?s 
willingness to negotiate.  On the evening of 27 October, Robert Kennedy again met 
with Dobrynin and assured him that the Turkish missiles would be removed but not as 
part of the public negotiations?there would be no quid pro quo.  He also delivered 
an ultimatum that the U.S. would destroy the missile sites in Cuba if the Soviets did 
not act promptly to remove them.  The next day, Khrushchev relented.  So concerned 
was he to preserve his image of steadfastness that President Kennedy hid the details 
of the resolution from the public, which knew nothing of the swap until long after his 
him that the ?administration had communicated to Lippmann the idea for his compromise solution.?  
Radvanyi concluded that later reports tended to disprove that theory.
61
 CWIHP, Memorandum of Conversation, The Second Castro-Mikoyan Conversation, 4 November 
1962, Bulletin 5: Cold War Crises.  Published as part of a set of documents titled ?Mikoyan?s Mission 
211
death.  During the crisis, the administration (most likely McGeorge Bundy) 
convinced James Reston to counter Lippmann?s trade proposal on two grounds: first, 
that Khrushchev had probably precipitated the crisis to achieve the removal of 
American missiles from Turkey and, second, that such a trade might prompt French 
president Charles de Gaulle to undertake construction of his own nuclear force.
62
In the aftermath of the crisis, Lippmann continued to be a point of contact for 
Soviet officials.  On 31 October, he hosted G. A. Zhukov, Information Counselor at 
the Soviet Embassy, and his colleague Georgi Bolshakov.  Bolshakov rated low on 
the embassy?s seniority list but by some accounts he was Khrushchev?s secret liaison 
with President Kennedy.
63
  Over tea at the columnist?s home the three men discussed 
the need to create an inspection process in Cuba, right-wing criticism of Kennedy, the 
prospects for a prohibition on nuclear testing, and the likelihood of another meeting 
between the president and Khrushchev.  Lippmann expressed concern that 
conservatives would use the Cuban missile crisis to assert that ?Kennedy has once 
again become the victim of Soviet deception.?  Zhukov reported to Moscow that 
Lippmann?like White House press secretary Pierre Salinger and diplomat W. 
Averell Harriman??was decidedly cordial . . . and expressed gratitude for 
[Khrushchev?s] wise actions that have opened a way toward a settlement of the 
Cuban problem.?  Lippmann, meanwhile, telephoned Mac Bundy to apprise him of 
to Havana: Cuban-Soviet Negotiations, November 1962.?  Available on-line at:
http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=library.document&topic_id=1409&id=32 .
62
 James Reston, ?Kennedy?s New Diplomacy in Cuba,? The New York Times, 26 October 1962: front 
section p. 30; Reston, ?To Deal or Not to Deal: That?s the Question,? The New York Times, 28 October 
1962: section 4, p. 10.  The Lippmann v. Reston counterpoint is discussed in Montague Kern, Patricia 
Levering and Ralph Levering, The Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983): 127-128.  
212
the discussions.
64
  The next day in a conversation with Dobrynin, Lippmann renewed 
his warning that the while the ?mood? at the White House boded well for removal of 
the Jupiter missiles that ?by no means can it be related to the Cuban events.?
65
Without alluding to the backroom bargaining in his column, Lippmann praised JFK?s 
use of force ?to boldly and successfully . . . achieve a specific and limited objective.?  
The president had kept his diplomatic options open and had opted for a ?settlement? 
not a ?crusade,? Lippmann wrote on 30 October 1962.  ?The world will be impressed 
by Kennedy?s resolution,? he concluded.  ?It will also be impressed by his wisdom.?
66
Privately, however, he still harbored concerns about the brinksmanship that 
precipitated Kennedy?s eleventh-hour diplomacy.
67
VI.
Lippmann?s public brokering in the Cuban missile crisis underscored his close ties 
with key administration officials.  Lippmann?s access to Kennedy?such as it was
68
?
63
 See Richard Reeves President Kennedy: fn. 137-138.  Ostensibly, Bolshakov was identified by the 
Soviet Embassy as a newspaper editor.  He was well-connected and an especially close friend of 
Khrushchev?s son-in-law.
64
 CWIHP, Forwarding Telegram from G.A. Zhukov, 1 November 1962, Bulletin 8-9: Cold War in the 
Third World and the Collapse of D?tente.  On-line at: http://wwics.si.edu .
65
 Dobrynin cable to Foreign Ministry (Moscow), 1 November 1962.
66
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Cuban Arrangement,? 30 October 1962.
67
 This is quite apparent from the transcript of Lippmann?s oral history interview available at the JFKL.  
His research assistant, who had many contacts in the administration, confirmed Lippmann?s attitude; 
Elizabeth Midgley, interview with author, 28 February 2001, Washington, DC.
68
 According to Lippmann?s appointment diaries he met with Kennedy on four, perhaps five, occasions 
during his presidency?the last in the spring of 1963.  According to his JFKL oral history, Lippmann 
recalled meeting alone with Kennedy only once?in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  
Lippmann believed that his criticisms early in the Kennedy presidency had mitigated his personal 
influence.  ?I may as well say here, for the sake of the historical record, that I only saw him once along 
in his office [on 8 November 1962].  I talked with him several times at various occasions.  But after 
[Kennedy went to the Vienna meeting in June 1961] I did my second broadcast, and in that broadcast I 
was asked what was his weakness.  I said he was not a good teacher.  He has no instinct to teach what 
he is trying to do and doesn?t explain himself, and therefore he is failing to communicate adequately 
with the people.  And he didn?t protest to me about that, but I know that was the end of any close 
213
came most often through advisers acting as go-betweens, particularly Schlesinger and 
Mac Bundy.  As a special assistant to Kennedy, Schlesinger brought Lippmann in to 
speak to the president in advance of the Vienna Summit.  Columnist and historian had 
socialized since the 1940s and, during the JFK years, often met alone for late-
afternoon cocktails to discuss events.  Here and there Schlesinger included a 
Lippmann observation in a memo to the president: how to handle Laos, how to 
effectively manage public information.
69
To a far greater degree, Kennedy?s national security adviser, Mac Bundy, was 
Lippmann?s most important government contact?eclipsing even those days when, as 
a youthful New Republic editor, Lippmann had known Wilson?s confidant, Colonel 
Edward House, and his Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker.  There were several 
reasons for this.  Bundy, like Schlesinger, befriended Lippmann years earlier, 
establishing a relationship with the columnist that fit Bundy?s overall pattern of 
personal relationship because his military aide, now General Clifton, called CBS and protested 
violently about the whole thing.  They never protested to me, but after that it was over.?  Lippmann, 
oral history, JFKL: p. 10.  This was the same CBS program in which Lippmann described the Kennedy 
administration as just like the Eisenhower administration in its approach to Cold War ?only thirty years 
younger.? Walter Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann (Boston: Little, Brown and 
Company, 1965): 39-40.
What Lippmann perceived as Kennedy?s failure to educate public opinion, concerned the 
columnist all the more because he believed the President to be a bright man and a potentially talented 
communicator of ideas.  ?The President was a man who understood things very quickly,? Lippmann 
recalled.  ?He would get to a point like that?without any difficulty.  But he was never a man to 
commit himself.  He never said, I agree.  He always maintained an escape hatch.  I found that in all my 
dealings with him.  He always had an escape hatch.  You see, he never could say, ?Yes,? he agreed on 
it.  He was going to listen to somebody else first.  He was a great listener and a most intelligent 
listener.? Lippmann, oral history, JFKL: 8.
69
 See for example, Schlesinger to Kennedy, ?The Administration and Public Information,? 16 March 
1961, President?s Office Files, Staff Memos (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), Box 65, JFKL.  Schlesinger had 
known Lippmann during World War II when he researched at the Library of Congress for a book that 
eventually became The Age of Jackson.  That path-breaking study earned Schlesinger a Pulitzer Prize, 
celebrity, and a Harvard professorship at a precocious age.  The historian and his wife, Marion, were 
close friends of the portrait painter Gardiner Cox and his wife, Phyllis Byrne Cox, the sister of Helen 
Byrne Lippmann.  The Lippmanns hosted the Schlesingers regularly at dinner parties, striking up a 
lasting acquaintance.  Even though Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., went overseas during the war and, later, 
settled in Boston, he and Lippmann corresponded and socialized frequently. 
214
ingratiating himself to powerful role models.
70
  For Lippmann, Bundy represented the 
nexus of the government bureaucracy?the man who synthesized information from 
the Defense and State departments, National Security Council, and intelligence 
agencies.  In his position, Bundy listened to Lippmann?s initiatives over lunch and 
recapitulated them later that afternoon to Kennedy either as debating points or as 
viable policy alternatives.
Reversing the flow, Bundy also communicated Kennedy?s opinions to the 
columnist.  In March 1962, for example, Lippmann published a column critical of 
French leader Charles de Gaulle who had refused to participate in a conference on 
nuclear disarmament negotiations.  De Gaulle instead planned to develop an 
independent French nuclear force?the force de frappe.  Lippmann dismissed the 
general?s initiatives? arguing that the American nuclear deterrent made it possible for 
De Gaulle to pursue a ?hitchhiking diplomacy? wherein American military might 
offered security for Paris officials to reassert a role in the alliance disproportionate to 
their power.
71
  Bundy wrote the columnist to express Kennedy?s appreciation and 
amusement: the president thought the phrase ?belongs in the history books as a 
precise description of what De Gaulle has been trying to do.  You must have had fun 
thinking it up, but it must also have taken some courage for a determined Francophile 
like yourself to use it.?
72
  When Lippmann criticized Kennedy?s decision to visit 
Berlin in the summer of 1963, and then reversed himself in a column admiring the 
historic trip, Bundy again communicated the president?s appreciation.  President 
70
Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy?Brothers in Arms (New York: 
Simon and Schuster, 1998): 99-101.
71
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Why Go to Geneva?? 8 March 1963.
72
 Bundy to Lippmann, 9 March 1963, White House Central Name File (WHCNF), Box 1631, JFKL.
215
Kennedy ?asked me to thank you for the very handsome remarks about his expedition 
to Europe,? Bundy wrote.  ?He has admired many of your columns, but in reading 
this one he is reminded of the remark of James Russell Lowell that the three words in 
the English language which are hardest to pronounce are ?I was wrong.??
73
These letters allude to a strikingly informal connection Bundy made with 
Lippmann?the kind of comfortable and jocular exchanges that befit the relations of a 
mentor and his prized prot?g? rather than a journalist and high government official.  
Theirs was?as one observer remarked?an ?intense relationship . . . almost like that 
of father and son.?
74
  During their long friendship the columnist had reciprocated 
many-fold, recommending Bundy for president of Harvard in the 1950s and, 
suggesting him to Kennedy as a possible secretary of state.  This friendship increased 
in importance after 1961.  By the time LBJ succeeded the slain President Kennedy in 
November 1963, Bundy provided the vital link between a new president desirous of 
establishment approval and a columnist drawn to power.
75
  Bundy brought Lippmann 
access.  The columnist, of course, reflected elite opinion and his writing influenced 
thinking in the capital and in foreign ministries around the world.  Of equal 
significance, Lippmann produced powerful insights that the national security adviser 
on occasion used to frame complex issues for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to 
73
 Bundy to Lippmann, 13 August 1963, WHCNF, Box 1631, JFKL.  President Kennedy had read: 
Lippmann, T&T, ?Reasonable Hopes,? 13 August 1963, Washington Post: A19.  Lippmann wrote, 
?President Kennedy has been proved right, in spite of the doubters, among them myself, about his trip 
to Germany.  For Bonn to diverge from Paris on the issue of nuclear testing is a sharp deviation from 
the treaty with General De Gaulle.  It leaves Gaullist France isolated, not only from all the outer world 
except Red China, but in the heart of the European continent itself.?
74
 Elizabeth Midgley, interview with author, 28 February 2001, Washington, DC.
75
 Kai Bird covers this aspect of the relationship somewhat more satisfactorily in his biography of 
Bundy than does Steel in his book on Lippmann.  See, for instance, Bird, The Color of Truth: 101-105; 
309-310; 314-316.  Steel, covers the Lippmann-Bundy relationship in a scattered fashion.  See, for 
example, Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 455; 524.
216
bring a fuller perspective to policy debates, often irrespective of whether or not he 
accepted Lippmann?s premises or conclusions.  Once, when LBJ complained early in 
his presidency that his advisors must formulate a peace proposal to answer overtures 
from Nikita Khrushchev, Bundy recommended the columnist as a font of ?sweeping 
policy initiatives.?  Bundy declared, ?Old Walter Lippmann?s got more per square 
inch than anybody else!?
76
  Insofar as the national security adviser considered 
Lippmann?s proposals, there was a kind of intellectual honesty?a willingness to give 
various sides of a debate a respectful hearing?in the Kennedy White House that 
seemed thoroughly lacking in LBJ?s tenure, particularly in 1965.  This special 
relationship conferred to both Bundy and Lippmann benefits that concealed large 
liabilities.  It would be years, however, before either man realized that their ideas 
about America?s global responsibilities were so different.
If anything, they became more intimate during the Kennedy administration, 
lunching at the Metropolitan Club, discussing this policy or that at diplomatic 
receptions around town.  Bundy demonstrated that he could sign on Lippmann for 
administration programs.  On one occasion, he convinced the columnist to act as an 
advocate for administration policy.  Shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, the 
President and national security adviser invited Lippmann for a talk about the course 
of events and to show the columnist Khrushchev?s communications.  On 8 November 
1962, Lippmann met alone with President Kennedy in the Oval Office for one hour?
the only time he would ever meet privately with Kennedy.
77
  They began the 
conversation talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The President showed 
76
 LBJ-Bundy telephone conversation, 2 January 1964, reprinted in Beschloss, Taking Charge: 145.
77
 Lippmann, Oral History, April 1964, JFKL: 14.
217
Lippmann the exchange of letters between himself and Premier Khrushchev which, 
the columnist recalled, ?were not very entertaining reading . . . stilted and 
officialese.?  The conversation ranged over the lessons and implications of the crisis: 
?about whether you could have an independent nuclear striking force, such as the 
French wanted, or whether air power was indivisible.?
78
  The main point President 
Kennedy impressed on Lippmann was that the crisis clearly demonstrated that nuclear 
decision-making should be kept in as few hands as possible.  After the Oval Office 
meeting, Bundy persuaded Lippmann to make a public statement to this effect, in an 
effort to counter Charles de Gaulle?s insistence on an independent French-European 
nuclear striking force.  Lippmann obliged.  He promptly drafted a speech to deliver in 
Paris at a gathering arranged months before to celebrate the anniversary of the Herald 
Tribune International Edition.  Bundy previewed the text, making two pages of 
editorial suggestions that Lippmann incorporated.
79
  ?I wish we were free to say what 
you are going to say,? Bundy told Lippmann a few days before the columnist 
departed for Paris.
80
Not that this necessitated a radical departure for Lippmann.  In the spring of 
1962, the columnist had launched his first editorial salvo against De Gaulle?s force de 
frappe?the independent, Paris-controlled nuclear striking force which, by some 
estimates, would achieve enough power to kill as many as 20 million Russians in a 
first exchange.  Lippmann squarely opposed its development, arguing that the 
splintering of control and authority over the use of nuclear weapons could only lead 
78
 Lippmann, Oral History, April 1964, JFKL: 14-16.
79
 Bundy to Lippmann, 13 November 1962, McGeorge Bundy Correspondence, National Security File 
(NSF), Box 402, JFKL.  Some of this episode is covered in Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American 
Century: 537-538.
218
to mischief.  ?The [French] rebellion against the American monopoly is taking place 
within the context of the American capacity to prevent nuclear war,? because of 
Washington?s massive deterrent strength, Lippmann wrote.  De Gaulle?s force de 
frappe would have to exist as a minority partner of the Atlantic Alliance?s nuclear 
force?managed from Washington, since it could only initiate, but not decisively win, 
a confrontation with Moscow.  Lippmann interpreted the French program as a clever 
move whereby De Gaulle could argue for the retirement of U.S. occupation forces 
from Western Europe by inserting a nuclear tripwire which he would control.  ?We 
do not have a divine right to have in our own hands, rather than in European hands, 
the ultimate decision,? Lippmann admitted.  ?But it is in our interest to hold on to the 
ultimate decision, if we can.?
81
Shortly thereafter, in a slim volume titled Western Unity and the Common 
Market, Lippmann caustically attacked De Gaulle?s efforts to foster a Franco-German 
locus of power on the continent?one that sought to exclude Britain and create a 
Europe from the ?Atlantic to the Urals.?
82
  Moreover, he wrote, the force de frappe
was De Gaulle?s mechanism to engage America in the defense of Europe while he 
simultaneously tried to end U.S. military occupation and economic participation on 
the continent.  Lippmann wrote:
. . . within the Western Alliance the ultimate responsibility in nuclear affairs 
must be in one capital, not in two or three.  For the United States the 
predicament would be intolerable if the key to the use of our strategic nuclear 
80
 Lippmann, Oral History, April 1964, JFKL: 14.
81
 Lippmann, T&T, 15 May 1962, ?Gaullist Rebellion Against the U.S. Nuclear Monopoly.?
82
 For De Gaulle?s efforts to reduce U.S. influence in Europe generally, his courtship of German 
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and, diplomacy to exclude Britain from continental affairs, see, William 
I. Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-2002
(New York: Doubleday, 2003): 221-241.
219
forces were not in Washington . . . We cannot allow this power to be set in 
motion by others.  We must keep the ultimate right to decide whether and 
when it shall be used.  A weak and independent nuclear force within the 
Western Alliance, a force which could start a world war but could not finish 
it, would be a danger to the peace of the world and to our own national 
security.
83
Lippmann?s Paris speech deviated little from that line of reasoning principally 
because he understood precisely how narrowly nuclear war over Cuba had been 
averted.  The final draft?vetted by Mac Bundy?sounded much more like a 
statement delivered by an administration spokesman than the impartial observation of 
a prominent political commentator.  On 29 November 1962, at the Palais d?Orsay 
Hotel, Lippmann addressed a gathering of the American Press Association.  The 
Cuban missile crisis, Lippmann told listeners, ?has confirmed us in the view that the 
command of nuclear power to balance Soviet nuclear power cannot be divided or 
shared.?  He employed a particularly blunt metaphor.  Western nations, he said, were 
passengers in the same car on a windy, mountainous road.  While it was perfectly 
legitimate for the passengers to consult one another and decide collectively on a 
route, once a decision had been arrived at, ?there can be only one driver at the 
wheel.?  Clearly, it had been decided years earlier that the U.S. would provide the 
nuclear protection for Western Europe, he continued.  Instead of modifying that 
policy at crises points, Lippmann proposed a ?division of labor.?  He argued against 
De Gaulle?s force de frappe plan, instead urging European nations ?to take upon 
themselves the burden of the conventional defense of Europe? while the U.S. 
shouldered the nuclear responsibility.  Bundy had told Lippmann that that phrase 
83
 Lippmann, Western Unity and the Common Market (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1962): 
36-37.
220
offered an interesting insight into the highest level of administration thinking on the 
nuclear sharing idea.  ?It is just this word ?burden? that is so interesting,? Bundy 
wrote Lippmann.  
We think of nuclear weapons as a terrible burden and more and more in this 
Administration we prefer to think about modernized regimental combat 
teams and tidy little naval task forces, so that the pressure for increase in our 
own conventional budget is generated partly by ourselves, as well as the 
Army and Navy.  These conventional forces are not a burden; they are in the 
most intimate psychological terms a means of escape from nuclear 
confrontation.  For our European friends, on the other hand, conventional 
forces are forever associated with the two World Wars and their terrible 
personal and social consequences.  So they find comfort and escape in tidy 
little nuclear forces that will never be used.  The new pattern of national 
defense of General De Gaulle is the extreme case and the most instructive 
one.  Many professional military men in France are against General De 
Gaulle?s concepts, and he has been heard to complain that they are trying to 
do a generation late, what they should have done for the war of 1940.
84
Lippmann stressed the necessity of European contributions in a conventional 
sense.  ?To those who tell us that we are trying to monopolize the big weapons which 
give prestige, or that we are trying to reduce Europe to the prosaic role of supplying 
the foot soldiers,? he concluded, ?my reply is that we are providing for the defense of 
Europe a big share?perhaps a disproportionate share?of the conventional forces, 
including the foot soldiers.?
85
Lippmann?s speech brought him into conflict yet again with Raymond Aron.  
Immediately after delivering it, he met with Aron, then a cautious supporter of an 
independent nuclear force.
86
  Though not an ardent Gaullist, Aron sympathized with 
84
Bundy to Lippmann, 13 November 1962, Bundy Correspondence, NSF, Box 402, JFKL.
85
 For the full text of Lippmann?s speech, see, Walter Lippmann, ?Cuba Etched the Diplomacy of the 
Nuclear Age,? 2 December 1962, Washington Post: E1; portions of Lippmann?s address were reprinted 
in The New Republic, ?Only One Driver Can Sit at the Wheel,? TNR, 22 December 1962, Vol. 147: 7-
8.
86
 Lippmann Appointment Diaries, 29 November 1962, Box 329, Folder 32, Series III, WLC.
221
the De Gaulle?s general policy of seeking a measure of political and military 
autonomy within the Western Alliance.  Citing the sharing of U.S. nuclear technology 
with Britain in the late 1950s, Aron famously asked why Washington could export 
nuclear secrets across the Atlantic but not across the Channel.  On the force de frappe
issue he had communicated with Bundy earlier in 1962, complaining that the unique 
U.S. consultation with the British on nuclear matters offended French interests.
87
Aron rejected Bundy?s implicit message that France should consult the U.S. 
but accept its status as a secondary nuclear power.  As early as November 1959, Aron 
supported Paris officials? plan to develop a small nuclear striking force.  He viewed it 
not as a strategic deterrent but as a useful diplomatic tool.  ?The strike force has a 
certain prestige value,? Aron noted at the time.  ?It has an incontestable diplomatic 
value in negotiating with the United States on the communication of secrets.  It 
represents a sort of supreme recourse . . . Finally, it gives France a greater voice in the 
counsels of the Alliance, when it develops a strategy of resistance to the Soviet 
Union.?
88
  Aron had earlier tried to persuade President Kennedy that the U.S. should 
cooperate with the French nuclear program.  He dismissed administration arguments 
that aid to the French would stimulate the West Germans to develop their own nuclear 
87
 McGeorge Bundy to Raymond Aron, 24 May 1962, APRA, Boite 210.   McGeorge Bundy privately 
countered Aron?s complaints. ?You are right to say, for the most part, that our feelings derive from our 
own conviction that the nuclear defense of the West is indivisible,? Bundy replied. ?On this point, in 
fact, our estimation of British nuclear capacity is no different from our estimation of French nuclear 
capacity.?  From the American perspective, Bundy wrote, British nuclear policy ?has been not so much 
to establish autonomy as to maintain a right of cautionary counsel? to Washington.  French demands 
for an independent nuclear force were perceived as ?increasing independence? and ?immediate control 
of [the nuclear] trigger??a development which U.S. officials could not countenance.  As Bundy 
explained to Aron, when Lippmann published a column about that distinction ?one of the senior 
members of President de Gaulle?s defense team promptly said to one of our people that he thought 
Lippmann was entirely right.?  In that context, Bundy asked whether the French commentator?s 
?argument that what is given to the British must in decency be given to France is not open to some 
question.? See also Aron?s discussion of this letter in his Memoires: 589-590. 
88
 Aron, Memoires: 594-595.  Aron was quoting from a November 1959 Le Figaro column.
222
weapons.  He believed that military and political obstacles to such a course would 
lead Bonn to ?prefer the provision of tactical atomic weapons from the U.S.,?
89
although he was not personally receptive to the notion of a Multi-Lateral Force 
(MLF) which emerged a few years later.  
In 1963, Aron tried his own hand at public intra-Alliance mediation with the 
publication of The Great Debate: Theories of Nuclear Strategy, based on his 1962-
1963 lectures at the Institut d?Etudes Politiques.  The book was partly a response to 
General Pierre Gallois?chief French critic of the Kennedy administration?s decision 
to abandon massive retaliation in favor of flexible response.  It also raised concerns 
about President De Gaulle?s effort to carve out an independent deterrent role for 
France.  Finally, it offered an analysis of U.S. policy.  ?For those who hope for the 
survival of the Atlantic Alliance,? Aron wrote, ?it is of primary importance that the 
policy makers and the public on either side of the Atlantic gain a greater 
understanding of the positions held on the other side.?
90
Aron?s essential point was that while the force de frappe created a useful 
political role for France it did not?nor would it soon?constitute a viable deterrent.  
?The French force may someday form the nucleus of a European deterrent; in any 
event it has persuaded our ally, the United States, to enter upon a dialogue with 
Europe on the subject of strategy,? Aron wrote.  ?It constitutes an incipient protection 
against the unpredictability of future diplomacy.  The French decision remains a 
subject for discussion so long as we confine ourselves to the coming decade and 
89
 Schlesinger to President Kennedy, 23 May 1961, President?s Office Files, Staff Memos, Arthur 
Schlesinger, Jr., Files, Box 65, JFKL.
90
 Raymond Aron, The Great Debate: viii.  For a recent study of De Gaulle?s foreign policy in this 
regard, see Frederic Bozo, Two Strategies for Europe: De Gaulle, the United States, and the Atlantic 
223
regard it as a sort of premium paid now for insurance against an unknown future.  
Downright absurd, however, is the attempt to transform the project into a symbol of 
patriotic pride that in ten years? time will replace the American deterrent, consolidate 
the balance of terror, and at the same time enhance our national self-esteem.?
91
  Aron 
later maintained that from the start his goal was to persuade De Gaulle to integrate the 
French nuclear force into the Alliance; to that end, he was highly critical of Paris? 
refusal to discuss the American offer of the development of a multi-lateral force?a 
subject broached at the 1963 Nassau meeting of Western officials.  He rejected also 
the ?detonateur? argument some French officials used to justify the force de frappe?
?that the national force would oblige the U.S. to use nuclear arms also.? Finally, he 
accepted the development of the flexible response strategy.  It was strategically 
?unassailable,? Aron wrote.  He added, ?it is contrary both to common sense and to 
elementary prudence to stake everything on the threat of massive retaliation and to 
revive time and again the choice between passive inaction and total disaster . . . the 
strategy of graduated retaliation is both less immoral and more efficient.?
92
Alliance, translated by Susan Emanuel (New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2001).  For a 
brief discussion of Aron, see pp. 122-123.
91
 Aron, The Great Debate: 120.
92
 Aron, The Great Debate: 171.  Aron saw that Paris?s independent striking force could have 
applications in a conflict between NATO and the Soviet Union but that it did little to answer French 
problems in Africa or the Middle East.  Significantly, too, Lippmann and Aron disagreed over the 
implications of superpower nuclear deterrence strategies.  Lippmann was constantly concerned that 
proxy wars or competition in the developing world could precipitate direct confrontation between 
Moscow and Washington?in essence, a game of nuclear brinksmanship.  To varying degrees this 
assertion was proven correct in the Tachens, Cuba, Laos, and in the Arab-Israeli conflicts.  Aron 
viewed it differently.  If the nuclear deterrent did anything, he argued, it provided more not less room 
for both the superpowers and secondary powers and their lesser allies to engage in local conflicts.  
?One does not increase the risk of total war by accepting the obligations of local wars,? Aron wrote in 
1950, in a sentence that foreshadowed his own support of a doctrine of flexible response a decade later.  
Quoted in Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 159.  ?Neutralite ou engagement,? presentation to the 
Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin, July 1950.  Reprinted in Polemique: 199-217.
224
Aron brought De Gaulle?s policy in for especially tough criticism believing 
that while France should develop its nuclear potential it must do so within the 
alliance.  All three of De Gaulle?s chief objectives?the prevention of a superpower 
?extra-European? nuclear monopoly, influence on U.S. strategic policy, and the 
acquisition of prestige?were, Aron argued, not incompatible with an integrated 
nuclear force.  Cooperation, however, would ?preclude . . . pretensions to a wholly 
independent diplomacy and strategy, which, I am aware, are General de Gaulle?s 
main concerns.  But in this respect I am afraid that his philosophy derives from 
nostalgia for the kind of independence vanished with ?the good old days.??
93
In this aspect, Aron was nudging his countrymen toward a reasonable, 
responsible conception of national policy?one that affirmed the realities of France?s 
declining international power in postwar politics.  On the other side of the Atlantic, 
Lippmann, too, tried to outline a course for Americans commensurate with their new 
power.  Both men sought to supplant old conceptions?with the latter urging 
acceptance of larger responsibilities and the former pressing for the acceptance of a 
more circumscribed role.  In concluding his discussion of the force de frappe, Aron 
wrote, ?To value the power of independent choice between war and peace above 
national security may once have been a sign of greatness.  But I do not believe that in 
the thermonuclear age this should be considered an appropriate goal for the national 
ambition of a nation such as France.?
94
Nevertheless, Aron dismissed Lippmann?s 29 November 1962 speech as a 
?scandalous? appeal to European nations to accept a role not only as junior military 
93
 Aron, The Great Debate: 261.
94
 Aron, The Great Debate: 265.
225
partners but also secondary diplomatic actors within the alliance, ?dependent 
proteges, if not satellites.?  Aron warned that for De Gaulle, ?Atlantic 
interdependence (or Atlantic association) is sheer window dressing, barely veiled 
hypocrisy designed to camouflage Europe?s reduction to political vassalage by the 
United States in the guise of protection.?
95
  Aron challenged the stark distinctions that 
American officials?and Lippmann?drew between consultation and control of 
nuclear weapons since, he believed, effective diplomacy with Moscow required the 
implied threat of nuclear force.  In a rebuttal to Lippmann?s speech, he wrote, ?it is 
obvious that when Lippmann asks Europeans to let America handle the wheel of the 
car, he is really asking them to abdicate after a fashion.  To the extent that diplomacy 
in the atomic age uses the threat of nuclear force as a deterrent weapon, the 
combination of an American monopoly and non-consultation with its allies reduces 
the European countries, in the last analysis, to the status of protectorate nations.  
General de Gaulle, whose projects are such a source of concern to Lippmann, could 
not have asked for a more striking confirmation of his contentions.?
96
  Aron 
countered that if U.S. official pressed this case, demanding De Gaulle and Europeans 
generally ?to have total confidence in the driver,? that they would be driven to an 
independent policy: ?they will consent to sacrifices in view of acquiring a deterrent 
force, even perhaps [if it is] ineffective.?
97
  French diplomats in Washington 
apparently used Aron?s response to frame Paris?s argument in meetings with U.S. 
diplomats at Foggy Bottom.  Amused by French irritation at the speech Mac Bundy 
95
 Aron, Memoires: 593; Aron, The Great Debate: 169.
96
 Raymond Aron, ?Must We Have Blind Faith?? The New Republic, 22 December 1962, Vol. 147: 9-
10.  See also Raymond Aron, ?Reponse A Walter Lippmann Le Monopole Atomique Americain Et 
226
wrote Lippmann, still traveling in Europe, to express the White House?s gratitude.  
?The President admired your Paris Tribune speech as much as one or two of the 
French newspapers seem to have been displeased by it,? Bundy quipped. ?You are in 
danger of becoming an Administration spokesman?which is of course just what the 
French fear.?
98
Lippmann responded to Aron with a velvet glove?hoping to impress upon 
U.S. policymakers the need to minimize Franco-American divisions.  Two weeks 
after returning home, he explained to Today and Tomorrow readers that there was no 
readily apparent solution to the nuclear impasse with De Gaulle.  The dispute would 
have to be ?arbitrated by events.?  He added, ?It will take many years before France 
can make itself a serious nuclear power, and the fact that we stand aside passively 
while she works at it and realizes the gigantic costs will constitute notice that were 
she to take nuclear action outside the Alliance, the United States government would 
not be morally and legally obligated to follow her.?  That said, Lippmann also 
counseled patience and perspective, insisting that the breach not be allowed to 
develop into a wide rift.  ?Believing as I do that the American view of nuclear power 
is right, I would be happier if, on our part, we do not allow the discussion with our 
allies to degenerate into a debating wrangle conducted with that moral self-
righteousness which is the besetting temptation of those who on intellectual grounds 
believe, perhaps even know, that they are right.?
99
L?Europe,? 3 Decembre 1962, Le Figaro, reprinted in Les Articles Du Figaro: Tome II, La 
Coexistence, 1955-1965, Georges-Henri Soutou, editor (Paris, Editions de Fallois, 1993): 1110-1113.
97
 Aron, Memoires: 593.
98
 Bundy to Lippmann, 4 December 1962, WHCNF, Box 1631, JFKL.
99
 Lippmann, T&T, 20 December 1962, ?The Agitated Alliance.?
227
Years later Lippmann recalled somewhat ruefully that his delivery of the Paris 
speech was the closest he ever came to advocating on behalf of the Kennedy 
administration.
100
  Such appearances perpetuated foreign misperceptions that much of 
what Lippmann wrote received official sanction or that he regularly served as the 
government?s informal spokesman.  The reality was that the Kennedy administration 
used Lippmann when it suited its needs and Lippmann, who had a weakness for being 
drawn to power, on occasion let himself get closer to officials than was proper.  
Relatively minor infractions during the Kennedy years prepared the way for a more 
complex period of personal persuasion between the columnist and the Johnson 
administration.
101
Access to powerful leaders, however, did not equate to influence in many 
instances and Lippmann?s true ability to shape ideas still lay in communicating 
alternatives through his column.  In setting the parameters of the debate and, at times, 
the very language employed by the discussants, Lippmann exercised his greatest 
influence.  Especially at crises points, and there were not a few during the Kennedy 
years, Walter Lippmann used his access and his column to try to defuse tensions?
with varying emphases.  The political scientist Charles Tarlton once observed that 
Lippmann was most perceptive and insightful in moments of ?dangerous disorder??
at times when the superpowers stood on the threshold of war, conventional or
thermonuclear; that, at these moments, Lippmann brought to bear his insights on 
100
 Lippmann, oral history interview, April 1964, JFKL: 16.  Lippmann recalled, ?My speech was as 
conscious an attempt as I?ve ever made in anything to explain the American official view.  Although I 
agreed with it, I took care to see that I wasn?t off base, because it was a kind of official occasion where 
I couldn?t afford just to speak my own views.?  
101
 See, for example, Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 557-572.  My analysis of this 
episode is extensive in chapters 7-9.
228
history with a very pragmatic approach to problem-solving?one that eschewed the 
rigidity and formalism of ideology or ?isms? to reach a practical solution.  In this 
regard, Tarlton observed (at the time the columnist was breaking with the LBJ 
administration over its Vietnam policies), Lippmann?s commentary best represented a 
maturing of American foreign affairs.  Unlike the ?deterministic, pessimistic, and 
realistic? view of a geo-politician like Alfred Mahan, or conversely, the ?utopian, 
optimistic, and moralistic? thinking of a pacifist like William Jennings Bryan, 
Lippmann?s outlook was one of ?pragmatic, sociological, and almost scientific? 
dimensions.
102
Within the Atlantic Community he sought to minimize frictions 
between Paris, Bonn, London, and Washington.  Toward the Soviet Union, Lippmann 
highlighted those areas in which the superpowers could reach an accommodation.  
Increasingly, as Laos and then Vietnam became prickly foreign policy problems, he 
reminded readers that the core Cold War conflict existed between America and the 
Soviet Union (and that it was centered in Western Europe)?and that both powers 
could disastrously de-stabilize their rough equilibrium of power if they waged proxy 
wars in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
VII.
Lippmann and Aron also conflicted over the influence of ideology versus geo-
strategic imperatives in shaping decision-makers? policies.  Aron believed that 
Kremlin leaders acted primarily upon the dictates of their Marxist ideology and that, 
therefore, the Cold War would not follow the patterns of traditional great power 
102
 See Charles D. Tarlton, ?The Styles of American International Thought: Mahan, Bryan, and 
Lippmann,? World Politics XVI (October 1964-July 1965): 584-614.
229
conflicts.  In contrast, Lippmann assigned little importance to communist ideology 
when explaining the foreign policies of Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, or Hanoi.
Herein, lay a contradiction in Lippmann?s thinking.  For he clearly believed 
ideology affected American policymakers?if in an overly negative sense.  On a basic 
level, Lippmann and Kennan shared the view that Wilsonian foreign policy had badly 
derailed American diplomacy.  In 1951, Kennan published his landmark work, 
American Diplomacy: 1900-1950, a sustained attack on Wilsonianism. In parts, it so 
closely resembled Lippmann?s argument in U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims
that one could only conclude that Lippmann had deeply impressed the diplomat with 
his construction of a postwar internationalism that replaced Wilson?s concept of 
collective security with a classical arrangement of great powers.  In 1943, Lippmann 
explained in words that foreshadowed Kennan?s prose, that Wilson had unwisely 
chosen to define American foreign policy aims with ?legalistic and moralistic and 
idealistic reasons, rather than the substantial and vital reason that the security of the 
United States demanded that no aggressively expanding imperial power, like 
Germany, should be allowed to gain mastery of the Atlantic Ocean.?
103
  This mis-
education of the public proved tremendously harmful for it obscured prerequisites of 
a strong network of allies and the application of power politics in order to promote 
international stability.  Kennan?s book American Diplomacy echoed Lippmann?s 
language, followed its periodization, and similarly asserted that the central flaw of 
103
 Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, and 
Company, 1943): 37-39.
230
American foreign policy was ?the legalistic-moralistic approach to international 
problems.?
104
A year later, in a series of lectures Lippmann delivered to British audiences, 
published as Isolation and Alliances (1952), he elaborated the critique of Wilsonian 
foreign policy he had last focused on in U.S. War Aims.  His argument amplified 
Kennan?s.  The roots of American isolationism, Lippmann explained, emanated from 
Jefferson?s warning against entangling alliances and, correctly, added that it had 
neither a neutralist or pacifist impulse but, rather, derived from unilateralist 
assumptions.  ?The isolationists of the twentieth century have wished to isolate not 
merely the American continental domain and the Western Hemisphere,? he wrote.  
?In the last analysis they have wanted to isolate American decisions and actions, to 
have the final word whenever Americans are involved.?
105
  Lippmann also noted the 
?exceptionalist? habits of American foreign policymakers.  By this he meant their 
conception that Manifest Destiny was somehow different from European colonialism, 
that instead of conquering a continent Americans were?in Jefferson?s rhetoric?
creating a ?new domicile of freedom? open to all mankind (at least, white European 
mankind).
106
  Finally, in much the same fashion as he had in his earlier expositions of 
Wilsonianism, Lippmann argued that Wilson exported these ?principles of American 
104
 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 95.
Kennan elaborated, drawing on a long list of pacts and schemes, many of which Lippmann had also 
singled out for attack.  Kennan wrote, ?This approach runs like a red skein through our foreign policy 
of the last 50 years.  It has in it something of the old emphasis on arbitration treaties, something of the 
Hague Conferences and schemes for universal disarmament, something of the more ambitious 
American concepts of the role of international law, something of the League of Nations, something of 
the Kellogg Pact, something of the idea of a universal ?Article 51? pact, something of the belief in 
World Law and World Government.  But it is none of these, entirely.?
105
 Walter Lippmann, Isolation and Alliances: An American Speaks to the British (Boston: Little, 
Brown and Company, 1952): 14-15.
106
 Ibid.
231
democracy . . . [making them] universal throughout the world? in his attempt to 
safeguard democracy at home.  Lippmann concluded, ?The Wilsonian ideology is 
American fundamentalism made into a universal doctrine.?  It was the 19
th
 century 
American experience?as a geographically isolated nation?writ large; one in which 
there are ?no lasting rivalries, no deep conflicts of interest, where no compromises of 
principles have to be made, where there are no separate spheres of influence, and no 
alliances.? War could only be waged to fend off attack against the universal order.  
When carried out, war was waged like a crusade, partly because it was believed to be 
an ?intolerable criminal interference with the nature of things? and partly because 
Americans perceived the centralization of powers to make war as an invasion of their 
domestic rights.  Finally, Lippmann observed, ?In the Wilsonian ideology aggression 
is an armed rebellion against the universal and eternal principles of world society? 
and could be ended only by ?unconditional surrender? and the political rehabilitation 
and reconstruction of the offending regime.
107
Although Aron believed communist ideology to be the prime mover for Soviet 
actions he disagreed with Lippmann and Kennan that Wilsonian parochialisms 
underlay American Cold War initiatives.  He tended to regard American policy as 
prudent and emanating from legitimate security concerns?or, at least, security 
concerns that seemed especially immediate on his side of the Atlantic Ocean.  
?Containment in its original sense is less the result of ?Wilson syndrome,? or the 
dream of peace through the universalization of democratic regimes, than its critics 
make out,? Aron wrote in The Imperial Republic (1973).  ?It is rather due to the 
American style and the specific traits of the external behavior of a republic which has 
107
 Lippmann, Isolation and Alliances: 22-23.
232
never accepted the Realpolitik or Machiavellianism of old Europe; the concept, rather 
than the doctrine, of containment represented the defensive version of the inevitable 
rivalry with the Soviet Union.?
108
  Aron did not identify what he meant by ?the 
American style,? which leaves room for interpretation.  For, if he meant ideologies 
like Manifest Destiny and U.S. exceptionalism, or traits like isolationism or 
xenophobia, then he and Lippmann and Kennan were talking about similar things.  
The difference is that the American realists did not think of these parochialisms as 
being separate from Wilsonianism?but rather as being central to it.  While Aron?s 
assertion may have applied to containment in its original conception?with Germany 
as the locus of the conflict?it is far less persuasive when measured against the 
globalized version.   
It was principally on the different emphases that Aron and Lippmann assigned 
to ideology, where they disagreed on their brand of realism.  The Frenchman was not 
part of the wing of the realpolitik school which he described as a kind of ?theoretical 
realism,? that he believed to be both impractical and unrealistic in its expectations.  
He objected, for instance, to the kind of rigidity and empiricism of the realism 
advocated by academics such as Hans J. Morgenthau.  ?In my opinion pseudo-
certainty, based on the relationship between the states and the risks, on some rational 
calculation ascribed to a likely aggressor, is of no more value than the dogmatism of 
the Maginot Line.?
109
  Yet, Tony Judt believes, Aron was indeed a realist for he 
sought to come to terms with only those things he perceived to be real about the 
world.  Where he differed from Lippmann was that Aron ascribed real weight to the 
108
Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945-1973, translated by 
Frank Jellinek (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1974): 300.  My italics.
233
power and influence of ideas.  For Aron, personal convictions, political ideologies, 
and moral considerations shaped human behavior as much as alignments of power, 
strategic interests, and armaments.
110
In this respect, Aron shared the worldview of U.S. officials who interpreted 
the Cold War within an ideological framework and a civilizational context.  His 
perspective was not that different from Paul Nitze and others who adhered to the 
assumptions of NSC-68?that is, that the Soviet-American rivalry was an 
irreconcilable conflict between a ?free society? based on Western liberties and a 
?slave society.?
111
  Aron always believed that Lippmann under-estimated the 
ideological convictions of the men in the Kremlin.  He made this point most clearly in 
a column that examined Lippmann?s famous 1958 interview with Khrushchev in 
Moscow.  Aron rejected Lippmann? notion of achieving a modus vivendi, a ?pacific
coexistence? as the French columnist described it, with Moscow.  ?Only a radical 
ignorance of the theory and practice of communism would allow misunderstanding of 
the notion of status quo [i.e., official recognition of the division of Germany and 
Europe] which, at bottom, is another name for pacific coexistence,? Aron wrote.  ?No 
more than that the pacific character of the coexistence eliminates the death struggle 
between the two systems, does the status quo imply a stabilization, even temporary, 
of current borders or of the organization of states.  According to his philosophy, M. 
Khrushchev cannot but believe in the irresistible evolution toward the expansion of 
109
 Cited in Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 163; quoted from Aron?s Clausewitz, Vol. 2: 179.
110
 Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: 164-165.  
111
A very useful reader on NSC-68 which includes commentary by historians and policymakers is 
Ernest R. May (editor), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC-68 (Boston: Bedford Books-
St. Martin?s Press, 1994): especially, pp. 27-29.  For the original text of NSC-68, see Foreign 
Relations of the United States, 1950, Volume I, National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy 
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977): 234-292.
234
universal communism.  Walter Lippmann objects to this millenarianist interpretation 
of history (and to Western victims of an analogous error [i.e., Wilsonianism]) 
believing that there is space on the planet for different regimes.  How can we say he is 
not right?  But how can we forget that M. Khrushchev believes in the long run that his 
regime will be imposed on all of humanity??
112
  For Aron and most American Cold 
War leaders the irreconcilable ideological gulf between Moscow and the Western 
Alliance left no room for meaningful diplomatic engagement.
Ideology mattered in the Cold War.  ?Authoritarian romanticism,? for 
instance, helps explain otherwise inexplicable positions taken by Communist leaders: 
Stalin?s expectations for a war between capitalist nations after the Second World 
War; Mao Zedong?s willingness to subordinate national interests to secure a treaty 
with Moscow, as well as his readiness to absorb horrific losses in the Korean War; 
and even Nikita Khrushchev?s insistence on making a strategic commitment in 
Cuba?based on the thin hope it would act as a revolutionary springboard for Latin 
America.
113
  But ideology also tended to obfuscated geopolitical motivations and to 
obliterate a necessary internal sense of limitations.  It was precisely Lippmann?s de-
emphasis of ideological motivations that made him such a perceptive and early critic 
of Western policy in Asia.  Unlike Aron, and successive casts of Washington 
officials, Lippmann identified the geopolitical tensions that would necessarily arise 
between Moscow and Beijing, the tendency of national interests to subordinate 
ideology?and the opportunities these developments opened for Western 
112
 Raymond Aron, ?Walter Lippmann A Moscou,? 21 Novembre 1958, Les Articles Du Figaro: Tome 
II, La Coexistence, 1955-1965: 467 -470.
235
policymakers.  Similarly, in reading events in Vietnam as evolving within the context 
of a civil conflict?directed by nationalists in Hanoi and Saigon?Lippmann 
delivered compelling commentary on the poor prospects of U.S. intervention in that 
country earlier, more consistently, and with greater effect than any other American 
commentator.
113
 See, John Lewis Gaddis?s discussion in We Now Know: 289-291.  See also Shuguang Zhang, Mao?s 
Military Romanticism: China and the Korean war, 1950-1953 ( Lawrence, KS: University Press of 
Kansas, 1995): on Mao?s ?romanticism,? see especially, 12-30; for a critique of it see, 247-261.
236
Chapter 5: 
?An Unending Series of Insoluble Dilemmas?: Walter Lippmann and 
Containment in Asia, 1947-1955
I.
From April 1945 to May 1967, Lippmann critiqued the foreign policies of the first 
American Cold War presidents, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. 
Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.  He wrote more than 2,200 Today and Tomorrow
columns during that period, the majority of them dealing with Cold War 
developments in Europe and Asia.  Yet, there has been no sustained analysis of 
Lippmann?s writings, particularly regarding containment strategies toward China and 
in Korea which helped to frame his position on American intervention in the 
Indochinese civil war.  The standard literature addresses this facet of Lippmann?s 
career in broad strokes, framed largely in terms of his response to George F. 
Kennan?s original articulation of containment in the X-Article.
1
  Washington?s China 
policy highlighted the pitfalls of supporting a reactionary authoritarian regime in the 
form of Chiang Kai-shek?s Kuomintang and refusing diplomatic recognition to the 
People?s Republic of China (PRC).  Conflict on the Korean peninsula from 1950 to 
1
 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little Brown, 1980): especially 
465-467 (China White Paper); 470-473, 475-476 (Korea); 486-490 (on Lippmann?s approach to 
containment generally.
237
1953 inflicted huge human and material costs and ended in an indecisive military 
stalemate.  Both China policy and the Korean War confirmed Lippmann?s doubts 
about the geo-strategic wisdom of global containment.  For more than two decades 
after World War II he warned American leaders that diplomacy rather than military 
intervention was the best means to exercise U.S. power and to preserve its influence 
in Asia.  His analyses?expressed in books, columns, public speeches, interviews, 
correspondence, and private conversations?were framed by the principles of 
strategic internationalism discussed in Chapter Two.
This chapter examines Lippmann?s commentary on U.S. policy toward China 
from 1945 to 1958, and in Korea after the Pyongyang?s invasion in June 1950.  In the 
decade after World War II, Lippmann consistently and rigorously engaged the 
problems of American foreign relations in Asia.  His criticisms of policy there tended 
to be straightforward attacks on Wilsonianism, which he detected in the dictates of 
the Truman Doctrine of March 1947. Lippmann?s anchored his commentary in the 
precepts of his strategic internationalism which included: the belief that the U.S. had 
no vital interests on Asian mainland; that Washington officials would badly damage 
their influence by acting unilaterally there; and that the U.S. should not send under 
any circumstances ground troops to fight in Asian wars which they could not win in 
any conventional sense.  These three aspects of Lippmann?s strategic internationalism 
were lent additional urgency with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.  
Lippmann believed that the global containment policy adopted by U.S. officials in 
NSC-68 would drain U.S. resources, dangerously destabilizing the delicate balance of 
power between Washington and Moscow.
238
II.
Lippmann?s philosophic roots, travels, cultural preferences, and social and political 
connections oriented him toward an European outlook.
2
  From the late-1940s onward, 
however, Walter Lippmann closely monitored developments in American Asian 
policy because of their potential for dangerously globalizing an already burdensome 
containment policy.  He devoted hundreds of columns to U.S. policy in Asia, in 
addition to the many installments of Today and Tomorrow that focused on the 
Vietnam War in the 1960s.  Lippmann did not recommend that the U.S. abandon its 
interests in Asia or ignore its prior commitments there.  Quite the contrary: He saw 
America as a vital participant in postwar affairs in the Pacific region.  At the time, 
congressional, administration, and public opinion leaders who criticized Lippmann 
did so primarily because his message of moderation and collaboration in Asia 
conflicted with their own interventionist aspirations and unilateral actions.  Critics 
often distorted Lippmann?s record by choosing a crisis-specific approach and by 
consulting in a highly selective fashion his thousands of Cold War columns.  The 
2
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 464-465; 570.  Steel suggests that Lippmann 
ignored American policy in Asia, came late to it, and that his commentary was impaired by a Western 
European bias.  He therefore implies that Lippmann?s break with Johnson over Vietnam marked a 
belated realization of the problems of containment in Asia, problems which his realism had failed to 
elucidate because it did make moral considerations or fully understand American economic motives.  
That interpretation staggers under the weight of its own ideological assumptions.  Aside from the fact 
that Lippmann had been clearly critical of unilateral interventions in such places as post-World War I 
Russia and post-World War II China he also firmly opposed intervention anywhere in Asia proper: 
Korea, Formosa, French Indochina, and, later, Laos and Vietnam.  For a more balanced perspective on 
Lippmann?s cultural cosmopolitanism, see D. Stephen Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in 
the Century of Total War (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984): especially, 23- 39.
239
standard literature, which views crisis episodes without examining the sweep of his 
commentary, also misses Lippmann?s cumulative consistencies.
3
Lippmann never discounted Asian concerns, priorities, and culture during the 
Cold War.  His outlook, however, was more Western European (at times more so than 
American), and, while his views on race were a good deal more cosmopolitan than 
many of his contemporaries, they still reflected his time?which is to say, by 
presentist standards, they were not always fully evolved.
4
  Given these assumptions, 
however, there is no sustainable argument that Lippmann?s lack of detailed 
knowledge about Asian culture or his perceived insensitivities appreciably inhibited 
him from being a perceptive critic of U.S. policy.  And, as we shall see, he usually 
framed his assumptions for proper policies based on the essential need for Asian 
autonomy and self-rule, as well as respect for various nations? unique strategic 
interests and concerns.  Those, like Walt W. Rostow, who charge Lippmann and other 
Vietnam War critics with a perverse kind of racism?that they would not sanction 
sending ?white boys? to fight for Asians (a charge galling for its own blindness to the 
racial and class composition of U.S. forces)?are unconvincing.
5
  In retrospect, 
Lippmann?s vision for post-colonial Asia emerged as an infinitely more humane and 
civilized outcome than the denouement of American policy in Southeast Asia in the 
1960s and 1970s.
3
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: for example, 471-472.  Steel takes Lippmann to 
task for his initial reaction to the Korean War.  Caught off-guard by the North Korean invasion on 25 
June 1950, the columnist offered cautious support in two columns approving of U.S. air and naval 
support for the Republic of Korea.  But on the Korean issue?as with every other Asian crisis that 
Lippmann evaluated?upon longer reflection he chose a moderate approach that emphasized American 
withdrawal and diplomatic negotiations rather than military confrontation.
4
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 551-554; 570.
5
 Walt W. Rostow, interview with author, 26 March 1998, Austin, TX.  I discuss Rostow?s criticisms of 
Lippmann?s approach to Vietnam in greater detail in Chapter Nine.
240
Lippmann believed that Beijing?s expansionism?like Moscow?s?had to be 
checked but he differed with policymakers over the means they employed.  Contain 
China with diplomacy not a prolonged military siege, Lippmann advised, to each 
administration from Truman to Johnson.  This was not mere intellectual finessing or 
equivocation.  Here, the means were inextricably linked with the ends.  And the 
means Lippmann supported were hallmarks of his unique kind of realism.  American 
policy in Asia could not be unilateral but instead multi-lateral and in cooperation with 
other ?natural powers?: China, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
6
  Accordingly, the U.S. 
could not support a reassertion of European colonialism, he argued.  Time and again, 
Lippmann advised against confronting China with American military power on the 
Asian continent.  U.S. air and naval forces should be arrayed in a line far away from 
mainland Asia?stretching from the Aleutians to Hawaii to the Philippines.
7
  Nor 
would it do much good to bolster reactionary regimes such as Chiang Kai-shek?s 
Nationalist government in Taiwan?a needlessly provocative and strategically 
unsound endeavor, he maintained.  Instead, the containment of China would be a 
matter of diplomatic maneuvering and would likely require the tacit, if not overt, 
cooperation of the Soviet Union. Lippmann?s was the voice continually reminding 
U.S. officials that embracing such internationalism in favor of parochial interests and 
unilateralist desires would demand more than a modicum of political courage in 
Washington.  Against the wishes of a small but vocal right-wing clique of anti-
Communist senators, the Truman administration would have to recognize the Beijing 
6
 See, for example, Lippmann, T&T, ?The China Fact,? 8 January 1951.
7
 See, for example, Lippmann, T&T, ?After Japan What?? 13 June 1950.  Lippmann believed up until 
the Korean invasion that the U.S. should withdraw from Japan and Okinawa once a peace treaty was 
ratified.  He thought the islands were strategically vulnerable.
241
government as the de facto government of all China and, eventually, establish 
relations with it.  As Lippmann wrote in April 1949, the president and his advisors 
should disregard the ?frivolous fringe? who believe that ?another billion dollars or 
thereabouts given to Chiang Kai-shek? would solidify the Nationalist government on 
the mainland of China.
8
Over time, as the PRC consolidated its rule on the mainland and as America 
rebuilt Japan into a strategic stronghold, Lippmann?s frame of reference shifted from 
core to peripheral countries.  Here, too, he believed American influence was minimal 
and that it must align itself with the liberal and nationalist elements in the emerging 
nations of Southeast Asia.  America?s goal, he wrote repeatedly, should be to detach 
these countries from the U.S.-Sino-Soviet struggle, to neutralize them, to de-
militarize them wherever possible, and to engage them in cultural and economic 
exchange.  Washington?s best interests would be served by promoting their 
independence from the PRC and the USSR rather than by herding them into an anti-
Communist alliance.
III.
In 1943, when Walter Lippmann first articulated his sphere-of-influence approach, 
the postwar world Asia was?even more than Europe?unstable and fluid.
9
  The war 
had shattered Japanese and Chinese power and, added to that, the rapid decline of the 
European empires portended tremendous instability in a host of colonial capitals.  
8
 Lippmann, T&T, ?China and U.S. Policy,? 26 April 1949.
9
 Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 
1943).
242
And, yet, Lippmann believed, American power could not rush in to fill the vacuum in 
Asia as it seemed prepared to do in Europe.  U.S. (and Western) influence, he wrote, 
was limited there.  Indeed this view conformed to the idea, held by many officials in 
the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, that China should play the central role in 
the reconstruction, rehabilitation, and policing of Asia.
10
  To understand the origins of 
Lippmann?s position on Vietnam one must consider his perspective on the larger 
questions of America?s role in Asia, China?s place as a great power, and 
developments on the Korean peninsula that pitted Washington against Beijing in a 
?hot? war.  For Lippmann, no settlement in Southeast Asia could be constructed 
without addressing these three inter-related areas.  American policy, he believed, 
would have to recognize and allow for constructive Chinese participation in postwar 
Asia.  Without that kind of foundation, Washington?s objectives were consigned to 
failure.
In U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic Lippmann devoted relatively 
few pages (six out of 177) to a discussion of American relations with China.  Still he 
carved out a prominent?if vague?role for China in postwar politics as one of the 
four great powers.  World War II, he argued, fundamentally altered the policy 
Washington had followed there since 1899 which, in fits and starts, had been aimed at 
preserving Chinese territorial integrity first from European and then Japanese 
imperialism.  One consequence of World War II, he explained, would be the 
emergence of Chinese regional influence once Japanese power was broken.  ?How 
can we calculate the course of a great power which has never existed but is about to 
10
 Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1979): 389-391.
243
appear?? Lippmann wrote.  ?All that we know is that with independence unity and the 
industrialization of their country the vast numbers of the Chinese nation should in the 
course of time organize themselves as a great power.?
11
  Lippmann, nevertheless, 
believed that China would have to be brought into a great ?nuclear alliance? with 
America, Great Britain, and Russia which would provided the basis for postwar 
international cooperation around which a ?wider association of many nations can 
constitute itself.?
12
  Lippmann defended this system on numerous occasions in Today 
and Tomorrow columns in the fall and winter of 1943.  His justifications revealed a 
Hobbesian view of the world at least in the sense that he believed the basic state of 
relations between nations to be conflictual.  Peace, Lippmann argued, was not the 
normal condition that prevailed in international politics; it had to be structured, 
ordered, and brought into being.  When explaining his rationale for how to organize 
postwar peace he was blunt.  ?Is this ?power politics??  It is,? Lippmann told Today 
and Tomorrow readers.  ?In the last analysis all international politics are now and will 
be unless the separate nations disappear, a function of their actual and potential 
power.  The problem of peace is not how to abolish power, or to pretend to ignore it, 
but how to organize power, regulate it, bring it under law, and in general to civilize 
the exercise of it.?
13
In U.S. War Aims (1944) Lippmann elaborated on his original notion of a 
?nuclear alliance.?  Also echoing the earlier book and his columns from the 1943-
11
 Lippmann U.S. Foreign Policy: 156.
12
 Lippmann began using this term ?nuclear alliance? in 1943 in part of his analysis in U.S. Foreign 
Policy; citation, p. 168; for a general discussion on the nuclear alliance, see pp. 161-177.  His 
geopolitical argument was influenced by the work of Yale strategic theorist Nicholas J. Spykman who, 
just a year earlier had published America?s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the 
Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1942).  My reading of Spykman does 
not, however, turn up the term ?nuclear alliance,? and it may be that Lippmann coined the phrase. 
244
1944 period, he forecast that the fundamental problem of international politics in the 
postwar period would be organizational.  ?World order,? he wrote in words that 
resonated from The Stakes of Diplomacy, could not be reconstituted among a loose 
coalition of 60 nations and many more post-colonial states.  Instead, Lippmann 
looked to develop four regional systems within which would reside a major power as 
an anchor state.   Into such systems nations could find their place in ?orbit? around 
the great power and, thus, be better organized: an Atlantic alliance, a Russian nucleus, 
a Chinese-Southeast Asian sphere, and a Hindu- or Moslem-centered region.  Such 
?regional constellations of states,? Lippmann explained, ?are the homelands not of 
one nation alone, but of the historic civilized communities.  This is the shape of 
things to come.?
14
  This plan for world order, sketched 14 months before the end of 
World War II, had many similarities to the ?civilizational? model that the political 
scientist Samuel Huntington described more than 50 years later?a system wherein 
nations with common cultural, ethnic, and religious values would coalesce around a 
dominant state.
15
Lippmann?s vision for the basis of postwar peace closely resembled President 
Franklin Roosevelt?s own plan for the foundations of international order after the war.  
This idea was most clearly expressed in the Four-Power Declaration in September 
1943?which committed the U.S., Britain, Russia, and China to united action for 
postwar peace, though it avoided a specific commitment to a permanent peace-
keeping establishment by promising to create such an organization at the soonest 
13
 Lippmann T&T, ?On ?Power Politics?? 18 December 1943.
14
 Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1944): 87.
15
 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon 
and Schuster, 1996): especially, 40-55; 301-321.
245
opportune moment.
16
  FDR envisioned a large role for China even though the 
British?particularly Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Minister 
Anthony Eden?were distinctly unenthusiastic about allotting Chiang (or whatever 
Chinese government might emerge from the conflict) such a role in postwar affairs.  
But the president had several reasons?some geo-strategic, some domestic?for 
overriding his allies? reservations and including China as one of the world?s four 
?policemen.?  For one thing, China played an important part of FDR?s plans for 
defeating the Japanese since war strategy called for establishing supply routes and air 
bases there from which to attack the Japanese homeland.  By giving the Chiang 
government an expansive?albeit futuristic role?as a major world player, he 
believed he could provide some measure of stability to prevent the regime?s 
collapse.
17
  Second, U.S. domestic opinion supported a vigorous defense of China as 
well as the designation of a major part for the nation in the postwar world.  Sensing 
this, FDR perceived that by playing to those popular emotions he could lead the 
American public to accepting even greater postwar responsibilities.  Finally, as 
Roosevelt told British foreign minister Anthony Eden, ?China might become a very 
useful power in the Far East to help police Japan? and ?in any serious conflict with 
Russia, [China] would undoubtedly line up on our side.?
18
Like the President Lippmann prodded British leaders to accept an expanded 
role for China after the war even though he believed that ?in the practical work which 
lies ahead that [China] has no direct interest in the policing of Europe, Africa, and the 
16
 Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945: 419-422.
17
 For Roosevelt?s views on relations with China, see Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American 
Foreign Policy, 1932-1945: 389-391.
18
 Ibid., 390-391.
246
Atlantic Ocean??as did the Americans, British, and Russians.  When Churchill 
declared in a broadcast that ?the United Nations, headed by the three great victorious 
powers,? would begin to confer about the postwar peace, Lippmann observed that the 
statement was inadequate.  ?We look upon the friendship of China as the only 
possible guaranty that the Asiatic war will not degenerate now or will explode later, 
into an endless conflict between the Western and Eastern peoples,? Lippmann wrote 
in T&T.  ?That is why we wish the British and the Russians to walk with us hand in 
hand with the Chinese.?
19
 On the topic of postwar political power arrangements, 
Lippmann, indeed, was most closely in agreement with President Roosevelt.  He had 
arrived at the same geopolitical conclusions in U.S. Foreign Policy, just a few months 
prior to the announcement of the Four-Power Declaration in the fall of 1943, and 
elaborated on them in the critical election year of 1944 in U.S. War Aims.
Lippmann?s U.S. War Aims reinforced the ideas expressed both in his earlier 
volume and by the FDR administration. In 1944, the outcome of the Chinese civil 
war was far from settled but Lippmann believed that whatever government eventually 
ruled the country?Communist, Nationalist, or a coalition?that China?s size, 
strategic location, and manpower predestined its role as a major world power.  It 
would have, in any case, no rival in Asia.  ?It will in time encompass not only 
Chinese dependencies in the north but also the whole or greater part of the mainland 
of Southeast Asia,? Lippmann wrote.  ?China will be a great power capable of 
organizing her own regional security among the smaller states of Indo-China, Burma, 
Thailand, and Malaysia.?
20
  Accordingly, he believed America?s postwar role in Asia 
19
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Mr. Churchill on China and Europe,? 27 March 1943.
20
 Lippmann, U.S. War Aims: 93.
247
could only be circumscribed, deferring to China within its orbit of power.  Lippmann 
thought the Chinese sphere of influence should even encompass Japan, where he 
feared that a prolonged American occupation would alienate Beijing and other Asian 
states which would draw dark inferences from the spectacle of yet another Western, 
white power ?persecuting? Asians.  ?The reform and reconstruction of Japan are 
beyond our ken,? Lippmann told readers, ?and we shall be wise to solidify our 
relations with China by being in these matters her second.?
21
  He applied this 
principle to Asia in general where, he wrote, ?the tutelage of the Western empires . . . 
is coming to its predestined end.?  The new politics in Asia no longer could be 
commanded from the capital of an imperial power, but would be based on 
?consultation and agreement? between the receding Western powers and the rising 
post-colonial governments.
22
  In this respect, too, Lippmann shared President 
Roosevelt?s disposition to short- circuit European colonial rule in Asia?particularly, 
French ambitions to reassert control in Indochina.
23
Chinese Communist leaders took notice of Lippmann?s recommendations in 
U.S. War Aims and integrated them into their analyses which probed American 
intentions in postwar Asia and offered suggestions for how Mao Zedong?s forces 
should work with Allied governments in the final phase of the Japanese war.
24
  One 
policy document quoted Lippmann?s contention that the U.S. ?should make it the 
primary aim of the Far East settlement that Japan shall not hold the balance of power 
in the Far East among China, the Soviet Union, and the United States.?  Communist 
21
 Ibid., 105.
22
 Ibid., 94-95.
23
 Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945: 389; 501-502.
248
officials apparently placed Lippmann in a category with others, like Vice President 
Henry A. Wallace, who seemed less inclined toward Chiang?s Kuomintang and its 
anti-Soviet position.  Like Wallace, CCP officials explained, Lippmann was 
?favorable to the development of China?s resistance and democratic forces.?
25
  If that 
analysis seemed tentative, it was because Lippmann?s position on the composition of 
a postwar Chinese government was still unsettled even as the Japanese surrendered.  
The columnist had earlier made this point to Joseph W. Jones, an editor at Henry R. 
Luce?s Fortune magazine and later a State Department speechwriter, who complained 
that Lippmann had been obtuse on China?s role in U.S. Foreign Policy.  ?I am vague 
about China, not because I do not believe the inclusion of China is necessary and 
desirable, but because I am frankly not sure what the future of China is to be,? 
Lippmann replied.  ?I felt my particular job was to be vague if in fact the future is 
uncertain, but I would certainly proceed on the assumption that China will be an 
effective great power.?
26
Lippmann?s suspicions about the Chiang-Nationalist forces multiplied while 
his conception about China?s status as a ?big four? power was mitigated by what he 
saw as the intractability of its civil war.  Lippmann shared Roosevelt?s goals in China 
and, months after the president?s death in April 1945, adhered to FDR?s policy of 
trying to mediate a cease-fire between the Communists and Nationalists and to 
develop provisions for a coalition government.  In December 1945, the columnist 
24
 Report, CCP Southern Bureau, ?Opinions on Diplomatic Affairs and Suggestions to the Central 
Committee,? 16 August 1944, translated by Zhang Shu Guang and Chen Jian, Cold War International 
History Project, Virtual Archive, http://wwics.si.edu .  
25
 Ibid.  Lippmann?s quote from U.S. War Aims: 159.
26
 Lippmann to Joseph W. Jones, 2 October 1943, reprinted in Lippmann, Public Philosopher: Selected 
Letters of Walter Lippmann, edited by John Morton Blum (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985): 446-
447.
249
opposed calls to send the roughly 60,000 U.S. Marines, stationed in Chinese port 
cities such as Shanghai, into the Communist-controlled northern provinces where a 
large Japanese army was still awaiting surrender to Nationalist forces.  By clearing 
the way for a large Kuomintang army to establish a beachhead in the north, the U.S. 
would be making an ?outright intervention in the Chinese Civil War, and once 
committed to it our troops could not withdraw.?
27
  Lippmann told readers that the 
alternative?to evacuate completely and leave China ?hopelessly divided and 
dangerously weak??amounted to a ?horrid dilemma.?  Though Roosevelt?s envoy, 
General Patrick J Hurley, earlier had failed to secure a coalition government (largely 
because he favored Chiang), Lippmann believed in 1946 that the only hope was for 
former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General George Marshall, President 
Harry S. Truman?s personal envoy, to pursue the same policy.  The solution, 
Lippmann wrote, ?is to use our power and influence in China to induce and compel 
the Chinese factions to reach a working agreement upon a government which will be 
national, not only in theory, but in fact.?
28
Marshall?s failure to procure substantive concessions from either side forced 
Lippmann to recalculate American interests in China.  By 1947, Lippmann was 
prepared to concede that American policy in China since the Open Door Notes?the 
preservation of an unified China?had become obsolete.  In a memorandum for his 
working files, Lippmann observed that the U.S. had three vital interests that provided 
the basis for its foreign policy: ?namely that Europe, the Middle East and China shall 
27
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Dilemma in China,? 4 December 1945.  For a discussion of Hurley?s and 
Marshall?s diplomacy, see, Warren Cohen, America?s Response to China: A History of Sino-American 
Relations, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Hurley mission, see especially pp. 
143-150; 147-175.  Marshall mission, see especially pp. 152-157; 175-176.
250
not be absorbed into the Russian military empire.  But the obverse of this does not 
follow, that Europe, China and the Middle East can be organized into an anti-Soviet 
coalition.  This is a critical error.?
29
  How then could the U.S. prevent Soviet 
domination, specifically in China?  Here, Lippmann relied not on grooming 
indigenous armies but rather on American strategic advantages.  ?In the Far East our 
capacity to hold the Russians in check depends not on the organization of the armies 
of Chiang Kai-shek, but on our ability to strike at eastern Siberia? from air and naval 
bases on Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines.  Under the old concept of U.S. China 
policy, the ?Luce-Bullitt-Wedemeyer view [which] is really a heritage from prewar 
days,? Japanese naval power and imperial ambitions on the Asian mainland had 
menaced U.S. interests in the Pacific by ?threatening to organize China as [Tokyo?s] 
hinterland? from which it could draw raw materials and manpower.  The American 
victory in the Pacific theater of the war had completely altered that schema, removing 
the Japanese from the equation and leaving the U.S. with forward-deployed forces in 
a powerful configuration along the Pacific island chain.  ?Therefore in strict terms of 
power politics it is no longer of vital interest to the U.S. that China should be 
unified,? Lippmann reasoned on 18 December 1947.
30
  Several months later, on 5 
April 1948, he developed these ideas in greater detail to Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, 
commander of U.S. naval forces in the Mediterranean:
Our Far Eastern position should now be based not on China, but 
upon Japan, and our main base for action in eastern Asia should be 
the Japanese islands.  We should build up there the power to 
28
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Dilemma in China,? 4 December 1945.
29
 Lippmann, Memorandum (untitled), 18 December 1947, WLC, reprinted in Blum, Public 
Philosopher: 502-503.  
30
 Ibid.
251
dominate Soviet Siberia, and should make Japan a subordinate ally 
of the United States.  
If this is done the unity of China is no longer a vital interest of the 
United States.  From the point of view of our own national interests, 
the prevention of the unity of China is advantageous in view of the 
fact that China can be unified only as an ally of the Soviet Union or 
unified as an independent power which might very well itself 
became aggressive in southeastern Asia, the Philippines, and perhaps 
even in India.
Recognition that the unity of China is no longer an American vital 
interest is a novel thing in our history, but I am pretty nearly
completely persuaded that it is now fundamentally necessary.?
31
Events would soon outstrip Lippmann?s reconfigurations.  Mao Zedong?s 
CCP forces waged a successful offensive in the spring of 1949 that dislodged 
Nationalist forces from their postwar capital in Nanjing and sent them fleeing 
southward for Guangzhou in the Canton province.  In 1949, the Nationalist forces 
were expelled from the mainland and found sanctuary on the island of Taiwan off the 
coast of south China.  American aid, however, continued to flow to Chiang Kai-shek 
and the Kuomintang from 1947 to 1949?a result, Lippmann believed, of the careless 
language of the Truman Doctrine.  ?Our clients are becoming our masters,? he 
warned in a memorable column.  ?General Chiang Kai-shek [has] been given such 
unqualified support so publicly that the Truman administration is constrained to 
follow . . . and cannot lead.?
32
  He concluded that these conservative Asian regimes?
particularly Chiang?s government in Taiwan and Sygnman Rhee?s in Seoul?had 
played classic roles in manipulating American aid to their own ends.  ?We must 
31
 Lippmann to Forrest P. Sherman, 5 April 1948, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 507-508.  My 
italics.  This note was written in the heat of the war scare n Western Europe and the direct language 
regarding Japan reflects some of Lippmann?s momentarily heightened fears. On 25 February the 
Soviets had fomented the Czech Coup and on 1 April had begun random interference with traffic along 
the Berlin corridor.
32
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Costs of Containment,? 10 February 1948.
252
support our clients no matter what they do because we have slammed and bolted the 
door,? he told readers.  ?They know that we cannot withdraw our support without 
eating our words, and suffering humiliation and a spectacular loss of prestige.?
33
Other American clients in Asia would quickly inculcate that lesson.
IV.
During the Truman administration, Walter Lippmann actively engaged and dissected 
America?s Asia policies?moving from the large problem of adjusting to China?s new 
status and influence to the more detailed matter of how this would affect a 
constellation of states on its periphery, including Indochina.
At the time he wrote The Cold War in 1947, Lippmann?s concern centered on 
Europe?but his two keys assertions, nevertheless, were relevant to American policy 
toward Asia.  In fact, these fundamentals would become the bedrock of Lippmann?s 
analysis as he turned sustained attention to Asia in 1950.  The first theme was that 
policymakers were dangerously militarizing their containment policy to the detriment 
of diplomacy; and, second, that containment itself should be limited to the heart of 
Europe?to force a military stalemate and negotiated settlement in Germany.  
Containment in places such as the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East he 
believed to be wasteful and indecisive.  Thus, Lippmann advised constantly to avoid 
waging containment on the ?periphery? of the Soviet Union?later, he would write 
the same for the PRC.
33
 Ibid.
253
There were three inherent strategic weaknesses of constructing a policy of 
military containment in Asia, Walter Lippmann believed.  The first was a problem of 
organization?that to contain Communism in Asia would require the U.S. to recruit, 
subsidize, and support a patchwork coalition of regimes ranging from Iran and 
Afghanistan to India, Korea, and Malaysia.  To construct and preserve such an 
unstable alliance for a ?prolonged diplomatic siege,? much less militarized 
containment, would prove ?impossibly difficult.?
34
  The very attempt to do so, 
Lippmann warned, would amount to a policy of ?continual and complicated 
intervention.?  Second, this kind of policy would concede diplomatic and strategic 
advantage to the Soviets and Chinese.  Moscow and Beijing would expend far less 
treasure and resources to test American resolve and to challenge its credibility than 
the U.S. would pay to prove itself up to the challenge.  (One need only recall 
Khrushchev?s earthy analogy of Berlin or Mao?s kindred description of Quemoy and 
Matsu to understand this point.)
35
   These disproportions also applied to the 
Communists? inexpensive efforts to topple or disrupt already disorganized countries 
relative to the costs the U.S. would incur to organize, pacify, and placate them.  
Third, and perhaps most significantly, such a containment policy invested too much 
power in regimes which supposedly were to become obedient satellites in the Cold 
War.  American security, Lippmann said, would come to be linked inextricably to the 
actions taken by foreign leaders?often fulfilling their own nationalist agendas?in 
34
 Lippmann, The Cold War: 21-22.
35
See, for example, references in John Lewis Gaddis?s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 140, 251.  Mao perceived Quemoy and Matsu to be 
places where he could apply and relax pressure at will against Washington.  ?The noose was made by 
America itself,? Mao once remarked, ?and [yet] it throws the other end . . . to mainland China, letting 
254
Seoul, Taipei, and Saigon.  Herein, Lippmann rationalized, existed the greatest 
potential for superpower confrontation?in which a proxy war might escalate into a 
regional or world conflict or a debilitating military commitment in a strategically 
insignificant locale that might dangerously alter the balance of power between 
Moscow and Washington in places of vital importance?namely, Germany and 
Western Europe.  American client states in Asia, Lippmann predicted, ?will act for 
their own reasons, and on their own judgments, presenting us with accomplished facts 
that we did not intend, and with crises for which we are unready.?  Rather than the 
?unassailable barriers? George F. Kennan envisioned, such a coalition would present 
?an unending series of insoluble dilemmas.?  Lippmann concluded, ?We shall have 
either to disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat 
and the loss of face, or must support them at an incalculable cost on an unintended, 
unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue.?
36
  In time, those words epitomized the 
tragedy of America?s Asia policy, particularly as it developed in Indochina.
For Lippmann, however, Asia remained something of an abstraction for the 
first few years of the Cold War.  He wrote more often about American cold war 
policy in Europe, where he gave qualified assent to an American military presence.  
His analyses in The Cold War forecast with unnerving accuracy the possible dangers 
of intervention in Asia, but Washington strategists rejected his solutions for providing 
a framework to organize the post-colonial parts of the world?such as those presented 
in U.S. War Aims.  Not until the events of 1949, with the triumph of Mao?s 
us grasp it.?  Khrushchev described Berlin in a similar, if earthier, analogy.  ?Berlin is the testicles of 
the West,? he explained.  ?Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.?
36
 Lippmann, The Cold War: 22-23.
255
Communist forces in China, did Lippmann begin to write regularly on Asian events?
with a firmer sense of American options.
Shortly after taking office in January 1949, Dean G. Acheson set his staff to 
producing a study on American policy in postwar China.  The final product was the
so-called ?China White Paper,??a dispassionate, if lengthy, explanation of why the 
U.S. failed to prevent the success of Mao Zedong?s Communist forces.  Acheson?s 
letter of transmittal accompanying the report, however, stirred the most controversy 
for it portrayed Chinese Communists as being subservient to Moscow.  It also implied 
that pro-Nationalist U.S. policies were implemented though American diplomats had 
already foreseen the fatal weaknesses and imminent decline of Chiang Kai-shek?s 
government.  By overstating the thrust of the paper, Acheson made it much more 
difficult for himself to deflect his congressional critics and to pursue a policy of 
recognition for the PRC and detachment from Chiang.
37
The White Paper pleased neither the Republican China Lobby?which labeled 
it a ?1,054-page whitewash of a wishful do-nothing policy??nor Walter Lippmann 
who took to the offensive in a series of expository columns.  Lippmann deeply 
regretted Acheson?s assumption that the Chinese were puppets controlled by Russian 
masters.  But he reserved his harshest judgment for Acheson?s (and, indeed, the entire 
White Paper?s) tone of resigned inevitability regarding U.S. policies.  ?The 
unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China 
was beyond the control of the government of the United States,? Acheson had 
explained.  ?Nothing that this country did or could have done within reasonable limits 
37
James A. Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York: 
Simon & Schuster, 1998): 220-221.
256
of its capabilities could have changed the result; nothing that was left undone by this 
country has contributed to it.?
38
  Lippmann conceded that Acheson was entitled to 
argue the final outcome was beyond American control.  He objected, however, that 
the secretary of state tried to contend that ?our own actions and commitments in 
relation to that civil war were also inevitable and beyond our control.?
39
  Washington 
must learn from this ?diplomatic disaster,? he wrote, some lessons applicable to 
future Southeast Asian policy.  Of course, the points Lippmann raised were the same 
ones Acheson hoped to skirt for domestic political reasons, primarily for fear of 
arousing Congressional Republicans.  
The crucial question, Lippmann asked, was why had U.S. policy lost all 
bargaining power with the very government (Chiang) it was trying to save?  He drew 
three conclusions about America?s China policy.  First, he believed?as he would 
maintain throughout the 1950s?Washington had ?so irrevocably and so exclusively? 
embraced Chiang and the Kuomintang that it could no longer bargain for or exact 
concessions that might reform the inefficient and corrupt Nationalist regime.  Further, 
in making that policy, U.S. officials refused to consult key allies, principally Great 
Britain, which had greater experience and more immediate economic interests at stake 
in China.  Washington never seemed to have considered, Lippmann observed, ?that 
the responsibility for Chiang?s future might prudently have been shared and the risks 
spread out.?  Finally, he took aim at the manner of Acheson?s presentation, writing 
that the White Paper seemed more the product of a lawyer seeking a ?verdict for his 
38
 For Acheson?s letter of transmittal, see U.S. Department of State, United States Relations with China
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949): iii-xvii.  Quote taken from Lippmann, T&T, 
?The White Paper: I,? 6 September 1949.
39
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The White Paper: I,? 6 September 1949.
257
client? than that of a diplomat forming policy.  A more candid examination would not 
undo the disaster, Lippmann added, but ?it might teach us something worth keeping 
very much in mind in, say, Western Germany and Japan, and in the weak and 
disorderly countries where, it is being said, we must hurry to intervene.?
40
Lippmann despaired that Washington would not alter the fundamentals of its 
China policy, either to adjust for past mistakes or to accommodate new realities.  The 
greatest fault in the policy, Lippmann told his friend, U.S. Navy Admiral Forrest P. 
Sherman, was to support Chiang when U.S. diplomats clearly recognized that the 
Generalissimo no longer was viable.  In hindsight, Lippmann lamented, the U.S. 
should either have supported a far more liberal regime or been strictly neutral.  ?Now 
we are almost hopelessly committed to the support of those elements in Asia that 
cannot possibly hope to recover the leadership of Asia.  All we have in the Far East 
now are a few beachheads occupied by discredited or puppet regimes,? Lippmann 
told Sherman on 16 February 1950.  Of American policy in Asia generally, India 
particularly, he believed Washington acted ?without sufficient understanding, without 
diplomatic ingenuity and resourcefulness.?
41
  Indeed, the pattern that the U.S. 
established in China?as well as South Korea?of supporting authoritarian, 
reactionary governments, left a lasting imprint on future U.S. relations with newly-
merging Southeast Asian nations; one which Washington would replicate time and 
again.
In the spring of 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy?s attacks on Acheson 
and the State Department reached a crescendo, Lippmann suggested in Today and 
40
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The White Paper: III,? 12 September 1949.
41
 Lippmann to Forrest P. Sherman, 16 February 1950, in Blum, Public Philosopher: 548.
258
Tomorrow that the secretary should resign as a ?way to restore a measure of 
confidence and some national unity in the conduct of foreign affairs.?
42
  Partly, 
Lippmann blamed Truman for abdicating a leadership role in the making of foreign 
policy.  With a weak president, no political clout of his own, and lukewarm support 
from Democrats in Congress, Acheson would continue to flounder, Lippmann feared.  
Foreign policy would suffer.  ?No human being can think clearly and effectively 
under such virulent and persistent personal attack,? he wrote.  ?And no Secretary of 
State can hope to deal successfully with our allies, and with the Soviet opposition, if 
his standing at home is so deeply challenged.?
43
Attacks on Acheson had the unpleasant appearance of lending aid to right 
wing Republicans in Congress?and for this, Lippmann jeopardized his standing 
among the Washington elite.  It was, his biographer notes, a ?bold, and even brave? 
position to stake out in political culture where ?personal loyalty took precedence over 
public responsibility.?  Lippmann felt compelled to answer critics, writing Judge 
Learned Hand that ?throughout this whole wretched business all my personal 
inclinations were and still are in [Acheson?s] favor.?
44
But when empathy for Acheson?s hardships ran up against his own firm 
beliefs that Truman and his secretary of state were set on a course that dangerously 
42
 Lippmann, T&T, 21 March 1950, ?Acheson or His Successor.?  See also, T&T, 28 February 1950, 
?Acheson?s Political Vulnerability.?  During the onset of the Korean War, Lippmann?s attacks became 
even more pointed.  ?It is impossible . . . for Mr. Acheson to repair his fundamental mistake which was 
his refusal to coincide in the people?his refusal to debate the issue, and if his real views could not 
command popular support in Congress, his failure to resign.  The position he has been in since last 
winter has been terrifying to contemplate?that of the principal adviser to the President who has little 
knowledge of his own in these matters, and himself so vulnerable that the problem of dealing with his 
domestic critics must dominate his judgment of the problems abroad.  The mere possibility which can 
never be wholly excluded from the minds of people who know what?s what here and abroad, that the 
gravest decisions might be dictated in part by the need to placate his critics, are shattering to the nerves 
of an ever increasing number.?  See Lippmann, T&T, 14 December 1950, ?Mr. Acheson?s Troubles.?
259
globalized containment, the latter mattered more to him.  This conflict with Acheson 
presaged Lippmann?s behavior in the Johnson years: he would fight for his core 
convictions and risk alienating himself from officials and friends.  Part of Acheson?s 
problems, he told readers in 1950, derived from the fact that he?d been a prime 
developer of a foreign policy that placed too few limits on American power and 
influence.  ?We have become so over-extended, we have promised so much more 
than we can fulfill, we have demanded so much more than we can enforce, we have 
used words that are so much bigger than our deeds,? Lippmann wrote. ?Now we are 
in the backwash and reaction, which is always painful and embarrassing, of being 
forced to live internationally within our means.?
45
  Lippmann amplified these 
criticisms after the outbreak of the Korean War.
46
  The columnist expected American 
statesmen to be communicators and educators about internationalism, combatants of 
parochialism not its perpetrators.  Those public officials whom he knew shared many 
of his core assumptions, but who violated them in office, quickly became his targets.  
Dean Acheson?s failure to educate public opinion about U.S. China policy?his 
tendency to adopt anti-Communist rhetoric?enraged the columnist.  It explains, in 
part, his disillusionment with the secretary of state and his willingness to speak out so 
forcefully against U.S. policy in Asia when Acheson faced criticism from the political 
right.  
Lippmann administered criticisms in bipartisan fashion and certainly was not 
lending succor to Acheson?s congressional opponents.  A week after his September 
43
 Lippmann, T&T, 21 March 1950, ?Acheson or His Succesor.?
44
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 475.
45
 Lippmann, T&T, 21 March 1950, ?Acheson or His Successor.?
260
1949 series on the China White Paper, the columnist attacked a plan advocated by 
Congressional Republicans to reinforce and supply by air as many as eight Nationalist 
armies on mainland China.  Aside from the insuperable logistical problems of the 
scheme, Lippmann compared such an intervention in the Chinese civil war to the 
Allied incursion in the Soviet Union after World War I?an action that ruined 
diplomatic relations for more than a decade and irrevocably ?militarized? the Soviet 
state. The columnist feared a similar outcome in China.  ?For nothing is so likely to 
forge a powerful and fanatical military instrument as a prolonged struggle, which [the 
Communists] would probably win, against Chinese reactionaries and foreign 
interventionists,? Lippmann told readers.  ?That would provide them with just the 
incentive, the stimulus, the pretext, the pressure, the discipline, and the necessity for 
making the Chinese Communist state a powerful military state in close alliance with 
the Soviet Union.?
47
William F. Knowland, the influential California senator and China Lobby 
stalwart, wrote Lippmann in mid-September 1949 to complain about his analysis.  
The columnist brushed aside these criticisms and replied firmly with a five-point plan 
for a new Asian policy.  Central among Lippmann?s suggestions was the need to 
?reject completely all nonsense about alliances among straw men, among feeble states 
such as southern Korea, what is left of Chiang, and the Philippines.  That is nothing 
but mischievous meddling in which [Congressional supporters will] get their fingers 
burnt.?  He recommended ?full-scale? economic aid to India and Pakistan, with 
46
 See, for example, Lippmann?s T&T columns of 14 December 1950, ?Mr. Acheson?s Troubles,? and 
24 April 1951, ?Agreement and Disclosure.?
261
provisions for ending the Kashmir dispute.  Should the Chinese Communists 
consolidate their power, he added, the U.S. should extend de facto recognition.
48
Lippmann also believed that the U.S. should reaffirm its commitment to U.N. Charter 
Article 51 (which guaranteed frontiers against military incursions) and to the idea that 
the U.S. would react with force even if it had to by-pass a Security Council veto.  
Finally, there was the increasingly important matter of Indochina.  ?I would do what 
high French officials have told me privately they hope we will do, though they cannot 
say so publicly,? Lippmann told Knowland, ?insist that the French government grant 
complete independence to Indochina subject only to the continual presence of the 
French army for a period of three to five years.?  This offer, Lippmann added, could 
be made with the provision that an independent Indochinese government have no 
military or political alliances without the approval of an overseer?s council of Asian 
states that might include India, Pakistan, Australia, and the Philippines.
49
Lippmann?s exchange with Knowland came days before he embarked on his first trip 
to the Middle East and South Asia, including India.  He told Knowland that he hoped 
his travels would ?clarify in my own mind what our Asiatic policy should be.?
50
47
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Intervention in China,? 19 September 1949.  For Lippmann?s objections thirty 
years earlier to intervention in post-World War I Russia, see Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American 
Century: 163-164.
48
 Lippmann held this position until the end of his life.  In the fall of 1971, at age 82, Lippmann 
described Richard Nixon?s overture to China as a ?great historical event? and as the 
?acknowledgement of a colossal error? in American Cold War policy whereby Washington usually 
extended diplomatic recognition only to those regimes and governments that ?we liked.? Lippmann 
added:  ?My view is that it?s better to have made the mistake and to correct it than to persist in it.  It?s a 
mistake that can be corrected by a strong power, without humiliation necessarily, and with a certain 
amount of good faith.  The willingness to admit the mistake and adjust to it, to make decisions quietly, 
to reverse the policy slowly, with due consultation is what diplomacy is all about.?  See Chalmers 
Roberts, ?Walter Lippmann: Journalist, Philosopher,? 15 December 1974, Washington Post: A8.
49
 Lippmann to William F. Knowland, 21 September 1949, in Blum Public Philosopher: 544-545.
50
 Ibid.
262
Lippmann spent about three months abroad, from his customary Western 
Europe stops working his way eastward through the Mediterranean and on to Pakistan 
and India.  His appointment diaries from the trip attest to Lippmann?s ability to have 
access to foreign leaders and the international intelligentsia.
51
  Arriving in Paris on 1 
October 1949, he spent the next ten days meeting with Charles de Gaulle, Jean 
Monnet (twice), minister of defense Rene Pleven, diplomat Herve Alphand, and
Alexandre Parodi, secretary general of the foreign office, with whom he discussed the 
situation in Indochina.  U.S. Ambassador to France David K.E. Bruce also hosted a 
dinner for the Lippmanns and met privately with the columnist.  On it went, two 
private meetings on 10 October with Konrad Adenauer in Bonn and, on 29 October in 
Athens, an audience with Paul I, King of Greece, Field Marshall Alexander Papagos
(commander-in-chief of the army and future prime minister), and Prime Minister 
Alexander Diomedes.  The king later sent Lippmann a private note apologizing that 
his schedule had not permitted a long private talk and sending along his telephone 
numbers in the hope that Lippmann would pay another visit (he didn?t because it 
didn?t suit his schedule).  Politicians and statesmen were not the only interests for 
Lippmann: he had a long talk with the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in Geneva, stayed 
with his friend the art critic Bernard Berenson at I Tatti outside Florence, and met the 
novelist Ignatio Silone in Rome.
52
The month-long November 1949 journey to India marked the first of two trips 
Lippmann and his wife, Helen, would make to the nation which had gained 
51
 The discussion of Lippmann?s trip in the fall of 1949 is drawn entirely from the Lippmann 
Appointment Diaries, Box 238, folder 13, Series VII, Walter Lippmann Collection, Sterling Memorial 
Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (hereinafter referred to as ?WLC?).
263
independence from British colonial rule just two years earlier.  He visited with top 
officials and traversed a wide swath of territory?accompanied part of the way by 
three U.S. Senators on a separate congressional fact-finding mission: Democrat Allen 
Ellender of Louisiana, Republican William Jenner of Indiana, and Theodore Green, a 
Rhode Island Democrat who would eventually chair the Foreign Relations Committee 
in the 85
th
 and 86
th
 Congresses (1957-1961).  Lippmann arrived first in Karachi, 
Pakistan, for a three-day stay commencing on 8 November.  While there he had 
private meetings with Prime Minister Liquat Ali Khan and Mohammed Ali, secretary 
general of the government.  On 11 November, he traveled to Dehli where, the 
following day, he dined with much of the Indian cabinet: foreign secretary Krishna 
P.S. Menon, defense secretary H.M. Patel, and home secretary H.V.R. Ienga.  Newly-
appointed Prime Minister of the Republic of India Jawarhal Nehru, who had just 
completed a trip to the U.S., met privately with Lippmann and hosted the small 
entourage of American politicians for dinner on 16 November.  After the senators 
departed, Nehru, his nieces, and the Lippmanns sat down for a long talk with the 
Indian leader, speaking in detail about the history of partition.  
Over the next three weeks, Lippmann visited Benares, Calcutta, Madras, 
Bombay, and Hyderabad, meeting with a host of Indian officials.  Three meetings 
with Indian diplomats would take on added significance in light of events in Korea in 
1950.  In Dehli, Lippmann met twice with Kavalam (K.M.) Pannikar, the influential 
Indian ambassador to China.  In the late-summer and early-fall of 1950, Pannikar 
would be a key mediator between China and the West?trying to resolve the Korean 
52
 See Lippmann?s notations for October 1949, Appointment Diaries, Box 238, folder 13, Series VII, 
WLC.
264
conflict and warning off Washington from crossing north of the 38
th
 Parallel.
53
Lippmann would write several columns explaining to his American readers why they 
should support Pannikar?s efforts.  In Bombay, Sir Benegal Rama Rau, India?s chief 
U.N. delegate, hosted Lippmann for three days, meeting him at the airport, 
entertaining at his home, and driving the Lippmanns around Bombay?s tourist sights, 
including the Parsee Tower of Silence.  Rau, in August 1950, would introduce a 
proposal?citing as his inspiration a Walter Lippmann column?for a special U.N. 
panel of non-Security Council members to mediate a truce on the Korean peninsula.  
Also during his stay in India, Lippmann met on several occasions with Shri Girja 
Shankar Bajpai, a senior official in the foreign office who, by the summer of 1950, 
would be its minister.  The men discussed Bajpai?s desire to partition Kashmir, the 
need for American economic aid to India, and the question of extending recognition 
to the PRC.  When Lippmann left Dehli on 9 December to return home, he flew part 
of the way with Bajpai who was bound for a U.N. meeting in New York.
54
The experience confirmed for Lippmann his earlier analysis for Knowland.  
Ideology, economics, and geopolitics were all secondary considerations when 
measured against the civilizational hurdles between the West and the newly-
emancipated nations in these regions.  ?For what we are struggling for in Asia, I now 
realize, is not democracy and not free enterprise, and not new allies in the cold war 
against the Soviet Union, but to maintain some contact between Asia and the West,? 
53
 For Pannikar?s role as a mediator between China and the West, see William Stueck, The Korean 
War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995): 51, 140, 278-280.  
For his warnings to Washington about the prospects of Chinese intervention, see William Stueck, 
Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 
University Press, 2003): 100-101; 105-106; as well, Stueck, The Korean War: 90-91.
54
 See Lippmann?s notations for November 1949, Appointment Diaries, Box 238, folder 13, Series VII, 
WLC.
265
Lippmann wrote his friend, the New York City financier Russell Leffingwell.  ?We 
have only a little power in Asia, and we must not think ourselves as the lords of 
creation who can fix the terms of the bargain on which relations are to be continued.  
We have to make connections, we have to seek out avenues of contact and influence, 
or we shall gradually find ourselves shut out.?
55
  The experience also convinced 
Lippmann that Nehru was a neutralist with whom the U.S. could work and that India, 
with its potential for military power, economic development, a large population, 
geographical size, and political system steeped in centuries of British tradition, made 
it a logical regional anchor.
By this time Lippmann?s attitude toward Mao Zedong?s newly-installed 
Communist government in Beijing was at wide variance with that of official 
Washington which assumed that China would be subservient to Moscow and would 
have to be militarily contained.  Into 1950, the columnist did not believe Beijing was 
predestined to take orders from Moscow or that it would even form a close alliance 
with the Soviets?a view that aligned closely to that held by Nehru?s government and 
British diplomats.  Instead, Lippmann wrote, historic tensions would arise between 
the two countries in Manchuria and at other places along the Chinese-Russian frontier 
and set the two Communist giants at odds.  Here, American diplomacy toward these 
borderland states was critical to influencing Sino-Soviet relations.  ?The assumption 
that [China] is necessarily a satellite and that therefore the problem [is] to contain it, 
is false and defeatist,? Lippmann wrote in a memorandum for his files in early-
January 1950.  ?The problem for us in China is not containment, but division between 
55
 Lippmann to Russell B. Leffingwell, 29 December 1949, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 
545.
266
Mao Tse-tung and Stalin.?
56
  The American attitude toward China would either open 
or foreclose a whole range of possibilities for dealing with the smaller but more 
numerous, and potentially more thorny, problems of the emerging states of Southeast 
Asia.  Lippmann?s critique of U.S.-China policy in the late-1940s also subtly implied 
that American policymakers had squandered earlier opportunities to reach an 
accommodation with Mao?s Communist regime.  In retrospect, that assessment strikes 
one as overly confident in its assumption that the U.S. could resolve vital Chinese 
security interests which conflicted with American aims in the region.  Archival 
materials released in the 1990s, however, largely disproved what became known in 
the 1960s and 1970s as this ?lost chance? thesis later refined by scholars.  America, 
Chen Jian has convincingly demonstrated, made the perfect foil for Mao who 
believed he needed an external enemy to consolidate his domestic power.
57
Fomenting divisions between Moscow and Beijing seemed a formidable 
challenge at the time, especially since U.S. officials still were modifying their own 
strategic roadmap in Asia.  Lippmann attended Secretary of State Acheson?s 12 
January 1950 address at the National Press Club, in which the Truman administration 
seemed to give a clear indication that it was reconsidering its containment policy and, 
perhaps, had settled on a basis for pursuing a wedge strategy between the two 
Communist powers.  The secretary of state told listeners ?not to become obsessed 
with military considerations? in Asia, particularly in regard to Communist China.  
Working largely from notes he?d prepared personally, Acheson warned Chiang Kai-
shek?s lobbyists in Congress against the ?folly of ill-conceived adventures on our 
56
 Lippmann, Memorandum for files, 7 January 1950, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 546-547.  
267
part? that might ?deflect from the Russians to ourselves the righteous anger, and the 
wrath, and the hatred of the Chinese, which must develop.?  Further, the secretary 
outlined a ?defensive perimeter? in the Pacific?a line that stretched (much as 
Lippmann?s own strategic boundary) from Alaska to the Philippines.  Beyond that 
line, Acheson intimated, American strategic interests were secondary.  This 
geographical divide excluded Formosa, Indochina, and the Korean peninsula.  
Though America had a responsibility to defend South Korean interests, Acheson 
added, the U.S. would rely primarily on indigenous forces and the U.N. Charter to 
protect the Western client government in Seoul.
58
Walter Lippmann hailed the National Press Club speech as a momentous 
clarification of U.S. policy.  It marked, he wrote a few days later, ?an action of great 
moment throughout Asia,? reflecting ?great sagacity and deep penetration.?  
Acheson?s suggestion closely mirrored what the columnist had been writing for 
months: that rather than grab and hold strategically indefensible locations on the 
Asian mainland or nearby islands, Washington should patiently exploit Soviet-PRC 
strategic conflicts.
59
  ?Mr. Acheson?s recognition of the conflict, his insistence that 
the crucial area is not in Formosa or in Hainan but in the long-disputed Chinese-
Russian borderland, is a China policy.?
60
  As Lippmann sometimes did on critical 
57
 See, ?China Roundtable,? Diplomatic History, 21 (Winter 1997), esp. Chen Jian, ?The Myth of 
America?s ?Lost Chance? in China: 77-86.
58
 See Walter H. Waggoner, ?Four Areas Listed: Secretary Says ?Adventures? Would Divert Hatred of 
Orient to Americans,? 13 January 1950, New York Times: 1; Ferdinand Kuhn, ?Russia Now Carving 
Up China But Will Face Wrath of People, Acheson Says in Policy Outline,? 13 January 1950, 
Washington Post: 1. See also Chace?s description of the National Press Club Speech in Acheson: 222-
223.  
59
 For more on the development of the ?wedge strategy,? see John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: 
Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): especially, pp. 
164-173.  For revelations from new Chinese archival materials indicating the challenges in 
implementing a wedge strategy, see Gaddis, We Now Know: 62-66.
60
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Dust Has Settled,? 16 January 1950.  Lippmann?s italics.
268
issues, he read far into the statement to glean the best possible interpretation.  
Lippmann and many other observers found in the Acheson?s address explicit 
confirmation that the administration would not insert American ground forces in Asia, 
even in the event of a Communist incursion into the southern part of the Korean 
peninsula.  In this assumption Lippmann shortly would be proven wrong.
Nevertheless, Lippmann sought to advertise this new approach and to tie it to 
historical precedent, as well.  In April 1950, in an Atlantic Monthly article titled 
?Breakup of the Two-Power World,? he argued that China policy should be grounded 
in the ?traditional? American role (going back to the days of Secretary of State John 
Hay) of lending ?support? to China to protect it ?against dismemberment and 
imperialist aggression.?
61
  Lippmann elaborated, that Chinese leaders ?should be 
made to feel that they have an alternative to submitting to the demands of Moscow, 
that they can turn to Washington and London, that they are not imprisoned in the 
Soviet system, that they are not limited to the economic help which can be drawn 
from it, the doors will not be slammed in their face and they will not be driven back 
into the arms of the Russians.?
62
  American officials, he explained, had embraced a 
?monstrous heresy and fallacy? that mirrored the ideology of Marxists: that Soviet-
American rivalry required that all nations to choose one or the other side?an 
assumption he rejected.  Lippmann?s approach to a revamped China policy fit his 
larger framework for detaching countries from the Cold War conflict and, where 
possible, to undermine Soviet power with diplomacy that promoted neutralism.  ?That 
would mean that we put our influence and power behind the general tendency 
61
 Walter Lippmann, ?Breakup of the Two-Power World,? April 1950, Atlantic Monthly 185 (No. 4): 
25-30.
269
towards national independence, towards military neutrality, and towards diplomatic 
disentanglement?a tendency which is manifest in almost all of Asia, and in much at 
least of Central and Eastern Europe,? Lippmann concluded.   ?Since we cannot 
encircle the Soviet Union by a military coalition, we should cultivate and exploit all 
the national forces, all the human impulses to escape from the havoc of war, in order 
to prevent the Soviet Union from forming its coalition and in order to disintegrate its 
military alliances in Eastern Europe and those which it hopes to achieve in Asia.?
63
IV.
Throughout the spring of 1950, as Washington officials backed and filled on 
Acheson?s January outline of strategic disengagement in East Asia, Lippmann kept 
hammering home the need for a strategic pullback from the Asian mainland.  On the 
eve of the Korean War, he was even advocating complete U.S. withdrawal from 
Japan once a peace treaty was ratified?a view he had modified since the momentous 
Soviet achievement of the atomic bomb.  He told readers, that Washington should 
remove its military forces from the Japanese islands which he now believed 
vulnerable to an aerial attack with nuclear weapons.  American forces should remain 
in the Philippines but no closer to mainland Asia, he wrote.  ?This would be a 
corollary to a Japanese peace treaty and an American withdrawal from Japan,? 
Lippmann explained.  ?It is also a more effective and a less embarrassing and 
dangerous way of accomplishing the main purposes which are supposed to be served 
by America staying entangled with Chiang in Formosa, by meddling and muddling a 
62
 Ibid., ?Breakup of the Two-Power World,? 30.
270
little with Bao Dai in Indo-China.?
64
  While consolidating their strength behind this 
Pacific line?and staying clear of ?entanglements? on the Asian mainland?
Lippmann hoped American officials would fix their attention on Europe and focus on 
their primary objective: creating a powerful enough deterrent to discourage potential 
Soviet provocations.  The Japanese peace process, American relations with the PRC, 
and U.S. aid to Southeast Asia, however, would be fundamentally altered by the 
North Korean invasion of the South on June 25, 1950.
65
The North Korean attack caught Lippmann off balance.  Washington officials 
were surprised, too.  We now know that until the eve of the invasion, even Kim Il 
Sung?s handlers in Beijing and Moscow remained intentionally uninformed about 
much of the operational planning?although Stalin and Mao both approved the 
invasion plans.
66
  In first addressing the attack, Lippmann endorsed the American 
defense of the Seoul government though it soon became evident as the military 
situation deteriorated that Lippmann intended the defensive action to cover a retreat 
off the peninsula.  On 27 June, President Truman dispatched the 7
th
 Fleet to the 
Taiwan Straits and authorized air and naval action.  Two days later, Lippmann wrote 
that Truman?s quick decision demonstrated that the president ?met his great 
responsibility . . . without flinching and without fumbling.?  The administration had 
to act, he noted, because ?to accept this aggression passively would have been fatal to 
the [United Nation?s] authority and its influence.?
67
63
 Ibid.
64
 Lippmann, T&T, 13 June 1950, ?After Japan What Then??
65
 See, for example, Stueck?s analysis in The Korean War: 348-370.  See also, Michael Schaller?s 
discussion in, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1985): see especially, pp. 278-289.
66
 Gaddis, We Now Know: 71-75.
67
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The President?s Decision,? 29 June 1950.
271
Ronald Steel?s biography suggests that Lippmann?s quick reverse on the use 
of forces in Asia demonstrated his tendency to support containment in practice while 
criticizing it as an intellectual abstraction.
68
  That interpretation is misleading.  There 
were major caveats to Lippmann?s support.  In his 29 June 1950 column, he urged 
officials to rethink their priorities.  America had few allies to support a major 
operation in Asia and the Western Alliance, moreover, was forced to commit its 
forces to the front-line battles in Asia while the Russians enjoyed the advantage of 
using indigenous troops.  Lippmann?s support, he made clear, was temporary?i.e. 
until the situation on the ground in Korea stabilized.  He warned against landing a 
large American army and launching a sustained counter-offensive to the 38
th
 Parallel.  
He also perceived of the military disaster as a way to liquidate a burdensome 
commitment; a return to the status quo ante?that is, a divided peninsula with Allied 
troops stationed in the south?he wrote, would not be a desirable outcome.  ?Unless 
our present position in the Asiatic Far East can be held in large measure by the will 
and the native forces of the Asiatic peoples,? he concluded, ?ever larger bodies of 
American troops will become frozen there.?
69
The administration almost immediately violated Lippmann?s cardinal rule of 
engagement.  On 30 June, Truman authorized General Douglas MacArthur to use 
ground combat forces stationed in Japan to intervene in Korea.  Lippmann responded 
in T&T by advocating that U.S. ?localize? the conflict by severely limiting its 
military objectives.  It should support a coalition of Asian states?led by India and 
Pakistan?which would orchestrate and administer a cease-fire in Korea.  The United 
68
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 488-489.
69
 Ibid.
272
Nations might then oversee elections for the whole of Korea.  The goal, he wrote, 
should be ?abolish the partition? and ?to achieve a united and independent Korea.?
70
He did not specify what kind of government would be acceptable.  It would not be 
ideal at all for the North Koreans to conquer the South, Lippmann wrote.  But an even 
grimmer prospect, he told readers, would be a decision by Washington to garrison 
troops in South Korea.  ?It will not be a decent settlement if at the end of the Korean 
fighting the American Army finds itself at the thirty-eighth parallel,? he wrote, ?and 
is invested for the indefinite future with the task of defending South Korea and 
therefore of occupying it, policing it against guerillas, and in fact providing it with a 
government.?
71
  There also was a second motive for encouraging Korean 
reunification through regional diplomacy: it might mend some of the damage inflicted 
on U.S. relations with India in commensurate proportion to Washington?s increasing 
support for French forces in Vietnam.  ?It is no secret that our intervention in Indo-
China has won us no friends in India or in any of the other uncommitted nations of 
Asia,? Lippmann told readers on 11 July 1950.  American ?association with Bao 
Dai??like its support of Chiang in Taiwan??could have cost us the support of 
Nehru had the North Korean invasion not been such a naked and obvious violation of 
the [U.N.] charter.?
72
70
 See for example, T&T, ?To Localize the Fighting,? 11 July 1950, and ?Toward a Korean 
Settlement,? 20 July 1950.
71
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Toward a Korean Settlement,? 20 July 1950
72
 Lippmann, T&T, ?To Localize the Fighting,? 11 July 1950.  Lippmann encouraged Indian and 
Pakistani leadership on the Vietnam issue as well.  He believed that through such a diplomatic 
cooperation, the two countries could work out their differences.  An Indian-Pakistani alliance, he 
believed, was the cornerstone to stability in Asia.  As he explained in early 1950, ?If Pakistan and 
India can be brought together, all of south Asia can be held, and we shall have a great Asiatic force on 
our side.  If Pakistan and India blow up in communal rioting and civil war, we?ll have no position at all 
left in Asia.  The effects of the disaster will spread both to southeast Asia and to the Middle East.?  
Lippmann to Forrest P. Sherman, 16 February 1950, WLC.  Cited in Blum, Public Philosopher: 548.
273
A few days later Lippmann penned a column which castigated the Truman 
administration for its ?snap judgments and its improvisations? in Korea.
73
  Pointing 
out that Korea?because of its proximity to the large American military presence in 
Japan?was the lone place on the ?Asiatic border of the Soviet Union? where the U.S. 
could have immediately intervened (and, hence, could not be construed as a workable 
model for U.S. capabilities elsewhere in Asia), Lippmann argued that the purpose of 
mobile American forces was not ?to fight wars inside Asia, not to become involved in 
ground fighting with land armies and with guerillas.?  The Western Alliance could 
not ?allow ourselves to be diverted? from ?the free world?s supreme and vital military 
interest?: to maintain enough uncommitted military power to deter Soviet political 
and military aggression eslewhere.  Korea, so far as Lippmann believed, was part of a 
?deficit diplomacy??codified in the March 1947 Truman Doctrine?that had vastly 
expanded American commitments just as the power to fulfill them had declined.  ?In 
Korea we are suffering painful reverses: they are local and limited samples of what 
can happen when, to make it specific, Mr. Acheson has commitments that Mr. [Louis] 
Johnson [the Secretary of Defense] is not prepared to carry out,? Lippmann wrote.
74
Washington officials were drawing the exact opposite conclusions: they were 
preparing to dig in to defend their Asian commitments.  In an emergency meeting on 
26 June 1950 at Blair House, for instance, Acheson had argued for a ?strong military 
mission? for Indochina.  One participant at the meeting later noted that Acheson?s 
presentation convinced Truman to increase aid to Indochina.
75
  On 27 June 1950, the 
73
 Lippmann, T&T, 13 July 1950, ?Deficit Diplomacy,? 13 July 1950.
74
 Ibid.
75
 See Ronald L. McGlothen, Controlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia
(New York: Norton, 1993): 197; and Philip Jessup, ?Memorandum of Conversation (Large Meeting), 
274
administration authorized an additional disbursement of $5 million in aid to French 
forces in Indochina; a week later, Acheson requested that the president make another 
immediate emergency allocation of $16 million?the balance of the planned aid 
budget approved in May 1950.
76
  By early August 1950, 35 U.S. military officers, the 
advance members of the Military Advisory Group for Indochina (MAGIC), were in 
Vietnam.  Less than a year after the North Korean invasion, the U.S. had spent 
roughly $50 million in aid to Southeast Asia?$22.5 million of it earmarked for 
Indochina.
77
Privately and publicly, Lippmann expressed grave doubts about American 
intervention in Korea.  When John Foster Dulles, then special adviser to the State 
Department for the Japanese Peace Treaty, read Lippmann?s 13 July Today and 
Tomorrow installment, titled ?Deficit Diplomacy,? he sent the columnist a letter 
expressing his own initial doubts about using ground troops in Korea.  Prior to the 
North?s attack Dulles believed, and had stated in a June 19 speech to the Korean 
National Assembly in Seoul, that if Pyongyang invaded the South the U.S. ?would do 
something about it.  Just what that ?something? would be, I did not attempt to define,? 
he told Lippmann.  ?I had doubts as to the wisdom of engaging our land forces on the 
Continent of Asia as against an enemy army that could be nourished from the vast 
reservoirs of the U.S.S.R.?
78
  Dulles expressed those doubts to the Pentagon, warning 
military planners that he believed ?a land venture was dangerous from the standpoint 
26 June 1950, Papers of Dean Acheson, Box 65, June 1950 Conversations File, Harry S. Truman 
Library, Independence, MO (hereinafter referred to at ?HSTL?).
76
 Acheson to Truman, 3 July 1950, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950 6: 835-836 
(hereinafter referred to as ?FRUS?).
77
Figures from McGlothen, Controlling the Waves: 197.
78
 John Foster Dulles to Lippmann, 13 July 1950, WLC, Box 68, folder 667.  Underlining is original.
275
of U.S. safety, I thought that the political arm of the government could get along with 
something less than that.?  He assured Lippmann that the decision to land an army on 
the Korean peninsula was made ?by the Defense Establishment itself and it was not, 
in this respect, under the compulsion of any prior political commitment.?
79
Dulles?s explanation, however, did little to allay the columnist?s concerns that 
politics drove the Korean intervention as much as any tactical considerations.  
Lippmann confided to Dulles that the decision ?to commit a land army was a far 
deeper and a far more momentous and a much more irrevocable commitment? than 
the decision to dispatch air and naval forces.  He also expressed shock that Dulles had 
never clarified what the U.S. response would be, prior to the outbreak of war.  ?We 
have given hostages to fortune which we would have been much stronger without,? 
Lippmann warned, noting that a war to restore South Korean control up to the 38
th
Parallel could provoke Chinese intervention and, at best, would mean an interminable 
U.S. military occupation.  He added that only with British and Indian mediation, or 
perhaps through a UN-sponsored proposal, could Washington pull back from its 
commitment and get ?a better aim than merely fighting our way back to the 38
th
parallel.?  His pessimism increased in July as he watched events from his summer 
home in Maine.  ?I have been very deeply depressed by the Korean affair,? Lippmann 
told the columnist Joe Alsop.  Truman and Acheson were at fault, Lippmann wrote, 
?not having clarified the question of our obligation in Korea and insisted on knowing 
whether we were prepared to support it.  They knew and accepted the theory that 
79
 Ibid.
276
Korea had been written off and, therefore, that we were not going to be prepared to 
fight there.?
80
The same day Lippmann expressed his concerns to Alsop, Truman spoke 
before a Joint Session of Congress to report on the conflict calling it a ?naked, 
deliberate, unprovoked aggression, without a shadow of justification.?  The president 
also linked opposition to engaging Communist forces in Korea with the specter of 
Munich and appeasement.  Truman told the assembled Representatives and Senators 
that the ?free world,? however, ?had learned the lessons of history? and stood up 
against the ?lawless aggression? in Korea (the president described this ?as a milestone 
toward the establishment of the rule of law among nations?).
81
  Addressing 
Americans on television and radio that evening, Truman echoed much of his Capitol 
Hill speech, once again conjuring the image of Munich.  ?The free nations have 
learned the fateful lessons of the 1930s. . . . Appeasement leads only to further 
aggression and ultimately war.?  He then broadly laid out his program for a dramatic 
$10 billion defense budget expansion?following the guidelines that the 
administration drew up and approved as the top-secret NSC-68 in September 1950.
82
NSC-68 dramatically boosted not only the defense budget but it 
fundamentally altered the policy of containment conceived by George F. Kennan?
80
 Lippmann to John Foster Dulles, 18 July 1950, WLC, Box 68, Folder 667;  Lippmann to Joe Alsop, 
19 July 1950, WLC, Series III, Box 50, Folder 38.  Alsop largely agreed and replied that Acheson and 
Alexis Johnson, the Secretary of Defense, should be replaced.
81
 Harry S. Truman, ?Special Message to Congress,? 19 July 1950, Public Papers of the Presidents: 
Harry S. Truman, 1950, 6, Doc. No. 793: 531-537 (hereinafter referred to as ?PPP/HST?).
82
 Harry S. Truman, ?Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea,? 
19 July 1950, PPP/HST, 6, Doc. No. 194: 537-542.  Truman?s complete public papers, as well as those 
of every president through Ford (and partially for succeeding presidents), also are available on a very 
useful web site run by the political science department at UC-Santa Barbara:  
http://americanpresidency.ucsb.edu .
277
sending it far down the track Lippmann had publicly attacked in 1947.
83
  There is no 
documentary evidence that suggests Lippmann saw a draft of NSC-68, either during 
the months in which it was circulated for markup prior to Truman? final approval, or 
in its final form.  It is, however, likely?even probable?that Lippmann discussed 
with George Kennan or other concerned government officials the broad outlines of 
the debate within administration circles about circumscribed containment versus a 
global policy based upon full military and economic mobilization.
84
  Truman had 
authorized a review of U.S. military policy as early as the winter of 1949-1950?
rumblings of which Lippmann and other Washington columnists such as Joe Alsop 
had heard for months.  On 3 April 1950, four days before NSC-68 was submitted to 
83
 Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: see especially, 60-106.  The document is reprinted and dissected 
by scholars and policymakers in Ernest R. May, ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC-
68 (Boston: Bedford-St. Martin?s Press 1994).  NSC 68 was originally reproduced in Foreign 
Relations of the United States (hereinafter referred to as ?FRUS?).  See, NSC 68, ?United States 
Objectives and Programs for National Security,? 14 April 1950, FRUS 1950, Volume 1, ?National 
Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy? (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977): 
234-292. Kennan had argued that the U.S. should pursue a policy in which Russian moves were to be 
?contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force.?  Proceeding from the assumption 
that America had limited resources with which to wage such a policy, Kennan followed on that 
argument by prioritizing areas of vital U.S. interests?placing Western Europe, Germany, and Japan at 
the top of the list and arguing that outside these select points the U.S. should not over-commit itself.  
Kennan later maintained that he had intended to use economic and political means as primary 
instruments; military force would be kept in reserve.
While purposefully vague about it costs, NSC-68?s authors insisted that full wartime 
economic mobilization was necessary to deter a Soviet offensive in Western Europe which, they 
believed could occur as early as 1954.  NSC-68 subordinated diplomacy to military imperatives, 
largely because the authors assumed that negotiations were futile.  Paul Nitze, Kennan?s successor as 
director of the PPS and the document?s primary author, described the Soviet-American struggle as an 
apocalyptic conflict between a ?slave society? and a ?free society? upon which hinged the fate of 
Western civilization.  ?No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours,? NSC-68 
continued, ?so implacable in its purposes to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most 
dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the 
elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and 
growing center of military power.? Whereas Kennan argued that the U.S. must meet Soviet power at 
strategic points, NSC-68 viewed Russian advances anywhere in the world as threats to vital U.S. 
interests; that American credibility and prestige could be destroyed by any Communist ?success.?  
NSC-68 spiked defense spending immediately.  The 1950 budget had allocated $13 billion for military 
spending?equal to one-third of the national budget and 5 percent of the gross national product (GNP).  
The 1951 budget, the first after NSC-68 had gone into effect, earmarked $60 billion for defense, 
accounting for about two-thirds of the national budget and more than 18 percent of a rising GNP.
278
President Truman, Lippmann wrote a column on proposed changes to strategic air 
power, counseling that officials adopt a ?policy of maintaining what is in fact a 
defensive, deterrent, but not provocative military establishment.?
85
By August 1950 with U.S. forces embroiled in the Korean War, Lippmann 
penned some of his most dire warnings of the Cold War?including a 22 August 
piece entitled ?Cassandra Speaking,? a rubric he reserved for crisis situations.  The 
logic behind this column, however, clearly ran counter to the policy upon which 
Truman administration officials were soon to settle.  They believed the American 
economy could be ratcheted up to a perpetual wartime footing that would allow the 
military to wage global containment.  Lippmann, who in July 1950 described the 
Korean War as a diversionary tactic incited by Kremlin leaders to ?neutralize us in 
Europe,? believed that the U.S. would have to be selective about its primary interests; 
he believed these lay in the defense of Western Europe and Germany.  American 
officials would have to prioritize their geopolitical goals rather than to inflate their 
defense establishment to achieve an open-ended agenda.  ?The deficit in our 
diplomacy?the disparity between our commitments and our moves?is being 
enlarged and is not being reduced,? Lippmann warned readers.  ?Our obligations have 
become greatly inflated because we have allowed ourselves to be drawn into a war on 
the ground of the Asiatic mainland and into direct conflict with China . . . But what is 
84
 Kennan was not involved in the drafting of NSC-68, but he was aware of the debate going on about 
military expansion?a study which Truman had authorized in the winter of 1949-1950.  See, Kennan?s 
Memoirs, 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1967): 473-476.
85
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The National Security,? 3 April 1950; see also, Lippmann, T&T, ?The New 
Weapons,? 22 June 1950.
279
most serious is that we are in a diplomatic jam where our adversaries in Asia can keep 
us endlessly entangled in fact isolated and forever outnumbered.?
86
It is a virtual certainty that had Lippmann been privy to the full debate, or had 
officials chosen to publicize NSC-68 as they had Kennan?s original containment 
theory, that the columnist would have attacked it with even more vigor than he had 
the ?X-Article.?  For NSC-68 had the effect of stimulating precisely the application of 
containment that Lippmann had warned of in 1947 and would come to denounce in 
column after column for the next two decades.  It irrevocably militarized U.S. 
national security policy.  If Kennan had doubted the use of diplomatic dialogue NSC-
68 disqualified it entirely as an option.  It exaggerated the Soviet threat in some of the 
most sweeping language possible.  Moreover it conflated vital U.S. interests with 
peripheral ones.  As a Cold War historian has written, NSC-68 ?paid obeisance to the 
balance of power, diversity, and freedom, but nowhere did it set out the minimal 
requirements necessary to secure those interests.  Instead it found in the simple 
presence of a Soviet threat sufficient cause to deem the interest threatened vital.?
87
  In 
this respect NSC-68 was heir to the expansive Truman Doctrine, which Lippmann 
bluntly had attacked as a ?strategic monstrosity.?  Finally, NSC-68 set in motion the 
creation and feeding of a vast military-industrial complex in which major U.S. 
corporations?particularly those in the aerospace industry?were literally subsidized 
86
 Lippmann, T&T ?Probably the Showdown,? 18 July 1950; Lippmann, T&T, ?Cassandra Speaking,? 
22 August 1950.
87
 Gaddis Strategies of Containment: 98.  Gaddis also explains on page 95, ?For the authors of NSC-68, 
American interests could not be defined apart from the threat the Soviet Union posed to them: 
?frustrating the Kremlin design,? as the document frequently put it, became an end in itself not a means 
to a larger end.?
280
by Pentagon expenditures.
88
  The political influence of this conglomeration raised 
fears that it might subvert the basic processes of democratic government.  The 
prevailing domestic climate, in which Truman administration officials used excessive 
rhetoric to raise fears of Soviet aggression, soon countenanced soaring defense 
budgets that leached money from long-delayed domestic reforms, welfare, urban 
renewal and infrastructure, and environmental rehabilitation.  By the late 1950s, 
Lippmann and other perceptive critics such as Kennan, wrote that in preparing to 
meet external threats national security policies pursued after 1950 had the unintended 
effect of creating domestic dissonance and internal weakness.
89
Years later, Walter Lippmann identified the Korean War as Truman?s greatest 
foreign policy blunder, telling a CBS television interviewer that the president was 
placating Congress and his military chiefs and, in his attempt to accommodate them, 
simply lost control of his Korean policy.  While conceding that Truman was right to 
intervene immediately, Lippmann said, ?I?ve never been satisfied that it was right to 
resist except by air and sea, which is what [General Douglas] MacArthur and 
[General Dwight] Eisenhower originally wanted to do.  Even if you assume that that 
was all right?to fight a land war in Korea with American troops?he made a fatal 
mistake when, having won that war and driven the North Koreans across the Thirty-
Eighth Parallel, he didn?t stop there and instead went up to the Chinese border, which 
brought the Chinese into the war, and created a war between China and the United 
States which we have never been able to solve.?  Was that the President?s fault or the 
88
 Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 
1991); and Ann Markusen et. al., The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial 
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
281
general?s fault? the interviewer probed.  ?I blame the President and his Secretary of 
State [Acheson],? Lippmann replied, ?and generals don?t make policy of that kind, in 
any well-ordered government. . . . My impression is that the President and his 
Secretary of State were just as eager to do it.?
90
John Foster Dulles? firsthand account of MacArthur?s initial reaction to the 
outbreak of Korean hostilities resonated with the columnist and it was an encounter 
that he would recall time and again for the public and in private meetings with 
officials during the Vietnam years.  Dulles had been in the Japanese countryside when 
North Korea commenced its invasion, and quickly flew back to MacArthur?s Tokyo 
headquarters.  He found the supreme commander so insulated from negative news by 
his staff that he was largely unaware of the scope of the invasion more than 24 hours 
after it began.  MacArthur was not sanguine about the prospects of fighting a war on 
the Korean peninsula.  Despite going on at great length about his admiration for 
Chiang Kai-shek, his contempt for the PRC, and his own willingness to engage Soviet 
forces, the general expressed grave reservations about Korea.  ?Anyone who wants to 
commit U.S. troops to fight in Korea should have his head examined,? he told Dulles, 
while seeing him out of the office.
91
Lippmann did not budge from his central convictions about the strategic 
blunder of fighting a war in Korea.  Into the fall of 1950, he continued to advocate for 
Indian mediation as a diplomatic channel ?uncontaminated by the suspicion of 
imperialism and power politics.?  In July, New Dehli?s ambassador to China, K.M. 
89
 See, for example, the following Lippmann T&T columns on the arms race and its impact on 
American society: ?The Portent of the Moon,? 10 October 1957; ?Arms and the Mind,? 7 January 
1958; ?Explorer and Sputnik,? 4 February 1958; ?The Thaw,? 2 January 1964.
282
Panikkar, proposed that China be admitted to the U.N. Security Council which would 
then (Soviets included) vote for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal to the 38th 
Parallel.  On 17 August 1950, Lippmann described the offer as a ?most opportune? 
chance to end ?what might be a long, expensive and destructive stalemate.?
92
  If the 
U.S. salvaged Korean sovereignty while ?destroying? the country, Lippmann wrote, 
the victory would be ?pyrrhic.?
93
  Part of this critique derived from his certainty that 
the U.S. no longer could treat Communism as a monolithic entity.  Like George 
Kennan he closely noted that Moscow and Beijing had responded very differently to 
Panikkar?s offer?the Soviets skeptical and the Chinese cautiously approving.  U.S. 
diplomats, Lippmann believed, needed to exploit Soviet and Chinese Communists? 
shared tensions?in short, ?to refuse to regard China as a Russian satellite.? At a time 
when Washington was diplomatically isolating Mao?s government, American actions 
in Korea, Indochina, and Taiwan threatened Beijing?s interests directly and pushed it 
toward an alliance with Moscow, Lippmann warned.
94
Meanwhile Lippmann used his column to float mediation plans and to 
generate diplomatic momentum for third-party brokering.  India?s delegate to the 
United Nations, Sir Benegal Rau, cited Lippmann?s 17 August T&T column when he 
proposed to Security Council members that the U.N. should create a committee of 
non-permanent Security Council members to investigate and deliver findings on 
90
 Lippmann interview with Howard K. Smith, 11 August 1960, Lippmann, Conversations with Walter 
Lippmann (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1965): 20.
91
 Memorandum of conversation with Foster Dulles, September 1950, WLC, Box 68, folder 667.
92
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Light of Asia,? 17 August 1950.  For background on this aspect of Korean 
War, see Burton I. Kaufman?s The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command
(New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1986): esp., pp. 52-56.  See also, Stueck, The Korean War: 51.
93
 Ibid.
283
proposals for Korea?s future.  Reporting back to New Dehli, Rau claimed that his plan 
had been endorsed by the ?influential columnist Lippmann.?  Indeed, Lippmann?s 
proposal?which the Canadians and Australians also supported?sought to draw New 
Dehli closer to the West by giving it a leadership role in bringing about a Korean 
truce.  Rau?s proposal raised red flags in Washington, especially when he suggested 
that the committee be empowered to ?hear any person they please? (an apparent 
reference to consulting non-members like the PRC).  Judging from the Indian foreign 
minister?s cool response, Rau was free-wheeling when he made the offer.  Girja S. 
Baijpai, secretary general of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, told the 
concerned American Ambassador, Loy W. Henderson, that he had specifically asked 
Rau not to make any such proposal.  After New Dehli learned of Rau?s initiative, 
Nehru and Bajpai cabled the UN delegate that any ?advisory committee? would have 
to include great powers but that perhaps non-Security Council members or even 
countries outside the UN might be invited to participate.  Bajpai assured Henderson 
that Rau had been instructed that ?if [the] attitude [of the] great powers should not be 
receptive [the] plan should not be pushed since their cooperation [is] necessary.? 
Facing the threat of a Soviet veto, an unenthusiastic response from the American 
delegate, and reproving instructions from New Dehli, Rau gave up the plan by the 
time the UN convened its General Assembly meeting in mid-September 1950.
95
Virtually from the start of the conflict Lippmann placed Korea low on a 
crowded list of U.S. priorities?for which there were limited resources.  He penned 
94
 Lippmann, T&T, ?David and Goliath,? 15 August 1950; ?As Between Moscow and Peiping,? 7 
September 1950.  See also Warren Cohen?s, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991 (New 
York: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 69.
284
two dire, August 1950 columns that warned U.S. military commitments were spread 
too thin to fight a war in Asia and to protect Western Europe.  With the American 
army in South Korea, he feared that the Soviets would take the diplomatic and 
military offensive in Germany and Western Europe.  Like many others at the time, 
Lippmann allowed that Stalin instigated the North Korean invasion for just those 
purposes.  ?If this diagnosis is correct, then it is an overriding American interest to 
keep the war in Korea localized,? Lippmann wrote, ?and to have it ended without 
committing to the Far East not only most of our forces in being but the better part of 
the forces we shall mobilize in the next critical year or two.?
96
   He savaged President 
Truman and Secretary of State Acheson for losing control of their foreign policy by 
trying to appease their domestic critics in Congress.  ?They are carrying out, 
unhappily and ineffectively, a policy imposed on them by their political opponents,? 
Lippmann wrote.  ?[They] have neither the power to make it work nor the 
responsibility if it does not work but leads to some kind of global Korea.?
97
  As 
military planners considered taking the war into North Korea after General Douglas 
MacArthur?s dramatic and successful Inchon landing in September, Lippmann 
cautioned that U.S. forces should halt at the 38
th
 Parallel.
98
95
 Henderson to Acheson, 18 August 1950, Dispatch 419, 330/S-1850, FRUS, 1950, 7: 607-608; see 
also Henderson to Acheson, 18 August 1950, Dispatch 415, 330/S-1850, FRUS, 1950, 7: 603-604.  For 
an account of Rau?s proposal see, Stueck, The Korean War: 63-64.
96
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Probably the Showdown,? 22 August 1950.
9797
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Cassandra Speaking,? 18 August 1950.  Two days earlier Paul Nitze?s Policy 
Planning Staff at the State Department recommended a cautious approach in Indochina-emphasizing 
for the time being political rather than military goals. ?We would be deceiving the French government 
were we to offer encouragement of decisive military support.  Furthermore, we would be undertaking a 
responsibility for the course of military events in Indochina which could be flung back in our face with 
recriminations should military aid fail.  The conclusion, therefore, is that if the French?and we?are 
to be spared a humiliating debacle in Indochina, some means other than reliance on military force must 
be found.?  See PPS, ?United States Policy Toward Indochina in the Light of Recent Developments,? 
16 August 1950, FRUS, 1950 6: 857-858.
98
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The 38
th
 Parallel,? 26 September 1950.
285
Chinese intervention sharpened Lippmann?s criticisms.  In December, with 
MacArthur?s forces driven back down the penninsula, Lippmann called for a strategic 
retreat to Japan.  American naval and air power, he wrote, should hold a line in Japan 
and the Philippines but no more ground forces should be committed to mainland Asia.  
A prolonged war in Korea would have far-ranging diplomatic repercussions, he 
feared, leading to the ?disruption? of U.S. alliances and the ?disintegration? of the 
Atlantic Community.  ?The defeat in Korea is a warning which, if we heed it, may yet 
prove to be our salvation,? Lippmann explained in T&T, ?that the course which we 
took with the Truman Doctrine is based on a fatally wrong estimate of our 
adversaries, and of our friends, and of ourselves.?
99
  Moreover, the events of late-
1950 confirmed, Lippmann wrote, that China was a great power within its ?natural? 
and historic sphere of influence: Korea, Taiwan, Indochina, and the rest of Southeast 
Asia.  Washington officials might debate the merit of diplomatic recognition of 
Beijing and whether to permit China a U.N. seat.  ?But what is not debatable is the 
fact that Red China is a strong power capable of exerting its influence effectively 
within its own region,? Lippmann wrote, ?and much too strong to be dealt with 
forcefully by anything less than a very great war.?
100
When the military situation stabilized near the 38
th
 Parallel in early 1951, 
Lippmann suggested that the UN could end hostilities quickly?with India acting as 
the chief mediator?by arranging for an international ?stewardship? of Korea.  He 
envisioned that a Korean armistice and reunification must be part of a larger regional 
settlement, including other crisis points in Asia such as French Indochina?a 
99
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Examination and Withdrawal,? 11 December 1950.
100
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Chinese Fact,? 8 January 1951.
286
settlement that recognized the new postwar balance of power in the region and the 
immediate problem of Chinese influence and expansionism.  On 11 January 1951, 
Lippmann proposed a simple horse-trade with Beijng: if the U.S. recognized 
Communist China?s right to repatriate Taiwan, China could be induced to guarantee 
Korean and Vietnamese autonomy.  Whether or not that solution could have been 
applied, Lippmann was convinced the Korean problem was not divisible from Taiwan 
or Indochina.  Any plan for ending the Korean conflict would have to be 
accompanied by ?satisfactory assurances that China will not invade Indo-China, and 
that she will not obstruct a peaceable settlement, let us say in the U.N., of the Indo-
Chinese civil war and the problem of Indo-Chinese independence.?
101
The war dragged on for more than two years, with Lippmann repeatedly 
placing the problem in this larger frame of reference.  An armistice that simply left 
Korea divided was inadequate to the imperative of a regional peace plan.  
Accordingly, he continued to press Washington to negotiate with Beijing with the 
general features of a settlement being: recognition of the PRC pending ratification of 
a peace treaty; Korean reunification; a seat for China on the U.N. Security Council; 
neutralization of Taiwan, Chiang?s removal from power, and international 
administration of the island; and a great power conference to end the Indochinese 
war.
102
101
 See, for example, Lippmann, T&T, ?The Lines of a Policy,? 11 January 1951; ?Korean Prospects,? 
15 February 1951; ?Armistice for Indo-China?? 8 January 1952.
102
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Clarification in the Far East,? 4 February 1952; ?Moscow and Korea,? 2 April 
1952; ?The Spreading Far Eastern War,? 1 December 1952.
287
V.
Lippmann?s basic aversion to U.S. intervention near mainland Asia was expressed 
clearly again in 1955 during the crisis over the Tachen islands, known as the first 
Taiwan Strait Crisis.  During that episode, and the subsequent 1958 confrontation 
precipitated by Communist China?s bombardment of the Nationalist outpost islands 
of Quemoy and Matsu, Lippmann pressed President Dwight Eisenhower and 
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to resolve the Taiwan problem?a flash point 
for nuclear war?through a general settlement that could have codified the existence 
of two Chinas.
103
Mao Zedong?s decision to bombard Quemoy and Matsu in 1955 was, in part, 
a reprisal for Eisenhower?s support in 1953 of Nationalist air strikes against the 
Chinese mainland, the administration?s central role in the creation of Southeast Asian 
Treaty Organization (SEATO), and an outgrowth of Beijing?s fears that the U.S. and 
Taipei would sign a binding military alliance.  Chinese leaders feared a policy of U.S. 
?encirclement??which they perceived Washington as waging on three fronts in 
Korea, Indochina, and the Taiwan Straits.
104
  In January of 1955, Chinese Communist 
troops based in Fujian Province on the mainland began shelling the Tachen Islands 
including the harbor islands of Quemoy and Matsu?on each Chiang had garrisoned a 
division of his troops.  Eisenhower quickly evacuated most of the Nationalists forces 
off the Tachens but decided to defend Quemoy and Matsu, insisting in a variation of 
103
 For more on the Taiwan Straights crises, see Shuguang Zhang, Deterrence and Strategic Culture: 
Chinese-American Confrontations, 1949-1958 (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992): 189-224, 
especially pp. 190-199. Chinese leaders were especially fearful of the U.S. using Taiwan as a 
launching pad for a possible intervention ?to expand the military conflict onto the mainland from the 
Taiwan Strait, ?either to take revenge or start a new war.??  Quote on p. 190.
104
 Zhang, Deterrence and Strategic Culture: 190-199.
288
his domino theory that if the islands fell so would Taiwan, inflicting irreparable harm 
to U.S. prestige in Asia. President Eisenhower, therefore, went before Congress on 24 
January 1955 and asked for the authority to use U.S. armed forces to protect Taiwan, 
Quemoy, and Matsu in the event of a Chinese attack.
105
  It was one of those rare 
instances (in fact, the last such instance) in the latter half of the twentieth century 
when an American president went to Congress to ask permission for military force, 
rather than to dictate reasons why the use of force ought to be employed.  In an 
unprecedented show of support, both houses of Congress?with only three dissenting 
votes in each chamber?gave Eisenhower the blank check that he sought.  Lippmann 
called it an ?extreme delegation of authority,? noting that the resolution set no ?clear 
and definite juridical, strategic or political standard? for the president to use force.
106
A major war scare ensued with the U.S. threatening nuclear war and seriously 
considering a preventive strike against mainland China.  Dulles put the odds for war 
at even, and advocated using tactical nuclear weapons?noting that with care and 
precision in choosing targets, worldwide ?revulsion might not be long-lived.?
107
105
?Special Message to the Congress Regarding United States Policy for the Defense of Formosa,? 24 
January 1955, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight David Eisenhower (1955), Doc. no. 21, 
available on-line at 
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/site/docs/pppus.php?admin=034&year=1955&id=21 .  Eisenhower 
told Congress, ?the situation has become sufficiently critical to impel me, without awaiting action by 
the United Nations, to ask Congress to participate now, by specific resolution, in measures designed to 
improve the prospects for peace.  These measures would contemplate the use of the armed forces of the 
United States if necessary to assure the security of Formosa and the Pescadores . . . a suitable 
Congressional resolution would clearly and publicly establish the authority of the President as 
Commander-in-Chief to employ the armed forces of this nation promptly and effectively for the 
purposes indicated if in his judgment it became necessary.?
106
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Offshore Entanglement,? 12 April 1955.  Contrast this response with his far 
milder reaction to the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution: Lippmann, T&T, "In the Gulf of Tonkin," 6 
August 1964.
107
 See for example, Cohen, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991: 97-99; and Ambrose, Rise 
to Globalism: 147-149.
289
Lippmann rebuked Eisenhower and Dulles for threatening war over two 
strategically negligible islands.  Instead, he recommended that the administration 
remove Nationalist troops to Taiwan, liquidate its commitment to defend the offshore 
islands, and draw its strategic line in the Taiwan Straits behind the power of the 
Seventh Fleet.  Quemoy and Matsu, he wrote, were strategic liabilities as long as the 
U.S. defended them?because they were Chiang?s final hope of drawing the U.S. into 
a major war with Beijing to restore his government to power on the mainland.
108
Lippmann, moreover, believed it a positive diplomatic program that would 
compensate for the administration?s tendency to create military stalemates, where 
American commitments were backed by the threat of massive retaliation.
Even after tensions subsided (mainly because the Soviets pressured Mao to 
relent), Lippmann insisted that the U.S. recognize formally the situation as it existed: 
i.e., the reality of two Chinas.  It could no longer afford to make the legal case that 
Chiang?s government was the legitimate government of mainland China.  Even if 
American officials did not extend diplomatic recognition to the PRC, they had to face 
the political reality, Lippmann argued.  During the 1950s, Lippmann believed that 
American recognition of the PRC would have to precede Chinese entry into the 
United Nations.  Besides, he explained to John Cowles, editor of the Des Moines 
Register, ?The U.N. matter is not entirely within our control.  Recognition is entirely 
within our own control.?  It was a necessary first step to giving China a place on the 
Security Council which, Lippmann believed, befitted its place as a major world 
108
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Definition of Formosa,? 25 January 1955; ?The Offshore Entanglement,? 12 
April 1955.
290
power.
109
Thus, he called for a three-point settlement between the Nationalists and 
the PRC: 1) whereby Chiang renounced the use of force to invade the mainland and 
re-establish a Nationalist government; 2) Taiwan would be placed under U.N. 
guardianship as an ?autonomous, demilitarized and neutralized Chinese territory? 
with its own seat in the General Assembly; and, 3) with Beijing declaring that it had 
no further intentions to reunite the two Chinas through an invasion of Taiwan.  ?All 
that would be given up would be the legal fictions,? Lippmann told readers, ?that 
Chiang?s government is the true government of China, that Mao?s government, which 
is indisputably the government of the mainland, has no legal existence.?
110
When Mao rekindled the international crisis by bombing the islands in 
1958
111
, Lippmann again recommended abandoning them and placing Taiwan under 
international supervision.  This time, he added, the bulk of the mainland Chinese who 
had fled to Taiwan should be repatriated and Chiang and his lieutenants should be 
removed and given asylum.  Under U.N. control and protected by the American 
Seventh Fleet, Taiwan would be ?invulnerable.?  American interests could best be 
served by severing its ties to the Nationalists, whose political future Lippmann judged 
to be short.  These measures would ensure that the Taiwanese had a viable 
government after Chiang was gone, while also denying Communist China use of the 
island as an advance staging base for possible strikes against American interests in 
109
 Lippmann to John Cowles, 13 May 1954, reprinted in Blum, p. 577.
110
 Lippmann, T&T, ?A New China Policy,? 6 June 1957; ?Dulles Rides Again,? 17 January 1956.
111
 Zhang, Deterrence and Strategic Culture: 225-267.  Mao believed that ?an active defense policy 
would improve China?s strategic position.?  Beijing leaders were fearful of the deterioration of their 
position in the Taiwan Strait, particularly the U.S. decision to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to 
Taiwan in 1957.  See Zhang, especially pp. 226-229.
291
the Philippines or Indonesia.
112
  Lippmann also flatly rejected Joe Alsop?s argument 
that linked the defense of Quemoy and Matsu with that of America?s core allies.  
?Quemoy is not like Berlin anymore than it is like London, Paris, or Washington,? 
Lippmann countered.  ?Evacuating Quemoy is not like the appeasement at Munich.?  
The island had no ?political significance? and was ?strategically . . . negligible.?  
Lippmann concluded, ?It is merely a minor nuisance.?
113
VI.
Prominent commentators disagreed not only with Lippmann?s analysis of the Korean 
War, but the larger implications about containment that he drew from it.  Richard H. 
Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The General and the President (1951) 
wondered whether Lippmann?s argument over-stated the globalization of containment 
itself.  ?Certainly, if the containment policy is to be construed in a doctrinaire way, 
Mr. Lippmann?s argument is unanswerable,? the authors conceded.  ?But, in practice, 
the problems have tended to answer themselves.  No one, for example, advocated the 
American defense of Tibet against Chinese invasion . . . . The number of danger spots 
in between [the superpowers] may be unlimited geographically, but they are limited
practically.  No one (except MacArthur) argues for global containment; selective 
containment, at least the kind practiced from 1947 to 1951, seems well within the 
112
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Dulles Formula,? 11 September 1958; ?Mr. Dulles on Tuesday,? 2 October 
1958; ?The Latest Gambit,? 7 October 1958; and ?The Position of Strength,? 14 October 1958.
113
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Latest Gambit,? 7 October 1958.  See the exchange of correspondence: 
Alsop to Lippmann, 9 October 1958; Lippmann to Alsop, 10 October 1958; Alsop to Lippmann 29 
October 1958; all letters located in Series III, Box 50, Folder 38, WLC.
292
limits of our capabilities.?
114
  The problem, as Lippmann singled it out for review 
during the Eisenhower years, was that U.S. policymakers most often sought to 
implement a seamless application of global containment.  According to the 
imperatives of NSC-68, the threat to U.S. national security that inhered in a potential 
Chinese attack on Taiwan or in Soviet provocations in the Middle or Far East, 
mattered as much as a move against West Berlin or the Japanese islands.  Without 
fundamental diplomatic settlements to resolve some of the multiplying crisis points, 
containment would, in fact, by its own logic become a burdensome worldwide 
apparatus.
The Korean War particularly confirmed Washington?s resolve in French 
Indochina and other Southeast Asia countries.  At several critical junctures, as 
Lippmann admonished U.S. officials to chose a diplomatic solution, Washington 
recommitted itself to the military defense of the region.  As early as the fall of 1950, 
defense department planners were considering a dramatic expansion of NSC-64 
which had been approved earlier that spring.
115
  The Joint Strategic Survey 
Committee determined that while the ?French bear primary responsibility? for 
114
 Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The General and the President (New York: 
Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1951): 247.  Rovere had met Lippmann shortly before the book was 
published?while writing a profile on him for a popular magazine.  They became relatively close 
friends during the last quarter-century of Lippmann?s life and, for a while, Rovere initiated research on 
an authorized biography of Lippmann?a project he eventually turned over to Ronald Steel when his 
health began to fail in the early 1970s.  Rovere?s appraisal of Lippmann in his memoirs was far 
different than it had been in 1951: ?He saw the fatal weaknesses of our post-1945 foreign policies 
sooner than any of his contemporaries.  His reason for opposing our participation in the war in Korea 
in 1950 was, essentially, that it would lead precisely to the kind of disaster we were later to meet in 
Vietnam.  Though always an internationalist, he never believed in a global conception of our national 
interest.?  See Rovere?s Arrivals and Departures: A Journalist?s Memoirs (New York: Macmillan 
Publishing Company, 1976): 143.  In another collection of essays and anecdotes published after 
Rovere?s death in 1979, he would write that The General and the President was a book ?based on the 
very fallacies that led to Vietnam?conceiving communism to be monolithic and using military means 
to achieve political ends.?  See Rovere?s Final Reports: Personal Reflections on Politics and History 
in Our Time (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1984): 224.
293
fighting the Viet Minh that the U.S. should proceed with a ?military assistance 
program to be based on an overall military plan developed for Indochina by the 
French, concurred in by the Associated States of Indochina, and acceptable to the 
United States.?
116
  The Joint Chiefs of Staff informed newly-installed defense 
secretary General George Marshall that ?United States security interests demand that 
this government, by all means short of actual employment of United States military 
forces, seek to prevent the further spread of communism in Southeast Asia generally 
and, in particular, in French Indochina.?
117
 A CIA national warned that Chinese 
intervention in French Indochina ?may occur at any time,? and, if it did, it would 
shortly render the French position in North Vietnam ?untenable.?  The report 
concluded that if the Vietminh, either alone or with direct Chinese assistance, 
expelled the French from Indochina, that development ?would eventually entail 
Communist control of all mainland Southeast Asia in the absence of effective 
Western assistance to other countries of the area.?
118
By early 1952, NSC-64?which had provided the initial framework for U.S. 
aid to Indochina?had been superceded by NSC-124, a sweeping statement of 
American policy in Southeast Asia.
119
  Not only would a communist victory in 
Indochina set off a chain reaction, it ?would render the U.S. position in the Pacific 
off-shore island chain precarious and would seriously jeopardize fundamental U.S. 
115
 Analysis Prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff by the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, 17 
November 1950, FRUS 1950 6: 949-954.
116
 Joint Strategic Survey Committee, 17 November 1950: 949-954.
117
 Memorandum by the JCS to General Marshall, ?Possible Future Action in Indochina,? 28 November 
1950, FRUS, 1950, 6: 945-948.
118
 National Intelligence Estimate, ?Indochina?s Current Situation and Probable Developments,? 29 
December 1950, FRUS, 1950, 6: 950-963.
119
 NSC 124, ?United States Objectives and Courses of Action with Respect to Communist Aggression 
in Southeast Asia,? 13 February 1952, FRUS, 1952-1954, 7: 45-51; quote on page 46.  
294
security interests in the Far East,? particularly American military and economic 
interests in Japan.
120
  NSC-124 laid out a detailed agenda for securing Indochina that 
provided the blueprints for policies that the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations 
would follow to ?intensify support of constructive political, economic, and social 
measures.?  The paper set out three goals: 1) to continue providing aid to French 
Union forces including military equipment; 2) to stabilize internal security; 3) and to 
?assist developing indigenous armed forces which will eventually be capable of 
maintaining internal security without the assistance of French units.?
121
The Korean War compelled U.S. officials to globalize containment, even as it 
yielded more evidence for Walter Lippmann that the American commitment in Asia 
must be circumscribed.
122
  Indeed, the lessons that Lippmann absorbed while 
evaluating U.S. China policy in the latter 1940s and while critiquing U.S. action in 
the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 were quite the opposite of ideas that imbued the 
thinking of American officials.  The columnist, in public and private, stressed two 
distinct themes: 1) the necessity of recognizing the Communist government in Beijing 
and applying lessons of U.S. diplomatic missteps in postwar China to improve future 
U.S. influence in post-colonial Asia; and, 2) the imperative of drawing a strategic line 
along an arch of Pacific islands stretching from the Aleutians to Guam?beyond 
120
 Ibid., 47.
121
 Ibid., 48.  Among the notable revisions and additions to the final document that the council 
approved was the expressed intention ?to assure the French that the U.S. regards the French effort in 
Indochina as one of great strategic importance in the general international interest rather than in the 
purely French interest, and as essential to the security of the free world not only in the Far East but in 
the Middle East and Europe as well.?  See also, See, ?Memorandum for the President of Discussion at 
the 120
th
 Meeting of the National Security Council Held on Wednesday, June 25, 1952, FRUS, 1952-
1954, 7: 123-126; and, NSC-124/2, ?Statement of Policy by the National Security Council on United 
States Objectives and Courses of Action with Respect to Southeast Asia,? 25 June 1952, FRUS, 1952-
1954, 7: 127-134.
122
 For more on the Korean War?s globalizing effects on American containment policy see, Gaddis, 
Strategies of Containment: 109-126; Stueck, The Korean War: 348-370.
295
which the U.S. would sparingly commit its military power and, above all else, avoid 
putting troops onto mainland Asia.  Both assertions contrasted with Washington 
officials? universal conception of America?s interests and the sublime self-assurance 
in their ability to project power. Lippmann would not countenance unilateral 
American intervention in Asia.  As the French war against the Vietminh intensified, 
and pressure mounted in the U.S. for more decisive support of Chiang?s regime in 
Taipei, Lippmann believed the only way to preserve Asian stability was through a 
general settlement in which ?key? regional countries could participate.  These ideas 
starkly clashed with unilateralist assumptions of the Acheson State Department.  
Dean Rusk, Acheson?s assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, a China 
hard-liner, and later a principal decision-maker who supported Americanization of the 
Vietnam War in 1965, recalled that in the postwar years American officials assumed 
they should and could ?control every wave in the Pacific Ocean.?
123
Lippmann 
shared no such illusions.
That Walter Lippmann came to oppose so fervently American intervention in 
Southeast Asia should have surprised no one?not officials at the time, not historians 
looking backward.  His dissent over American policy in Indochina would mark no 
break from his past.  Rather, Lippmann?s writing on Vietnam may best be understood 
as the culmination of his mounting concern about the unchecked globalism of postwar 
U.S. foreign policy in Asia.  
Lippmann became a trenchant, consistent, and prescient critic when U.S. 
officials chose militarization and unilateralism in favor of diplomatic engagement.  
And, here was a man for whom diplomacy meant a great deal, not just on an abstract 
123
 Quoted in McGlothen, Controlling the Waves: 205.
296
intellectual level but as a matter of personal habit.  Elizabeth Farmer Midgley, who 
worked as Lippmann?s sole research assistant from 1961 to 1967 claimed that two-
thirds of the columnist?s contacts (both professional and social) were with foreign 
diplomats.
124
  The old columnist surrounded himself with a constellation of foreign 
perspectives on U.S. Cold War policy?Nehru?s from India, De Gaulle?s from Paris, 
the British Foreign Office, and even Khrushchev?s from inside the Kremlin.  At home 
in Washington, as his appointment diaries demonstrate, a minority of his meetings 
were with U.S. officials.
125
  He knew the embassy circuit in the capital unlike any 
other journalist and cultivated it as did few professional diplomats.  Lippmann?s 
unusual list of contacts did not escape the notice of the watchful if irascible Joe 
Alsop.  ?The story of Walter?s sources is a very odd one,? Alsop told one researcher.  
?Walter was a very hard-working reporter n his way but his sources have never been 
American, or at least American officials.  In his New York period . . . his domestic
sources were Morgan partners, and after that they were in the British embassy; then, 
in other foreign embassies . . . His own government he always regarded with 
suspicion and even contempt.?
126
  Alsop, who most often haunted the corridors of the 
Pentagon for sources, meant to insult his journalistic adversary.  But Lippmann would 
have considered his catholicity of sources?and his independence from the official 
U.S. perspective?as a matter in which to take pride.  One got the sense, recalled 
124
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley, interview with author, 28 February 2001, Washington, DC.
125
 Lippmann?s Appointment Diaries, which cover the entire postwar span of his career (1945 to 1967), 
faithfully record his daily contacts with foreign diplomats, journalists, and American government 
officials: Lippmann Appointment Diaries, Series VII, WLC.
126
 Joseph Alsop, interview, papers of Montague Kern and Ralph and Patricia Levering, Box 1, no date, 
John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.  
297
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that cultivating American officials meant a lot less to 
Lippmann than it did to his peers?he?d seen too many come and go.
127
There also was a strategic component to Lippmann?s analysis of U.S. policy in 
Asia.  He warned that it was an exceedingly poor place to wage a militarized form of 
containment.  The Korean War especially confirmed these assumptions for him.  Four 
recurring themes factored into his analysis: (1) The U.S. could not win a land war in 
Asia, which was a view shaped largely by the estimates of prominent U.S. military 
officers and European officials; (2) that with few local allies, America lacked the 
necessary logistical, military, and political support to intervene successfully in a 
conventional conflict with the Russians or Chinese or in a civil insurgency; (3) that 
Washington?s influence, such as it was, derived from its ability to offer an alternative 
to the history of European colonialism?a past that would burden U.S. officials if 
they dispatched troops into Asian countries; and, (4) America?s tendency to fight the 
Cold War by unilateral military action jeopardized its relations with the few key and 
viable governments in the region that might act as counterweights to Beijing and 
Moscow?namely India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Japan.  The tendency of U.S. 
policymakers to conceive their containment strategy in Southeast Asia as primarily a 
military effort, coupled with their eventual decision to intervene with U.S. troops in 
the 1960s, guaranteed that Lippmann would oppose them.
127
 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (New 
York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2001): 383.
298
Chapter 6:  
?Long . . . A Pessimist About Vietnam?: Walter Lippmann and U.S. 
Policy in Indochina, 1949-1963
I.
Walter Lippmann was a consistent critic of U.S. intervention in the Indochinese-
Vietnamese civil war through two decades in which four successive U.S. presidential 
administrations edged closer to a costly military commitment there.  Lippmann?s 
commentary on events in Indochina paralleled his observations about American 
policy in Korea: first, that it would be a strategic folly to send U.S. soldiers to fight 
anywhere in Asia?particularly in guerilla-style combat in the jungles of Laos or 
Vietnam; and, even more decisively, that the U.S. had no vital primary interests to 
fight for there.  A diplomatic strategy that detached Vietnam from the Cold War 
struggle, Lippmann eventually argued, even if the country eventually was run by 
Communists in Hanoi, would be a victory for American interests.  These assertions 
made Lippmann the most formidable critic of U.S. policy.  The evidence 
demonstrates?indeed, key policymakers later attested to it?that Lippmann?s 
critique of American Vietnam policy began early, remained fundamentally unaltered, 
299
and provided firm footings for his famous dissent when U.S. officials opted for direct 
American military intervention in 1965.
1
This chapter examines Lippmann?s commentary during four phases of 
Washington?s incremental intervention in Indochina.  First, was the initial American 
decision to aid French efforts to secure Indochina after World War II?a development 
which Lippmann opposed because he believed it underwrote imperialism and aligned 
the U.S. with reactionary governments in Asia that had little popular backing.  The 
second phase encompassed the Eisenhower administration?s decision not to intervene 
to relieve French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954?and the concomitant choice to 
commit U.S. resources and political support on behalf of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.  
Lippmann, who had backed the general in 1952 as a presidential candidate who could 
end the Korean War, supported Eisenhower?s refusal to send troops into Vietnam.  
But he was highly critical of Washington?s cultivation of the Saigon government in 
late-1954.  The third, step involved American policy toward creating a stable, pro-
Western government in Laos, particularly during the first year and a half of the 
Kennedy administration.  Lippmann not only opposed military intervention?
personally counseling President Kennedy against it on several occasions?but he 
1
 Ronald Steel?s Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 
1980), devotes cursory treatment to Lippmann?s pre-1964 writings about Southeast Asia.  His 
treatment, moreover, is uneven.  While recognizing that Lippmann was accurate in his geopolitical 
reservations about the war, Steel nevertheless discounts the value of these long-standing positions 
when he discusses the culmination of Lippmann?s Vietnam critique in 1964-1965.  See especially, 503; 
541-542.  Fredrik Logevall offers a partial correction to Steel?s interpretation, arguing that 
Lippmann?s realist critiques were pivotal to his interpretation of events in Vietnam.  See Logevall?s 
Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: 
University of California Press, 1999): 141-143; 340-341; and Logevall?s article, ?First Among Critics: 
Walter Lippmann and the Vietnam War,? Journal of American-East Asian Relations 4, no. 4 (winter 
1995): 351-375.  While stressing the ?realist? consistencies of Lippmann?s commentary, Logevall does 
make a sustained analysis of its origins or its applications in Asia.  Indeed, U.S. policymakers? 
observations about Lippmann, both in private and in official documents, demonstrate the consistency 
of his criticisms about U.S. Cold War policy (the subject of Chapter IX).
300
believed the coalition government that emerged, provided an ideal model for the 
?neutralization? plan that he later recommended for Vietnam.  In the final phase?as 
Washington officials increased the American military ?advisory? presence in South 
Vietnam from 1961 to 1963 and moved closer to deposing the Diem regime in the fall 
of 1963?Lippmann opposed them on both counts.  He argued that no military 
commitment could stabilize the Saigon government at any acceptable cost.  
Moreover, he believed that any dramatic regime change would produce a more 
unstable situation that could further draw Washington into the civil conflict.  No 
matter whether he acted as a Washington ?outsider? (as with the Eisenhower 
administration) or ?insider? (as, within limits, he did during the Kennedy 
administration)?Lippmann?s vigorous critique of U.S. policy in Vietnam was 
unaltered.  
II.
At the close of the Second World War French leaders determined to recoup their 
former Indochinese colony.
2
  As the war against the Japanese ended, the lines were 
being drawn in Indochina?with French troops liberating Saigon on 12 August 1945, 
and Ho Chi Minh?s forces entering Hanoi just eight days later.  Paris officials pledged 
to find a diplomatic solution as small-scale skirmishes broke out between Viet Minh 
fighters and French troops in the fall of 1945 and into 1946.  But a rift shortly 
emerged among French policymakers.  On 6 March 1946, Jean Sainteny, 
commissioner for the Tonkin region of Indochina (northern Vietnam), signed accords 
301
with Ho recognizing his Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) ?as a free state and 
as a member of the Indochinese Federation and the French Union.?
3
  Almost 
simultaneously, however, the High Commissioner for Indochina, Admiral Thierry 
d?Argenlieu, proposed a plan that Paris officials soon adopted to divide Indochina 
into five separate states: Laos, Tonkin, Cambodia, Cochinchina, and Annan?all of 
which would fall under the ?French Union? umbrella.  The proposal was intended to 
secure French power in Cochinchina (the southern colony which held Saigon and 
France?s largest stake of economic interests) and to isolate the DRV in the northern 
Annan and Tonkin regions.  In November a French naval cruiser shelled Haiphong 
killing an estimated 6,000 civilians.  On 19 December, the Vietminh launched a 
surprise attack on French installations throughout Vietnam.  These two incidents in 
late-1946 plunged the region into a full-scale war which?with varying degrees of 
intensity?would last for three decades.
4
Undersecretary of State Dean G. Acheson and other U.S. officials were not 
eager to underwrite a French return to colonial rule in Indochina.
5
  Washington 
officials preferred a negotiated settlement between the French and the nationalist Viet 
Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh (Vietnamese Independence League), or ?Vietminh? for 
short.  During this period Washington?s policies were reactive and keyed to keeping 
Paris contented enough to support America?s containment strategy or reconstruction 
2
 A true international history of the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1975 remains to be written.  The closest 
example of such a work is R.B. Smith?s three-volume study which picks up in 1955: An International 
History of the Vietnam War (New York: St. Martin?s Press, 1983-1991).
3
 For a concise account on the intersection of U.S. and French policy in Vietnam in the late 1940s, see 
Ronald L. McGlothen, Controlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia (New 
York: Norton, 1993): quote on p. 168.
4
 George C. Herring, America?s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (New York: 
McGraw-Hill Inc., 1986): 6-8.  For the early postwar years and French efforts to reassert its power in 
302
and militarization in Western Europe.  Negotiations between Paris and the DRV 
collapsed in May 1947 and, later that year, the French began to cultivate Bao Dai, the 
former emperor of Annan, to lead a plaint, anti-Communist government. On 8 March 
1949, the French gave Bao Dai limited powers of governance.  With Acheson now 
installed as Secretary, the State Department refused to seek greater concessions from 
the government of Vincent Auriol, even though high-ranking U.S. diplomats warned 
that nationalist aspirations would drive most Vietnamese to support Ho Chi Minh?s 
republic.
6
  In June 1949, Bao Dai became Chief of State of Vietnam, and Washington 
cabled its congratulations.  
In the short-term, the Truman administration refused to extend direct military 
aid to French forces in Indochina.  That policy evolved over time, with Washington 
committing more resources to keep the French engaged in Indochina.  Years later, 
Acheson complained that Paris officials ?blackmailed? the Truman administration by 
threatening to pull out and leave the U.S. to pick up the pieces.  Indochina policy 
during his tenure, he admitted in his memoirs, was a ?muddled hodgepodge.?
7
Reluctant or not, Acheson helped to administer an American program which provided 
$1.9 billion in unrestricted economic aid to France between the fall of 1945 and July 
1948.  While the U.S. refused throughout 1949 and early 1950 to equip French forces 
suppressing Ho Chi Minh?s independence movement, it was clear that the scale of 
American economic aid to France enabled Paris to mount major military operations in 
Indochina, see Ellen Hammer, The Struggle for Indochina, 1940-1955 (Stanford: Stanford University 
Press, 1966): especially, p. 148-202.
5
 McGlothen, Controlling the Waves: 163-201; especially pp. 169-170 and 180-182.
6
 James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York: Simon 
and Schuster, 1998): 262-269.
7
Dean G. Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1969): 671-678, 
on Indochina policy from 1949-1954; quote on p. 673.  See also, Chace, Acheson: 267.
303
Indochina.  By choosing to support Paris?s Indochina policy up until the Korean War 
?on French terms, [Acheson] put the United States directly in line to inherit a French 
war.?
8
Lippmann did not support U.S. aid to help the French reassert colonial control 
in Indochina. On 9 January 1949, he told Today and Tomorrow readers that support 
for Asian nationalism was not just ?promising? but the ?most truly American way.?  
Washington must disavow the imperialism of the Western European countries, he 
wrote.  ?Our most precious asset in Asia is our ability to persuade the people of Asia 
that there is a nation in the Western world, more powerful than the Soviet Union, 
which sympathizes with their struggle for independence, and has no wish to exploit 
it,? Lippmann concluded.
9
  In blunt terms, Walter Lippmann warned University of 
Chicago Professor of International Law Quincy A. Wright that there was a ?danger 
that we are underwriting the imperialism of the western powers in Asia.?  Lippmann 
wanted Washington to take an independent posture in Asia by establishing relations 
with governments in Indonesia, Indochina, Malaysia, and by ?openly associating? 
with Nehru?s India.  He also believed U.S. officials should challenge the French and 
Dutch governments on the issue of why large portions of Marshall Plan aid were 
?siphoned off? to wage the Indochinese and Indonesian wars.  He concluded, ?we 
must deal directly with the problem of not associating ourselves with the western 
colonial powers in their reactionary policies in Asia.?
10
8
 McGlothen, Controlling the Waves: 201.
9
 Lippmann, T&T, ?America in Asia,? 10 January 1949.
10
 Lippmann to Quincy A. Wright, 14 February 1949, Box 111, Folder 2280, Series III, Walter 
Lippmann Collection, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (hereinafter 
referred to as ?WLC?); see also, Wright to Lippmann, 11 February 1949.  Wright went so far as to 
argue that by joining NATO, the U.S. reinforced European imperialism in Asia.  ?The North Atlantic 
arrangement might not only make us a tail to the imperialist dog, but it might convince Asia that we 
304
A number of imperatives inhered in Washington officials? decision to initiate 
a gradual assumption of financing the war on behalf of the French.  In large measure, 
Washington?s monetary support?like the military aid that followed?was meant to 
relieve economic pressures on Paris and to ensure its participation in the NATO 
alliance. Until after the Korean War, U.S. officials viewed Indochina as a secondary 
concern, a drain on military assets better deployed to deter a Soviet invasion of 
Europe.  But they feared that if the French pulled up stakes and left Indochina only
U.S. military forces could fill the power vacuum.  Increasingly, U.S. officials?unlike 
Lippmann?placed a high premium on the psychological and political fallout from 
the ?loss? of Vietnam.
11
  American prestige, they argued in a mirror-opposite 
argument from Lippmann, was staked on empowering Southeast Asian regimes to 
withstand Communist insurgencies through military and economic aid and, when 
needed, U.S. intervention.
Mao Zedong?s consolidation of Communist power on mainland China (and 
the specter of Beijing-directed insurgency movements), reinforced an American 
policy of support for French military pacification of Indochina.  Mao?s victory also 
accelerated the process of Vietnamese autonomy.  On 30 December 1949, Paris 
transferred all constitutional power to Bao Dai?in effect, creating a sovereign 
government and fulfilling Washington?s wishes.  A month later the French National 
Assembly voted to extend recognition to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as 
had abandoned interest in their security, and it might transfer the major political discussions of high 
politics to the North Atlantic Council and thus by-pass the United Nations so far as security problems 
are concerned.?  Lippmann rejected that assessment, arguing that the U.S. could maintain separate 
policies toward Asia.
11
 See, for instance, the language in NSC-124, ?Statement of Policy by the National Security Council: 
Review of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Far East,? 20 August 1954, Foreign Relations of the United 
States, 1952-1954, 12: 771-774 (hereinafter cited as FRUS).
305
independent states within the French Union.  On 7 February 1950, Washington and 
London extended de jure recognition to the Bao Dai regime and U.S. policymakers 
were swiftly determining what proportions of military and economic aid would 
follow.  By March 1950, Acheson determined that Washington ?predicated its course 
of action in Indochina . . . on the assumption that fundamental objectives of [the] US 
and France in Indochina are in substantial coincidence.?
12
Soviet recognition of Ho Chi Minh?s government in late-January 1950, 
however, became the catalyst for a major U.S. commitment to directly aid French 
Union forces in Indochina.
13
  On 27 February 1950, the National Security Council 
produced NSC-64 a sweeping policy document that fixed an American policy of 
underwriting French military efforts with an influx of money and arms.  American 
security interests required ?that all practical measures be taken to prevent further 
communist expansion in Southeast Asia.  Indochina is a key area of Southeast Asia 
and is under immediate threat,? the authors concluded.
14
12
 Acheson to David K.E. Bruce, 29 March 1950, FRUS, 1950, 6 (Washington, DC: Government 
Printing Office): 768-771.  Acheson?s overall pattern in dealing with Cold War threats was to move 
from a more moderate approach to a hard line stance.  For more on this aspect of his career, see Robert 
L. Beisner, ?Patterns of Peril: Dean Acheson Joins the Cold Warriors,? Diplomatic History 20 (no. 3, 
summer 1996): 321-355.  Acheson?s lament about adjacent Southeast Asian governments? seeming 
lack of concern about the Viet Minh movement, reflected the prevailing view in Washington.  ?Ho Chi 
Minh is not [a] patriotic nationalist but Commie Party member with all the sinister implications 
involved in the relationship,? Acheson cabled American Ambassador to Thailand Edwin F. Stanton.  
When Stanton replied that Thai ambivalence had more to do with ?detestation? of the French-
sanctioned Bao Dai government?and ?that it completely outweighs [the] danger [of] Ho Chi Minh??
Acheson was unmoved.  See Acheson to Stanton, 17 January 1950 and Stanton?s 19 January reply, 
FRUS, 1950 6: 697.
13
 ?Memorandum by the Director of the Office of Eastern European Affairs to the Assistant Secretary 
of State for European Affairs,? FRUS, 1950 6: 710-711; ?Military Aid for Indochina,? 1 February 
1950, FRUS, 1950 6: 711-715.
14
 NSC-64/1, ?The Position of the United States with Respect Toward Indochina,? 27 February 1950, 
FRUS, 1950 6: 744-747.  Not surprisingly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff concurred with this analysis, citing 
the strategic threats if Indochina was lost: loss of vital raw materials, disruption to lines of 
communication, threat to Japan, India, and Australia, the likely collapse of all Southeast Asia, the 
direct threat to American interests in Japan because of its economic and military isolation, and the 
probability that control of Southeast Asia would alleviate China?s food problems and provide the 
306
During the spring of 1950, Lippmann clarified his position on America?s role 
in Indochina.  Like Acheson he feared that Paris might pull out and leave the U.S. to 
fight an unwinnable guerilla war.  But his answer was not to open the military 
hardware spigot to the French.  As Congress debated a bill to aid French Union 
forces, Lippmann penned two important columns that advised U.S. officials to avoid 
extending military support to France.  Aid under the Mutual Defense Assistance Act 
would be an ineffective, quick fix, Lippmann explained on 21 February 1950.  He 
questioned the American ?tendency to reduce our foreign policy to the question of 
how much money and how many weapons Congress can be induced to vote in order 
to strengthen the weak situations.  This is an attempt to conduct foreign policy 
without resorting to diplomacy.?
15
  Lippmann, moreover, saw instability in Indochina 
within a larger frame of reference?the question of China?s place as a great power.  
American recognition of Mao Zedong?s government, as well as its inclusion in the 
United Nations, was the key to creating stability in the region, he wrote.  Lippmann 
believed the Indochinese states that emerged from French rule would find their places 
in China?s ?orbit?: ?the key to Indo-China is Mao as the key to the Greek situation 
was Tito.?  Diplomatic contact with Beijing, which might induce it to adopt a foreign 
policy independent of Moscow?s, was a far more effective and less costly policy, 
Lippmann believed.  U.S. policymakers should ?try to defend Indo-China by 
diplomacy in Peiping as well as by material aid, and not solely by subsidizing 
resistance to a guerilla war in Indo-China,? he concluded.
16
Soviets with key strategic materials.  See Louis Johnson to Acheson, 14 April 1950, FRUS, 1950 6: 
780-785.
15
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Frozen Policies in the Cold War,? 21 February 1950.
16
 Ibid.
307
In April 1950, as Congress crafted legislation to provide direct military 
assistance to French forces, Lippmann re-affirmed his position?this time adding that 
the situation was so bleak that not even massive American military assistance would 
likely preserve French control in Indochina.  ?Put bluntly but truthfully, the French 
army can be counted on to go on defending Southeast Asia only if the Congress of the 
United States will pledge itself to subsidize heavily?in terms of several hundred 
million dollars a year and for many years to come?a French colonial war to subdue 
not only the Communists but the nationalists as well,? Lippmann wrote.
17
  Again, the 
message was clear: diplomacy not military aid was required to end an intractable civil 
war.  He proposed that a U.N. commission, led by India and Pakistan, mediate a 
settlement and guarantee the protection of the Indochinese states.  He mocked the 
administration?s piece-meal strategy. ?The French colonial army, Bao Dai, a little 
American money and some arms, a little bit of Point 4, a few visiting warships, and a 
lot of ringing declarations are not enough to make a policy that has any prospect of 
success,? Lippmann warned.  ?We shall have to rise above the notion that it can be 
dealt with by giving some help to the French, and we shall have to put the problem in 
a different and larger frame of negotiation.?
18
U.S. officials chose a military option?albeit one in which a war against 
Communist expansion would be fought by proxy.  On 1 May 1950, less than a month 
after Lippmann?s columns appeared, the Truman administration authorized $10 
million in aid, the first installment of direct military support for French forces in 
Indochina.  Later that year, the U.S. committed an additional $133 million to Paris, 
17
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Total Diplomacy in Southeast Asia,? 4 April 1950.
18
 Ibid.
308
including immediate authorization for the delivery of arms, ammunition, naval 
vessels, aircraft, and military vehicles.  The French Union governments received 
another $50 million in direct economic and technical support from Washington in 
1950.
19
  The Korean War accelerated this established process of American funding of 
the French war effort, as it indeed globalized the American containment policy.  But 
in Indochina, American policymakers had already firmly committed themselves to the 
decision to aid the Bao Dai government directly?to make the French effort more 
effective and efficient. Washington?s first disbursements were authorized nearly two 
months before the North Korean invasion.  Walter Lippmann repeatedly advised 
against these decisions.
III.
Lippmann backed Dwight D. Eisenhower?s presidential candidacy in 1952 primarily 
because he believed the hero-general would be more moderate in his exercise of 
power.
20
  Lippmann approved the framework of the New Look foreign policy the 
president developed, particularly the administration?s promise to retrench 
conventional military commitments overseas.  But the columnist soon homed in on 
the moralist rhetoric of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles?attacking it as a 
19
 Truman to Acheson, 1 May 1950, FRUS, 1950 6: 791; see also, Herring, America?s Longest War: 18-
22.
20
 The theme of restraint and the responsible use of power is conveyed in a number of books on 
Eisenhower.  See for example, John Lewis Gaddis?Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of 
Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982): see 
especially, pp. 129-136; and Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New 
York: Oxford University Press, 1987): see especially on the use of nuclear weapons, pp. 140-146. See 
also, Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981): 3-
30. A major biography that agrees with these assessments is Stephen Ambrose?s Eisenhower: Soldier 
and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).  Robert Kaiser challenges the assumption that 
Eisenhower was cautious and dubious about the chances for American success in Southeast Asia; see 
309
Wilsonian throwback and thus abruptly ending his long association with Dulles. 
Lippmann particularly regretted Eisenhower?s willingness to transfer U.S. resources 
out of Korea to an enlarged commitment in Vietnam.  Reluctant to send troops to 
Southeast Asia, the Eisenhower administration nevertheless set the political 
framework for later intervention. 
Eisenhower?s humble origins, decades of experience in a small, budget-
strapped army, and his political acumen in snuffing out intra-alliance rivalries during 
World War II, shaped his leadership style.  From 1946 to 1948, Lippmann met the 
general for interviews and on social occasions, striking up a mildly effusive 
correspondence.
21
  As tensions rose between the Soviet Union and the United States 
in early 1946, Eisenhower advised against provocative military preparations. On 2 
June 1946, as Chief of Staff of the Army, Eisenhower delivered a speech to the 
Reserve Officers Association Convention which highlighted his moderation.  
?Occasionally we hear predictions as to how and where and why the next war will be 
fought,? Eisenhower told the audience.  ?Such talk is more than foolish: it is 
vicious.?
22
Lippmann wrote Eisenhower that he was ?very much moved? by that 
passage.  He added, ?I almost feel that the soldiers are going to have to save the peace 
which the diplomats and politicians will, if they don?t look out, most surely wreck.?
23
In 1948, when Eisenhower left the Pentagon to serve as president of Columbia 
Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge: 
Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000): 10-35.  
21
 There are perhaps 15 letters exchanged between Eisenhower and Lippmann (c. 1945-1951) which 
can be found in their manuscript collections.
22
The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The Chief of Staff, Volume 7, Louis Galambos et. al., 
editors (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978): 1104.  Eisenhower?s reply to 
Lippmann is printed.
23
 Lippmann to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 4 June 1946, Pre-Presidential Name Files, Dwight D. 
Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS (hereinafter referred to as ?DDEL?).
310
University, the columnist wrote this serendipitous note: ?Don?t go too far away.  We 
shall need you again soon.?
24
  He welcomed Eisenhower?s appointment as supreme 
NATO commander in 1950.  As Lippmann?s frustrations with Truman mounted, he 
gravitated toward the idea of a popular, moderate Republican in the White House.
25
Lippmann never thought Eisenhower to be a visionary leader but he 
nevertheless supported Ike?s 1952 campaign early believing that a centrist president 
might bring the Republican Party to the center and make it less dependent on its right 
wing.  For decades, Democratic control of the White House had made the 
Republicans fatuous and mischievous out of power, Lippmann told readers that 
January.
26
  Joseph McCarthy?s antics in the Senate were a direct result of the party?s 
marginalization in American politics, he believed.  Ike he equated with responsibility.  
He worried, however, that Eisenhower would squander his considerable popularity in 
an ineffective campaign.  He explained to Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall, 
a leading Eisenhower proponent, his concern that the presumptive candidate keep off 
the campaign trail until the summer: ?All his inexperience will, I think, be exposed to 
24
 Lippmann to Eisenhower, 6 February 1948, Pre-Presidential Name Files, DDEL.
25
By 1952 it seemed as if Lippmann?s aspiration for an Eisenhower candidacy reflected the popular 
sentimentality that he earlier disparaged.  In 1948, he had written the British diplomat Robert Brand 
that the public speculation that both parties might nominate the war hero produced an ?almost 
irrational demand for Eisenhower.?  He explained, ?This demand is not based on a judgment of his 
capacities as a President; it is a kind of romantic projection upon him of all the wishes of the people.  
They would like to think that this most engaging man possesses all the qualities they wish the 
President of the United States would have.?  Eisenhower lacked the ?intellectual equipment? and 
?experience? Lippmann told Lewis W. Douglas as the Republican convention approached that summer.  
?He is not a real figure in our public life but a kind of dream boy embodying all the unsatisfied wishes 
of the people who are discontented with things as they are.? Lippmann to Robert Brand, 5 April 1948, 
reprinted in Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann, edited by John Morton Blum 
(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985): 509-510; Lippmann to Lewis W. Douglas, 9 July 1948, 
reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 514.
26
 See, for instance, Lippmann, T&T, ?Eisenhower,? 10 January 1952, Washington Post: 11.  ?In my 
view the problem of the transfer of power from one party to the other is of overriding importance,? 
Lippmann wrote.  ?A change of party has become most necessary after 20 years.?  See also, Steel, 
Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 480-483.
311
the country, and the American people, we must not forget, can turn quickly against 
their heroes.?  Consequently, he advised Saltonstall that Eisenhower should run a 
?very aloof campaign . . . one which keeps him in the position of being above the 
party struggle.?
27
Lippmann recommended much the same strategy to Herbert Bayard Swope, 
an Eisenhower enthusiast and political advisor.  Lippmann assured the famous 
publicist that he agreed ?entirely about Ike? and his desirability as a centrist,
internationalist Republican.  ?The thing that I have been worrying about in 
connection with him,? Lippmann confided to Swope, ?is his tendency to talk too 
much on too many subjects.  Now, of course, he does this privately, but once he takes 
off his uniform, I am afraid he won?t easily restrain himself.?  Lippmann continued 
that Eisenhower?s ?great strength and his great value to the country? was his ability to 
unify the public by embracing ?the big things for which there are really no violent 
issues?; in particular, Lippmann meant finding an end to the Korean War.  He 
warned, however, that Eisenhower ?must find some formula for not getting entangled 
in the little issues that are quite hot and full of politics,? obliquely alluding to Taiwan 
and the China Lobby.  Without elaborating, Lippmann insisted that as a candidate 
Eisenhower ?must take refuge in the formula that these issues are blown up politically 
and that he doesn?t propose to deliver curbstone opinions about them, that his habit is 
to make careful inquiries, and to make up his mind after he has heard all the experts 
and that while he knows what he thinks on the great issues of principle and policy 
both at home and abroad, he isn?t prepared to pass on every detail about every issue 
27
 Lippmann to Leverett Saltonstall, 11 January 1952, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 566.
312
that has been debated in Congress for the last 10 years.?
28
  Swope summarized this 
information for Eisenhower, explaining that he had contacted Lippmann initially ?to 
smoke him out?to align him on the side of God.  I think this has been done.?  Swope 
added, ?I wanted to give you the view of a serious-minded man (God knows he is 
serious enough!) for what it is worth.  In my book you will do!?  On 15 April 1952, 
during his annual spring visit to Europe, Lippmann met with Eisenhower at the 
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) command in Brussels to 
discuss major policy issues and the campaigning topics Lippmann covered in his 
letter to Swope.  The NATO commander wrote Swope, ?the ?serious-minded? 
gentleman . . . and I spent a most enjoyable time together. . . I feel that we both have a 
better understanding now of each other?s thinking.?
29
 Lippmann did not repudiate his 
support despite disappointment with Eisenhower?s uninspiring campaign and, more 
significantly, a much closer ideological affinity to his friend, Democratic candidate 
Adlai Stevenson.
30
28
 Lippmann to Herbert Bayard Swope, 27 March 1952, WLC; see also Swope?s initial letter to 
Lippmann, 26 March 1952. Portions reprinted in Galambos et. al., The Papers of Dwight David 
Eisenhower: NATO and the Campaign of 1952, Volume XIII: 1189-90.
29
 Eisenhower to Herbert Bayard Swope, 24 April 1952, ibid.; portions of Swope?s letter of 9 April 
1952 to Eisenhower also are reprinted in Volume XIII.
30
When the Illinois governor had consulted Lippmann about accepting the Democratic nomination if it 
were offered to him in 1952, Lippmann advised against it.  As the columnist recalled it, he told 
Stevenson not to run ?because I would have such a miserable year resisting him, if he did.?  Lippmann 
recognized that his one-time Woodley Road neighbor would not have the domestic political clout to 
make critical foreign policy decisions in Asia without severe criticism from Congressional 
Republicans.  Fearing a Stevenson administration would be little more than a reprise of the late-
Truman years, Lippmann supported Eisenhower principally for his twin concerns about liquidating the 
American commitment in Korea and restoring an out-of-balance political system at home, rather than 
from any enthusiasm for the Republican?s policy ideas.  Lippmann to Wilmarth Lewis, 13 October 
1952, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 567.
One story is particularly revealing.  Weeks after the election, the columnist visited a 
conference at the Massachusetts Institute Technology Center for International Studies.  Afterward, 
returning to the airport to catch a plane back to Washington, Lippmann struck up a conversation about 
the election with his driver, Francis Bator, a graduate student who would later serve as an NSC staff 
member and European affairs advisor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.  Whom had Bator 
supported? Lippmann asked.  To which the young man replied, Stevenson.  ?Well, Francis, if I was 
your age that is exactly where I would sit,? Lippmann remarked.  ?It?s for an old man like to worry 
313
Yet, during the Eisenhower years, for personal and institutional reasons, 
Lippmann was persona non grata in the White House.  Unlike Wilson, Franklin 
Roosevelt, Truman, and, later, Kennedy and Johnson, Eisenhower never once sought 
Lippmann?s advice on foreign policy issues.
31
  Eisenhower, who took few reporters 
into his confidence, had stopped reading Today and Tomorrow after assuming the 
NATO command in 1950.
32
  Lippmann, he believed, wrote without sufficient 
knowledge of the issues and held a particularly na?ve view about the prospects of a 
military withdrawal from Europe and the creation of a decentralized federation of 
historic German states.  As president, however, he knew of Lippmann?s criticisms 
even if he refused to read them.  During the Suez crisis in the fall of 1956?when 
Lippmann lashed out at the administration for allowing Anglo-American relations to 
fall into disrepair and eventually rupture because of a joint British-French effort to 
seize the Suez Canal?Eisenhower dismissed him.  ?From what I am told, Walter 
Lippmann and the Alsops have lots of idea, but they are far from good,? the president 
explained to a friend, ??about what you?d expect from your youngest grandchild.?
33
When John Hay ?Jock? Whitney, who served as Eisenhower?s ambassador to Great
Britain for two years, bought the New York Herald Tribune (Lippmann?s employer) 
about maintaining the balance and worrying about the Republicans not being in office since 1932.  The 
nuances and subtleties are fine for an old man like me, but if I were your age, Stevenson is exactly who 
I would vote for.? Francis Bator, interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, MA.
31
 John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts make this claim in The Press and the Presidency: From George 
Washington to Ronald Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 475.  The authors cite no 
evidence for this claim, though Lippmann?s appointment diaries indicate that Lippmann was never 
summoned to the White House during Eisenhower?s two terms.
32
 Craig Allen, Eisenhower and the Mass Media: Peace, Prosperity, and Prime-Time TV (Chapel Hill, 
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993): Eisenhower evaluation of Lippmann, p. 49; on 
columnists generally, see p. 49-54. For a summary of the few journalists whom Eisenhower 
respected?Arthur Krock, Roscoe Drummond, and David Lawrence?see Eisenhower to Lucille 
Dawson Eisenhower, 6 May 1960, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The Presidency?
Keeping the Peace, Volume XX: 1936-1937.
314
in 1958 the president wrote him with the hope that the paper might drop its noted 
columnist, for whom Eisenhower had ?no respect, no admiration and no liking.?
34
Jock Whitney did not drop Lippmann, but he offered little financial enticement to 
keep the columnist on staff (in 1963, Phil Graham lured Lippmann away to the 
Washington Post with a lucrative deal).  Until the last years of his life Eisenhower 
complained of the columnist?s ?fuzzy thinking.?  In 1968, when Lippmann wrote a 
Newsweek column that argued Eisenhower?s support for the Vietnam War prevented 
the Republican Party from campaigning on behalf of a negotiated settlement, the 
former president dismissed the idea as Lippmann?s old ?habit of setting up a straw 
man that he can enthusiastically destroy.?
35
  Lippmann?s analysis, like that of many 
other Washington pundits, led Eisenhower to get his news ?from the news columns 
and not the ?columnists.??
36
Institutional developments also acted as a barrier between the president and 
columnist.  Though Eisenhower held an astounding 193 press conferences, he rarely 
33
 See Eisenhower to Edward Everett Hazlitt, Jr., 2 November 1956, The Papers of Dwight David 
Eisenhower: The Presidency?The Middle Way, Volume XVII: 235-237
34
 Eisenhower to John Hay Whitney, 5 May 1958, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The 
Presidency?Keeping the Peace, Volume XIX: 866-867.  The president may have been referring to 
Alsop, too; however, this was during a period when Lippmann was particularly critical of 
Eisenhower?s policy in Quemoy, Matsu, Taiwan and Berlin.  Eisenhower explained to Whitney that he 
believed newspapers? reliance on columnists to be ?an abdication of responsibility.?  He complained 
about New York Times reporters? ?high degree of latitude in expressing their personal ?opinions.??  He 
told Whitney: ?The news columns belong to the public; the editorial pages to the paper itself.?  
Jokingly, he added that ?despite such people as Lippmann [and] Alsop . . . I remain loyal to the paper.?  
See The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The Presidency?Keeping the Peace, Volume XXI: 
2168-2169.  
35
 Herbert Hoover Oral History Collection, Dwight D. Eisenhower Interview (1967): 105, Hoover 
Library, Stanford, CA; Eisenhower to Milton Eisenhower, 15 January 1968, Box 1, Milton Eisenhower 
Papers, DDEL.  See also, Lippmann, ?The Hard Choice,? 7 October 1968, Newsweek: 27.
36
Unlike JFK and LBJ, Eisenhower had no confidants among the Washington press?no Alsop, no 
White, no Reston, certainly not Lippmann.  As James Hagerty recalled, that was a conscious and 
purposeful strategy.  See Hagerty?s Oral History, OH-91, (April 1968), DDEL.  In his post-presidential 
years, Eisenhower explained his reservations this way: ?I do not mean that all [columnists] are 
consciously engaged in misleading the public.  However, many of them are not only prejudiced and 
one-sided in their viewpoints, but on top of that are badly informed as to fact and careless in their 
315
met with reporters on an informal basis.  Press Secretary James Hagerty carefully 
choreographed Eisenhower?s relationship with the national media.
37
  The scripted 
news conferences aimed at the newest form of media?television.  In part, this 
strategy enabled Eisenhower to address Americans directly, by-passing the 
established Washington print press corps.  Through such innovations Hagerty proved 
to be a formidable public relations manager, especially after Eisenhower?s 1955 heart 
attack.  The chain-smoking press secretary regularly flanked the president, ensuring 
that the news was ?managed constantly and continuously,? Lippmann recalled years 
later.  ?[Hagerty] is really the biggest expert there is at it.?
38
Finally, Lippmann?as he did with virtually all the men whom he entrusted 
with his political hopes and ideals?grew frustrated with Eisenhower in office.  
Though cognizant of the domestic constraints working on the new administration, he 
shortly expressed impatience with Eisenhower?s meager efforts to silence the 
Republican Party?s right wing.  By the time of McCarthy?s Army hearings in the 
spring of 1954, Lippmann?s disillusionment was nearly piqued at the President?s 
seeming inability to discipline Capitol Hill Republicans.  Describing the McCarthy 
purges as ?mob rule? and a clear usurpation of executive power, Lippmann assailed 
the Eisenhower administration for failing to reign in the Wisconsin senator and his 
supporters.
39
  As late as 1955, however, Lippmann recognized the powerful 
allegations.? Eisenhower to Wilbur V. Dunn, 26 August 1964, DDE Principal File (1964), Post-
Presidential Papers, Box 33, DDEL.
37
 Allen, Eisenhower and the Mass Media: especially, 52-63.
38
 Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann: 147.  See Craig Allen?s able and lucid discussion 
of the Eisenhower Administration?s media strategies in Eisenhower and the Mass Media: esp. pp. 47-
63.
39
 See, for example, Lippmann, T&T, ?The McCarthy-Stevens Affair, 1 March 1954.  For his part, 
Eisenhower never forgave the treatment he received from the media for that episode.  See Allen?s 
Eisenhower and the Mass Media: 50-54. As early as the spring of 1950, Lippmann had criticized 
316
conservative forces working against a policy of disengagement in the cold war.  He 
was willing to give Eisenhower the benefit of the doubt as the president readied 
himself for his first summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.  Politics at 
home, Lippmann told readers, fundamentally shaped a good cop-bad cop routine 
employed by the president and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.  ?For this 
point-counterpoint of Eisenhower hopefulness and Dulles wet blanket there have been 
a number of explanations: for example, that Eisenhower never reads the fine print 
whereas Dulles is an expert on the fine print?or that Eisenhower believes in the 
natural goodness of man and that Dulles believes in original sin,? Lippmann wrote.  
This was a political maneuver, Lippmann conjectured, a ?harmony of two parts? with 
the President spinning optimism for public consumption and Dulles assuaging the 
fears of hard-line Republican senators that the administration was preparing to 
negotiate with Communists.  The President?s end goal, Lippmann still hoped, was to 
neutralize his party?s right wing and proceed with ?disengagement and conciliation? 
with Moscow and Beijing.
40
  Already, however, Eisenhower?s policies in Asia were 
McCarthy.  He encouraged Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine to speak out against her red-
baiting colleague.  On 23 May 1950, Smith visited Lippmann?s home, seeking advice on whether to 
challenge McCarthy directly with a floor speech.  ?Lippmann,? Smith recalled, ?expressed strong 
approval, but he did not suggest any theme or wording for my potential speech.  A little more than a 
week later, Smith delivered her ?Declaration of Conscience? speech?becoming the first Senator to 
challenge McCarthy.  See Patricia L. Schmidt, Margaret Chase Smith: Beyond Convention (Orono, 
ME: University of Maine Press, 1996): 213.
40
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Eisenhower-Dulles Duet,? 12 July 1955. Lippmann initially had few strategic 
disagreements with Eisenhower?s foreign policy.  He embraced the prospect of a sharply curbed 
containment policy, endorsing the expansion of the nuclear program in exchange for reductions in 
conventional forces, overseas commitments, and military interventions in post-colonial regions.  All 
things considered, Lippmann found what John Gaddis later dubbed as Eisenhower?s ?asymmetrical? 
containment far preferable to Truman?s ?symmetrical? version; the former had the merit of focusing 
U.S. forces and the latter the problem of dispersing them, Lippmann thought.  The notion of a 
?containing military ring of anti-Communist states . . . is out of date,? he wrote in 1955, for it was 
undermined by the Soviets? achievement of nuclear weapons. Lippmann, T&T, ?Mr. Dulles and the 
Basic Decision,? 18 January 1954.  If mutual nuclear deterrence raised the ultimate stakes, he thought, 
it also diminished the likelihood that either side would undertake provocative or unilateral adventures.  
Discussing the New Look in early 1954 after Dulles debuted the idea before the Council on Foreign 
317
leading Lippmann to doubt that the administration would progress toward his ideal of 
a modus vivendi with the Russians or the PRC.
It was in his capacity as secretary of the Inquiry that Lippmann first met John 
Foster Dulles at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.  Both men were deeply chastened 
by the failure of the conference, the recalcitrance of the European democracies in 
regard to crafting a just peace, Wilson?s inability to win support in the Senate and 
public, and his insistence on basing high moral principle on shaky domestic political 
foundations.
41
  For decades afterward, when they retreated to private life and became 
fixtures in New York society, Lippmann and Dulles carried on a friendly 
correspondence.  They shared many internationalist assumptions, but increasingly, 
Dulles? tendency to analyze foreign affairs in moral, pseudo-religious terms was an 
entering wedge that eventually split them apart.
42
Relations, Lippmann told readers, ?What we are giving up is our reliance on military means as the 
main instrument of our leadership in the Cold War . . . by its very specialization, our military policy 
will prevent us from contemplating any changes by military means.?  Over time, however, Lippmann 
lost enthusiasm for this approach?even though it meant in practice that the Eisenhower administration 
was less likely to commit American ground forces in every place where Communist insurgents posed a 
threat.  
41
 On Dulles especially, see Townshend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston: Little, 
Brown, and Company, 1973): 28-32.  A standard biography is Richard Immerman, John Foster Dulles: 
Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 
1999). 
42
Lippmann and Dulles?s difference began to emerge in 1944 when Dulles served as the chief foreign 
policy adviser to New York Governor and GOP presidential candidate Thomas Dewey.  Lippmann 
devoted a column to attack a Dewey speech on the Polish issue which had implied that Franklin 
Roosevelt had abandoned the principle of Polish autonomy.  Such campaign rhetoric, Lippmann wrote 
on 21 October 1944, served only to complicate negotiations and make the Polish government?s 
position ?irreconcilable.?  Lippmann, T&T, ?Governor Dewey in Foreign Affairs,? 21 October 1944, 
Washington Post: 7. He also disputed Dewey?s interpretation of the provisions of the Romanian 
armistice?which were disproportionately disadvantageous to the Soviets.  Dulles countered privately: 
?The basic difference between you and the Governor is that you do not believe that the United States 
should have any policies at all except in relation to areas we can make those policies good through 
material force. . . . I believe, and I think the Governor believes, that moral force is a potent reality and 
that the American people should continue to stand for principles of human liberty and freedom as of 
universal application, and so irrespective of whether or not they are willing or able to achieve them by 
fighting.? JFD to WL, 22 October 1944, WLC, Box, 68 see Lippmann?s reply of 25 October 1944, 
WLC, box 68, folder 667.  
318
Ultimately, Dulles?s public moralism, though mitigated by his private 
diplomacy, alienated Lippmann.
43
  Even before he became secretary of state, Dulles 
had authored a polemical book, War and Peace (1950), and, shortly after the invasion 
of South Korea, publicly declared that the U.S. should ?find the ways to paralyze the 
slimy, octopus-like tentacles that reach out from Moscow to suck our blood.?
44
Dulles? diplomatic maneuvering at the 1954 Geneva Conference and his increasingly 
bellicose rhetoric, as during the first Taiwan Straights crisis in 1955, concerned 
Lippmann.  Dulles?s negotiating tactics, his treatment of George F. Kennan, after the 
diplomat?s recall from Moscow, and particularly his refusal to countenance 
neutralism among less powerful nations caught in the superpower standoff henceforth 
made him a favorite target of derision in Today and Tomorrow.   
Assigning blame for the origins of the Cold War became sport between the two men.  In 1948 
both Lippmann and Dulles chose Dewey as their candidate against Truman.  Dulles again served as 
Dewey?s foreign policy expert and, had the governor been elected, would almost certainly have 
become his nominee for secretary of state.  Though supportive, Lippmann repeatedly cautioned Dulles 
about using the failure of the Yalta agreements and the disposition of Poland as a campaign issue 
against the Democrats.  ?It really isn?t fair to imply that the United States had the power to compel the 
Russians to act differently in the area which was under complete domination of the Red Army,? 
Lippmann wrote.  Dewey?and by extension Dulles?gambled by calling attention to his prewar 
position, Lippmann observed.  ?It will be easy to point out that if Roosevelt and Churchill made 
greater concessions to Stalin at Tehran and Yalta than we wish they had, the compelling reason was the 
relative military weakness of Great Britain and the United States and their dependence on the Red 
Army.  From that it is an easy step to the argument that our military preparedness in 1941 was a 
determining cause of our diplomatic weakness later and, of course, the Republican Party bears a heavy 
responsibility for our un-preparedness in the early stages of the war.?  Lippmann to Dulles, 13 
February 1948, Box 68, folder 667, WLC.
43
 Immerman, John Foster Dulles: 196-197.  Immerman points to Dulles?s ?contradictory legacy,? 
noting that Dulles ?demonstrated sophistication and enlightened understanding of the problems 
inherent in an international system that did not accommodate nationalist aspirations.?  Yet, ?by 
overestimating the reach of communism, Dulles underestimated the power of nationalism.  He thereby 
aligned the United States with the status quo, producing the very alienation, unrest, and instability that 
he predicted would result from opposing dynamic elements? in the developing countries.  ?Dulles 
thought strategically,? Immerman concludes, ?but too often he behaved tactically.?  See also, Ronald 
W. Pruessen?s John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York: Free Press, 1982): especially, 499-
509.  In a study that traces Dulles?s approach to foreign affairs up until 1952, Pruessen?in contrast to 
Immerman?convincingly argues that Dulles?s streak of moralism was present at  a formative stage 
and fundamentally shaped his approach to international relations.
319
While Dwight Eisenhower fulfilled his campaign pledge to conclude a Korean 
War armistice on 27 July 1953, Washington strategists already were shifting their 
focus to Vietnam for.  On 5 August 1953, the National Security Council advised that 
the ?loss of Indo-China would be critical to the security of the U.S.?  Fearing that the 
French position was so weak that Paris would compromise with the Viet Minh, the 
NSC added, ?any negotiated settlement would mean the eventual loss to Communism 
not only of Indo-China but the whole of Southeast Asia.?
45
  The authors concluded, 
?If the French actually decided to withdraw,? the paper concluded, ?the U.S. would 
have to consider seriously whether to take over in this area.?
46
  Following the NSC 
recommendations, the Eisenhower administration chose to help the French 
consolidate their forces and initiate a new offensive against Ho Chi Minh?s 
Communist guerillas, disbursing $385 million in military aid.  From 1950 to 1954, the 
U.S. contributed more than $2.6 billion in military aid to the French army in 
Indochina.
47
  American political influence was commensurate with the quantity of aid 
flowing to the French effort.
48
  During this period, the U.S. role steadily changed 
from that of junior partner in the defense of Indochina to protector of the Saigon 
regime that it helped to install in the partitioned South.
While Eisenhower and Dulles perceived Indochina as a strategic keystone 
vital to stemming Beijing-directed Communist expansion, they were reluctant to 
commit U.S. forces to mainland Asia.  Intervention, however, became a distinct 
44
 Immerman, John Foster Dulles: 17-20; quote comes from Immerman?s entry for Dulles in American 
National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
45
 Policy Planning Staff to NSC, 5 August 1953, ?Further United States Support for France and the 
Associated States of Indochina,? FRUS 1952-1954, 7: 713-719.
46
 Ibid.
47
 Herring, America?s Longest War: 20, 27, 42.
48
 PPS to NSC, 5 August 1953, FRUS 1952-1954, Volume 7: 713 -719.
320
possibility in early 1954 as the French position deteriorated.  At a NSC meeting on 8 
January 1954, Eisenhower declared that putting American ground forces into 
Southeast Asia ?was simply beyond his contemplation.?
49
 Alternatives short of 
inserting ground troops were, apparently, still in play.  When two participants 
objected to U.S. air strikes, Eisenhower revealed a much more ambivalent attitude 
about intervention.  Turning to Treasury Secretary George Humphrey and Special 
Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Robert Cutler, Eisenhower 
lectured them that Indochina was a ?leaky dike,? holding back Communist expansion.  
?And with leaky dikes,? the president continued, ?it?s sometimes better to put a finger 
in than to let the whole structure be washed away.?
50
  The President was inclined to 
arm and equip anti-Communist forces, short of actual intervention, to preserve 
stability in Southeast Asia.  
Failed French strategy precipitated a major crisis by the springtime of 1954.  
General Henri Navarre concentrated French forces to engage the Communists in 
large-scale actions in which Western firepower could be brought to bear against 
Asian manpower.  The prospects for American intervention rose sharply when an 
elite French garrison of 12,000 soldiers came under siege in a remote northern locale 
named Dienbienphu.
51
  Eisenhower resisted a U.S. troop commitment, but Paris now 
insistently asked for one.  In late March, French Chief of Staff General Paul Ely came 
49
Record of NSC Meeting, 8 January 1954, FRUS, 1952-1954, Vol. XIII: 949-952. According to a 
memorandum of the conversation, Eisenhower declared, ?Indeed, the key to winning this war was to 
get the Vietnamese to fight.  There was just no sense in even talking about United States forces 
replacing the French in Indochina.  If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their 
hatred of the French to us.  I can not tell you, said the President with vehemence, how bitterly opposed 
I am to such a course of action.  The war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!?
50
 Record of NSC Meeting, 8 January 1954, FRUS, 1952-1954, Vol. XIII: 949-952.
51
 For an account of the Dienbienphu episode see Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War: 39-55, and 
Herring, America?s Longest War: 21-36.
321
to Washington to request the transfer of additional U.S. aircraft for use by the French 
to strike at Viet Minh positions in the hills around Dienbienphu.  Ely also asked 
Dulles what the American response would be if the Chinese intervened.  Dulles 
dissembled but Commander of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Arthur Radford?with the 
Secretary of State?s tacit assent?detailed his plan for a massive air strike to save 
French forces.  Dubbed ?Operation Vulture,? Radford?s proposal involved 60 B-29 
bombers, more than 150 carrier-based aircraft, and the use of tactical nuclear weapons 
to blast Giap?s forces.  Eisenhower rejected Operation Vulture, though Ely returned to 
Paris with the impression that, as a last resort, the French could call in the American 
cavalry.
52
While Lippmann supported U.S. efforts to extricate the French from their 
seven-year colonial war in Indochina, he did not believe America should replace 
them.  Though unwilling to let Vietnam ?be washed away? under Beijing?s influence, 
Lippmann?s solution was not to erect the garrison state that U.S. officials soon 
established in South Vietnam.  First, he thought U.S. military resources were not 
sufficient to win a decisive victory against the Viet Minh.  ?They are designed to 
maintain the balance of power among the great military powers,? Lippmann wrote on 
29 March 1954, ?and not for a civil war fought by guerilla tactics in a primitive 
country.?  To insert American troops in Indochina would constitute a ?grandiose 
folly,? and the assumption by many in the Eisenhower administration that the U.S. 
might instead train an indigenous army to defeat Ho Chi Minh was ?wishful 
thinking.?  Lippmann down-played the significance of a French loss at Dienbienphu.  
The vital question was not military, but political, Lippmann told his readers: to create 
52
 Herring, America?s Longest War: 30-32.
322
a stable Vietnamese government and negotiate a settlement that led to French 
withdrawal and Vietnamese autonomy.
53
  Direct military aid to the French 
compounded problems.  ?On the general line that there is no asking for something 
that can?t possibly be obtained,? Lippmann wrote a prominent newspaper executive, 
?I would say that as long as we give help to the French we will not persuade the other 
side to stop helping the Viet Minh.?
54
  For the time being, he was not willing to 
support a coalition government which, he knew, would be dominated by the Viet 
Minh?largely because he realized it would be a political non-starter in Washington.  
During a pointed conversation on 13 April 1954, Lippmann told the Polish 
ambassador, V. Josef Winiewicz, that any plan ?which amounted to turning the 
country over to Ho Chi Minh would be rejected without negotiation.?  This view 
accounted for the political reality of the intransigent right-wing Republicans in 
Congress.  Within that context, Lippmann added, the ?communists must not expect to 
get by negotiation at Geneva anything more than they now have, and that what they 
now hold is the maximum they can expect to get.?
55
Lippmann?s solution was to withdraw French forces from the countryside to 
coastal cities and Saigon and?from these ?genuine positions of strength??to 
negotiate with the Viet Minh.  American military support for France should only be 
circumscribed, he wrote on 13 April 1954, having the goal of helping to secure and 
supply the major cities along the coast.  This ?limited objective? would recognize the 
?political reality? that the Viet Minh controlled the countryside and the allegiance of 
53
 Lippmann, T&T, ?A New Look in Indo-China?? 29 March 1954; ?Indo-China and Geneva,? 8 April 
1954.
54
 Lippmann to John Cowles, 13 May 1954, cited in Blum: 576.
323
a majority of the Vietnamese people.  Lippmann described such an arrangement as an 
?honorable? settlement that would not ?surrender? Vietnamese or Western vital 
interests.  It also would permit the French to build toward a settlement that could 
satisfy the ?specific interests of Red China? in Indochina?namely guarantees against 
the buildup of Western military power there and approval for an economic outlet via a 
railroad to Haiphong.
56
  This strategic stronghold solution resonated with Lippmann, 
for it was the exact policy he endorsed for American forces in 1965?then under the 
name ?enclave strategy.?  Surveying the situation in 1954, Lippmann determined that 
American air and naval power could blockade mainland Asia, protect trading routes, 
and assist the French in holding their coastal defenses.  ?But it cannot occupy, it 
cannot pacify, it cannot control the mainland, even in the coastal areas much less the 
hinterland,? he added.  ?Any American who commits American power in violation of 
this principle is taking an uncalculated and incalculable risk.?
57
  That assessment did 
not change in the intervening decade.
On 19 April 1954, Lippmann again warned U.S. officials about ?any notion 
that the French could ?go out? and that we could ?go in?? to fight in Vietnam.  That, 
he wrote, was an ?hallucination.?  The column caught the attention of American 
officials and foreign ministries for its suggestion that the U.S. should collaborate with 
India and Pakistan to arrange a viable system within which Burma, Laos, Thailand, 
Cambodia, and Vietnam could retain their autonomy.  Lippmann envisioned an 
internationally-guaranteed framework in ?which the old imperial authority could be 
55
 Lippmann recounted that conversation in a memorandum to CIA chief Allen Dulles. Lippmann to 
Allen Dulles, 13 April 1954, Lippmann Collection, Yale University, reprinted in Blum, Public 
Philosopher: 573-575.
56
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Is an Armistice Conceivable??  13 April 1954.
324
withdrawn without creating a vacuum into which the new imperialism of China 
would flow.?
58
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called Lippmann that evening to say that 
the column ?got the spirit of what he is trying to do better than anything he has read.?  
Dulles told Lippmann that he had indicated such a course in several off-the-record 
news briefings, ?but no one got the point although the point may not have been 
sufficiently sensational to write about.?  The two men discussed Dulles?s departure 
the next day for Paris and London, where he would seek allied support in preparation 
for an intervention of Western coalition countries.  Lippmann told Dulles that, in his 
absence, he would use Today and Tomorrow to keep administration interventionists 
and Congressional Republicans ?from making too much trouble at home.?  ?If they 
keep quiet,? Lippmann told the secretary, ?it would be better.?
59
   He was alluding, 
apparently, to a piece he had prepared that day for publication the next morning in 
which he rebuked Vice President Richard Nixon for a recent speech he delivered to 
the American Society of Newspaper Editors.  Nixon?whose sympathies with leading 
Republican senators brought him closer toward a pro-intervention stand than any 
other principal administration figure?had intimated that the U.S. would not negotiate 
with Communists at Geneva and that it might assume the French military role in 
Vietnam.  In a crisp column, Lippmann reiterated the argument that the U.S. could 
only fulfill an advisory role to the French.  Though, at the time, he considered 
?partition and coalition are not acceptable solutions,? the columnist believed it foolish 
57
 Lippmann, T&T, ?A New Look in Indo-China?? 29 March 1954; ?Mr. Dulles and Mr. Knowland,? 6 
May 1954.
58
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Dulles Trip and Indo-China,? 19 April 1954.
325
to suggest in advance that the U.S. would not conduct diplomacy at a conference 
which it called and at which it had promised to negotiate.
60
The next morning the Indian ambassador, Gaganvihari L. Mehta, invited 
Lippmann to the embassy to discuss his latest columns.  Over tea, Mehta told 
Lippmann the New Dehli government had developed a plan similar to the one the 
columnist had put forward, in which India and Pakistan would take leading roles in an 
international coalition with oversight in Indochina.  Diplomat and columnist 
discussed the proposal at length, as Lippmann recounted later that evening for Central 
Intelligence Agency chief Allen W. Dulles:
I put it to him this way: that while the Indochinese states are entitled to 
independence, they are and will be incapable of exercising full 
independence for a considerable time to come.  They are, and [Mehta] 
agreed, unready for self-government.  Therefore, independence as such 
must create a political vacuum which would promptly be filled by the 
communist dictatorship.  That being the situation, the problem is to 
create a political protectorate of some sort within which the newly 
emancipated states could learn to use their independence.  Such a 
protectorate, once the French withdraw, cannot be created by any 
Western power alone, and therefore unless the independent nations of 
Asia take the lead in creating that protectorate, Indochina will either fall 
within the communist orbit or become a battleground of a great war.
61
Ambassador Mehta told Lippmann that during an upcoming meeting of the 
prime ministers of India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, and Indonesia, that this proposal 
would be discussed.  He expected the participants to ratify something along its lines.  
59
 John Foster Dulles-Walter Lippmann, telephone conversation, 19 April 1954, Telephone 
Conversation Series (Subseries: General), Box 2, March 1954-April 30, 1954 (1), John Foster Dulles 
Papers, 1951-1959, DDEL.
60
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Mr. Nixon?s Remarks,? 20 April 1954.
61
 Walter Lippmann to Allen Dulles, 20 April 1954, Lippmann Collection, Yale University, reprinted in 
Blum?s Public Philosopher: 575-576.  Allen Dulles was a friend of Lippmann?s and, for a brief time, 
his only high-ranking contact within the Eisenhower administration.  Once Lippmann began to criticize 
Allen?s brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in 1955 the relationship cooled. See John Foster 
326
Lippmann concluded that at Geneva ?we shall see discussed three Asian pacts: one 
from the communists modeled on Molotov?s pact for Europe, our own proposed pact, 
and a third Asian pact.?
62
  Clearly, the third approach was one for which Lippmann 
held out the most hope.  But his optimistic expectations that the adoption of such a 
plan might draw India further toward the Western Alliance went unfulfilled.
Ever since his trip to the region and meeting with Jawarhal Nehru in 1949, 
Lippmann had been convinced that India could be a powerful, keystone ally.
63
  As 
with Korea, he again pinned some of his hopes for regional stability on New Dehli?s 
ability to assert itself as a power.  Less than a month after his discussion with the 
Indian ambassador, Lippmann pressed his idea with Paul J. Sturm, a member of the 
State Department?s Office of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs.  Nehru?s India, 
the columnist told Sturm, was following a policy of neutrality between the great 
powers that closely mirrored the foreign policy of the early American republic.  ?If 
these Indian policies were expressed, as they might well be, in the language of The 
Federalist they would be more readily understood here and would find a responsive 
echo,? Sturm recorded Lippmann as telling him.  When Sturm proposed the idea to 
Senator Mike Mansfield, the Montanan immediately envisioned a ?Nehru Doctrine? 
which the American Navy?as the British did for Monroe?s Doctrine?might 
?underwrite . . . directed against expansion of Communist ?colonialism.??
64
Dulles-Allen Dulles, telephone conversation, 23 May 1955, Telephone Conversation Series, Subseries: 
General, May 2, 1955-August 31, 1955 (7), Box 4, John Foster Dulles Papers, DDEL,
62
 Ibid.  No pacts were discussed at Geneva; nor was the United States an active participant.  Rather, 
John Foster Dulles refitted the Asian pact proposal turning it into a loose military confederation 
(guaranteed and led by the U.S.) that was ratified at the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) 
in September 1954.  More on that later.
63
 Lippmann Appointment Diaries, November 1949, Series VII, Box 38, Folder 213, WLC.
64
 Paul J. Sturm, ?Situation in Indochina and Possible Defense Arrangements in Southeast Asia,? 12 
May 1954, FRUS 1952-1954 8: 1538 -1540.
327
Meanwhile the Eisenhower administration scrambled to create ?United 
Action??a coalition of British, French, U.S., and Associated States forces that might 
be inserted to restore stability in the region.  It also turned up the public rhetoric.  At a 
7 April 1954, press conference in the Old Executive Building, President Eisenhower 
affirmed the American interest in Vietnam, laying the framework for possible U.S. 
intervention.  With the region?s vital raw materials at stake and the danger of Chinese 
expansionism, Eisenhower said, the U.S. could not afford more ?losses? in Southeast 
Asia.  If Indochina should fall, all Southeast Asia would ?go over very quickly,? he 
warned in a now-famous analogy, ?like a row of dominoes,? cutting off American 
access to Asian markets and threatening the U.S. strategic position in the Far East by 
bringing Japan into the Chinese orbit.  ?So,? Eisenhower concluded, ?the possible 
consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.?
65
  To underscore 
U.S. resolve, the President sent the director of the U.S. aid program, Harold Stassen, 
before a congressional committee to submit a $3.5 billion foreign aid package?of 
which the administration had earmarked more than one-third ($1.33 billion) for 
Indochina.
66
London firmly declined joint intervention, however, and Eisenhower knew 
British reluctance would deprive him of a congressional resolution for action.  He 
gave up on the idea, telling the public that it would be a ?tragic error to go in alone as 
a partner of France,? and that the U.S. could participate only with a ?grouping of 
65
 ?The President?s News Conference,? 7 April 1954, item 73, Public Papers on the Presidents: Dwight 
D. Eisenhower (hereinafter referred to as ?PPP/DDE?).  Online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu . 
66
 See Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel, Roots of Involvement: The U.S. in Asia, 1784-1971 (New York: 
W.W. Norton and Co., 1971): 74-75.  The breakdown was as follows: $500 million in direct aid to 
anti-Communist forces; $300 million in military equipment; more than $210 million in technical 
assistance; and $21 million in economic aid.
328
interested nations.?
67
  That decision sealed the fate of the French garrison at 
Dienbienphu, which surrendered to the forces of Vietminh General Vo Nguyen Giap 
on 7 May 1954?a day before negotiations were set to commence at Geneva.
Lippmann clearly perceived that neither a dashing military victory nor any 
arbitrary line of demarcation could solve what was essentially a Vietnamese civil 
conflict.  ?The crucial difficulty,? he wrote at the start of the Geneva Conference, ?is 
that the real threat to security [in Indochina] is from internal revolution, and not, as 
our other security pacts envisage, from external armed attack.?
68
  France had failed to 
subdue the Viet Minh uprising, losing the contest to rally and unite the people behind 
the Bao Dai government as much as it had on the battlefield.  The disastrous defeat at 
Dienbienphu obscured the central problem of the conflict: the battle for Indochina 
was principally political not military, certainly not in any conventional sense, 
Lippmann wrote.  Any settlement, he explained, ?will have to be done on terms and 
for objectives that command popular support among the newly emancipated nations 
on the Asian mainland.  That kind of support cannot be bought.  It cannot be 
compelled.  It cannot be had by brandishing atomic bombs.  It cannot be had by 
emphasizing military measures to the exclusion of all others,? he continued.  ?It can 
only be had only by winning [Indochinese] confidence that we understand and respect 
and support their vital interests?not merely our own.?
69
Rather than playing a constructive role at Geneva, as Lippmann had hoped, 
the U.S. participated only in an observer?s capacity, principally so that Dulles and 
67
 ?The President?s News Conference,? 5 May 1954, item 101, PPP/DDE.  Online at 
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu . See also, Herring, America?s Longest War: 37.
68
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Crucial Problem in Southeast Asia,? 13 May 1954.
329
Eisenhower could disassociate themselves from any compromise with the Communist 
powers.
70
 The Geneva Accords, approved on 21 July 1954 brought into existence the 
two entities of North Vietnam and South Vietnam.  The accords stipulated French 
withdrawal, divided the country along the 17
th
 Parallel, deemed that the division was 
temporary (not to be ?interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary?), 
and set national elections for 1956, supervised by an international commission, that 
would lead to reunification.  Though the American delegation, led by Walter Bedell 
Smith, refused to ratify the agreements, the Eisenhower administration did not find 
the Geneva Accords entirely unpalatable.  The partition allowed American officials to 
consolidate military forces, building South Vietnam as a bulwark against further 
Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.  The French also were removed from the 
equation, freeing Eisenhower and Dulles to allocate and direct U.S. resources without 
interference from Paris.  
Nevertheless, policymakers viewed the overall situation with apprehension.  
The expansion of America?s role was ratified in the 20 August 1954 NSC-5429/2 
policy paper.  In South Vietnam particularly, officials believed, ?the U.S. must 
protect its position and restore its prestige in the Far East by a new initiative . . . the 
situation must be stabilized as soon as possible to prevent further loss to Communism 
through (1) creeping expansion and subversion, or (2) overt aggression.?
71
Policymakers sought to provide military aid to Saigon to train and equip an 
indigenous army; to extend economic aid directly to the administration?s hand-picked 
69
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Reappraisal in Southeast Asia,? 11 May 1954; ?The Crucial Problem in Southeast 
Asia,? 13 May 1954.
70
 Herring, America?s Longest War: 38-41.
330
client government of Ngo Dinh Diem?further reducing French influence; and to 
support Diem politically while enticing him to reform his government along 
democratic lines.
72
Dulles, who studiously avoided most of the negotiations at Geneva?he left 
shortly after the convocation?and was wrankled by the drift of the meeting, arranged 
for a Far Eastern security pact.  On 8 September 1954, at a conference in Manila, the 
U.S., Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan 
signed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) agreements.  The pact was a 
collective defense engagement which called for consultation and united action by all 
the signatories.  Though it excluded from its consideration such potential hot spots as 
Hong Kong and Taiwan, a special addendum to the treaty guaranteed protection to 
Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam under the condition of invitation or consent.
73
  Now 
America was tied to the Saigon regime?diplomatically, as well as militarily and 
economically?fully displacing France as its primary guardian.
While siding with Eisenhower?s decision not to commit U.S. ground forces in 
Vietnam, Lippmann nevertheless held deep doubts about the political commitments 
Washington accepted in supporting the Diem regime and arranging the SEATO 
regional security pact.  Toward the end of 1954, he wrote several reflective columns 
in which he questioned the major premises underlying U.S. policy in partitioned 
Vietnam.  Though Lippmann had approved of the administration?s decision not to 
intervene unilaterally at Dienbienphu, he understood that developments over the 
71
 ?Statement of Policy by the National Security Council: Review of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Far 
East,? 20 August 1954, FRUS 1952-1954 12: 771-774.
72
 Ibid.  See also Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War: 52-53; Herring, America?s Longest War: 40-
41. 
331
summer had nevertheless exponentially increased the American commitment in 
Southeast Asia.  Lippmann rejected the premise underlying Eisenhower?s ?domino 
theory??insisting instead that the U.S. should put its resources only into viable 
countries such as India, Japan, and the Philippines.  He called this the ?key country 
approach?:
It stands in contrast with what might be called the policy of plugging the 
holes in the dam of containment.  The policy of the key country approach 
is to build strength upon strength, to make more prosperous, more 
powerful and more influential the key countries which are already on the 
way to power and to influence.
This is in the realm of high policy a sound conception: not to think of 
ourselves as engaged primarily in building, plugging, and holding a dam 
of small states around the periphery of the Communist world?but to 
think of ourselves as one among several centers of free power and 
influence in all the vast regions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and South 
America, that are not in the Communist world.
74
Further, Lippmann held out little hope that Western-backed authoritarians 
could ever create a stable government in Saigon.  Central to this conviction was his 
understanding that the conflict in Indochina was a civil war in which Saigon?s control 
was ?infiltrated and subverted from village to village by native Indo-Chinese 
revolutionists.?
75
  He resolved himself to the probability that Ho Chi Minh?s Hanoi 
regime would supplant Diem and reunite the country either at the ballot box or by 
renewed subversion.  However, he did not consider such a development a ?loss? for 
Western interests in Southeast Asia.  As early as 22 April 1954, Lippmann told 
readers that ?we could ask for nothing more and hope for nothing better than that the 
73
 Herring, America?s Longest War: 39-42; Robert Ferrell, American Diplomacy: The Twentieth 
Century (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988): 344-352.
74
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Key Countries,? 13 December 1954.
75
 Ibid.
332
people of Indo-China should be . . . liberated from the old colonialism and 
independent of the new satellitism.?
76
  By December 1954, Lippmann was even more 
amenable to the idea that a Vietnam, reunited and governed by Hanoi, could chart a 
neutral course in the Cold War.  ?We are much too ready to see the issue in terms of 
black and white: either the country will become a [Chinese or Soviet] satellite or it 
must be, like South Korea under Dr. Rhee and Formosa under Chiang, irreconcilable 
and militant,? he wrote.  ?A large portion of humanity is neither black nor white but 
gray, unwilling and unable to let the issue be drawn too sharply . . . The non-
Communist world would be doing very well indeed, better than it has had much 
reason to believe it would do, if the outcome in Indo-China is a government which 
manages not to become a satellite of Peking.?
77
Since the primary threat in Indochina was from internal subversion rather than 
external attack, Lippmann criticized Dulles?s construction of the SEATO pact.  
Unlike NATO or the U.N. Charter, SEATO marked a ?new venture.?  The agreement 
did not organize collective power to meet Communist aggression, but committed the 
U.S. to shoulder the burden of intervention.  It improperly conceived of that 
aggression in conventional terms that were not applicable to guerilla warfare.  ?In the 
Manila treaty we have acquired an undefined right and an implied obligation to 
intervene under certain conditions in Southeast Asia,? Lippmann warned.  ?What we 
have to fear in these weak countries is, as in Viet-Nam, the outbreak of a civil war in 
which the great powers participate at second hand.  We must avoid being caught in 
76
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Negotiation and Surrender,? 22 April 1954.
77
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Containment and Revolution,? 21 December 1954.
333
such an entangling affair without at least strong moral support both from Western 
Europe and from free Asia.?
78
On 3 May 1955 Lippmann hammered the State Department, arguing that 
Dulles and his lieutenants had failed to adjust their diplomacy to the ?inexorable 
logic? that the development of Soviet nuclear capabilities had pushed non-atomic 
powers into increasingly neutralist foreign policies.  ?Our policy, which is to expect 
every anti-Communist or non-Communist nation to line up with us in a posture of 
defiance, is incompatible with the realities of nuclear weapons,? Lippmann wrote.  ?It 
has become a diplomacy of Colonel Blimp and it is in trouble all around the great 
circle from Japan to Germany.?
79
  This column, in combination with a string of others 
in 1955, prompted John Foster Dulles to despair to his brother, CIA chief Allen 
Dulles, about his rough treatment at Lippmann?s hands.  Why, the Secretary asked, 
had Lippmann been ?so extremely antagonistic??  Allen Dulles, who was Lippmann?s 
primary contact in the Eisenhower administration until the attacks on Foster 
eventually cooled their relationship, consoled the secretary of state.  Lippmann?s 
criticisms weren?t important, he told his brother, and besides ?people don?t follow? 
his columns anyway.
80
  That didn?t stop them from coming, however.
81
78
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Manila Treaty,? 14 September 1954.
79
 Lippmann, T&T, 3 May 1955, ?The Diplomacy of Col. Blimp.?
80
 See John Foster Dulles-Allen Dulles, telephone conversation, 23 May 1955, Telephone Conversation 
Series, Subseries: General, May 2, 1955-August 31, 1955 (7), Box 4, John Foster Dulles Papers, 
DDEL.
81
 In 1957, for example, Lippmann inveighed against Dulles? hard-line diplomacy on the international 
stage against the backdrop of events in Little Rock, Arkansas.  ?Mr. Dulles is in action a tough and 
realistic operator in the realm of expediency,? Lippmann observed.  ?But in speech he is a moralizer, 
the invariable and confident exponent of all that is righteous. His great handicap, which might be 
removed by a searching of the soul, is that he lays down the moral law without humor or humility, as 
one of the righteous speaking down to the unrighteous.  This lack of the grace of humility does not 
make for affection or understanding, or even for charity, as when in Little Rock we, like other nations, 
fall far short of our professed ideals.?  Lippmann, T&T, 24 September 1957, ?The Grace of Humility.?  
334
Lippmann?s reservations, in the final analysis, flowed from his perception that 
the Eisenhower-Dulles policy of massive retaliation produced military stalemates but 
not diplomatic solutions to a growing series of armed standoffs at crisis points around 
the globe.  The policies of containment and liberation (rollback) broke down, 
Lippmann reminded readers, ?when they were militarized, when the attempt was 
made to translate [them] into military projects, when they ceased to be backed by a 
flexible and resourceful diplomacy.?
82
  The administration?s handling of Indochina 
revealed the logic of massive retaliation which, in the final analysis, portended no 
great change from the diplomatic intransigence of the Truman administration.  The 
tenets were clear: 1) hold the line against Communist advances; 2) avoid direct 
military intervention while supplying, arming and training native armies to carry the 
bulk of the ground fighting; and, 3) use the threat of nuclear war to intimidate and 
dissuade Beijing from expanding the war in Indochina.
83
In May 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem?backed to the hilt by Washington?won a 
power struggle with the French-backed Prince Bau Loa consolidating his power in the 
South.  On 23 October, Diem deposed Bao Dai and, three days later, announced the 
formation of the Republic of Vietnam, proclaiming himself its first president.  As 
Americans filled the power vacuum by strengthening the South Vietnamese 
government with military and economic aid, there was a sense that Washington was 
embarking on an enterprise, the end of which it could not see.  ?There is more 
bewilderment than anything else here in Washington about the developments in 
Vietnam,? Lippmann wrote Henri Bonnet, who had just resigned as French 
82
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Time of Reappraisal,? 31 August 1954.
335
ambassador to the U.S.  ?Our two governments do not seem to see eye to eye, perhaps 
because neither of them really sees clearly what can be done.  But then I have long 
been a pessimist about Vietnam.?
84
IV.
The themes about U.S. policy in Asia that Lippmann employed in Eisenhower?s final 
years carried over into the Kennedy administration.  As the columnist viewed it, the 
Eisenhower administration had over-extended American commitments in Asia by 
assembling a regional alliance of client states along the periphery of China.  In early 
1961, at two meetings with President John F. Kennedy, Lippmann argued that the 
U.S. was over-committed in Southeast Asia and that the new U.S. leader must 
perform the unpopular but necessary task of retrenching those commitments.  Both 
the president and columnist?contrary to the position of senior officials at the State 
Department, Pentagon, and White House, as well as other prominent voices?favored 
the creation of a coalition government in Laos, administered by an International 
Control Commission (ICC), similar to the one created under the 1954 Geneva 
Accords for Indochina.  Lippmann, however, wanted to go a step further by using the 
eventual Laotian agreement in the summer of 1962 as a model for all of Southeast 
Asia, specifically South Vietnam.  Instead, Kennedy and his advisors chose to move 
down the military track in support of their Saigon clients.  This difference was 
amplified by the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam and also by the relative 
83
 See Divine?s summary of the use of massive retaliation in Indochina in Eisenhower and the Cold 
War: 51.
84
 Walter Lippmann to Henri Bonnet, 2 May 1955, Box 57, Folder 254, Series III, WLC.
336
abatement of Cold War tensions elsewhere.  With the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 
Kennedy and Khrushchev seemed to have found a new spirit of superpower 
cooperation.  As the successive layers of Soviet-American conflicts were peeled 
away?Congo, Berlin, then Cuba?Vietnam emerged as the administration?s top 
foreign affairs priority.  The earlier crises obscured just how wide a gap existed 
between Lippmann and the administration on policy in South Vietnam.  The divide 
rapidly became evident.  By the late-summer of 1963, Lippmann sided with French 
leader Charles de Gaulle?s plan for ?neutralization? of the region?a position that 
eventually drove him further from the administration.
85
While he supported the policy of containing Chinese expansion he believed it 
could not be accomplished by placing U.S. military power against China?s borders.  
Rather, Lippmann believed that policymakers should focus on cooperating with key 
countries such as India, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, and Japan.  As the Sino-Soviet 
split widened he wrote that the U.S. could counterbalance Chinese influence in 
Southeast Asia by cooperating with Moscow.  Lippmann called for a neutralization of 
both Laos and Vietnam, citing coinciding Soviet-American interests in detaching 
Indo-China from the Cold War conflict and checking Chinese expansion. In advising 
the Kennedy administration to eschew Eisenhower?s summitry, Lippmann exhorted 
U.S. officials instead to pursue ?quiet diplomacy and to stay away from spectacular 
actions,? utilizing a network of diplomats in the alliance, the U.N., and the unaligned 
85
 For recent literature on Kennedy and Laos, see Kaiser, American Tragedy: 36-57; 127-149; Logevall, 
Choosing War: 23-25; 214-216; Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2003): 350-353.  Laos remains a largely unexplored area in the 
new international diplomatic history field.  Older interpretations include: Timothy Castle, At War in 
the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955-1975 (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 1993); Arthur Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization
(New York: Praeger, 1971).
337
world to probe Moscow and Beijing for areas of potential compromise.  Such 
statesmanship was crucial to keeping ?the critical questions?Laos, the Congo, 
Algeria, Cuba?from reaching the point of irreparable decision.?  Lippmann also held 
a special expectation that Kennedy would be the public educator that his predecessor 
was not.  ?In a democratic society,? he told readers, ?quiet diplomacy is possible and 
can be fruitful only if at the same time there is an increase of communication between 
the Chief Executive and the public.?
86
Laos was the most significant crisis that the Eisenhower administration passed 
on to the Kennedy administration.  Since the late-1950s, a string of U.S.-backed anti-
Communist regimes controlled by right-wing general Phoumi Nosavan, had fought an 
unsuccessful civil war against the Pathet Lao communists.  Laos was inhospitable to 
American military power?landlocked and largely inaccessible.  But by the logic of 
the Cold War Washington determined this tiny country of two million persons to be a 
vital strategic outpost.  In addition to its long eastern border with North and South 
Vietnam, Laos shared a substantial northern frontier with China.  American officials 
deemed Laotian independence from Beijing?s influence to be high on their list of 
priorities?for they believed that a free, neutral government in the capital city of 
Vientiane was vital to preserving the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.  
86
 See Lippmann, T&T, ?Quiet Diplomacy,? 10 January 1961; ?Rusk on Quite Diplomacy,? 26 January 
1961; and, Lippmann, T&T, ?The President?s Adventure,? 7 August 1959.  Lippmann believed that the 
problems created by Dulles?s sharply ideological diplomacy were compounded by Eisenhower?s 
leadership style.  Whether or not, in fact, Eisenhower was disengaged from policymaking, or if he 
dominated the creation and implementation of policy, the idea Lippmann and others believed, and 
conveyed to the public, was that of a ?hands-off? executive. Eisenhower?s 1955 heart attack, and his 
subsequent poor health, contributed to the image of a president no longer commanding the levers and 
controls of his government.  Thus, Lippmann observed late in the general?s presidency, that 
?Eisenhower has been quiescent, as it were submerged . . . throttled down by diffidence, by a lack of 
confidence in his own political know-how, by his illnesses with their aftermath in a kind of self-
regulated invalidism, and by the authority of his advisers.?
338
More than Soviet or Chinese aid?and perhaps even Phoumi?s battlefield mistakes?
Hanoi?s support spurred a string of Pathet Lao victories.
87
An August 1960 coup produced a tenuous power-sharing arrangement 
between Centrist Prince Souvanna Phouma and the military strongman, Phoumi.  But 
the general reneged and threw Souvanna out of power in September, establishing a 
new regime and martial law with Prince Boun Oum.  Pro-neutralist forces in the 
Royal Laotian Army (RLA) took up arms with the Pathet Lao?a military reversal 
that threatened Phoumi?s remaining forces anew.
88
 During briefings on foreign 
policy in January 1961, Eisenhower warned Kennedy that if Phoumi?s government 
appealed to SEATO for military assistance (ostensibly to fight an externally-backed 
insurgency), that the U.S. would have to send in troops?even if this meant a 
unilateral intervention without Western Alliance sanction.
89
  In the first months of the 
new administration, the situation in Laos neared crisis proportions.  The Pathet Lao 
and North Vietnamese troops secured a vital route for Hanoi to funnel supplies into 
South Vietnam.  By April 1961, under a buildup that began with Eisenhower, more 
than 300 U.S. military advisors were in Laos and the Boun Oum regime was 
receiving air support, military supplies, and $32 million in economic assistance.  With 
Moscow matching American aid in early 1961, the Pathet Lao swept clear the Plain 
87
 On developments in Laos during the late 1950s, see Smith, An International History of the Vietnam 
War, Volume 1: Revolution Versus Containment, 1955-61: 72-82; 254-56.  Smith also discusses in 
these pages the growing tensions between Beijing and Moscow as they vied for influence in Laos.
88
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy?s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2000): 296.
89
Lawrence Bassett and Stephen Pelz, ?The Failed Search for Victory: Vietnam and the Politics of 
War,? in Thomas Paterson, ed., Kennedy?s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 228-231; Kaiser, American Tragedy: 31-33.
339
of Jarres in the eastern half of the country by the time of the Kennedy-Khrushchev 
meeting at Vienna in June.
90
Laos became Lippmann?s prime example of a place where the superpowers 
could find it mutually beneficial to reach a diplomatic compromise.  As early as 
August 1959?on the eve of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev?s visit to the U.S.?
Lippmann wrote that Moscow was the ?passenger? rather than the ?driver? in Laos; 
that, in effect, Beijing and Hanoi, were primarily responsible for instigating and 
supplying the Pathet Lao.  The columnist believed that the Soviets and Americans 
could find common ground in preserving the former French Indochinese colony from 
Chinese domination.  While Lippmann did not expect a pact or joint declaration 
between the superpower leaders, he did believed they could tacitly recognize their 
?common interest in containing the expansionist aggression of revolutionary 
China.?
91
  Eisenhower and Khrushchev never reached such an unspoken accord, 
especially after the U-2 spy plane incident poisoned relations in 1960?canceling 
Eisenhower?s reciprocal visit to Moscow. 
During the U.S. presidential transition period late in the year, Lippmann 
worried that Laos could quickly become a flash point for superpower confrontation.  
He urged the out-going Eisenhower administration to ?freeze? its Laotian policies.  
He simultaneously asked for the recall of the International Control Commission 
(represented by Canada, India, and Poland) to mediate an end to the civil war and to 
carry out the prescriptions of the 1954 Geneva Accords by forming a neutralist 
90
 Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1990 (New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 
1991): 220-221, 231-232; James S. Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and 
Vietnam, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin?s Press, 1991): 68-70.
91
 Lippmann, T&T, ?From Cuba to Laos,? 18 August 1959; ?High Politics,? 1 September 1959.
340
government.  American planners, he added, should consult the British and French, 
both of whom had more experience in Southeast Asia.  Most importantly, Laos did 
not constitute a ?primary interest? for Washington, Lippmann wrote.  ?For we are not 
the arbiters of human destiny in every corner of the globe.?
92
  On 10 January 1961?
echoing some of the apprehension that Secretary of State Christian Herter expressed 
in meetings with Kennedy?Lippmann concluded that the Laotian crisis was 
?insoluble? if U.S. planners pursued a military intervention.  ?There is no conceivable 
way in which Laos, which has two Communist states on its frontiers, which is a 
country of trackless jungles, can be made finally secure against infiltration and 
guerilla fighting,? Lippmann wrote.  ?We cannot seal off Laos from the Communist 
states which it touches.?
93
Domestic politics merged with international events in directing Kennedy?s 
ambiguous middle-course policies in Southeast Asia.  His thin margin of victory in 
the 1960 election made the administration vulnerable to critics who might brand it 
with ?losing? Indochina, in much the same manner that Congressional Republicans 
tarred the Truman administration with ?losing? China.  Kennedy was keenly aware 
that the conservative press would castigate him for any sign of acquiescence to 
Communist power in Southeast Asia?and, at one point, he feared that Eisenhower 
would publicly challenge his handling of the Laotian negotiations.
94
  Washington 
92
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Stop, Look and Listen,? 29 December 1960.
93
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Quiet Diplomacy,? 10 January 1961.
94
 Kaiser, American Tragedy: 136; Eisenhower did not publicly comment on Kennedy?s policy. The 
anti-Communist milieu persisted throughout Kennedy?s presidency?within both major political 
parties?and is perhaps best distilled in Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater?s Why Not Victory? A Fresh 
Look at American Foreign Policy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).  In this book Goldwater, the 
eventual 1964 Republican presidential candidate, rejected as useless any effort to make a diplomatic 
accommodation with the Soviet Union.  While Goldwater did not explicitly advocate it, the argument 
raised the specter of a preventive nuclear war against Moscow.  
341
officials also viewed Laos within a complex and volatile international scene, and 
within the context of Nikita Khrushchev?s promise that Moscow would support ?wars 
of national liberation.?
95
  The Soviet premier warned Kennedy at Vienna that 
American meddling in these conflicts increased the chances of the ?terrible prospect 
of mutual destruction.?
96
Lippmann recognized the complex pressures for American intervention in 
Southeast Asia and, as well, Kennedy?s ambivalence.  In his column he assigned 
much of the problem to Eisenhower?s policies.  The crises in Laos and South 
Vietnam, Lippmann wrote on 29 December 1960, were caused by the breakdown of 
the ?semi-circle of American military clients? the Eisenhower administration 
supported on the Russian and Chinese periphery.  But Dulles?s framework was a 
?dying policy.?
97
  In theory it worked when America held a strategic nuclear 
monopoly in the early 1950s and, with impunity, could threaten both Moscow and 
Beijing with ?massive retaliation? as retribution for any Communist-backed 
insurgency against an independent country.  When the Soviets punctured the myth of 
American invulnerability with Sputnik in 1957, the Dulles doctrine lost much of i ts 
95
 Laos was but one of several ?brushfire wars? (in the New Frontier parlance) during 1961?the others 
being in the Congo and South Vietnam.  For a sense of how the Kennedy administration approached 
these multiple conflicts see Freedman, Kennedy?s Wars: 92-111.  For how Laos fit into the scene and 
how President Kennedy approached it, see pp. 293-305; 340-356.
96
 Quoted in Bassett and Pelz, ?The Failed Search for Victory,? 231.  All these concerns raised the 
stakes for victory in Southeast Asia.  ?It was a hell of a note,? Kennedy told Arthur Krock of The New 
York Times late that year, that he had ?to handle the Berlin situation with the Communists encouraging 
foreign aggressors all over the place . . . in Vietnam, Laos, etc.?  Co-mingled with such frustrations, 
however, was an expression of caution, with Kennedy noting that he did not believe ?United States 
troops should be involved on the Asian mainland.?  He also told The New York Times columnist that 
the domino theory was not credible in Southeast Asia, since China (once it became a nuclear power) 
would dominate the region.  He added, moreover, that the U.S. ?can?t interfere in civil disturbances 
created by guerillas, and it was hard to prove this wasn?t largely the situation in Vietnam.?  Arthur 
Krock, 11 October 1961, Memorandum of Conversation, Box 1, Krock Papers, Mudd Library, 
Princeton, NJ.  Kaiser reprints the memo at length in his account; see American Tragedy: 100-101.  A 
much more abbreviated treatment is in Bassett and Pelz, ?The Failed Search for Victory,? 229.
97
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Stop, Look and Listen,? 29 December 1960.
342
clout, Lippmann explained.  Moscow had achieved, if not numerical parity in nuclear 
warheads, then at least the technology (or perceived capability) to inflict horrible 
destruction on American cities.  It was not clear that Eisenhower or his successors 
would absorb the loss of New York or Chicago to defend Berlin, Taiwan, South 
Korea, or South Vietnam.  Aside from the gamble of threatening nuclear war to 
prevent leftist revolutions in developing countries, Lippmann wrote, Dulles?s policy 
also aligned America with ?corrupt? and ?intolerably reactionary? governments?
those authoritarian regimes that were most fervently anti-Communist.  Here, the 
columnist fixed his gaze on Asia from Chiang Kai-Shek in Tapei to Pak in Seoul, to 
Phoumi in Vientiane, to Diem in Saigon.
98
Kennedy?s antennae were attuned to this kind of advice because of its source 
but also because it confirmed his private estimates about Laos.
99
  He knew Lippmann 
could be a valuable ally in bringing public opinion around to a negotiated settlement 
in Laos.  Shortly before Lippmann left for a trip to Europe that would include a 
meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the president asked Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to invite 
the columnist for a talk.
100
  On 20 March 1961, Lippmann, Schlesinger, and the 
president discussed Laos and Berlin during lunch at the White House.  The historian 
and presidential advisor recalled years later that meeting opened with Lippmann 
making ?a great argument that we were over-committed in Southeast Asia, an 
argument with which Kennedy agreed.?
101
98
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Facts of Life,? 28 March 1961.
99
 See, for instance, Kaiser, American Tragedy: 38-39; 46.
100
 This was the first of two meetings Lippmann had with Kennedy that spring.  Mac Bundy would 
bring Lippmann back to the White House to debrief him on his meeting with Khrushchev in mid-April.
101
 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., interview with author, 12 March 2002, New York City.
343
The ensuing conversation dwelt on Laos?with Kennedy doing most of the 
talking.  Kennedy?s military advisors had laid out options that ranged from a force 
build-up in neighboring Thailand to a U.S.-led intervention with paratroopers seizing 
the Plain of Jarres.  Hours before Kennedy?s lunch with Lippmann, the president had 
received a blunt reply from the Pentagon to a White House proposal to scale-back 
planning for the use of force.  Lyman Lemintzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, briefed the president on the Pentagon?s minimum prerequisites for unilateral 
U.S. intervention in Laos: 60,000 troops, air cover, and, as a last resort, authorization 
to use nuclear weapons on Hanoi and Beijing in the event of Chinese intervention.
102
As Schlesinger recalled the lunch meeting, Kennedy seemed to formulate on the spot 
a policy ?between intervention and retreat.?
103
It is just as probable, however, that the President already knew that a middle-
course position was his only option in Laos and, moreover, that he was probing 
102
 Kaiser, American Tragedy: 43; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the 
White House (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1965): 332-333; Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey 
Schulman, eds., Robert Kennedy: In His Own Words (New York: 1988): 246-248.  Much of Kaiser?s 
narrative convincingly depicts Kennedy as taking a diplomatic line, often conflicting with his military 
and top civilian advisers.  As regards Laos, Kaiser writes, ?Kennedy continued to redefine American 
policy along diplomatic, pro-neutralist lines, in the face of a stream of hard-line proposals from State, 
Defense, the Joint Chiefs? and the NSC (p. 46).  For a more critical appraisal of Kennedy?s conduct of 
Laotian policy see Noam Kochavi, ?Limited Accommodation, Perpetuated Conflict: Laos, China, and 
the Laos Conflict, 1961-1963,? Diplomatic History 26 (No. 1/Winter 2002): 95-135.  In synthesizing 
much of the recent literature on the Laos crisis?supported by a boon of documentary releases in the 
1990s?Kochavi insists that while Kennedy?s record in Laos shows his restraint it also demonstrates 
his unswerving perception of the Chinese threat.  His policy of holding firm in South Vietnam, even 
while negotiating in Laos, was meant to demonstrate American resolve to Beijing.  In the final analysis 
this factor made him reluctant to seriously explore a full-scale settlement with the PRC in Southeast 
Asia.  ?Kennedy personified a decision maker so wedded to a zero-sum perspective and so obsessed 
with the objective of deterrence as to overlook the ?security dilemma,?? Kochavi explains.  ?Namely, 
he failed to appreciate the degree to which his deterrence policies may have acquired the nature of a 
self-fulfilling mechanism, stoking apprehensions and hostilities on the Chinese side and thus 
contributing to an escalating spiral? (130-131).  
103
 Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: 331-332.  Kennedy?s quotes in the foregoing discussion are taken 
from Schlesinger?s text.  Despite his strong sympathy with Kennedy, Schlesinger?s account is probably 
accurate in terms of his perceptions of Kennedy?s intentions in Vietnam.  The book was written and 
published by early 1965, before the U.S. had even committed to a ground war in South Vietnam.
344
Lippmann for his approval rather than making policy ad hoc.  Though the U.S. was 
?over-committed? in Southeast Asia, Kennedy told Lippmann, it must prevent ?an 
immediate Communist takeover? in Laos.  To do that it had to work, in some 
measure, with Phoumi to preserve Vientiane?s independence in order to negotiate.  
?We cannot and will not have any visible humiliation over Laos,? the president said.  
There were, however, limits to what he would countenance?and the unilateral 
intervention that Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs advocated did not seem feasible.  
Kennedy remarked about the poor geography and the uncommitted Laotian people.  
Schlesinger and Lippmann listened, offering ?little help,? as the President continued.  
?I don?t see why we have to be more royalist than the king,? Kennedy complained.  
?India is more directly threatened than we are; and, if they are not wildly excited, 
why should we be??  Laos, he ventured, might be a place where the Soviets would 
accept neutralization since the strength of indigenous Communist forces favored them 
anyhow.  Exasperated?and with a touch of resentment perhaps directed at his 
predecessor?Kennedy concluded, ?If I decide to do nothing, I could be an 
exceedingly popular president.?
104
Whether or not Kennedy?s ruminations were spontaneous, as Schlesinger 
assumed, or were contrived to explore Lippmann?s position, the effect was 
immediate.  A few days later, Lippmann presented the context of his private 
presidential meeting in Today and Tomorrow, telling readers that neutralization was 
the only viable solution to the Laotian problem.  As he did on a score of occasions for 
104
 Schlesinger?s account is the only detailed version of this meeting that is available.  Lippmann?s 
appointment diaries record only a brief mention of the meeting.  Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: 331-
332.  In fact, the do-nothing approach worked admirably to Kennedy?s advantage?as he constantly 
deferred on policy choices presented by his more hawkish advisers.
345
Kennedy and, later, Lyndon Johnson, Lippmann tried to put breathing space between 
the Democratic president and conservative Republican critics who were looking to 
make political capital out of controversial Asia policies.  Eisenhower?s ?false and 
imprudent? commitment in Laos, Lippmann wrote, had now ?boomeranged.?  The 
Kennedy administration had to steer ?between a diplomatic defeat and a meaningless 
war . . . and [Kennedy] is entitled to try without too much advice from the backseat 
drivers.?
105
  Lippmann counseled that Kennedy should begin the process of 
retrenching American military commitments in Southeast Asia.  ?Laos is a classic 
example of a great power being overextended,? he wrote on 28 March 1961, ?and the 
commitment in Laos goes back to the days when we were strong enough, or thought 
we were strong enough, to bring that remote and land-locked country into the sphere 
of American influence.?  Laos was a place that the Soviets and Americans could 
make an accommodation, Lippmann believed, because none of their vital interests 
were at stake.  More importantly, they would have ?to bow to the facts of life??that 
neither could gain a clear-cut victory in Laos and that the only alternative was a 
?passive and neutralized? government led by Prince Souvanna Phouma.  ?Because we 
cannot subdue the guerillas in the jungle, and because [Khrushchev] cannot drive us 
out of that part of the world,? he forecast, ?the future is not going to be decided by 
arms in the jungles, the swamps, and the mountains of Laos.?
106
While weighing diplomatic and military options, Kennedy conveyed in public 
the resolute message that the U.S. would not settle for a pro-Communist tilt in 
Vientiane.  Three days after his meeting with Lippmann, the president held a press 
105
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Congo and Laos,? 23 March 1961.
106
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Facts of Life,? 28 March 1961.
346
conference in which he asserted that the outcome of the Soviet-American 
confrontation in Laos would indicate ?what kind of future our world is going to 
have.?
107
  He implied a parallel in South Vietnam by interpreting the threat in Laos as 
being ?posed by the military operations of internal dissident elements directed from 
outside the country.?  He added, alluding the Laos?s eastern neighbor, ?This is what 
must end if peace is to be achieved in Southeast Asia.? The next morning the 
Washington Post ran a banner headline that declared, ?Kennedy Keys World Future 
to Laos, Vows U.S. Will Honor Its Obligations.?
108
In yet another meeting, Kennedy and Bundy prepped Lippmann on 
administration policy, particularly in Berlin and on nuclear disarmament, in advance 
of his visit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on 10 April 1961.  But when 
Lippmann spent a day with Khrushchev at his Crimean retreat neither the Soviet 
leader nor columnist devoted much of their discussion to the issue of Laos or even 
Southeast Asia in general.
109
  On the trip to the Soviet Union, Lippmann made 
stopovers in Paris and Rome, wiring brief reports to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.  In a 
memo to Kennedy, Schlesinger apprised the president on progress of ?our European 
agent.?
110
  In Paris, the columnist met with officials in the French foreign ministry to 
talk specifically about Laos and South Vietnam.  On 5 April he spent an evening with 
Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville talking about Khrushchev, Berlin, and 
Laos.  When the conversation turned to Southeast Asia, Couve complained that the 
107
 Washington Post, A1, A12, 24 March 1961.
108
 Ibid.  The Post reprinted the entire text of Kennedy?s press conference.
109
 Laos was hardly mentioned in Lippmann?s published account of the interview.  See Walter 
Lippmann, The Coming Tests with Russia (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961).
110
 Schlesinger to JFK, 3 April 1961, President?s Office Files, Staff Memoranda (A. Schlesinger), Box 
65, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA (hereinafter referred to as ?JFKL?).
347
policies Dulles and Eisenhower developed?and that were embodied in the SEATO 
charter??had never realized that if we entered a country, the Russians (communists) 
would, too.?
111
  Soon after meeting with Lippmann, Khrushchev told U.S. 
Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson that he found Lippmann to be ?a wise and 
intelligent man? whose columns he read ?regularly.?  The Soviet premier had 
authorized the publication of several Today and Tomorrow installments in the Soviet 
press, in part, ?to show not all Americans held [the] same opinions.?
112
  Interestingly, 
it was during this meeting that Khrushchev informed Lippmann of his intention to 
meet with Kennedy later in the year; White House officials apparently had not made 
the possibility of a meeting known to Lippmann prior to his visit with the Soviet 
premier.
113
The failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which occurred while Lippmann still was 
abroad, momentarily overshadowed Laos and Southeast Asia.  After returning from 
Europe?worried that Kennedy had chosen a strategy of confronting the Soviets in 
crises areas?Lippmann pressed even harder for negotiations over Laos.  In the weeks 
leading up to the Vienna Conference, Lippmann encouraged Kennedy to seek a joint 
resolution with Khrushchev on a ?neutralization? plan for all of Southeast Asia.  In 
concept this was much like the idea put forward State Department official Chester 
Bowles in the fall of 1961 and, two years after that, by French leader Charles de 
111
 Lippmann Diaries, 5 April 1961, Box 239, Folder 30, Series VII, WLC.
112
 Thompson to State Department, 24 May 1961, President?s Office Files (Countries: USSR-Vienna 
Meeting), Box 126, JFKL.  
113
 Memorandum of Conversation, President Kennedy-Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov, 16 
May 1961, FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume 5: 136.  See also the U.S. embassy?s summary of Lippmann?s 
conversation with Khrushchev: Telegram 2472, Moscow to Washington, 11 April 1961, Dept. of State, 
Central Files, RG 59, #961.6122/4-1161, National Archives and Records Administration II, College 
Park, MD (hereinafter referred to as ?NARA II?).
348
Gaulle.
114
  Specifically, he wanted to formalize the participation of the Pathet Lao in a 
coalition government.  Lippmann hoped the administration might parlay Laotian 
neutralization into a region-wide system encompassing all post-colonial Indo-China, 
including South Vietnam.  American prospects of defeating Communist insurgents in 
Laos and Vietnam were ?bleak,? he declared.  The Ngo Dinh Diem regime in Saigon 
was ?in great peril,? for though it held the major cities ?it has all but lost control of 
the countryside to the Communist guerillas . . . our man is extremely unpopular, his 
government being reactionary and corrupt.?  Lippmann conceded that perhaps the 
Diem regime, like the Buon Oum government in Vientiane, could be strengthened 
through reforms.  But the emphasis here was on political change not military 
reinforcement.  Neither government could be ?salvaged by dropping in our 
paratroopers and expecting them to win a guerilla war,? the columnist wrote.
115
  In 
negotiating with the Soviet premier at Vienna and through diplomatic back-channels 
with Beijing, the President ?must try to induce the Soviet Union and Red China to 
settle for a ?neutralization,? that is to say an agreement by the great powers not to 
fight the cold war by proxy inside Laos.?  Cooperation in Laos might be the catalyst 
for a ?regional system of independence and security and neutrality for the old colonial 
lands of South Asia.?
116
In these columns during the spring of 1961, Lippmann advised this broad 
policy of neutralism to detach developing countries from the Cold War conflict.  He 
reminded policymakers that the end goal of American foreign policy in Asia should 
114
 On Bowles, see Kaiser, American Tragedy: 95-96; on De Gaulle, see Logevall, Choosing War: 103-
105; 112-113.
115
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Reappraisal,? 4 May 1961.
116
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Fragments of an Empire, 16 May 1961.
349
not be to create governments with internal politics that mirrored their own.  Rather, it 
should be to encourage popularly-supported Southeast Asian governments to pursue 
foreign policies compatible with American interests in Southeast Asia?which meant, 
generally, that they did not align themselves too closely with Beijing or Moscow.  
Though he agreed that the U.S. should contain Chinese expansion, he wrote 
repeatedly that it could do so only in cooperation with the other Asian great powers 
that shared this objective: India, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union.  He articulated a 
primitive policy of Southeast Asia triangularization?much as he had in 1949 and 
1950?that balanced off Soviet, American, and Chinese influence.
Joe Alsop?s pro-intervention columns placed pressure on Kennedy to 
militarize the American commitment in Laos.  In March 1961, Alsop wrote several 
columns darkly forecasting ?the increasing possibility that traditional diplomacy will 
not produce the desired minimum result in Laos.?
117
  For Alsop the minimal 
acceptable outcome appeared to be a pro-West government in Vientiane that would 
transform the country into a bastion of American power.  Anything short of that 
would, in his words, be ?a disguised but decisive surrender in Laos.?
118
  Alsop visited 
Indochina in late-March sensing that a showdown loomed.  He explained to readers in 
a familiar Alsopian rendition of the ?domino theory,? that a ?disastrous chain 
reaction? was certain to follow a Communist takeover in Laos.  ?If Laos falls under 
effective Communist control, South Viet-Nam will be automatically doomed,? he 
wrote in a column filed from Bangkok.  ?Cambodia?s capricious but genuine 
neutrality will turn into something very different.  Thailand?s present Western 
117
 Joseph Alsop, ?Behind the Public Face,? Matter of Fact, 22 March 1961, Washington Post: A15.
118
 Ibid.
350
orientation will be all but impossible to maintain.  And if these things happen, the 
process will not end in the countries that border Laos.?
119
When President Kennedy maneuvered American naval forces into the region, 
and deployed a small contingent of troops in Thailand, Alsop enthused that it was ?as 
a textbook illustration of the rule that guts are needed for successful dealings with the 
Kremlin.?
120
  Yet, by late-May, when the Laotian Communists continued to attack the 
RLA forces and it seemed that Khrushchev had been slow to implement earlier cease-
fire agreements, Alsop lambasted the Kennedy administration.  From the Geneva 
conference he filed a column critical of the U.S. decision to support the creation of 
another International Control Commission (ICC) to police Laos.  The original ICC for 
Indochina, created under the 1954 Geneva Accords, had in Alsop?s estimate been 
grossly ineffective.  Composed of Indian, Canadian, and Polish observers, the 
commission he wrote, ?produced no result anytime except by its occasional spasms of 
pro-Communist bias.?
121
  Western policy suffered from its Alice-in-Wonderland 
quality.  In seeking a diplomatic settlement over a policy of ?real firmness,? Alsop 
told readers, American and French negotiators had adopted the ?method of the White 
Queen, who boasted that she had trained herself to believe as many as ?six impossible 
things before breakfast.??
122
  President Kennedy, after reading several of Alsop?s 
dispatches, privately told Schlesinger and Mac Bundy, ?I agree much more with 
Walter than I do with Joe on this.?  With characteristic caution?worrying that this 
119
 Joseph Alsop, ?No Summer Lightning,? Matter of Fact, 29 March 1961, Washington Post: A15.
120
 Ibid.  
121
 Joseph Alsop, ?The Hollow Conference,? Matter of Fact, 22 May 1961, Washington Post: A17.
122
 Ibid.
351
comment would be repeated to Alsop in a social setting?the president added, ?But 
don?t let Joe know that!?
123
Though Kennedy considered military options, eventually authorizing 
increased naval operations off the coast of Vietnam and putting a small force of U.S. 
troops into Thailand, he settled on the middle-course policy which he had outlined for 
Lippmann in March 1961.  The neutralist option had articulate?if not especially 
powerful?advocates in the U.S. government: Ambassador-at-Large W. Averell 
Harriman, Senator Mike Mansfield, and the U.S. Ambassador to Laos, Winthrop 
Brown.
124
  More significantly, Kennedy came to believe that American and Soviet 
interests coincided in Laos.  Neutralization would prevent the U.S. and U.S.S.R. from 
engaging in an expensive, dangerous proxy war.  As Washington was only beginning 
to belatedly realize, Moscow was eager to neutralize Chinese influence.
125
  Most 
importantly, Kennedy seemed inclined toward a diplomatic solution in Laos from the 
beginning.
126
123
 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., interview with author, 12 March 2002, New York City.  Schlesinger pulled 
this quote and his recollections of the meeting from his unpublished personal diaries.
124
 This is based on Kaiser?s interpretation in American Tragedy.  See, for example, 40-41 (Brown); 86-
90 (on Harriman); 177-180 (on Mansfield).
125
 Kochavi, ?Limited Accommodation, Perpetuated Conflict?: 95-135.
126
 ?The President?s News Conference of 25 January 1961,? Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. 
Kennedy, 1961 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1962): 16 (hereinafter referred to as 
PPP/JFK).  Though he never ruled out the military option, he repeatedly stated his desire throughout 
the first half of 1961 to reach a negotiated settlement.  Days after his Inaugural, in his first news 
conference as president, Kennedy defined the American goal in Laos as creating ?an independent 
country not dominated by either side but concerned with the life of the people within the country . . . 
[an] independent country, peaceful country, uncommitted country.?  Twice in March 1961, as the 
military situation deteriorated the president made similar statements.  Even when he held out the 
possibility of American military intervention, he coupled the suggestion with strong overtures for 
diplomacy.  On 23 March 1961, days after his private meeting with Lippmann, Kennedy opened a 
press conference with a lengthy statement outlining the origins of the struggle in Laos.  He expressed 
determination but also a desire to negotiate:  My fellow Americans, Laos is far away from America, 
but the world is small . . . The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral 
independence.  Its own safety runs with the safety of us 
all? in real neutrality observed by all. I want to make it clear to the American people and to all of the 
world that all we want in Laos is peace, not war; a truly neutral government, not a cold war pawn; a 
352
On 24 May 1961, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy met Lippmann 
to discuss the upcoming Vienna Conference and, two days later, Kennedy and Bundy 
brought Lippmann into the White House for still another briefing.
127
  Apparently, 
however, the meeting was not solely designed to get Lippmann?s advice on
negotiating with Khrushchev.  The president also wanted to insure that Lippmann 
would continue to be a public ally in advance of a Laotian settlement with the Soviet 
premier.  The conversation touched on Berlin and negotiations in Laos, with Kennedy 
repeating to Lippmann his desire to install a coalition government in Vientiane.  
Afterward Bundy met alone with Lippmann to cover the details on what would be 
offered at Vienna.  He later wrote to Kennedy, ?You made a strong point with 
Lippmann that a neutral administration [in Laos] can in fact be helpful to both sides 
when their vital interests are not involved and what is needed for both is an objective 
reassurance on the real situation?both Laos and the test ban meet this standard, in 
our view.?
128
  Kennedy alluded publicly to Laos as a test case for superpower 
cooperation on other issues such as the nuclear test ban treaty and Berlin in a 2 June 
1961 press conference in Paris.  The President stressed that he would try to reach a 
common understanding with Khrushchev on what a ?neutral and independent? Laos 
meant and that the U.S. would not withdraw from the Geneva negotiations.  ?I cannot 
believe that anyone would imperil the peace by failing to recognize the importance of 
reaching an agreement in this country,? Kennedy added, ?by breaking up a 
settlement concluded at the conference table and not on the battlefield.  ?The President?s News 
Conference of 23 March 1961,? PPP/JFK (1961): 213-220.  See also Kennedy?s news conference of 8 
March 1961, p. 154.
127
 See Lippmann?s appointment diaries, 24-26 May 1961, Box 239, Folder 30, Series VII, WLC.
128
 ?Talking Points: President?s Trip, Europe 5/61-6/61, Khrushchev Briefing Book Vol. 1, Box 234, 
Trips and Conferences, National Security Files, JFKL.
353
conference and refusing to agree to a cease-fire and a government and a people which 
can maintain their neutrality against outside intervention from whatever the 
source.?
129
At the Vienna Summit in June 1961, Laos offered the only common ground 
Kennedy and Khrushchev shared.  A tersely worded communiqu? explained that the 
President and Chairman ?reaffirmed their support of a neutral and independent Laos 
under a government chosen by the Laotians themselves, and of international 
agreements for insuring that neutrality and independence, and in this connection they 
have recognized the importance of an effective cease-fire.?
130
  The two leaders agreed 
to have Britain, the U.S., and Russia reconvene members the 1954 Geneva 
Agreements.  Even on this point, however, Kennedy expressed dissatisfaction with 
Khrushchev?s ambiguous pledge of cooperation.  A month later in a meeting with 
Pakistani President Khan Ayub the president remarked, ?On Laos, Khrushchev had 
said the right words about neutrality? but Kennedy ?had come away unclear as to 
what meaning he attached to them.?
131
Lippmann continued to work on behalf of administration policy in Laos by 
presenting the coalition government arrangement as the only available option.  For 
months, he had written about it in his column, but on 15 June 1961 he made the 
argument before a national television audience.  During an hour-long, prime time 
CBS interview, Lippmann discounted the ?domino theory? as it applied in Laos and 
129
 ?Remarks and Question and Answer Period at the Press Luncheon in Paris,? 2 June 1961, PPP/JFK  
(1961): 433-434.
130
 ?Joint Statement Following Discussions with Premier Khrushchev in Vienna,? 4 June 1961, 
PPP/JFK  (1961): 438.
131
 Memorandum of Conversation, President Kennedy-Pakistani President Ayub, 11 July 1961, 
Washington, DC, FRUS, 23 (South Asia): 66-67.
354
the rest of Southeast Asia.  ?I don?t consider Laos ?gone,?? Lippmann told interviewer 
Howard K. Smith.  He expected cooperation on the Laotian crisis between Moscow 
and Washington because Southeast Asia did not represent a ?primary interest? for 
either superpower?echoing his late-May meeting with Kennedy.  ?Laos is not going 
to be what we rather foolishly, I think, two or three years ago tried to make it?an 
American satellite,? he concluded.  ?I mean, putting in a government that suited us 
and?that is not possible.?
132
Other matters, principally the developing crisis in Berlin, soon reoriented the 
administration?s attention away from Laos for the duration of 1961 and into the 
spring of 1962.  During that time, however, American diplomats worked to encourage 
Phoumi and Boun Oum to accept Souvanna as the prime minister of a coalition 
government.  Under intense pressure from Averell Harriman and the U.S. embassy, 
Phoumi relented in March 1962, agreeing to support Souvanna ? in principle.?  He 
refused, however, to support the make-up of the neutralist cabinet.
133
Phoumi?s most ardent American supporter, the columnist Joseph Alsop, 
criticized American policy, which, he believed, served French interests in Southeast 
Asia.  Averell Harriman had an ?acrimonious? talk with the columnist about Laos in 
February 1962.  Alsop wanted the administration to pursue a hard line by supporting 
Phoumi.  He was wary that the neutralist forces in Vientiane were aligned with 
French diplomats.  Harriman later recalled, ?I tried to din into his mind that there was 
no choice except to attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement in which Souvanna 
Phouma would be the dominant factor of the coalition government, or to put in 
132
 Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1965): 68-69.
133
 Kaiser, American Tragedy: 129-130.
355
American troops with or without SEATO, that if he criticized the administration?s 
policies, he should come out for American intervention.?  Alsop?s prejudices, 
however, got the better of his judgment.  For years he had viewed the French 
initiatives in Indochina to be disruptive and self-serving.  He once wrote that French 
diplomacy was ?gravely influenced by the emotion of the dog in the manger, who 
cannot bear for others to wield the influence he no longer possesses himself.?  De 
Gaulle and his lieutenants planned ?to use Laos as a lever? to promote the General?s 
idea of a French-American ?directorate??presumably in which Paris would help 
administer Indochina with the guarantee of American military force.
134
 ?[Alsop] loves 
Phoumi and hates the French, from [Foreign Minister] Couve [de Murville] on 
down,? Harriman wrote in 1962.  ?He sees no reason why we can?t make an 
American political and military bastion of Laos.  He doesn?t admit that a Lao could 
be anti-Communist and neutral, and still against his conception of US domination of 
Laos.?
135
Lippmann chose to place the Laotian problem into a larger perspective than 
Alsop.  Soviet-American cooperation developed, in part, because of a common 
interest to block Chinese expansion.  As the Pathet Lao continued to pile up victories, 
Beijing took the initiative to build roads to the northern Laotian border for use by its 
own military.
136
  Moscow increased the tempo of its aid to Ho Chi Minh and the 
Pathet Lao in order to off-set Beijing.  Gradually, the deterioration of Sino-Soviet 
relations during this period also became more visible to American policymakers and 
134
 Joseph Alsop, ?Leadership Regained,? Matter of Fact, 31 March 1961, Washington Post: A15.
135
 Memorandum of Conversation with Joseph Alsop, 15 February 1962, Box 586, Harriman Papers, 
LC.
136
 LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1991: 220.
356
observers like Lippmann.  In the spring of 1962, Lippmann suggested that the Soviets 
had aided the North Vietnamese to keep Hanoi out of Chinese hands and ?not so 
much as to precipitate a conflict with the United States in Laos and South Viet-Nam.?  
He was less sanguine about prospects for negotiating with Beijing: ?it is useless to 
woo Peiping or to threaten it . . . The right policy is to contain Red China to prevent it 
from expanding and to avoid provoking it.?  
Lippmann pointed out that there already existed an alignment of Asian powers 
favorable to achieving that goal?and capable of exerting enough pressure so that the 
U.S. would not have to intervene unilaterally.  According to Lippmann?s logic, 
Moscow was exerting pressure on Mao Zedong to ensure that he did not precipitate a 
war in Indochina and, also, preserving its own interests.  ?[The Soviets] seem to be 
using such influence as they have, which is not omnipotent, to further the 
neutralization of Laos, and eventually all the southern borderlands facing Red China,? 
Lippmann wrote.  ?So it may not be going too far to say that under the pressure of 
Chinese expansionary actions?in the north against the Soviet Union, against India to 
the south, and against Southeast Asia?there is coming into being a de facto coalition 
to contain the expansion.?
137
The fragile situation in Laos again threatened to erupt into full-scale conflict 
when the Pathet Lao overwhelmed Phoumi?s northern outpost at Nam Tha on 6 May 
1962.  Administration officials contemplated plans to send 40,000 troops to occupy 
the Mekong Delta along the southeastern Laotian border.
138
  President Kennedy, 
however, remained inclined to resolving the crisis at the negotiating table.  During a 
137
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Peiping and Moscow,? 10 April 1962; ?Change to the East,? 29 May 1962.
138
FRUS, 1961-1963, XXIV: 377-379; 381-384.
357
17 May press conference he said, ?The great hazard is of a shooting war in Asia?in 
the jungles of Asia?and it is our object to bring about a diplomatic solution which 
will make the chances of such a war far less likely.?
139
  Kennedy dispatched several 
thousand U.S. troops to Thailand and sent the Seventh Fleet into the Gulf of Siam?
Lippmann called it the equivalent of gunboat diplomacy.
140
  He meant this as a 
positive assessment of a policy reminiscent of the constructive show of force his 
political hero Theodore Roosevelt once employed to encourage U.S. rivals to 
negotiate.
Administration officials, including President Kennedy, blamed Phoumi for 
intentionally precipitating a military crisis at Nam Tha to draw in American forces 
against the Pathet Lao.
141
When Phoumi again refused to cede power, Kennedy cut 
off economic aid and the regime collapsed.  Shortly thereafter, on 12 June, the 
Vientiane factions agreed to reinstate Prince Souvanna Phouma to head the neutral 
government and to retain control over the make-up of his cabinet, which included a 
large Communist representation. Geneva Conference participants developed a 
provisional plan to withdraw foreign troops from Laos and to guarantee the coalition 
government in Vientiane.  On 23 July 1962, Secretary of State Dean Rusk signed the 
Declaration and Protocol on the Neutrality of Laos.
142
Pondering political developments and the likely pro-Communist tilt of the 
new coalition government, Lippmann told readers late that spring: ?We are now ready 
to settle for a neutral Laos, which does not mean a Laos with a government that is 
139
 Tad Szulc, ?US Asserts Aim in Laos Is Accord to Halt Fighting,? 18 May 1962, New York Times: 1.
140
 See Conversations with Walter Lippmann: 111.
141
 See Kaiser, American Tragedy: 122-149.
142
 Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: 46-50; Dommen, Conflict in Laos: 213.
358
mathematically equidistant between Senator [Barry] Goldwater and Mao Tse-tung.  It 
means rather a Laos which tries to avoid entangling alliances and to live a quiet 
life.?
143
  Several weeks later, Lippmann again told a national television audience that, 
despite Laos?s proximity to China and North Vietnam, ?Russia is the country that is 
acting? primarily there.  The Soviets were there for ?preventive reasons,? he said, ?to 
prevent the Chinese, who are reckless and inexperienced, from doing something that 
would produce a war . . . just as we had one in Korea.?  Chinese and Soviet archival 
materials released in the 1990s confirmed the developing rivalry between Moscow 
and Beijing in Southeast Asia.
144
  But Lippmann, like many Washington observers at 
the time, failed to account for the deterioration of Moscow?s influence in the region?
and just how consequential this development was to his hopes for a future great-
power configuration to solve the problem of South Vietnam.
145
Laos failed to provide the precedents Lippmann hoped Washington would 
apply in the rest of Indochina.  Particularly in the case of Vietnam, there was little 
cross-over.  Neutralization proceeded in Laos along the coalition track while in 
Vietnam partition seemed the only outcome between Hanoi and Saigon.  For one 
thing, Vietnam lacked a viable neutralist leader (like Souvanna) around whom to 
143
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Change to the East,? 29 May 1962.
144
 For a recent summary of the literature and new primary sources see, Yang Kuisong, ?Working 
Paper #34: Changes in Mao Zedong?s Attitude Toward the Indochina War, 1949-1973,? Cold War 
International History Project Virtual Archive, 
http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=library.document&topic_id=1409&id=952 .  For the 
literature on Chinese involvement in Indochina, see Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-
1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).    
145
 Moscow?s influence in Laos and in North Vietnam decreased as Hanoi and Beijing cooperated in 
increasing aid to the Laotian insurgency.  U.S. officials, Kennedy included, still continued to hold the 
Kremlin responsible for Pathet Lao actions as the coalition government began to unravel in Vientiane.  
The decline in Soviet influence accelerated when it withdrew military hardware under the provisions of 
the 1962 Geneva agreements.  ?Laos, Vietnam, all Southeast Asia.  You and the Chinese can fight over 
it,? Khrushchev told Harriman in 1962.  ?I give up. We give up.  We don?t want any of it.? Quoted in, 
Freedman, Kennedy?s Wars: 355.
359
construct a coalition.  (In the American-backed South, Diem?s regime lacked popular 
and credible politicians altogether.)  In Washington, too, considerable bureaucratic 
inertia had moved along the military track in Vietnam for a decade. The soft Laotian 
policy and the hard approach to Vietnam, at least in the minds of some of Kennedy?s 
closest advisers, were self-reinforcing ideas.  When ambassador-at-large Chester
Bowles urged a general policy of neutralization, including the dissolution of SEATO, 
in the spring of 1962, administration officials quickly turned it aside.  An American 
policy of military strength in South Vietnam, one NSC officer believed, offered an 
important ?counter-balance in the public mind to a more flexible policy in Laos and it 
also avoids misleading the Chinese and the Viet Minh into thinking that we might be 
preparing to disengage from the area.?
146
  President Kennedy seemed to share this 
viewpoint.  In a late-1961 meeting with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru and 
U.S. Ambassador to New Delhi John Kenneth Galbriath, the President said that while 
America was committed to a coalition government in Laos, continuing attacks on 
South Vietnam, some of them via Laos, were of special concern to Washington.  ?If 
these should succeed, it would look as if by our own willingness to negotiate on Laos 
we had lost both Laos and Vietnam,? Kennedy told Nehru.  ?That would discredit our 
efforts and make it impossible for us to negotiate on other issues, including Berlin.?  
Galbraith interjected that ?if in Laos or in any other country neutralism becomes 
merely a stage which precedes a communist takeover then the whole concept of 
neutralism will become a stench in the nostrils.?  Kennedy expressed resolve to get 
146
 Mike Forrestal to McGeorge Bundy, 10 April 1962, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. 23: 59-61. In a 
thoughtful overview of the recent literature on Laos, Noam Kochavi suggests that pursuit of a regional 
neutralization plan was undermined by the pervading fear that a moderate approach toward the Chinese 
360
the Laotian princes to reach an agreement that month.  But, he reiterated, ?we don?t 
want our efforts in Laos to end in a collapse in South Vietnam.?
147
V.
While willing to negotiate in Laos, Washington officials were determined to 
persevere in South Vietnam.  During the same time that Kennedy negotiated in Laos, 
he rapidly expanded the American military commitment to the war in South Vietnam.  
Following the broad recommendations of the Taylor-Rostow report in October 1961, 
the president enlarged the American military presence from 500 to 10,000 advisors by 
the end of 1962, authorized these advisors to participate in combat missions, and 
pledged U.S. support to the Diem regime.
148
  Kennedy?s concessions in Laos, 
moreover, considerably raised the political stakes and seemed to wed administration 
policy to a deterrence strategy in South Vietnam that would intimidate Beijing and 
pre-empt domestic criticism.
149
  Kennedy may not have relished a large American 
military commitment in Vietnam.  He may, as one recent account of escalation have 
argued, even have worked cautiously to bring his advisors around to a diplomatic 
would threaten administration strength at home and credibility abroad.  See Kochavi, ?Limited 
Accommodation, Perpetuated Conflict?: especially, 119-122.
147
 Memorandum of Conversation, President Kennedy-Indian Prime Minister Nehru, 7 November 
1961, Washington, DC, FRUS 23 (South Asia): 129-130.
148
 Herring, America?s Longest War: 80-83.
149
 Kochavi, ?Limited Accommodation, Perpetuated Conflict: Kennedy, China, and the Laos Crisis, 
1961-1963,? 119-122; see also, Kaiser, American Tragedy: 117-121.
361
exit.
150
  But intervention was precisely the course for which his middling policies?in 
another administration?s hands?prepared the way.
151
U.S. military and political fortunes in South Vietnam steadily declined during 
Kennedy?s brief term.  Starting in 1961, the Vietcong (VC) stepped up attacks in the 
provinces, using larger forces which Hanoi helped recruit and supply.  The American-
backed strategic hamlet program, initiated in February 1962, meant to counter 
Vietcong successes in the countryside.  Instead it further eroded support for the Diem 
government.  Poorly implemented and conceptually flawed, the program alienated 
rural peasants who were forced from ancestral land and made to work for less than 
150
 Kaiser, American Tragedy: 485-493.  For discussions of Kennedy?s options see: Basset and Pelz, 
?The Failed Search for Victory,? 228-231; Walter LaFeber, American, Russia, and the Cold War, 
1945-1991: 231-232.
151
The historiographical debate Kennedy?s Vietnam policies has shifted from early portrayals of JFK 
as a confirmed cold warrior committed to ?flexible response? to more recent appraisals which stress 
the president?s ambivalence about committing ground forces in the region.  As the documentary 
records of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations opened in the 1980s and 1990s, Kennedy?s 
Vietnam legacy improved even as LBJ?s declined further.  See, for example, Gaddis, Strategies of 
Containment: 201-205; Bassett and Stephen, ?The Failed Search for Victory: Vietnam and the Politics 
of War?: 223-252.  Some scholars even evaluated Kennedy as more aggressive or hawkish than his 
military advisors. See for example, Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in 
the Vietnam Era (New York: Cambridge University Press), especially 81-113.  Among the studies at 
the end of the 1990s a new consensus was taking shape?one that minimized Kennedy?s Wilsonian 
rhetoric while more closely examining his actions in Laos as well as his repeated refusals to deploy 
U.S. troops in the region.  These accounts emphasize Kennedy?s moderation, his openness to 
negotiation in Southeast Asia, his receptivity to European consultation, and, generally, a sense of 
diplomatic acumen that neither his predecessor nor his successor shared.  Two major works in 
particular have gone so far as to construct elaborate counterfactual hypotheses that suggest that had 
Kennedy lived to win a second term the U.S. likely would not have Americanized the Vietnamese war.  
See Logevall, Choosing War: 395-400; and Kaiser, American Tragedy: 485-493. Yet, neither study 
completely convinces.  See Kochavi, ?Limited Accommodation, Perpetuated Conflict,? 95-135, which 
particularly examines Kennedy?s diplomacy in Laos.  Kennedy?s problems in South Vietnam were 
compounded by his assumption?widely held in his administration?that until the military situation 
stabilized in South Vietnam there would be no political settlement acceptable to U.S. interests.  ?Let us 
never negotiate out of fear,? Kennedy said at his Inaugural, ?but let us never fear to negotiate.?  Those 
words haunt Kennedy?s Vietnam legacy, capturing the tragedy of his (as well as Johnson?s) policies: 
there never was a moment when the president or his advisors believed they?d satisfied the military-
political balance necessary to initiate a diplomatic resolution.
362
their previous subsistence level of living.  Strategic hamlet ultimately created more 
VC recruits.
152
Military reversals compounded political problems.  During 1962, when the 
South Vietnamese army began employing American battle plans and weaponry, the 
Vietcong?a force defined by their adaptability?changed tactics by conducting more 
ambushes and political assassinations, further destabilizing the key Bin Dinh province 
and most of the Mekong Delta south of Saigon.  When ARVN and Vietcong forces 
finally did meet in a large conventional battle at Ap Bac on 2 January 1963, the 
results were disastrous for the American-trained and supplied South Vietnamese.
153
American and world opinion further eroded when, in the late-spring of 1963, the 
Diem regime cracked down on Buddhist protests against government domestic 
policies.  A series of Buddhist self-immolations, captured on film and widely 
published in the U.S. and Europe, horrified the American public and Washington 
officials.  By August, the administration was debating whether or not to replace Diem 
in a military coup. 
On 29 August 1963, French leader Charles de Gaulle volunteered his own 
solution to the problem in South Vietnam?a communication that hardened 
Washington?s position rather than make it rethink its commitment to a military 
victory.  The General employed calculated ambiguity in order to permit Washington, 
Moscow, Hanoi, and Beijing enough political wiggle-room to find their way to the 
conference table.  He put forward a five-part proposal: end Saigon?s war against the 
152
 On strategic hamlet: Kaiser, American Tragedy: 170-180; Herring, America?s Longest War: 85-90.
153
 For the best account of the Battle of Ap Bac and its impact on American policy, see Neil Sheehan A 
Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988): 212-
363
National Liberation Front (NLF); normalize diplomatic contact with Hanoi; establish 
a coalition government in Saigon with the participation of the Vietcong; withdraw 
U.S. military advisors and hardware; and create a North-South federation of Vietnam 
which could provide the basis for eventual reunification.
154
  There was little daylight 
between the neutralization Lippmann had advocated piecemeal since 1961 and the 
plan De Gaulle concisely laid out for Washington in the late-summer of 1963.  
China?s designs would be checked without another American intervention on the 
Asian mainland?a replay of the Korean War.
155
  With relatively minimal effort, and 
no use of military force, France could restore a large measure of its political influence 
in Southeast Asia and curry favor with the non-aligned nations in Africa and Asia.  
De Gaulle, too, would have satisfied one of his passionate desires?to distance his 
country from American power and create an independent role for France within the 
Western Alliance.
156
De Gaulle?s proposal angered and concerned U.S. officials, including 
President Kennedy?making him less inclined to use Lippmann to explore the 
General?s position.  Kennedy made an unusually brusque public reply on 2 September 
during a CBS interview.  He implied that the French were meddling in an American 
problem.  ?I guess [De Gaulle?s statement] was an expression of his general view but 
he doesn?t have any forces there or any program of economic assistance,? Kennedy 
told interviewer Walter Cronkite.  ?So, that while these expressions are welcome the 
burden is being carried?as it usually is?by the U.S. and the people there.  What, of 
265; 269-283.  For an account that places Ap Bac into the larger context of US-ARVN military 
operations in 1962-1963, see Kaiser, American Tragedy: 150-185.
154
 For a summary of De Gaulle?s overture see, Logevall Choosing War: 13-15; 103-105.
155
 For one description of De Gaulle?s geopolitical aims see Herring?s America?s Longest War: 101.
364
course, makes Americans somewhat impatient is that after carrying this load for 18 
years we are glad to get counsel, but we would like a little more assistance?real 
assistance. . . . It doesn?t do us any good to say, ?Well, why don?t we just go home 
and leave the world to those who are our enemies.??
157
  During a meeting of Vietnam 
policymakers the next day Kennedy remarked that the French were not likely to 
challenge his cool statement about neutralization.  He mused that they would not 
make an official protest because he ?doubted [French] Ambassador [Herve] Alphand 
had enough guts to protest.?
158
  Instead, Alphand complained to Lippmann who, in 
turn, applied pressure to Kennedy in his columns.
159
  Nevertheless, the Kennedy and 
Johnson administrations steadfastly rejected the neutralization proposal proffered by 
De Gaulle and seconded by Lippmann in more than a dozen columns from September 
1963 to May 1964.
Lippmann grasped De Gaulle?s offering with an urgency that matched the 
deteriorating situation in Saigon.  In doing so, he emerged as the chief advocate of De 
Gaulle?s neutralization plan in the United States.  Though vague, neutralization 
carried a measure of influence with the Vietnamese people, he wrote on 3 September 
1963.  The General?s plan had ?little material force . . . no military power and little 
156
 Logevall, Choosing War: 103-105.
157
 Official transcript of select quotations from the Kennedy-Cronkite interview of 2 September 1963, 
Box 519, W. Averell Harriman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereinafter referred to 
as ?LC?).  A week later, on the Huntley-Brinkley Report, Kennedy was less circumspect about his 
immediate plans in Vietnam: ?We must be patient, we must persist . . . What I am concerned about is 
that Americans will get impatient and say that because they don?t like events in Southeast Asia or they 
don?t like the government in Vietnam, that we should withdraw. . . . I think we should stay.?  PPP: 
JFK, 1963: pp. 652, 659, 576.  Available on-line at: 
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/site/docs/pppus.php?=035&year=1963&id=349 .
158
 ?Memorandum of Conference with President,? 3 September 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV: 100-
101.
159
 Lippmann and Alphand, along with their wives Helen and Nicole, were close acquaintances?they 
socialized together in Washington and once flew to Paris together when the Lippmanns took one of 
365
economic power,? Lippmann conceded, in a column aimed squarely at the 
administration?s concerns about De Gaulle?s plan.  But it had ?moral force.?
160
  He 
implored the administration to ?welcome? French assistance and expertise.  
?However annoying, General de Gaulle may be right that the ultimate objective 
policy, though enormously difficult to attain, is a reunited, independent, and neutral 
Viet-Nam,? Lippmann explained.  ?If there is no such settlement . . . then a protracted 
and indecisive war of attrition is all that is left.?
161
  Kennedy read the column that 
morning and made the inference that Lippmann was arguing that Vietnam could be 
neutralized in much the same way as Laos.  Though Lippmann had, in fact, suggested 
Laos as a successful model to the administration in columns in 1961 and 1962, he did 
not directly make that link in this column.  Kennedy, nevertheless, rejected the 
comparison.  In a Vietnam meeting late that afternoon, the President?who thought 
the policy in Laos ?was not working??expressed frustration to a roomful of advisors 
that Lippmann kept suggesting the ?Laotian case provided an illustration of what 
should be done in Vietnam.?
162
The three columns Lippmann wrote in quick succession in September 1963 
framed the argument for neutralization in Vietnam which he employed in newsprint 
and in private meetings with U.S. officials for the next 18 months.  He warned the 
Kennedy administration against expanding the war, explaining to readers that the 
?price of a military victory in the Vietnamese war is higher than American vital 
their annual trips to Europe.  Lippmann?s appointment diaries show that they met regularly?as they 
did in the late-summer and fall of 1963?until Alphand left his post in 1965.
160
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Nettle of Viet-Nam,? 3 September 1963.
161
 Ibid.
162
 ?Memorandum of Conference with the President,? 3 September 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume 
IV: 100-101.  
366
interests can justify.?
163
   Lippmann also wrote that Diem showed no inclination?nor 
did the ARVN forces display ability on the battlefield?to win the war, which would 
require cutting off Communist guerillas in the South by interdicting their supplies 
from North Vietnam.  ?Only the United States could do that,? he wrote, ?and then 
only if we were willing to pay a price.?  The cost, he warned, would likely be Chinese 
intervention along Vietnam?s borders.  With all the attendant possibilities for 
escalation, the columnist believed a unilateral American military operation to be an 
unacceptable risk.
164
Like Kennedy and his advisers, Lippmann struggled to find a middle way in 
Vietnam.  But whereas Washington?s approach tilted toward military options the 
columnist steadily appealed for a diplomatic resolution.  Though he feared an 
American pullout from Saigon would precipitate chaos in Southeast Asia and damage 
U.S. influence in any future regional settlement, he seemed increasingly prepared to 
accept those consequences.  Lippmann took care to applaud the president?s signal in 
the Cronkite interview that he might be prepared to reconsider the nature of the 
American commitment to the Diem government.  The Vietnamese people ?are the 
ones who have to win [the war] or lose it,? Kennedy said.  ?We can give them 
equipment. We can send our men there as advisors but they have to win it?the 
people of Vietnam against the Communists.?  Asked if Diem?s government could 
regain the support of the people, Kennedy replied that ?with changes in policy and 
perhaps with personnel I think it can.?  He described the war as a ?very essential 
struggle.?  Lippmann, who at various times in his career chose to put the best possible 
163
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Mr. Kennedy on Vietnam,? 5 September 1963.
164
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Mr. Kennedy on Vietnam,? 5 September 1963.
367
face on an important public statement, may have read a little too far into Kennedy?s 
intentions.  He believed the president meant to leave the door open for a diplomatic 
exit from Vietnam.  ?In terms of power politics,? Lippmann told readers, ?this 
amounts to saying that South Viet-Nam is an important secondary interest but that it 
is not a primary vital interest of the United States.?
165
  In retrospect, however, it is 
clear that Kennedy, who supported the 1 November 1963 coup to overthrow Diem, 
thought the war at least could be prosecuted more vigorously with a more proactive 
regime.
166
Lippmann proved far less enthusiastic about the alternative to reforming 
Diem?s government: replacing it.  After the Buddhist crisis in the summer of 1963, 
Washington planners were convinced that Diem must go if the war was to be won.  
Over a late-August weekend, with Kennedy vacationing in Hyannisport and many of 
the principal decision-makers away from Washington, several State Department 
officials performed what the President?s Special Assistant for Military Affairs, 
General Maxwell Taylor, later called an ?egregious end run.?
167
  Undersecretary for 
Political Affairs W. Averell Harriman, Michael Forrestal, George Ball, and Roger 
Hilsman, drew up instructions authorizing the new U.S. Ambassador to Saigon, 
Henry Cabot Lodge, to encourage a group of ARVN generals to overthrow the 
unpopular regime.  They then obtained approval from Kennedy and Dean Rusk on the 
condition that a number of other key officials had signed-off on it?many of whom 
claimed later that they were not consulted.
168
  The hastily-arranged, ill-conceived plan 
165
 Ibid.
166
 Logevall, Choosing War: 68-74; Dallek, An Unfinished Life: 80-84.
167
 Abramson, Spanning the Century: 622.
168
 See for example, Abramson, Spanning the Century: 619-224; Kaiser, American Tragedy: 229-240.
368
had major consequences for it set in motion the 1 November coup?an event that 
would embroil Americans to a far greater degree in the management of their 
Vietnamese clients.  
When Lippmann heard coup rumblings in personal conversations with 
Harriman, Ball, and the French Ambassador Herve Alphand, he used his column to 
counsel Kennedy to move cautiously and to neither expand the war nor abandon 
Diem.
169
  ?While I have always thought it a mistake to become engaged in Southeast 
Asia,? Lippmann told readers in a mid-September Today and Tomorrow installment, 
?we must hold on and wait . . . holding not only President Diem?s hand but also that 
of Madame Nhu.  While this may not be a very attractive or satisfying thing to be 
doing we must leave it to the historians to decide how we got there, and whether the 
trip was necessary.?  He warned explicitly against an American-backed coup against 
Diem.  As bad as circumstances were with the unpopular ruling family, the prospect 
of a junta of generals in Saigon mustering popular support seemed even more remote.  
Moreover, it is likely that Alphand made clear to Lippmann that Diem and Nhu were 
moving closer to making a political settlement with Hanoi?a move that would have 
ensured Lippmann?s foremost desire for an American military withdrawal.
170
169
 Lippmann Appointment Diaries, September 1963, Series VII, Box 240, Folder 34, WLC.
170
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Whither Viet-Nam?? 17 September 1963.  Just before Lippmann wrote his 17 
September column he visited Alphand and Harriman to discuss the situation in Saigon. The Alphand-
Lippmann correspondence is not extensive (most often they spoke in person) but it gives a sense of the 
strong personal connection between the two men and their wives.  When Alphand retired as French 
Ambassador to the U.S. in 1965, the Lippmanns inscribed a gift: ?In admiration of their high example 
of the diplomatic art, their demonstration that it is best to navigate not by the winds and cross-currents, 
but by the fixed stars of the enduring interests of the French and the American nations.? Walter and 
Helen Lippmann to Nicole and Herve Alphand, 16 October 1965, Series III, Box, 50, Folder 36, WLC.
See also the Lippmann Diaries of 13 September 1963, Series VII, Box 240, Folder 34, WLC, for 
Lippmann?s meetings with officials during this period.
369
In some respects, Lippmann?s analysis reflected the media?s general posture 
on Vietnam, which was somewhat ambivalent about developments in Saigon.  The 
State Department?s 19 September 1963 summary of press opinion on Vietnam policy, 
which passed across the desk of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, noted 
that Lippmann led the general news disposition that the best present course was ?to 
increase pressure on the Diem family while continuing to subsidize it.?  Surveying 
support for De Gaulle?s neutralization plan, however, it found Lippmann to be in a 
small minority that included The New Republic and The Nation.
171
Lippmann and the columnist Joe Alsop were working different sides of the 
neutralization track.  Alsop filed several columns from Saigon in September 1963, 
seeking to discredit De Gaulle?s plan and his top diplomat to South Vietnam.  In his 
18 September column, Alsop echoed the fears of many top administration officials: 
that the Saigon regime might be ready to strike a deal with Hanoi in which U.S. 
forces would be asked to withdrawal.  He detailed French Ambassador Roger 
LaLoulette?s numerous visits to Gia Long Palace in an attempt to establish 
communications between Hanoi and Diem?s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.  LaLoulette and 
a Polish diplomat brought personal messages from North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi 
Minh and Foreign Minister Pham Van Dong to Nhu to bypass the more hard line 
President Diem, Alsop wrote.  He accused the French of propagating rumors that the 
U.S. would withdraw its support from Diem.  Such diplomatic efforts, Alsop told 
readers, were the ?hitherto invisible . . . really ugly? side of De Gaulle?s offer of 
neutralization.  It was, he explained, ?French intrigue? designed ?to defeat American 
171
 Benjamin H. Read to McGeorge Bundy, 19 September 1963, ?American Press Comment on the 
Viet-Nam Situation,? American Opinion Survey, Department of State, Harriman Papers, Box 519, LC.
370
policy here by playing upon the exacerbated vanity and manic suspicion of U.S. 
purposes which now prevail? in the Diem regime.
172
  Walt Rostow?s Policy Planning 
Council determined that Alsop?s information was ?essentially correct? though it 
considered ?highly unlikely? the chances that ?such explorations seriously concern 
imminent reunification.? Nhu?s willingness to speak to Alsop about these overtures 
did mark a departure since he?d previously denied contacts with Hanoi.  The Saigon 
regime ?has dropped transparent hints that the GVN would not necessarily refuse to 
consider overtures from Hanoi,? the PPC memorandum noted.  It concluded that 
?circumstances are more propitious than before? for Nhu to pursue this course.
173
Several days later, Kennedy dispatched to Saigon his two leading military 
advisors, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs 
of Staff General Maxwell Taylor.  The McNamara-Taylor mission was to evaluate the 
Diem regime.  On 23 September Kennedy brought McNamara, Taylor, Ball and Mac 
Bundy into the Oval Office to discuss the upcoming trip.  One issue Kennedy raised 
was Diem?s concern about criticism from the American press, particularly a young 
group of reporters in Saigon that included New York Times correspondent David 
Halberstam and Neil Sheenan of United Press International.
174
  Kennedy instructed 
McNamara to be sympathetic to Diem?s complaints, to note that the press ?is not 
always right.?  Kennedy mentioned Alsop?s latest column, which he?d read that 
172
 Joseph Alsop, Matter of Fact, ?Very Ugly Stuff,? 18 September 1963, Washington Post.
173
 ?Possible Rapprochement Between North and South Vietnam,? Policy Planning Council, 26 
September 1963, Box 519, Harriman Papers, LC.
174
McGeorge Bundy, Memorandum for the Record: Meeting on McNamara/Taylor Mission to South 
Vietnam, 23 September 1963, Box 519, Harriman Papers, LC.  William Prochnau admirably recounts 
the story of the young reporters who questioned U.S. programs in Vietnam and their often-strained 
relations with the Kennedy administration in Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil 
Sheehan, Peter Arnett?Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (New York: 
Vintage Books, 1996).
371
morning, in which the pundit attacked an influential group of young U.S. reporters in 
Saigon for criticizing U.S. programs and the prosecution of the war in South 
Vietnam.
175
  ?There was a great deal of truth in Alsop?s column,? Kennedy told his 
subordinates.  ?But the only way to deal with such press criticism [is] to get on with 
the job.?  The president concluded, ?The way to confound the press is to win the 
war.?
176
Walter Lippmann wrote nothing about the mission on Vietnam from October 
through December 1963.  He left for his annual fall trip to Europe, taking temporary 
leave from T&T and writing no columns for Newsweek in December.  The next time 
he turned sustained attention to Southeast Asia, in early 1964, he would be advising 
and gently critiquing a new president?Lyndon B. Johnson.
VI.
Neutralization fit not only Lippmann?s momentary objectives, it also comported with 
his longer perspective on the Cold War.  By championing the French plan, Lippmann 
provided?as he had often before?an internationalist context to the struggle between 
nationalist Communism and liberal capitalism.  He was keenly aware of the 
perspective of smaller, less powerful countries that tried to navigate a course between 
the foreign policies of the superpowers.  Since Tito?s break with Moscow in 1948?
175
 Joseph Alsop, ?The Crusaders,? 23 September 1963, Washington Post: A17.  Alsop wrote, about 
the American journalists who criticized the Diem regime, though he did not name David Halberstam 
and others by name.  ?The crusaders have contributed to the Diem government?s misguidedness . . . the 
constant pressure of the reportorial crusade against the government has also helped mightily to 
transform Diem from a courageous, quite viable national leader, into a man afflicted with galloping 
persecution mania, seeing plots around every corner, and therefore misjudging everything.?
372
and in theory, since he?d written about a ?buffer belt? of neutral states in Eastern 
Europe in 1944?Lippmann had sympathized with the trend toward neutralism in the 
Cold War.
177
  It was, he believed, the inevitable outcome of great power rivalries?
smaller powers stood clear and cared more about self-preservation than committing to 
one side or the other.  Lippmann applauded Yugoslavia?s independent course in the 
late-1940s, and he subsequently wrote many columns about how non-alignment was a 
desirable outcome in Central Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.  As an 
advocate for neutralism, Lippmann also opened for his readers an international 
context to the war in Vietnam and the larger conflict between American democracy 
and Sino-Soviet Communism.  The struggle in Saigon, he wrote, was not just an 
object of discussion, debate, and action for policymakers in Washington.  Nor could it 
be solved by their unilateral actions.  Though he accepted the premise that Chinese 
expansion should be checked, Lippmann thought such a policy would succeed only if 
it were developed and implemented in concert with other concerned powers in the 
region: India, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France.  These powers had to cooperate 
?discreetly? to promote in Hanoi some kind of ?trigger which would release Titoist 
nationalism in North Viet-Nam.?
178
  This was the crux of Lippmann?s argument for 
neutralism in Southeast Asia.  He knew that the ?trigger? for Vietnamese nationalism 
would be the creation of a unified government that Hanoi likely would control.  
While Lippmann?much like De Gaulle?offered an elaborate critique of the military 
pitfalls in Vietnam, he was purposefully imprecise as to how negotiations should 
176
 Bundy Memorandum, ?Meeting on McNamara/Taylor Mission to South Vietnam.?
177
 Indeed, the promotion of neutralism long had been a theme in Lippmann?s columns.  See, for 
example, Lippmann, T&T, ?The Buffer Belt,? 15 February 1949; ?To Defend the Balkan Peace,? 22 
September 1949; and ?That Black Cat,? 17 July 1956.
373
proceed?perhaps because he knew just inhospitable the political climate in 
Washington would be to arranging them.
Though a workable solution seemed elusive into late-1963, Lippmann 
possessed clear, long-held convictions against American military intervention in the 
Vietnamese civil war.  As early as the 1940s he believed that U.S. power, great as it 
was, was limited in Asia to the deterrent presence of its overwhelming naval and air 
forces.  He encouraged Truman administration officials not to establish a military 
foothold on the Asian continent but, rather, to draw their strategic line along the arc 
of islands running from Japan and Okinawa to the Philippines.  Washington officials 
instead chose to underwrite the French colonial war in Indochina while 
simultaneously pursuing a policy of ?rolling back? Communism by placing the 
American Army up against the Chinese border in a brutal, costly war on the Korean 
peninsula.  By the 1950s, during the Eisenhower administration, Lippmann rejected 
calls to insert U.S. ground troops in Indo-China, fearing it would become a strategic 
morass and that it would provoke another war with Beijing.  Intractable political 
problems, he wrote at the time, were at the root of the war.  He also doubted that a 
loose, patchwork coalition of anti-Communist governments, such as John Foster 
Dulles assembled in SEATO, could successfully contain Beijing?s advances.  While 
Eisenhower overrode his subordinates and refused to put American ground forces in 
Southeast Asia, the diplomacy of his secretary of state laid the political foundations 
for later American involvement in Vietnam.  Moreover, Eisenhower?s commitment to 
partition in 1954, and to Diem in particular with economic and military aid, solidified 
America?s role as the chief benefactor of South Vietnam.  During John Kennedy?s 
178
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Wither in Vietnam,? 17 September 1963.
374
expansion of advisory and material aid?while most observers confined their doubts 
to military tactics in Vietnam rather than political objectives?Lippmann believed 
only diplomatic measures would stabilize Southeast Asia.  In the final months of 
Kennedy?s presidency, confirmed in the belief that South Vietnam could not be saved 
militarily, Lippmann supported neutralization in the hope that a unified Vietnam, 
even if the Hanoi Politburo controlled it, would remain independent of Beijing.
In this instance, Lippmann did not communicate Kennedy administration 
policy but, rather, the French position on intervention in Vietnam. What Lippmann 
communicated to President Kennedy and the public in his columns in 1963, he 
recommended even more forcefully to LBJ personally?disengagement from South 
Vietnam was far preferable to a military quagmire.  Washington officials, however, 
were?if anything?even less inclined to explore a diplomatic option than they had 
been under Kennedy.  Worsening circumstances in Saigon, the continuity of principal 
advisers and their ideas from administration to administration, the growing 
investment of their personal reputations, and LBJ?s visceral determination not to lose 
South Vietnam, contributed to a strengthening of the American commitment in early 
1964.  The conclusion was obvious for Johnson administration officials who feared a 
public debate over their Vietnam policies: Lippmann would have to be converted to 
their cause.
Months after Kennedy?s death, Lippmann tried with new urgency to convince 
Johnson administration officials to choose a negotiated peace rather than military 
escalation.  He recalled the difficulty faced by Johnson?s predecessors in finding an 
opportune moment to liquidate the Vietnam commitment.  ?There never has been any 
375
other way out of the dead-end street in Southeast Asia except to make a political 
agreement, to construct international machinery, and to exert what influence we can 
by underwriting them,? Lippmann told readers.  ?President Kennedy made a 
fragmentary attempt to do this.  He tried it in Laos, but he allowed himself to remain 
entangled in South Viet-Nam, and he was drawn into an ever enlarging, continually 
unsuccessful, military struggle which has no visible end.?
179
  While admitting that the 
?original mistake? of building a military stronghold in South Vietnam would not be 
easy to repair, Lippmann recommended reconvening the Geneva Conference to reach 
a negotiated settlement or appealing to the United Nations to create and administer a 
coalition government resembling that in Laos.  ?We must look for a solution, not by 
expanding the war [into North Vietnam] but by taking it to the conference table,? 
Lippmann concluded.  ?We cannot make war on North Viet-Nam by executive 
order.?
180
  Waging war by executive order, however, was precisely what President 
Johnson and John Kennedy?s principal advisors were preparing to do. 
179
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Our Commitment in Viet-Nam,? 28 May 1964.
180
 Ibid.
376
Chapter 7:  
Personal Persuasion and Calculations of Co-Optation: Walter 
Lippmann, McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson, and Vietnam, 
December 1963 to February 1965
I.
Lyndon Baines Johnson and his advisors so feared Walter Lippmann?s power to 
provoke debate about Vietnam that for more than a year they conspired to cultivate 
his support.  Presidential blandishments ultimately failed to prevent Lippmann?s 
dissent but they had the salutary effect of postponing his mutiny.  Throughout 1964, 
into the crucial spring of 1965, the columnist hedged his public criticisms of the 
administration believing he could privately convince Johnson to opt for a diplomatic 
solution?even after events no longer warranted such restraint.  Chalmers Roberts, 
the Washington Post?s diplomatic correspondent from 1953-76 and a first-hand 
observer of this unusual courtship, watched it unfold with disapproval and empathy.  
?Here is a distinguished American who laid down sort of the basic rule for the press 
and that is ?Don?t get too close to public officials.  Don?t become captives,?? Roberts 
said.  ?[Lippmann] violated his own rule in my view, and Johnson got him into it.  I 
suppose it was inescapable.?
1
  Roberts got part of the story right.
A confluence of Johnson?s political calculation and Lippmann?s infatuation 
with advising the powerful drew them closer in the early days of LBJ?s presidency.  
377
The public perception that Lippmann participated in high-level policy debates lent the 
new administration credibility and authority, and imparted a measure of authenticity 
to the non-establishment figure at its head.  Because foreign affairs were Johnson?s 
area of weakness, he relied initially on Kennedy?s appointees?National Security 
Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense 
Robert McNamara.  This added to the president?s considerable insecurities.
2
Lippmann, in contrast, was a capital fixture who predated the New Frontiersmen.  He 
also had retained a measure of independence from the Kennedyites which appealed to 
Johnson as he tried to shape an identity distinct from that of the martyred president.  
Though outside of Lippmann?s presence he disparaged the idea that the U.S. should 
seek a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, the president nevertheless sidled up to the 
columnist because of his status as a foreign policy expert.  LBJ prized Lippmann as 
his adviser, intellectual, and public advocate?showing Lippmann top secret papers, 
bringing him into the Oval Office for meetings with principal advisers, and discussing 
with him possible running mates in the November presidential election.  Indeed, 
during the halcyon days of 1964, the columnist and president shared a symbiotic 
relationship.  
II.
LBJ showered Lippmann with his peculiar blend of flattery and political largesse that 
Washington columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called the ?Johnson 
1
 Chalmers Roberts, Oral History Interview 23 April 1969: 32. Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, 
Austin, TX.  Hereinafter cited as ?LBJL.?
2
 See Robert Dallek Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 (New York: Oxford 
University Press): 84-90.
378
treatment.?
3
  He enticed, overwhelmed, and captivated opinion-makers; and with 
Lippmann, the most influential of them all, Johnson got an early start.  As Senate 
Majority Leader he sent effusive letters expressing his ?unbounded? admiration for 
Lippmann?s support of the 1957 civil rights bill; on more than one occasion he read 
Today and Tomorrow into the Congressional Record.
4
  In 1962, then-Vice President 
Johnson hosted the columnist at his ranch in Texas hill-country.  In one improbable 
afternoon Johnson shuttled Lippmann to the far corners of his spread, steering his 
Lincoln Continental at high speeds down gravel roads and through pastures?pausing 
occasionally to toot the horn at cattle and throw back a few whiskey and sodas.  This 
whirlwind infusion of Texas culture carried on into the evening with cowhand 
demonstrations, dinner with Governor Daniel Price, and the next day, a poolside party 
serenaded by a mariachi band.  Lippmann reveled in it.
5
  Weeks after Kennedy?s 
assassination, Johnson dropped by Lippmann?s Woodley Road home in northwest 
Washington, D.C., humbly seeking counsel over a round of evening cocktails.  
Thereafter, LBJ and Lady Bird regularly hosted the columnist at private White House 
dinners.
6
3
 Dallek, Flawed Giant: 4-5.  Bill Bundy used an even more descriptive term: ?the Johnson trowel 
treatment.?  See Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998): 268.  Carroll Kilpatrick of the Washington Post remembered 
one of LBJ?s early overtures to the press pool on Air Force One.  On the flight from the LBJ Ranch to 
Washington, Johnson sauntered to the back of the plane to enlist reporters' cooperation in giving 
favorable coverage to his new Administration.  "You play ball with me and I'll make big men of you," 
Johnson said to the stunned reporters.  Carroll Kilpatrick, Oral History Interview I, 5 May 1979: 9, 
LBJL.
4
 Lyndon B. Johnson to Walter Lippmann, 4 September 1957, Folder 1161, Box 80, Series III, Walter 
Lippmann Collection, Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.  Hereinafter cited as 
?WLC.?
5
 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 
1980): 545-546.
6
 See Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (New York: Simon and 
Schuster, 1997): 80; Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 544.
379
Lippmann?s sense of place and importance as an adviser to Johnson far 
exceeded the titular role he had played in deliberations at the Kennedy White House.  
In the Kennedy years Lippmann gave plenty of advice, most of which the president 
ignored. JFK granted him access; but with Johnson Lippmann seemed to have real 
influence. If Johnson were unavailable, his latest mood on the issue de jure passed 
easily to the president through two of Lippmann?s friends, Mac Bundy and 
Undersecretary of State George Ball. Above all else, LBJ?s ambitious plans for far-
reaching welfare legislation and progressive domestic programs appealed to 
Lippmann?s closely-held belief that the nation had for too long neglected internal 
problems by fixating on the specter of Communism. Johnson?s reform impulse and 
legislative skills made Lippmann optimistic that, with improving U.S.-Soviet 
relations, crises abroad might be subordinated to those at home.
Buoyed by these hopes and an instinctual desire to be near the center of 
power, Lippmann moved toward an association with the administration that some 
observers felt violated the principles he expounded about good journalism.  Scholars 
often credit Lippmann?s objectivity and professionalism with revolutionizing 
twentieth-century journalism; after all, in 1914 he had co-founded The New Republic
and, in the 1920s, he had established himself as an authority with two path-breaking 
studies on the media,
7
 and had served as executive editor of the New York World.  
But in the eyes of contemporaries, his position as a confidant to LBJ compromised 
the rules of conduct he had defined between policymakers and reporters. Richard 
7
 Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American 
Politics (New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1992): 304-309.  See discussion in introductory 
chapter.  For specific examples in Lippmann?s writings see the opening chapter of Public Opinion
380
Rovere of the New Yorker later told an interviewer that in the first year of the 
administration, Lippmann, his friend, was ?very high on Johnson and had been closer 
to him than he would now like to admit.?
8
Yet, fundamental differences between Lippmann and Johnson on the problem 
of Vietnam ensured that their alliance, however spectacular, would be brief.  For if 
Lippmann heaped praise on LBJ and his Great Society triumphs, he wrote with 
discrimination and pessimism about America?s goals and prospects in Southeast Asia.  
From the start of the Johnson administration he lobbied hard for a diplomatic solution 
in Vietnam?a neutralization scheme conceived by French leader Charles de Gaulle.  
U.S. officials listened politely, but ignored his counsel.  
If access to policymakers did not translate into influence then neither did it 
equate to accord with the president?s aims in Southeast Asia.  Lippmann repeatedly 
used his access to push for negotiations.  Twice in 1964 he debated, as a group, the 
key architects of the Americanization of the war.  The realist convictions that 
informed his assessment of the war?conveyed in these White House meetings and 
set in print?put Lippmann on a collision course with LBJ. 
The administration?s pursuit of Lippmann would devolve into a rear-guard 
action to delay his inevitable criticisms.  McGeorge Bundy played an indispensable 
part in stringing Lippmann along.  He shared LBJ?s concerns about how Lippmann?s 
growing doubts about the war might affect opinion at home, among key allies, in 
Saigon, in Moscow, and even with Chinese and North Vietnamese leaders.  He also 
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our 
Heads," as well as his sequel book, The Phantom Public (New York: The Macmillan Company: 1925).  
8
 Richard Rovere, Oral History Interview I, 6 May 1969: 21, LBJL.  Steel?s analysis in Walter 
Lippmann and the American Century reflects this same judgment.
381
knew?perhaps better than the president?that if the war became an American war 
the administration would lose Lippmann.  Consequently, during the 18 months from 
January 1964 to mid-1965, Bundy, LBJ, and other officials misled the columnist 
about their Vietnam policies with sophisticated calculation.
A number of factors made it unlikely that Johnson?or indeed any president?
would have pulled out of Vietnam in the immediate months after Kennedy?s death.
9
The deterioration of the Saigon government after Diem?s assassination, concerns 
about Chinese ambitions in Southeast Asia, domestic political considerations, 
Johnson?s strong anti- Communism, and his fear of ?losing? Vietnam contributed to 
his decision to continue the policies of his predecessor.  There was continuity but also 
a subtle change from Kennedy that showed up in Johnson?s leadership style: his 
insistence on preventing defeat in South Vietnam.  He accepted the advice of 
Kennedy?s advisors that the U.S. must stand firm but he also set the tone.  ?I am not 
going to lose Vietnam.  I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go 
the way China went,? LBJ told Ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge at a 
meeting on 24 November 1963.  He admonished advisors, ?Don?t go to bed at night 
until you have asked yourself, ?Have I done everything I could to further the 
American effort to assist South Vietnam???
10
  Two days later, Johnson authorized 
NSAM 273 that reaffirmed America would help the South Vietnamese ?win their 
contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy.?  
9
 ?National Security Action Memorandum No. 273,? 26 November 1963, Foreign Relations of the 
United States (hereinafter cited to as FRUS), 1961-1963, Volume IV (Washington: Government 
Printing Office): 637-640. See also Dallek?s analysis in Flawed Giant: 97-101; Fredrik Logevall?s in 
Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: 
University of California Press, 1999): 77-80.
10
 Dallek, Flawed Giant: 100.
382
Presidential determination meant there would be no fundamental reappraisal of the 
rationale for the commitment.
11
Neither Johnson, nor his key advisors, were predisposed to pursue a 
neutralization plan in Southeast Asia, such as Lippmann endorsed in September 1963. 
As neutralization became a topic for editorialists in December, U.S. officials firmly 
tamped down talk of neutralizing South Vietnam.  They reassured the new 
government of General Duong Van Minh of their resolve to get a military decision.  
Dean Rusk sent Lodge a telegram that re-stated the American position in no uncertain 
terms.  ?You may categorically, and in a manner most likely to convince them, say to 
the generals that [the U.S.] in no way favors a neutral solution for South Vietnam,? 
Rusk instructed Lodge.  ?As you know, powerful voices such as the New York Times
and Lippmann have been advocating some sort of neutral solution but this in no wise 
reflects US Government policy which has consistently been a win the war policy.  As 
you know from recent messages, this is US policy from the top down.?
12
  Rusk told 
Lodge to stress that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara?s trip to Saigon, set for 
19-20 December, was a sign of that commitment.  During McNamara?s visit an aide 
to Roger Hilsman, undersecretary of state for political affairs, met with the South 
Vietnamese prime minister, foreign minister and several members of the ruling 
Military Revolutionary Council.  These leaders were ?uniformly worried,? the aide 
reported to Hilsman, about a Lippmann column that urged neutralism and American 
11
 See Dallek, Flawed Giant: 97-101; for an extended discussion of LBJ?s determination not to ?lose? 
Vietnam, see Logevall, Choosing War: 77-107; and George C. Herring, America?s Longest War: The 
United States in Vietnam, 1945-1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1986): 111-118.
12
 Dean Rusk to Henry Cabot Lodge, 10 December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV: 695 -696.  
George Ball, Roger Hilsman, and Michael Forrestal cleared the text of the telegram.
383
withdrawal from the South.
13
  The McNamara trip produced a new sense of urgency 
about developments in Saigon.  McNamara reported to Johnson that the situation was 
?very disturbing.?  If the rate of deterioration of the Minh government continued, he 
forecast, South Vietnam might be lost within months.  Little more than a month later, 
on 29 January 1964, a group of younger officers, led by General Nguyen Khanh, 
overthrew Minh.  The coup reinforced Washington?s doubts about its clients in 
Saigon?especially Khanh whose checkered past included support for the Vietminh 
and, at one point, opposition to Diem.  The Khanh government, it was feared, might 
cut a deal with Hanoi.
14
Looking to the wider situation in Southeast Asia administration officials 
perceived developments to be equally grim. The Laos agreements of 1962 were under 
attack from both wings of the coalition government; Cambodia?s Prince Sihanouk 
was agitating for a major international conference to secure his country?s neutrality; 
and Indonesia?s Sukarno made overtures to Beijing while waging open hostilities 
against the pro-Western government in Malaysia.  China, above all else, concerned 
U.S. planners.  Unsure of the extent of the Sino-Soviet rift, Washington feared that 
U.S. intervention in any of these places might unite the two great Communist powers 
against a common enemy.  China, moreover, faced massive food shortages because of 
its agricultural reforms and, U.S. officials thought, might ?overrun? Southeast Asia to 
secure these staples.  At the very least, Washington assumed that Beijing would incite 
instability in the nations along its periphery.
15
13
 Charles Sullivan to Roger Hilsman, ?Memorandum: Report of McNamara?s Visit to Saigon,? 21 
December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV: 728 -731.
14
 Herring, America?s Longest War: 111-118.
15
 Ibid.
384
Considering the internal weakness of the Saigon regime and the magnitude of 
the perceived external threat, LBJ signed NSAM 288 on 17 March 1964.  
Reconfirming the goal of preserving an independent, non-Communist government in 
Saigon, the policy directive provided for a national mobilization in South Vietnam, 
placing it on a war footing. In addition, Johnson appointed General William 
Westmoreland to replace U.S. military commander General Paul Harkins, authorized 
an adviser buildup (that by year?s end brought the total from 16,700 to 23,000), and 
granted $50 million in economic aid.
16
In making these decisions, Johnson hoped to keep South Vietnam a low-
intensity conflict during the election year of 1964.  He regarded the war, and foreign 
affairs generally, as an irritant and ?intrusion? that diverted his attention from plans 
for sweeping social reforms at home.  Moreover, as a leading biographer pointed out, 
in foreign affairs Johnson was ?much less sure of himself and frustrated . . . it was an 
area in which he had only limited control or capacity to dictate the course of 
events.?
17
  Unfit by temperament to rethink the assumptions for involvement, Johnson 
stayed the course.  There was, to be sure, on Johnson?s part a consideration of 
responsibility for the November coup that he had opposed; that, since the U.S. 
intervened so directly in Saigon?s internal affairs, it now had a greater moral stake in 
ensuring the welfare of the Vietnamese people.  LBJ also thought Vietnam to be an 
important personal test of his foreign policy mettle with the fall presidential election 
16
 Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam.  New York: W.W. 
Norton and Company, 1982: 32; Logevall, Choosing War: 128-129; also The Pentagon Papers, 
Senator Gravel edition, Volume III (Washington, DC: GPO): 50.
17
 Dallek, Flawed Giant: 97; Herring, America?s Longest War: 111-112.
385
approaching.  Underlying it all, Johnson and his advisors saw Vietnam as a challenge 
to American steadfastness abroad.
18
Despite the drift of Vietnam policy, Lippmann lined himself up as one of the 
administration?s most out-spoken admirers.  Several factors contributed to this 
affinity.  Much of his enthusiasm derived from the lofty expectations he had for the 
scope and pace of domestic reforms under the new administration.  A corollary to this 
was his belief that Johnson would exploit the relaxation of tensions between the U.S. 
and U.S.S.R., to focus on programs at home. LBJ also benefited from his relentless 
cultivation of Lippmann.  The columnist did not yet associate Vietnam with 
Johnson?s policies or, as he would several years later, the man himself.
Lippmann also welcomed the contrast between John Kennedy?s maverick 
style of leadership and the consensus-building skills Johnson perfected in the Senate.  
He portrayed the earthy Texan as a politician with whom average Americans could 
connect.  In a March 1964 interview, Lippmann told the popular German magazine 
Der Spiegel that LBJ had a moderating effect on American politics.  ?Kennedy 
divided the country,? Lippmann said.  ?Johnson, on the other hand, is like an old 
shoe?very comfortable.?  With LBJ, the country was ?much quieter and more at 
ease.?  Lippmann also addressed the ?distorted view? of the Kennedy record.  ?He 
was the idol of the left,? Lippmann remarked disdainfully, ?and Kennedy was not a 
man of the left at all?he was a very conservative man.?
19
  In the weeks leading up to 
18
 Dallek, Flawed Giant: 100.
19
 Lippmann interview with Der Spiegel, 7 March 1964; from a copy found in Acheson Papers, Box 
101, Folder: St. Dept. and White House Advisor, 1964, Harry S. Truman Library.
386
the 1964 election he used his column to anoint Lyndon Baines Johnson as a suitable 
successor, a ?born compromiser and healer.?
20
Systemic changes in the Cold War also contributed to Lippmann?s sense that 
Johnson could capitalize on an opportune ?thaw? in superpower relations.  In this 
respect, his outlook on international developments contrasted strikingly with that of 
U.S. officials.  By early 1964, Lippmann believed that the Soviet-American rivalry 
had moved beyond its crisis phase: Western Europe had stabilized and recovered, and 
a rough nuclear parity existed between the superpowers.
21
  These developments, he 
believed, made room for a period of peaceful co-existence.  The U.S. and Soviet 
Union ?are no longer on a collision course as they were before the Cuban missile 
confrontation,? he told readers in his first column of the new year.  ?It cannot be said 
that the two powers are now on the same course or even that they are on parallel 
courses.  But for some considerable distance ahead there is room for both of them.?
22
Thus, there was a tacit consensus between the two superpowers to curb the spiraling 
weapons competition?codified in the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  ?The race of 
armaments, which has been both an expression and a stimulus of the Cold War, has 
reached a point where, if there were war, military victory would have no meaning for 
either side,? he wrote on 2 January 1964.  Lippmann also was far more optimistic 
20
 Walter Lippmann, ?The Republican Moderates,? 12 October 1964, Newsweek: 29.
21
 Modern scholars suggest that it was the parity of nuclear deterrence (if not in actual numbers of 
weapons) itself which prolonged the Cold War, ultimately accounting for the fact that the conflict did 
not end in the early 1960s in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  John Lewis Gaddis has observed 
that by the 1970s, the Cold War had moved into a ?robust, sustainable, and at least at the superpower 
level, peaceful international system? even while Soviet power was in decline. Nuclear weapons, 
Gaddis argues, ?and the fear they generated may well have stretched out the process of decay inside 
the USSR?in effect slowing down time?although they could not reverse it.  Not the least of the Cold 
War?s oddities is that its outcome was largely determined before two-thirds of it had even been 
fought.?  See Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1997): 280.
387
about using the Sino-Soviet split to triangulate and to contain Chinese expansion in 
Southeast Asia.  While he believed small states on the border of China could not 
pursue overtly pro-Western policies that antagonized Beijing, they could nevertheless 
remain autonomous in their internal politics and neutral?in a Titoist sense?in their 
foreign affairs.  China was a great expanding power that the U.S. could not let go 
unchecked, Lippmann conceded.  But so long as it did not threaten Japan or the 
Philippines or American naval supremacy in the Pacific, it was a minimal threat.
23
The corollary Lippmann drew from this prognosis was that the enormous 
expenditures for the arms race and global containment could safely and wisely be 
diverted back into domestic programs for ?human progress . . . the advancement of 
education or an attack on poverty.?
24
  Weeks after this column appeared, the 
president?s chief speechwriters found inspiration in the title of Lippmann?s 1937 
book, The Good Society, for the phrase LBJ used to popularize his vision of post-
affluent America??The Great Society.?
25
  During the fall election season, Lippmann 
projected LBJ as the leader who, by vision, temperament, and divine ?Providence,? 
could best carry out a reform program.  He used this theme into 1965, perhaps, at that 
late juncture, sensing it was the only appeal that might convince Johnson to forego 
Americanization of the war. 
22
 Lippmann, T&T, "The Thaw," 2 January 1964.
23
 Ibid.
24
 Ibid.
25
 Eric Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf,1969): 165.  Goldman suggested 
to Richard Goodwin "that in terms of a popular slogan, the goal of 'post-affluent' America was 
probably best caught by the title of Walter Lippmann's book of some years back, The Good Society.  
Goodwin quite went along with me.  But he obviously preferred 'great society' to 'good society.'"  
Goodwin began peppering LBJ's speeches with this term in March 1964 and, at a May commencement 
address at the University of Michigan, the President spelled out his vision for the Great Society.    
Lippmann's mentor Graham Wallas, the Fabian socialist and professor at the London School of
Economics, used the term as the title of a 1914 book.
388
Lippmann?s early assessments of Johnson bordered on a kind of enthusiasm 
for powerful and charismatic leaders that, some observers claim, dotted the 
columnist?s long career.
26
This contradicted Lippmann?s reputation as a stoic who 
evaluated policymakers and their programs from a cool, detached, and placidly 
analytical perspective.  How could an intellectually-dispassionate analyst, a major 
proponent of postwar realism no less, be a cheerleader for great men?  
Ronald Steel?s biography exploded the myth?widely accepted during 
Lippmann?s working career?that he did not associate with powerful politicians and 
others who acted as his sources.
27
  In doing so, however, Steel may have gone too far 
in suggesting the distorting effects of Lippmann?s enthusiasm for some of the 
twentieth century?s most imposing political figures: Winston Churchill, Charles de 
Gaulle, Woodrow Wilson, and John Kennedy.  He admired Churchill and De Gaulle 
as historic figures who rose up to lead their countries in times of great crisis.  He also 
appreciated their deep sense of history and, as well, something that can only be 
described as their ?long view.?  Churchill articulated it in the early days of the war 
when his nation stood, virtually alone, as the defender of Western society.  De 
Gaulle?another wartime leader whom Lippmann admired?anticipated, better than 
anyone else, the changes in postwar European power alignments.  
Lippmann was no hero-worshipper, however, blinded to the faults and poor 
judgments of his subjects.
28
  He harshly criticized De Gaulle?s nuclear policy even 
26
 To be discussed at length in the concluding chapter.
27
 Much of the book?s engrossing quality derives from the stream of famous people who pass through 
its pages as part of Lippmann?s life.
28
 The historian Arthur Schlesigner, Jr., who knew Lippmann well, recalled that Lippmann was ?a 
skeptic.  He was very skeptical, even with De Gaulle, whom he admired as a sort of historical figure.  
He was not a hero-worshipper at all.  He was sort of a skeptic and from time to time he admired people 
who had done thins, with hose policies he agreed.  But he was not a hero-worshipper . . . I mean the 
389
while embracing the General?s warnings about intervention in Southeast Asia.  With 
Woodrow Wilson, whom he supported as editor of The New Republic, Lippmann 
believed the president had ?lost the peace? by seeking to impose democratic 
principles at Versailles rather than constructing a lasting balance of power.  He 
devoted much of his subsequent career to challenging the Wilsonian legacy in U.S. 
foreign affairs.  Decades later, he endorsed presidential candidate John Kennedy as a 
?natural leader of men.?
29
   The columnist, however, distanced himself from President 
Kennedy, whom he considered charismatic and able but somewhat impulsive and not 
always a careful judge of foreign policy issues.  
With LBJ, in the beginning, there were ideological and personal forces that 
pulled Lippmann nearer the administration.  Part of it was generational?Lippmann 
felt much more comfortable with Johnson, 10 years older than Kennedy, who shared 
some of the characteristic?s of Lippmann?s contemporaries.  Born in 1907, Johnson 
was part of an intra-generational group somewhere between the ?Lost? and ?GI? 
generations?able to draw on memories of America before its rise to global power 
greatest president that he wrote about was FDR.  But he was never worshipful of FDR.?  Interview 
with author, New York City, 12 March 2002.
Though he supported Roosevelt?s initial New Deal legislation, he later became a critic when 
he believed the approach had shifted from an emphasis on the ?compensated economy? toward a 
?directed economy.?  Over time, however, he came to admire FDR as a leader who could articulate his 
visions to the public and for his skill as a war president.  Days before the president?s death in April 
1945, Lippmann wrote a column that embodied a decade of such analysis.  Roosevelt proved a 
?remarkable strategist,? he wrote.  ?The President has his failings as an organizer and administrator of 
his policies and he has made mistakes of judgment, and has listened to poor advisors, and has indulged 
his temperament.  But taken in all, and measured by the results achieved, since the summer of 1940 his 
estimate of the vital interests of the United States has been accurate and far-sighted.  He has served 
those interests with audacity and patience, shrewdly and with calculation, and he has led his country 
out of the greatest peril in which it has ever been to the highest point of security, influence, and respect 
which it has ever attained.?  For Lippmann?s criticisms of the New Deal, see, Walter Lippmann, The 
Method of Freedom (New York, 1934).  For Lippmann?s praise of Roosevelt?s wartime leadership, see, 
Lippmann, T&T, ?The President as Strategist,? 7 April 1945.
29
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Two Men,? 18 October 1960; see also T&T, ?The TV Debate,? 30 September 
1960; T&T, ?The Second Debate,? 11 October 1960.
390
and tempered by the disillusionment on the inter-war years.
30
  LBJ?s roots in the New 
Deal years also oriented him toward a domestic agenda of social welfare, urban 
renewal, and civil rights reforms?all of which appealed to Lippmann.  For a decade, 
Lippmann had urged Americans to address crucial socio-economic problems at home 
while worrying a little less about the Soviet menace.  Coupled with these influences 
was Lippmann?s friendship with key Johnson advisors.  The columnist?s connection 
to Mac Bundy and George Ball proved decisive when the president?s Vietnam 
policies began to concern Lippmann.  
Lippmann?s unbridled admiration of LBJ raised troubling questions for some 
observers about his celebrated objectivity and detachment.  Their concerns were 
justified.  On a nationally-televised program the columnist rhapsodized about the 
president as being a ?healing man? and a ?genius in politics.?  On 8 April 1964, in the 
upstairs Oval Room of the White House, Johnson, advisor Jack Valenti, and 
presidential secretary Vicky McCammon gathered around a television to watch the 
annual installment of the network series, CBS Report: Conversation with Walter 
Lippmann.
31
  They listened as Lippmann explained that LBJ had supplanted 
Kennedy?s dashing but divisive politics of crisis with a calmer, domestic consensus.  
Seated comfortably on a studio couch set in front of book-filled shelves, Lippmann 
told interviewer Eric Sevaried, that under Johnson?s leadership ?the country is far 
more united and at peace with itself, except over the issue of Negro rights, than it has 
30
 Robert Kaiser makes a generational argument in his American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the 
Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000): 8-9.  He bases 
his analysis on the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America?s 
Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York, 1991).
31
 Lippmann was an innovator even in the medium that eventually helped super-pundits and talking 
heads supplant the Washington columnist.  The CBS Reports series taped seven one-hour interviews
391
been for a long time . . . I attribute that to the accession of this new President.?  
Reflecting on LBJ?s domestic legislation, particularly the pending civil rights bill, 
Lippmann added, ?And he?s done, I think, what President Kennedy could not have 
done had he lived.?
32
   Watching a television at the foot of her bed in the presidential 
living quarters, Lady Bird Johnson thought Lippmann?s oration ?couldn?t have been 
better.?  It seemed to her that the columnist thought ?it didn?t make any difference 
about whom Lyndon asked to be his Vice-President [in that fall?s presidential race], 
because he didn?t need the help.?
33
  Nothing Lippmann could have said would have 
pleased Johnson more.  ?Did you hear Walter Lippmann last night?? LBJ crowed to 
Georgia Senator Richard Russell the next day.  ?I thought he was wonderful.?  To 
which Russell, Johnson?s old mentor, laughed in reply, ?I just wondered what it cost 
you.  God, I know Old A.W. Moursund
34
 is signing up the deed to [your] damned 
television station.  It?s a Lippmann station now!?
35
  Lyndon Johnson, momentarily, 
had found his prized publicist.
Lippmann?s enthusiasm for the newest occupant of the White House was not 
lost on journalistic colleagues.  Eric Sevaried obliquely raised the point when he 
opened the interview.  How did Lippmann, he asked, for 50 years a confidant of 
presidents, retain his ability to be critical of them?  Lippmann answered that 
journalists had to observe certain ?rules of hygiene.?  He continued, ?Newspapermen 
cannot be the cronies of great men . . . I think it is advantageous for the President to 
with Lippmann between 1960 and 1965.  Interviewers include some of TV journalism's luminaries: 
Howard K. Smith, Eric Sevaried, and Walter Cronkite.
32
 Walter Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 
1965): 179-180; Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: 313, fn.
33
 Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970): 104.
34
 An ex-judge from Texas Hill-country, a Johnson crony, and one of LBJ's closest business partners.
35
 Beschloss, Taking Charge: 313.
392
be able to talk to somebody who won?t exploit him, or betray him, or talk his mind; 
and it?s certainly a great advantage to the correspondent to know what?s really going 
on so he won?t make a fool of himself.  But there always has to be a certain distance 
between high public officials and newspapermen.  I wouldn?t say a wall or a fence, 
but an air space, that?s very necessary.?
36
   It was not so clear that Lippmann heeded 
his own advice.
In retrospect, some colleagues insisted that Lippmann maintained his distance 
and independence during those critical months.  ?His influence came not from 
rubbing shoulders with celebrities,? recalled Joseph Kraft, the Los Angeles Times
columnist.  ?It flowed from his independence of thought and the penetration of his 
analyses.?
37
Washington Post reporter Carroll Kilpatrick, another recipient of the 
Johnson treatment, thought Lippmann?s convictions, not complicity with Johnson, 
shaped his columns.  The Johnson treatment worked in the beginning, Kilpatrick 
admitted. ?Some well-known people were completely . . . enamored of him because 
of his openness and willingness to see them,? Kilpatrick said.  ?For example the 
President thought?I?m sure?that Walter Lippmann was almost in his vest pocket.  
He called Lippmann to ask him what to do about this and that.  Lippmann was an
independent minded man and [eventually] he said, ?No, you shouldn?t do this.?  And 
then he would go out and write in public that the President made a mistake when he 
announced this policy yesterday.  That antagonized Johnson.?
38
36
 Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann, 161-163.
37
 Joseph Kraft, ?Lippmann: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,? The Washington Post, September 11, 
1980: A19.  Kraft wrote this editorial when Steel?s biography, analyzing Lippmann?s relationship with 
LBJ, was published.
38
 Kilpatrick, OH-I: 10.  Speaking to his press secretary, George Reedy, LBJ succinctly described his 
theory of press relations?a philosophy that later landed him in so much trouble.  ?This crowd here,? 
393
Other observers were far more critical of Lippmann?s close proximity to the 
president and his habit of ingratiating himself to those in power.  E. Ernest Goldstein, 
a special assistant to LBJ from 1967-69 and one of his Austin associates, recalled that 
during Lippmann?s 1962 visit to the ranch it was Johnson who was the recipient of 
the ?Lippmann treatment.?  The columnist ?was showing tremendous adulation for 
the [Vice] President, which is the mildest word I can think of,? Goldstein recalled.  
?Mr. Lippmann has always tried to manage to be very close to the seat of power in 
this country for as long as he could.  It seems to me he was doing what comes 
naturally as far as he was concerned.?
39
  While Lippmann?s research assistant, 
Elizabeth Farmer, believed his enthusiasm for Johnson to be ?spontaneous and real,? 
she nevertheless indicated to her boss that it seemed ?excessive.?
40
  Undeniably, 
Lippmann craved to be among the ?men of action,? as he liked to call them.  He 
coveted his insider status.  After all, access was part of his stock-in-trade.   
Lippmann practiced his craft in that gray area which exists between decision-
makers and those who interpret their actions for the public.  He seems constantly to 
have struggled with the implications of occupying such an undefined space and with 
his own conception of the role he played in the process of being the intermediary 
between officials and his readership.  A tension existed within him as to which his 
allegiance belonged.  This ambivalence carried over into the realm of policies and 
ideas, too.  What his biographer understood to be Lippmann?s unique ?intellectual 
Johnson said of the press corps in 1964, ?you got to understand that they are not the masters of the 
White House.  They?re just the servants and we give them what we want to give them.?  Beschloss, 
Taking Charge: 308.
39
 E. Ernest Goldstein, Oral History Interview, 9 December 1968: 12. LBJL.
40
 Interview with Elizabeth Midgley (Farmer), 28 February 2001, Washington, DC.
394
flexibility?
41
 (his ability to jettison old notions for new ones) could just as accurately 
be described as a kind of emotive fickleness.  Given far-ranging access to the most 
powerful persons in American public life, Lippmann often chose to stand apart from 
prevailing official views?sometimes without provocation or clear impetus, and not 
entirely for reasons of professional detachment.  Lippmann?s rival, the columnist Joe 
Alsop, once jested that the only way Lippmann managed to keep his columns fresh 
for four decades was to flip-flop his ?views roughly once every eight months??about 
the time in between Lippmann?s visits to Paris and London.  There was, as a 
prominent historian once noted, a contra-cyclical quality to his writing.
42
Competing with his strong need to be an insider, there existed in this complex 
man a deeper contrarian impulse from which he derived energy, pleasure, and a kind 
of intellectual replenishment.  The novelist of the New York intelligentsia, Louis 
Auchincloss (who was Lippmann?s lawyer and closest associate late in life), captured 
this enigmatic side of the columnist?s personality in a thinly-veiled fictional novel, 
The House of the Prophet (1980).  ?He was incapable of conforming to any pattern, 
noble or ignoble,? Auchincloss wrote about Felix Leitner, the book?s central 
character, patterned after Lippmann.  ?Sooner or later he was bound to separate 
himself from the team, whatever team it might be, and redefine himself in relation to 
it in less than complimentary terms.  The reason that he was so dangerous was that 
the pleasure he derived in separating himself from the team was greater than any 
material or even moral advantage that he might possibly derive from staying with 
41
 For example, see Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 77.
42
 Alsop, I?ve Seen the Best of It: 472-473.  See Arthur Schlesigner, Jr.'s essay, "Walter Lippmann: The 
Intellectual v. Politics," in Walter Lippmann and His Times, Marquis Childs and James Reston, eds., 
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959): 189-225.
395
it.?
43
   Years later, Auchincloss recalled that he chose Lippmann as a model of ?a man 
who is independent, totally and completely independent, of every creed, philosophy, 
and human being, because he is a mind operating alone.?  The book?s story, like 
much of Lippmann?s life, revolved around the difficulties and contradictions arising 
from this pursuit of intellectual independence.
44
Jim Rowe, a former aide to Franklin D. Roosevelt and a long-time friend of 
LBJ, had watched that process of disassociation happen when Lippmann turned 
against the New Deal reforms and endorsed Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential race.  
Rowe, in the spring of 1964, compared the Washington press corps to a docile flock 
following the ?bellwether [sic] sheep.?  He told President Johnson, ?The only two 
newspapermen practically all of them admire are Walter Lippmann and Scotty 
Reston.  As long as those two are for Lyndon Johnson he will, on the whole, get a 
good press from the rest of them.  You certainly have Lippmann and Reston in your 
pocket now.  I hope you do not lose them.?
45
  That outcome depended far more on 
events in Saigon than on Johnson?s entreaties, Lippmann?s vagaries, or, ultimately, 
his need to be an insider.
43
 Louis Auchincloss, The House of the Prophet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980): 142.
Auchincloss is both more critical of Lippmann?s personal shortcomings than biographer Ronald Steel, 
and more appreciative of the beauty of Lippmann?s prose, indeed the journalistic feat of writing a 
column for so long.
44
 Louis Auchincloss, interview with author, 12 March 2002, New York City.  
45
 James Rowe to LBJ, 22 April 1964, White House Central File (Ex Fg 1), LBJL.  Information on 
Rowe?s background can be found in Dallek?s Flawed Giant.  Years later, Johnson recalled Rowe?s 
advice almost verbatim (though with great bitterness) to his biographer Doris Kearns when recounting 
the loss of media support for the war.  ?The Washington press are like a pack of wolves when it comes 
to attacking public officials, but they?re like a bunch of sheep in their own profession and they will 
always follow the bellwether sheep, the leaders of their profession, Lippmann and Reston.  As long as 
those two stayed with me, I was okay.  But once they left me in pursuit of their fancy prizes, everyone 
else left me as well.  But the more they screamed and squawked, the more determined I was to stick it 
396
III.
During the spring of 1964, in contrast to his applause for the administration?s 
legislative triumphs and LBJ?s domestic prospects, Lippmann filled his analyses of 
Vietnam with foreboding.  He wrote about it more than any other subject, producing 
nearly a dozen columns in the first half of 1964 alone.
46
  Though he would wait more 
than a year before quitting the kid-glove treatment with Johnson, U.S. policymakers 
and the general public who paid attention in 1964 knew that Lippmann would not 
support an Americanized war in Vietnam.  He continued his support for De Gaulle?s 
plan for neutralization, developing several themes that later widened his schism with 
LBJ: the administration needed to debate openly, rather than obfuscate, the American 
role in the war; a bombing campaign against North Vietnam would not win what was 
essentially a civil war in the South, though it could trigger Chinese intervention; and 
the U.S. military presence in Vietnam should be temporary and used only to preserve 
American bargaining power.
47
  Critics believed he did not have the requisite 
knowledge of Asia to make these judgments.  But Lippmann, like the French leaders 
and intellectuals who informed his perspective, seemed singularly focused on creating 
a great-power framework to guarantee neutralism in Southeast Asia.  The only 
plausible strategy in Vietnam, he told readers, was a diplomatic settlement devised by 
the Western Alliance not an enlarged American military commitment.  
At times during 1964 and 1965, Lippmann acted like an informal ambassador 
between Johnson and De Gaulle when relations broke down between the official U.S. 
out.?  Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976): 
313-314.
46
 Culminating that May in a three-part series of French and American interests in Asia .
397
envoy, Charles Bohlen, and his French hosts.  Lippmann listened to French officials? 
estimates of the war because of their own direct experience in the country.  Too, 
Lippmann was an unrequited Francophile.  He moved easily among French 
diplomats, and was close to the French Ambassador Herve Alphand and his 
successor, Charles Lucet. Columnist Joe Alsop and Mac Bundy, thought poorly of it, 
insisting that Lippmann was on the receiving end of a propaganda pipeline. Alsop 
especially thought Lippmann?s special relationship with the French sources impugned 
his independent status.  Lippmann once met the historian Bernard Fall, whom Alsop 
considered a ?French agent.?  Forever after Alsop complained that ?mushy heads? 
like Lippmann used ?[Fall] as a guide whenever the French Embassy is 
unavailable.?
48
  When he met with French officials in Washington or visits with De 
Gaulle at the Quai d?Orsay?U.S. officials brought him in, partly to soothe his 
concerns but also to probe for European opinion about the war.  These White House 
meetings became rites of spring and late fall, coinciding with Lippmann?s twice-
yearly trips to the Continent.  After one visit to Paris, Lippmann decided that Bohlen 
harbored such antipathy for the General that he recommended LBJ replace the 
ambassador because his prejudices kept him from being an effective diplomat.
49
47
 See especially, Lippmann, ?Concerning Vietnam,? T&T, 5 March 1964; ?Foreign Policy Debate,? 
T&T, 21 April 1964.
48
 Joe Alsop to P.J. Honey, 10 March 1964, Box 69, Joseph W. Alsop Papers, Library of Congress, 
Washington, DC (hereinafter referred to as ?LC?).  According to Elizabeth Midgley, Lippmann?s 
research assistant, Lippmann met with Bernard Fall only once?purposefully in her presence.  
Knowing Fall?s reputation, Lippmann was careful to protect himself from the very charges Alsop 
leveled at him in private.  Interview with Elizabeth Midgley (Farmer), 28 February 2001, Washington, 
DC. 
49
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 555.  Years later Lippmann, who never showed 
much interest in government service, admitted that had it been offered he would have accepted the 
position as Ambassador to France.
398
Lippmann?s use of French officials and dissenting journalists exacerbated 
critic?s claims that he wrote with little direct knowledge of political and social 
realities in Southeast Asia.  This argument had merit.  On Western European subjects 
ranging from geopolitics and to economics, Lippmann was at his strongest.  He wrote 
lucidly about the intricacies of the problematic Multi-Lateral Force proposal or the 
effects of Gaullist nationalism on NATO.  But when he ventured into detail about 
Southeast Asia, he was less sure.  Like so many eastern Establishment figures of his 
era, Lippmann was an Atlanticist.  Asia fell outside that part of the world where he 
deemed the U.S. to have primary interests.  Later, defending himself against charges 
that he was a ?neo-isolationist? because he opposed intervention in Vietnam, he 
would explain that ?while we have important interests on the Asian and African 
continents, they are not vital interests which would justify a unilateral American 
commitment of our military forces.  In these areas, which are beyond the limits of our 
vital strategic interests,? it was better to rely on collective defense.
50
  Asia, moreover, 
fell outside the scope of Lippmann?s intellectual and cultural curiosity.  Though he 
twice toured India, meeting with Jawarhal Nehru, he never ventured to China, Japan, 
Korea, or Southeast Asia.
51
The dichotomy between Lippmann?s grasp of the details in Vietnam and his 
power to influence public opinion on the subject befuddled policymakers and Asia 
hands.  Bill Moyers, Johnson?s press secretary and chief of staff, recalled that this 
contradiction contributed to the president?s preoccupation with Lippmann.  ?LBJ took 
Lippmann seriously as the one philosopher-columnist who was read regularly by the 
50
 Lippmann, T&T, "The Neo-Isolationists," 2 March 1965.
51
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 463-464; 515-516.  
399
elites of the establishment,? Moyers said.  ?He was constantly frustrated because he 
believed Lippmann?s influence was out of all proportion to his knowledge of Asia, in 
particular, and that?s why he would spend so much of his time and effort to have 
various members of the administration try either to coddle or challenge Lippmann.?
52
Foreign correspondents expressed similar frustrations.  Most rejected 
Lippmann?s central assessments of the war in the early 1960s: the futility of 
prevailing militarily in South Vietnam; that no vital interests were at stake; and that a 
satisfactory settlement could be reached at the peace table. Informed observers, such 
as Newsweek?s Southeast Asia reporter Bob Elegant, dismissed Lippmann?s plans for 
the neutralization of Laos and the rest of Indo-China in 1961.  Elegant wrote privately 
that Lippmann ?seems almost as detached from reality as Mao Tse-tung in his 
construction of vast and airy fantasies without any basis in things as they are.  I have 
in mind his thesis about Southeast Asia [neutralization], which proceeds from a 
complete misunderstanding of the present situation . . . The view from Washington 
certainly comprehends some strange vistas.?
53
Nor did those who criticized American tactics share Lippmann?s fundamental 
reservations.  New York Times reporter David Halberstam and United Press 
International writer Neil Sheehan, among a small band of Saigon correspondents, first 
revealed to the American public in 1962 and 1963 the poor progress in fighting the 
Vietcong, as well as the Diem regime?s unpopularity and ruthless acts of suppression.  
Halberstam and Sheehan earned the enmity of the Kennedy administration for 
exposing the warts of the U.S. counter-insurgency program.  In hindsight, however, 
52
 Bill Moyers letter to author, 23 November 1998.
53
 Robert Elegant to Joe Alsop, 22 June 1961, Box 17, Joseph W. Alsop Papers, LC.
400
these observers, who were in the position to know how badly the war was going in 
the South, were not ready to embrace a negotiated settlement that they clearly felt to 
be a defeatist option.  By their own admission, while Halberstam and Sheehan 
opposed military strategy in 1963, they failed to question either the military character 
of intervention or American objectives.
54
Longtime veterans, like Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News, insisted that 
Lippmann inflicted grave damage on U.S. policy with his Olympian musings.  Far 
from the dinner parties and insider?s world of official Washington, in his Tokyo 
bureau office, Beech read Lippmann?s support for neutralization in 1964 with
mounting incredulity.  A seasoned war reporter and anti-Communist, he had cut his 
teeth covering the Korean War and spent much of the intervening time writing about 
Vietnam under the Diem regime.  His prescription for Saigon?s problems did not 
include compromise with Hanoi: ?It?s well to keep in mind Uncle Mao?s advice that 
there is no third road.?  De Gaulle?s plan for neutralization ?is fooling a lot of 
people,? he wrote. Beech thought that Lippmann, out of ignorance, abetted the 
General?s plan to restore French influence by so eagerly adopting his plan.  ?Congress 
ought to enact a law forbidding Walter Lippmann to write about Southeast Asia,? he 
told Joe Alsop after reading a column in which Lippmann confused the geography of 
Hanoi with Haiphong.  ?If that can?t be arranged, perhaps someone will be good 
enough to tell him that Hanoi isn?t a seaport.?
55
54
 William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett?
Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
55
 Keyes Beech to Joe Alsop, 23 March 1964, Box 69, Joseph W. Alsop Collection, LC.  Beech shared 
Alsop's long-held skepticism about Lippmann's analysis in Southeast Asia.  Early in the Kennedy 
Administration he'd told Alsop: "Fourteen years ago I stated that the Japanese should not be allowed to 
use oil paint.  It's not their medium.  Nothing has happened since to change my mind.  By the same 
token, Walter Lippmann should not be allowed to write about Asia, especially Southeast Asia.  I 
401
No colleague so openly ridiculed Lippmann?s ability to engage the issues in 
Vietnam as the tempestuous Joe Alsop.
56
  Few correspondents possessed his broad 
experience and deep appreciation for Asian culture.  Fewer still had involved 
themselves as such partisans in events there during the 1940s and 1950s.
57
  As an 
American Air Force captain in Kumming, China, during World War II, Alsop was a 
confidant of T.V. Soong the Nationalist government?s foreign minister.  He claimed, 
years later, to have helped Soong and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek draft the 
telegram that prompted FDR to recall U.S. commander General Joe Stilwell to 
Washington.
58
  Immediately after the war he returned to the New York Herald 
recently collected all of Mr. Lippmann's columns on Asia for the past six months and sat down to read 
them. The more I read, the more appalled I was.  By the time I finished I was so enraged I wrote a 
2,000-word rebuttal which pleased me if nobody else.  Isn't there something you can do about this old 
man?"  Beech to Alsop, 2 August 1961, Box 17, Joseph W. Alsop Papers, LC.  For more on Beech 
during this period see William Prochnau's Once Upon A Distant War.
56
The Newsweek front page of 18 December 1961 heralded the golden age of the syndicated columnist.  
The cover art featured a sketch of the East Front of the U.S. Capitol, with the columnists? by-lines 
emblazoned on conspicuous parts of the building.  As analogies go, the drawing conveyed much about 
their style and the relative station each inhabited.  Reston?s ?Washington? filled the pediment over-
hanging the center stairs?taking a middle position between the chambers and the legislators who 
occupied them.  Alsop?s ?Matter of Fact? spread across the Senate wing, wherein resided many of his 
sources who were part of Congress?s statelier and traditionally more conservative body.  Lippmann?s 
Today and Tomorrow rose above the others, perched atop the dome the building?s most recognizable 
feature.  Weeks before, Newsweek editor Ben Bradlee had pitched the project to Alsop, explaining that 
the story would ?escape the banalities of how a columnist works and lives into the subtleties of what he 
thinks, how he influences and whom he convinces.?  The most interesting aspect of the Newsweek 
piece was its study in contrasts between Lippmann and Alsop.  Both, Newsweek maintained, offered 
the president ?something of value.?  Lippmann?s ?air of gentility, kindliness and courtliness? provided 
?reason? and ?interpretation.?  Alsop??elegant, precise, arrogant??gave long-range warning on key 
issues.  The later was a ?hard-boiled egghead, [who] blends into his writings deep convictions, hard-
won facts, and, pervading all, an air of imminent cataclysm.?  The Newsweek editors chose not to 
dwell on how much the pair disagreed about the Cold War.  They also grossly exaggerated the 
influence that the columnists? access?and Kennedy?s apparent interest?seemed to afford them.  See, 
?The Columnists JFK Reads Every Morning,? Newsweek, 18 December 1961: 65-70; Ben Bradlee to 
Joseph Alsop, 2 November 1961, Joseph Alsop Papers, LC, Washington, DC; For more on the press 
during the Kennedy years, see  Montague Kern, Patricia W. Levering, and Ralph B. Levering, The 
Kennedy Crisis: The Press, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North 
Carolina Press, 1981); John Tebbel and Sarah M. Watts, The Press and the Presidency: From George 
Washington to Ronald Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985:476-489.
57
 Robert W. Merry, Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop?Guardians of the American 
Century (New York: Viking, 1996). Alsop's memoirs, I?ve Seen the Best of It?also are highly readable 
and, true to character?frank.  He mentions Lippmann sparingly.
58
 Alsop, I?ve Seen the Best of It: 228-256.
402
Tribune to write a column with his brother, Stewart.  ?Matter of Fact? would run for 
nearly 30 years, with Joe writing it solo after the brothers parted company in 1957.  
Joe Alsop had a great deal invested in Asian events.  He also had served during 
World War II as a political aide to Colonel Clair L. Chennault in China; landed at 
Inchon with General Douglas MacArthur; and, first reported from Saigon in 1953, 
where, during the next two decades, he spent a total of two years reporting in-country.  
He was a tireless supporter of the Nationalist Chinese exiled to Formosa and a 
frequent advocate of military adventures against the Communist regime in Beijing?
which he blamed for inciting the Hanoi-backed insurgency in South Vietnam.  A 
confirmed anti-Communist, Alsop used his Matter of Fact column to call for direct 
U.S. military intervention at Dien Bien Phu, as well as during the Quemoy and Matsu 
crises during the 1950s.  He took a hard-line approach to fighting the Vietcong 
insurgency, and never relinquished it.  Mac Bundy, a close family friend of Alsop, 
once confided to LBJ after reading one of the columnist?s Saigon dispatches: ?I think 
[Joe] really wants to have a little old war out there.?
59
  Bundy rejected Lippmann?s 
argument that Vietnam fell outside America?s vital geo-strategic interests, yet he was 
never fully at ease with Alsop?s full-throated enthusiasm for prosecuting the war 
against Hanoi.
60
Lippmann and Alsop courted factions within the elite D.C. society crowd, 
though their dinner gatherings evoked far different moods.  Evenings at the 
Lippmann?s were meditative, cerebral, choreographed, blending philosophy with 
politics.  If tempers flared, Lippmann or his wife, Helen, changed topics to avoid a 
59
 LBJ telephone conversation with Bundy, WH 6403.01, PNO 9, #2309, 2 March 1964; also quoted in 
Bechloss, Taking Charge: 262-263.
403
full-blown conflagration.  A disproportionate number of their guests were foreign 
diplomats, who co-mingled with U.S. senators, academics, and journalists?a staff of 
servants attending them all.  Alsop?s Sunday night potluck dinners included many 
established capital socialites?the Kennedys, Harrimans, and Achesons.  But they 
also drew a younger crowd of promising State Department and Pentagon officials.  
Invariably they featured gossip and heated arguments about the government policy de 
jure.  Alsop steered these unruly debates becoming more voluble as the booze flowed.  
After one especially lubricious evening of cocktails and verbal sparring (in which 
Lippmann participated), Alsop conceded in a letter of apology, ?In my family, no 
argument really was an argument unless everyone left the room at least twice, and 
this was bad training for the future.?
61
Alsop prided himself on being a good reporter rather than a columnist.  He 
worked officials.  He hunted down stories.  He relished ?scooping? his colleagues 
with hard news.  Joe was a master of dark hyperbole?and the style he developed in 
Matter of Fact often obscured those reportorial skills.  He was pugnacious, 
confrontational, and unshakably pessimistic?a combination he accentuated over the 
years until it became his public persona.  Alsop?s favorite method for taking a bearing 
on an issue, or turning up new leads, was to float a column based almost entirely on 
his theorizing, sit back, and wait for administration officials to react to it.  For all his 
bluster and theatrics, he was a keen observer.  Perhaps, because he was more firmly 
ensconced as a reporter than Lippmann, he had a better sense than his rival of the 
limits of a journalist?s ability to shape an issue.  He believed the ?personal 
60
 Bird, The Color of Truth: 274-275; 328-329.
404
journalism? columnists practiced had negligible influence on either public opinion or 
presidential decision-making.  ?I have never known any reporter who enjoyed this 
kind of influence, over any appreciable number of readers,? Alsop observed late in 
his career.  ?And, I have certainly never known any reporter who had this kind of 
influence over a President.  From time to time, a reporter can have an effect by 
ventilating a scandal, for example, or by dragging a very grave problem out from 
under the rug, or in some other way focusing the political community?s attention on 
significant, previously ignore[d] facts.?  Interpretation and analysis, however, weren?t 
the fundamental work at hand.  ?A reporter?s role is simply to draw attention to the 
facts,? Alsop concluded.
62
Beyond their contrasting personalities and their conflicting purposes in 
crafting political columns, Lippmann and Alsop were point-counterpoint debaters on 
American Cold War policies.  Geography, method, and, quite often, goals divided 
them.  Lippmann, by experience, and, at times focus, seemed most connected with 
western Europe.  He believed the center of the power struggle between the U.S. and 
the Soviet Union lay in Germany.  Alsop, who had long experience in the Asian 
theater in World War II, believed that the struggle with Communism (and he made 
little distinction between Soviet, Chinese, North Korean or North Vietnamese) would 
be won on the periphery, in post-colonial regions and developing nations.  For 
Lippmann, Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and, later, Hanoi were motivated by 
nationalist objectives not Marxist orthodoxy.  Alsop, conversely, believed that 
61
 Merry, Taking on the World: 155-156; 400-401.  Joseph Alsop to Walter Lippmann, imprecise date, 
c. February 1950, Box 50, Folder 38, Series III, WLC.
405
Communist ideology was infectious and decisively shaped a worldwide movement 
directed from the Kremlin.  In crisis situations, Lippmann urged negotiations and 
diplomatic discourse; Alsop wanted to send in the Marines.  Restraint and 
internationalism were Lippmann?s watchwords.  Alsop was an unreconstructed 
nationalist who cheered rather than challenged Washington?s expansionist tendencies.
Alsop?s low estimates of Lippmann?s forays into policy debates about 
Southeast Asia, like his views on Vietnam, solidified in the 1950s.  Their views on 
Indo-China were diametrically opposed.
63
  Alsop popularized the term ?domino 
theory,? accepting the idea that if a Communist government came to power in any of 
the former Indo-Chinese states, American prestige would suffer and its security 
would be threatened.  The root of their disagreements lay in the fact that Lippmann 
saw developments in Asia on a geopolitical basis: China was an expanding great 
power.  Alsop viewed Chinese moves through the prism of ideology: China was an 
expanding Communist power.  Amid a second major crisis in the Formosan Straits in 
1958, Alsop rebuffed Lippmann?s argument that Formosa could be turned into an 
?autonomous, neutralized and demilitarized? state.  Lippmann doubted the 
Nationalists would outlive the Chiang regime and that sooner or later the island 
would be reunited with the mainland.  ?I am considerably shocked by the wide 
divergence between your presentation of the facts of the situation-on-the-spot,? Alsop 
replied in private correspondence, ?and the same facts as I have observed them first 
62
 Joseph Alsop to Lewis R. Franck, 5 January 1967, Box 76, Joseph Alsop Papers, LC.  This is 
essentially the same argument Alsop expressed in a book he co-wrote with his brother, Stewart: The 
Reporter?s Trade (New York: Reynal, 1958).
63
 See, for example, the following Alsop "Matter of Fact" columns published in the New York Herald 
Tribune:  "Indo-China: The Multiple Crisis," 28 April 1964; "End at Dienbienphu?" 30 April 1954; 
"They Fight for Us!" 5 May 1954; "Add Up the Tab," 7 May 1954; "Bombs All But Fell," 10 May 
1954; and "The Dissolving Partnership," 21 May 1954.
406
hand.  Knowing you, I am very sure that you don?t wish to misrepresent the facts.?
64
To his two-page, single-spaced letter, Alsop attached a New Republic article he 
deemed suitably informed.  One anecdote that Alsop told the Washington Post?s
Saigon correspondent, Ward Just, summarized years of his frustrations.  Alsop once 
sent some books to Woodley Road in an effort to bring Lippmann up to speed on 
Chinese history.  A few months later the loaned copies were returned, unopened, with 
a note from Lippmann ?lamenting that ?somehow I can?t read about China.??  Alsop 
snapped, ?It all but gave me a double hernia, straining not to reply: ?But if you cannot 
read about China, why in God?s name write about it???
65
Ultimately, however, as the Vietnam debate became one about U.S. grand 
strategy and China?s role as a great power in the region, Lippmann proved a thorny 
problem for the Johnson administration and war enthusiasts like Alsop.  On the firmer 
ground of geopolitics, he was a formidable opponent.  They might quibble with his 
appreciation for the intricacies of nation-building in Southeast Asia, or even his 
serene faith in creating a neutral Vietnam.  But American officials and critics could 
not readily dismiss Lippmann?s twin assertions that sending the U.S. military to fight 
a guerilla war on the Asian mainland would be a strategic folly; and that Vietnam lay 
outside America?s core interests.
64
 This marked one of the few significant exchanges of correspondence between the two rivals.  See, 
Joe Alsop to Walter Lippmann, 9 October 1958, Box 50, Folder 38, Series III, WLC. Lippmann 
disagreed with Alsop?s contention that the shelling of the island of Quemoy by Chinese Communists 
was the opening phase of a military attack on Formosa.  See also, Lippmann to Alsop, 10 October 
1958, Box 50, Folder 38, Series III, WLC; and Alsop to Lippmann, 29 October 1958, Box 50, Folder 
38, Series III, WLC.  For Lippmann's opinions expressed in T&T see: "The Dulles Formula," 11 
September 1958; "Mr. Dulles on Tuesday," 2 October 1958; "The Latest Gambit," 7 October 1958; 
"The Position of Strength," 14 October 1958.
65
 Joe Alsop to Ward Just, 24 October 1967, Box 76, Joseph W. Alsop Papers, LC.
407
Lippmann believed U.S. strategists should work with France to promote a 
neutral government in Vietnam.  In a series of columns in early 1964 Lippmann 
renewed his efforts to get the administration to give De Gaulle?s neutralization plan a 
hearing.  It was not an easy sell because many U.S. officials were infuriated by the 
General?s impromptu announcement in January 1964 that France planned to extend 
full diplomatic recognition to China.  America?s isolation in the Far East?and by this 
Lippmann meant its lonely stand against recognition of the People?s Republic of 
China?created a ?neurotic jingoism about any country that differs with us and does 
not keep in step.? He counseled Washington officials to accept De Gaulle?s decision.  
The administration could ill afford to ?nurse a grievance?; De Gaulle, he wrote, 
simply was recognizing a situation of fact, not condoning the form of government in 
Beijing.  On Vietnam, he continued, ?we should welcome General de Gaulle?s advice, 
his help, his influence which is greater than many of us realize . . . without his help 
there is no prospect that we shall be able to extricate ourselves honorably from the 
entanglement in Southeast Asia.?
66
De Gaulle was offering a way out of the morass, ?rendering us a signal
service,? Lippmann wrote.
67
  He went on to explain that French and Americans were 
not at cross purposes; both, ultimately, hoped to contain Chinese expansion.  Rather, 
they conflicted over the reality of the problem in Vietnam. While the U.S. sought to 
create an advantageous military position prior to pursuing a negotiated settlement, De 
Gaulle believed that ?there cannot be a military solution of the Vietnamese civil 
66
 Lippmann, T&T, 21 January 1964, "Red China and the General."
67
 Lippmann, T&T, 4 February 1964, "The French-American Argument."
408
war.?
68
  Lippmann wholeheartedly shared De Gaulle?s pessimism about the military 
prospects.  ?General de Gaulle?s argument is unanswerable unless we are able to 
persuade ourselves that the civil war can be won,? he wrote. ?The official American 
view is that we have to say unreservedly that the war will be won and refuse to think 
about what we shall do if it cannot be won.?  The administration, by refusing a 
diplomatic solution, had ?bolted the doors? and denied itself the key part of any 
sound strategy, a ?fall-back position.?
69
  He reminded skeptics that ?we should not 
confuse ourselves with the notion that General de Gaulle has offered a plan for the 
neutralization of Southeast Asia which we must accept or reject.? De Gaulle?s 
vagueness allowed for wiggle-room: ?He has proposed a line of policy and a mode of 
thinking which we cannot afford to dismiss lightly.?
70
A week later, with an even bleaker description of prospects in Saigon, 
Lippmann identified that ?mode of thinking? with the kind of neutralism that the U.S. 
had learned to accept in Europe.  The war was ?going badly for our side,? he 
informed readers, ?more badly than the American public has been allowed to know  . 
. . [it] is being told what officially we hope will happen.  It is not being told what in 
fact is happening.?
71
  The U.S. could remain in Vietnam long enough only to reach a 
tolerable political settlement.  And, he wrote, the administration should seize on De 
Gaulle?s ?middle road approach? of neutralization while it still had the bargaining 
power to do so.
72
  ?It would be a very big mistake for the Administration to continue 
to limit itself, as it is now doing, to a choice between what is almost certainly an 
68
 Ibid.
69
 Ibid.
70
 Lippmann, T&T, 4 February 1964, "The French-American Argument."
71
 Lippmann, T&T, 11 February 1964, "Finland and Southeast Asia."
409
unattainable victory and an unacceptable catastrophe,? he concluded.  De Gaulle?s 
plan proposed just that kind of diplomatic escape hatch, a line of policy that would 
permit a neutralization of Vietnam and held out some hope for its own autonomy and 
latitude in dealing with China.  For those who argued that North Vietnam?or even a 
united Vietnam under Hanoi?could never be pried loose from Chinese influence, 
Lippmann held out the examples of Yugoslavia and Finland.  Geographically both 
were situated near the Soviet Union and its obedient satellites, yet both enjoyed 
relatively autonomous domestic affairs.  The point, Lippmann explained, is that ?a 
country on the border of a big Communist state need not inevitably lose its national 
independence.?
73
Though unflinching in his support for De Gaulle?s neutralization plan and the 
General?s recognition of China, Lippmann held no unrealistic hopes about drawing 
the administration to his position?at least publicly.  He told a former Belgian 
official, Camille A. Gutt, ?If it is a matter of talking out loud about de Gaulle and his 
policy in the Far East, I suppose I am just about completely isolated in this country.?  
At the time, Secretary of State Dean Rusk was pressuring the Chiang government in 
Taipei to consider breaking relations with Paris in protest of France?s decision to 
extend normal diplomatic relations to Beijing.  During a meeting with Rusk, 
Taiwanese Ambassador to the U.S. Tingfu F. Tsiang complained that his government 
found it difficult ?to distinguish official from unofficial views and comments in 
Washington.  So many people wanted to speak their minds on the problem, including, 
for example, Mr. Lippmann.?  Rusk dismissed the columnist?s support for recognition 
72
 Ibid.
73
 Lippmann, T&T, 11 February 1964, "Finland and Southeast Asia."
410
of the PRC: ?Lippmann?s held the same position for 15 years.?
74
  Lippmann?s 
frequent meetings with other U.S. officials, however, led him to believe that, in 
private, the president and many of his advisors did not share Rusk?s extreme position.  
?There is much more sympathy with [De Gaulle] in higher quarters than anyone feels 
it politically expedient to express,? he told Camille Gutt. Though he complained 
Johnson had a ?very short attention span? on discussions about neutralization, 
Lippmann observed that LBJ ?showed no sign of wanting a big war? in Southeast 
Asia.
75
Partly for this reason, Lippmann was loathe to assign too much blame to U.S. 
officials.  He vacillated.  He might use one T&T columns to prod the White House to 
pursue neutralization, while, in the following installment, express sympathy with the 
predicament LBJ faced.  His CBS Reports appearance in April 1964 conveyed this 
ambivalence. ?I believe in the old-fashioned American strategic doctrine which was 
in force before Korea?never to get engaged in a land war on the mainland of Asia,? 
he told Eric Sevaried.  ?Sea power, air power, yes, but never land . . . That?s the 
prejudice with which I approach this thing, and I would never have gotten in as 
deeply as we did get into Vietnam, but we?re in, and you can?t cry over spilled milk.?  
He then went on to say that ?it may be too late? to make De Gaulle?s neutralization 
plan succeed.  Were the General able to initiate some kind of settlement, American 
power would guarantee it.  Though Lippmann doubted that American ?bombers and 
advisers flying around in helicopters? could turn the tide in the war, he did not object 
74
 Memorandum of Conversation between Rusk and Tsiang, 24 January 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. 
30 [China]. Located on-line at the State Department Historical Office, FRUS Series, 
http://state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_xxx/zg.html. 
411
to the 1964-level of U.S. military commitments in South Vietnam. ?That?s a 
necessary thing,? he said.  ?We have to try and stabilize a government before we can 
do anything else.?
76
   In reply to a reader?s letter, Lippmann said that the American 
goal in South Vietnam should be to create a military and political ?stalemate??to 
strengthen the Saigon government ?so that it does not run out on us? and increase the 
U.S. naval and air presence in the Pacific.  Operating from a position of strength, the 
U.S. could then negotiate a way out of Vietnam.  He had little enthusiasm for more 
than this kind of exit strategy: ?as for defeating guerilla warfare, frankly, I don?t 
believe it?s possible for the United States to do that kind of thing on the mainland of 
Asia.?
77
  But by leaving the door open to a continued American military presence in 
South Vietnam, Lippmann unwittingly played into the administration?s hands.
IV.
Mac Bundy had a talent?and an increasingly important role?for garnering good 
press.  Johnson designated his national security adviser, already so well acquainted 
with Lippmann, Joe Alsop, and James Reston as mentor to administration spokesmen 
George Reedy, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti.  ?They need some leadership in this 
deal, just like you did your faculty,? LBJ told Bundy, referencing his time as Harvard 
dean.  ?I?d take ?em and I?d try to have coffee with ?em once every two or three days 
and say, ?Now here?s the kind of image we ought to mold? . . . I think Moyers has got 
the capacity and Jack Valenti can learn anything, if you?d just direct him.  You just 
75
 Lippmann to Camille A. Gutt, 29 January 1964, cited in Blum?s Public Philosopher: 610.  See also 
Elizabeth (Framer) Midgley?s diary entry for March 5, 1964.  
76
Conversations with Walter Lippmann: 168-171.
412
take them like they?re teachers of freshman government and you?re dean of faculty 
and you tell ?em what you think they ought to do.?
78
  The others were fast studies.   
But so far as LBJ was concerned, the national security adviser always took the point 
on Lippmann.
Thirty years Lippmann?s junior, Bundy shared an intense, almost filial, 
relationship with the columnist.  At precociously young ages, each was deemed the 
brightest mind of his respective generation.  Like the older men with whom Bundy 
surrounded himself?Henry Stimson, Felix Frankfurter, and Archibald MacLeish?
Lippmann was immediately taken with Bundy when they met in the late-1940s.  
Bundy had just co-written Stimson?s memoirs, On Active Service in Peace and War, a 
popular and, at the time, an authoritative account of the decision to drop the atomic 
bombs on Japan.  Bundy became much more than Stimson?s scribe; the old man?s 
Wilsonian conception of foreign affairs, that stressed the rightness of intervention to 
protect and instill democracy abroad, had a profound influence on his prot?g?.
79
  That 
wasn?t so clear in 1948 when Lippmann enlisted Bundy to revise The Good Society, a 
book he?d written in the 1930s.  The project never developed, with Bundy telling 
Lippmann after a year that though he?d taken apart the original arguments of the book 
he could not reconstruct the pieces.
80
  That episode did not end of their collaboration.  
When Harvard searched for a new president in the 1950s, Lippmann recommended 
Bundy.  Later, when John Kennedy asked Lippmann whom he should name to head 
77
 Lippmann to John Mecklen, 10 April 1964, cited in John Morton Blum, Public Philosopher: 
Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985): 611.
78
 LBJ-Bundy phone conversation, 14 April 1964, tape #WH6409.09, citation #3027, PNO #10, LBJL.
79
 Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (New York: 
Simon and Schuster, 1998): 88-98.
80
 Bird, The Color of Truth: 101-105. 
413
the State Department, the columnist suggested the 41-year-old, then Dean of Faculty 
at Harvard.
Partly at LBJ?s bidding, Bundy was encouraged to expand the scope of his 
purview.  Much, however, came from Bundy?s own initiative?from his desire to 
control, his tendency to do first and ask questions later, indeed, his relentless drive to 
assert his own influence in the power vacuums and gray areas that existed in the 
bureaucracy.  Mac Bundy?as David Halberstam memorably observed?did not 
shrink from power.
81
  And his power certainly expanded in the first year of the LBJ 
administration, as he tutored the president on foreign affairs, press relations, even 
domestic politics?all of these fell under his broad watch.  It worried some who felt 
he over-reached and that, though he was a first-rate operative, he was a little too un-
philosophical.
82
  Bundy?s memos were indicative of his approach: lucid, concise, 
exacting, and filled with his sharp cynicism.  They were legend among government 
circles; almost a new kind of literary genre.  LBJ biographer Robert Dallek observed 
that Bundy?s memos were no mere policy summaries from subordinate to superior.  
Instead, they read like guidelines from professor to pupil.  Most remarkable was the 
?didactic? tone Bundy adopted, Dallek explained, ?never disrespectful or patronizing, 
but like a teacher?s instructions to an eager student, they advised Johnson on what to 
say and how to orchestrate every detail of foreign policy.?
83
  He embraced LBJ?s 
admonition to be professorial, even when communicating with the president himself.  
81
 David Halberstam?s essay on Bundy and his aspirations to power is still the classic biographical 
treatment; see, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972): 41-60.
82
 A month into LBJ?s term, Undersecretary of State Averill Harriman and U.N. Ambassador Adlai 
Stevenson warned Johnson that he should not give Bundy too long a leash in international affairs.  
They though it vital that the President ?make it clear that Bundy speaks as your Assistant and not as 
the President.?  See Dallek, Flawed Giant: 89-91.
83
 Dallek, Flawed Giant: 90.
414
But Bundy also had a useful instinct to sense what others wanted, to know what they 
were thinking, to anticipate their positions, and to realign himself to suit them.  If this 
was a sycophantic side of his personality, it nevertheless served him well in his 
relations with presidents and columnists.
84
One of Bundy?s early press assignments was to enlist Lippmann to defend 
LBJ from Republican accusations that he was not vigorously prosecuting the war.  
Richard Nixon, upon returning from a fact-finding trip to Saigon in April 1964, 
charged the administration with preventing the Khanh government from taking the 
war into Laos and North Vietnam.  On the afternoon of 14 April 1964, LBJ phoned 
Bundy at his West Wing office to complain about Nixon?s statements.  He read from 
a UPI wire story: ?The United States should take a tougher line toward Communism 
in Asia and should unleash South Vietnamese troops to extend the country?s civil war 
to [in Nixon?s words] ?the sources of trouble, whether in North Vietnam or Laos.??  
Johnson fumed, ?Now I guess he?s unleashing ?em like Eisenhower unleashed Chiang 
Kai-Shek.  But they?re done unleashed.  What we?re trying to do is get ?em to protect 
themselves.  They haven?t got much capacity to advance . . . You ought to tell 
Lippmann to knock the tail off [Nixon] because he?s trying to start another war in 
China.?
85
  Who better to make a potent political retort to the Republican right than a 
respected realist?  The episode showed LBJ?s keen appreciation for Lippmann?s
underlying concern about the American buildup: Chinese intervention.  And, Johnson 
84
 Halberstam observed this part of Bundy?s personality; see The Best and the Brightest: 59.  Logevall 
uses the term ?sycophant? to describe Bundy during this period.  See also Kai Bird?s discussion in his 
conclusion where he writes that despite his deep doubts about the war?Bundy still essentially advised 
LBJ what he wanted to hear, especially pp. 396-409.
85
 LBJ-Bundy phone conversation, 14 April 1964, tape #WH6404.09, citation #3027, PNO #10, LBJL.
415
had a dual purpose, too.  The request to fend off Nixon, coming as it did from the 
White House, would reinforce Lippmann?s perception that the president was dovish.
Lippmann eagerly obliged when Mac Bundy approached him, offering his 
speech-writing services as well as column space.  When Bundy sent a draft of one of 
the president?s foreign policy addresses on Southeast Asia, Lippmann excised the 
word ?victory? from the list of objectives.  Nevertheless, he approved the line in 
which LBJ promised ??to keep our forces at whatever level continued independence 
requires.??
86
  Lippmann also dedicated an installment of T&T to blunting Nixon?s 
attack, adopting LBJ?s line about hollow Republican promises in the 1950s to 
?unleash? Chiang Kai-shek against China.  ?Mr. Nixon ought to know better, perhaps 
he does know better, than to say that the reason South Viet-Nam does not win the war 
in North Viet-Nam is that the United States won?t let it,? Lippmann replied on behalf 
of the administration.  ?The indubitable fact is that South Viet-Nam is quite incapable 
of carrying the war successfully into North Viet-Nam.?
87
  LBJ?s policy, though not 
?glorious,? he argued, was ?at least concerned with the reality of the situation?: to 
prevent the collapse of the weak Saigon regime before a negotiated settlement could 
be reached.  ?Any other plan for ?winning the war? in Southeast Asia must be, if the 
speaker is being candid and not tricky,? Lippmann told readers, ?a plan for the 
intervention of the United States with large forces prepared to overwhelm the whole 
of Indochina and to confront Mainland China itself.?
88
   Such was the policy at which 
Nixon hinted.  But by flushing out the war hawks on the Republican right, Lippmann 
simplified the administration?s task of casting Johnson as a moderate versus the 
86
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 20 April 1964.
87
 Lippmann, T&T, "Foreign Policy Debate," 21 April 1964.
416
Goldwaterites on the Vietnam issue.  In making this distinction, Lippmann added to 
the impression that LBJ walked far closer to the negotiation side of the street than he 
actually did.
In private, Lippmann doggedly pursued the case for neutralization despite the 
obstinate position of key administration officials.  On 19 May 1964, shortly after 
returning from a trip to Paris, he visited Bundy at the White House.  Lippmann 
expected to be debriefed about his talks with Georges Pompidou and Edgar Faure, 
among others. The national security adviser greeted him tersely: ?Well, what?s the 
French plan?? Bundy snapped.  ?I can?t seem to find out, and you presumably know 
what it is, so tell me.?  The columnist refused to be pressed.  The two men briefly 
discussed other matters before Bundy came back around to the subject of 
neutralization.  He called it a disguised plan for Communist takeover.  ?Mac, please 
don?t talk in such cliches,? Lippmann replied.  ?We both know better than that.?  A 
Titoist regime?unified and run by Hanoi?was the best hope for Western interests, 
he added.  The episode convinced Lippmann that Mac Bundy might not present the 
neutralization option to the president in an objective manner.
89
With his column he went over the advisers? heads, making a rare public 
appeal to LBJ.  The day after his meeting with Bundy, Lippmann reiterated to readers 
that French and U.S. interests in Southeast Asia were ?complimentary,? not 
?competitive.?  Both sought to contain Chinese power; but whereas America?s plan 
was unilateral, De Gaulle?s, he explained, wisely sought to incorporate the major 
88
 Ibid.
89
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 544.  Lippmann left that meeting so disturbed 
that he reversed his hopes that LBJ would replace Secretary of State Dean Rusk with Bundy if Johnson 
417
powers in a comprehensive conference for all of Southeast Asia.  Diplomacy was the 
?only conceivable solution of what is certainly an otherwise interminable military 
conflict.?  With unusually blunt language he offered a grim prognosis for the war 
effort: American military aid was no more ?than a shot in the arm? for the faltering 
Saigon government.  ?We are supporting and promoting a cruel and nasty war that 
has no visible end,? Lippmann wrote.  ?There is no light at the end of the tunnel; I 
have heard it said by people in Washington that we might fight in South Viet-Nam for 
10 or 20 years.  That may sound stout-hearted in Washington but it is a dismal 
prospect for the villagers of Viet-Nam.  What we are offering the Vietnamese people 
is altogether demoralizing.?
90
His strategy worked, to a degree.  Within a week he got a White House 
hearing?an animated two and a half hour discussion in which Lippmann made it 
clear that he believed Vietnam fell inside the Chinese sphere of influence, not the 
American.  At Johnson?s request McGeorge Bundy arranged the 27 May 1964 
meeting between Lippmann and the principal planners of Vietnam policy.  That 
morning Johnson reviewed the latest Gallup polls that indicated 65 percent of 
Americans knew little or nothing about the faraway Asian nation; a majority of those 
who did, believed the administration was mishandling policy.  ?It?s damned easy to 
get into a war,? LBJ lamented to Bundy, ?but it?s gonna be awfully hard to ever 
extricate yourself if you get in . . . What does Lippmann think [we] ought to do??:
was elected to a full term.  Bundy?s stint as national security adviser had, Lippmann thought, 
?coarsened? him.
90
 Lippmann, ?France and America in Asia,? T&T, 21 May 1964.  It was the third and final installment 
in a series.
418
BUNDY: What he really thinks is that you should provide 
a diplomatic structure within which the thing can go under 
the control of Hanoi and walk away from it. . . .
LBJ: You mean he thinks that Hanoi ought to take South 
Vietnam?
BUNDY: Yes, sir?diplomatically.
LBJ: Um-hmm.
BUNDY: Maybe by calling it a neutralization and 
removing American force and letting it slip away the way 
Laos did?[corrects himself] would, if we didn?t do 
anything, and will if we don?t do anything.  And we would 
guarantee the neutrality in some sort of a treaty. . . . I?m
sorry.  I?m not sure I?m the best person to describe 
Lippmann?s views because I don?t agree with them.
LBJ: Who has he been talking to besides you?  Has he 
talked to Rusk any on this?  Has he talked to McNamara?
BUNDY: He?s talked to George Ball. . . .
LBJ: Wouldn?t it be good for he and McNamara to sit 
down? . . . I?d try to get his ideas a little more concrete . . . 
I?d like to hear Walter and McNamara debate this thing.
91
In a memorandum to LBJ later that day, Bundy suggested that the Lippmann-
McNamara debate take place late that afternoon following a Vietnam briefing with 
key advisors.   Bundy thought the discussion should include only the president, the 
secretary of defense, and himself?excluding two participants from the earlier 
briefing, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor and CIA 
Director John McCone.  He added that LBJ might ask Undersecretary of State George 
Ball, ?an old friend of Walter?s,? to attend.
92
91
 LBJ-Bundy phone conversation, 27 May 1964, WH6404.09, citation # 3025, program #8, LBJL.  
Also reproduced in Beschloss, Taking Charge, 372-373.  Bundy?s slip-up on neutralization in Laos 
was revealing; he seemed to conflate the withdrawal of U.S. power with Communist victory.
92
 Bundy to LBJ, NSFM (3) 27 May 1964, NSF Bundy Memos 5/1-27/64.  LBJL.
419
Ball, who joined the meeting, fast became a key conduit between the
columnist and the administration on Vietnam matters.  He and Lippmann had become 
friends two decades earlier living on the same tree-shaded street at the foot of the 
National Cathedral.  They shared the same Atlanticist sympathies and a vision for an 
internationalist foreign policy. Though they were both critics of escalation in 
Vietnam, they were uncertain allies.  From early 1964 onward, Ball worked inside the 
administration to change its methods for winning the war; he particularly objected to 
the bombing offensive in 1965.  Lippmann?at a more fundamental level?came to 
doubt the wisdom of American objectives.  Where Ball saw American altruism, 
Lippmann later found all the trappings of imperialism and global overreach.  
Eventually, the war cast its long shadows across their friendship.
93
Business occupied much of their acquaintance.  Ball and Lippmann met 
regularly for dinner, lunch at the Metropolitan Club, or late afternoon cocktails at one 
another?s homes to talk about politics and policies.  ?It was more than a mere 
neighborly friendship,? Ball recalled years later.  ?I sought out Walter to clarify my 
own muddled thinking, while he used me as a kind of practice dartboard against 
which he could throw ideas for his column.?
94
  When Ball entered service in the State 
Department, he became an invaluable source for Lippmann.  With the exception of 
Mac Bundy?perhaps even more than Bundy as the debate over Vietnam became 
acrimonious?Lippmann relied on Ball for information about administration thinking.  
It was no secret that they were confidants.  It became more apparent when both 
93
 See Ball's memoirs, The Past Has Another Pattern (New York: 1982); 90-91; 430-431.  Still one of 
the most insightful (if uncritical) brief sketches of Ball can be found in Halberstam's The Best and the 
Brightest: 173-175; 491-499. For his role as an ?in-house critic,? see Berman?s Planning a Tragedy: 
85-89.
420
men?Ball in internal memos and Lippmann in his columns?forecast poor prospects 
for bombing in the spring of 1965.  Bundy and LBJ utilized the Ball-Lippmann 
relationship to their advantage, probing Ball about how best to address Lippmann?s 
concerns or blunt his criticisms.  He obliged them with frank advice.  And there were 
tense moments.  Once, after listening to Ball argue against bombing North Vietnam, 
Johnson teased him, ?Are you telling Lippmann what to write or is he telling you 
what to say??
95
  Until the decision to send troops in the summer of 1965 the answer 
was not that clear.
Whether or not Bundy intended to have Ball level the playing field by siding 
with Lippmann in the 27 May 1964 debate, the undersecretary of state plainly wanted 
the columnist to clarify his case for neutralization.  At 4:30 p.m. Bundy ushered 
Lippmann into the small lounge adjoining the Oval Office.  A few hours before, 
Lippmann had completed a column to appear the next morning that argued the only 
way out of the ?dead-end street in Southeast Asia? was to make a political settlement.  
By Ball?s account of the meeting, Lippmann reiterated much of that analysis to LBJ 
and his principal advisers: his ?usual? pitch, Ball noted, in support of the French plan.  
?It is not easy for any country to repair its mistakes, especially those in which it has 
invested lives, money, and moral judgments,? Lippmann explained in his column.  
?But the original mistake in Southeast Asia has to be repaired.  The way to do this is 
to go to a conference.?  In a phrase that could only have caused the president and 
94
 Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: 100.
95
 Ibid, 430.
421
McNamara to shudder at its public utterance, the columnist told readers ?the military 
outlook in South Viet-Nam is dismal beyond words.?
96
During the meeting Lippmann also restated his assessment, included in the 
column, that Vietnam was ?bound to lie within the Chinese sphere of influence,? but 
that U.S. withdrawal from the South did not necessarily mean overt occupation by 
North Vietnamese or Chinese troops. A great power structure, guaranteed by the U.S., 
U.S.S.R., France, Great Britain, and China, could prevent such an occupation and 
perhaps help a unified Vietnam ?to go Titoist.?  He concluded, ?what will do most for 
our real interests in Southeast Asia is not to bomb Hanoi but to create a visible 
guarantee which makes it safe for Hanoi not to be, as it has always striven not to be, a 
Chinese satellite.?
97
By putting such analyses in print at such an early date, Lippmann 
distinguished himself from later war critics who, while advocating negotiations, did 
not wish to discuss the likely outcome in public in 1964.
98
  During the meeting, Ball 
pressed him on that point: What were the implications of neutralization for the 
region?  Lippmann conceded that neutralization assumed that ?all of Southeast Asia 
was destined inevitably to become a zone of Chinese Communist control.?  The U.S. 
could do little to prevent it.  On this final point he was blunt: ?our best hope [is] to 
seek by political means to slow that expansion down and to make it less brutal.?
99
96
 Lippmann, T&T, 28 May 1964, "Our Commitment in Viet-Nam."
97
 Ibid; George Ball to Dean Rusk, 31 May 1964, Memorandum, Folder: Top Secret Documents, Box 
23, Records of Undersecretary George W. Ball, 1961-1966, Lot 74D272, National Archives and 
Records Administration (NARA) II, College Park, MD.
98
 For example, Senators J. William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield.
99
 Ball to Rusk, 31 May 1964, Memorandum.
422
Johnson wasn?t convinced, though he waited until Lippmann departed before 
rendering his judgment.  Ball told Dean Rusk?the only principal absent from the 
meeting?that the president hadn?t ?bought Lippmann?s ultimate thesis.?  LBJ 
expressed concern, however, about Lippmann?s ?contention that the United States 
was presenting itself in a bad light to the world by refusing to negotiate and 
entertaining the possibility of enlarged military action.?
100
  Several days later, based 
on Lippmann?s description to DeGaulle?s neutralization plan, the president dispatched 
George Ball to Paris to speak with the French leader.
101
  The 27 May meeting also 
prompted McGeorge Bundy to start gathering material to use against Lippmann?
should the need arise.  He assigned a member of his NSC staff to sift through 
hundreds of Lippmann?s columns on a variety of Cold War crises.  Gordon Chase, 
Bundy?s aide, filled four folders with excerpts which?as Chase explained to his 
boss??bear on the charge that Lippmann?s frequent inclination, when the going gets 
rough for the U.S., is to ?cut and run.??
102
  Unaware how much the meeting unsettled 
Johnson and his advisors, Lippmann left believing with more faith than reason that 
the president would opt for a diplomatic solution to the Vietnam problem.
103
100
 Ibid.
101
 See, for instance, Logevall, Choosing War: 175-177.
102
 Gordon Chase to McGeorge Bundy, 7 June 1964, ?Walter Lippmann, [1of 4],? Box 7, Files of 
Gordon Chase, NSF, LBJL.
103
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 550.  More than three months earlier, Johnson 
and Bundy had effectively ruled out the neutralization option.  See their phone conversation of 7 
February 1964 in Beschloss, Taking Charge, 226-227:
LBJ: ?What do we say about neutralization of Vietnam?  We have probed and we know that there is no 
possibility of neutralizing North Vietnam.  If they would leave their neighbors alone . . . But they 
won?t do it.  And to say that you?re going to neutralize South Vietnam and let them take North 
Vietnam is silly.
BUNDY: . . . If the U.S. forces were withdrawn, that thing would collapse like a pack of cards.  Maybe 
when we have a stronger position, maybe when we?ve pressed through with this and maybe if they can 
get a government that?ll move . . . there?ll come a time when there?ll be a balanced force in South 
Vietnam that can survive.  But anyone who thinks that exists now is crazy and anybody who says it 
exists is undermining the essential first effort.  And that is the hazard of what de Gaulle is doing and 
423
The 27 May exchange marked the beginning of a roughly 18-month period of 
administration efforts to keep the influential columnist?if not completely on board?
at least mollified.  For a long while it worked.  Several weeks later Lippmann told 
readers that though there existed a strong faction of advocates for bombing in the U.S. 
government, they did ?not, not yet at least, speak for the Administration.?  Lippmann 
would come to believe that among the Vietnam principles, McNamara and Rusk were 
far more pro-war than Bundy or Johnson.  While it was ?not our intention to 
withdraw and wash our hands,? officials were building military strength in Saigon 
solely to allow the U.S. to negotiate from a position of strength.  ?Unless I have been 
grossly and continuously misled,? he reassured readers, ?our objective is to create a 
balance of forces which favors and supports a negotiated settlement in Southeast 
Asia.?
104
  The president, Mac Bundy, and Ball reiterated that message in virtually 
every subsequent meeting with the journalist, even after the decision to send in 
ground troops was taken in July 1965. 
V.
The presidential election displaced Vietnam from Lippmann?s agenda soon after the 
late-May meeting at the White House.  With the exception of one T&T column on the 
Tonkin Gulf crisis, he did not devote any sustained attention to problems in Southeast 
Asia during the summer and through late-November 1964.  Partly, Lippmann did not 
want to provide Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater with foreign 
it?s the hazard in what some other people are suggesting.  I wouldn?t mention them, but you can look 
?em right in the eye.
424
policy issues to bludgeon Johnson.  Vietnam policy, he believed, could not be made 
on the campaign stump.  The administration welcomed Lippmann?s unqualified 
support, as well as his relative silence on Vietnam.  His value in deflecting domestic 
criticism from the Republican right temporarily offset administration concerns with 
his open advocacy of neutralism.  Indeed, officials sought his advice and, more 
significantly, considered ways in which they might more visibly associate candidate 
Johnson with Lippmann?s status as the doyen of American commentators.
Punctually, Walter and Helen Lippmann left Washington in mid-June for their 
annual summer retreat to a vacation house in Southwest Harbor, Maine.  Cloistered 
from his capital sources for nearly three months on the New England coast, Lippmann 
nonetheless followed campaign developments with growing interest.
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater became an easy target for Lippmann in 
these months.  Less than a week before the Republican Party Convention convened in 
San Francisco, Lippmann wrote a column deriding ?Goldwaterism.?  He described 
the presumptive Republican nominee as an ?ardent anti-Federalist, who would like to 
reduce sharply and deeply the national power? to marshal the economy, resources, 
transportation system, and industry.  Such decentralization, he warned, would 
provoke ?social disorder? and throw the modern nation-state into a ?loose 19
th
century social order.?
105
  Applied abroad, ?Goldwaterism? portended even greater 
problems; specifically, the senator?s enthusiasm for facing down Russia and China 
without fully contemplating the risk of war.  Goldwater was so ?obsessed by the 
104
 Lippmann, T&T, "The Shake-Up in Saigon," 25 June 1964.  See also Steel, Walter Lippmann and 
the American Century, 550.  It is entirely possible that Lippmann knew the Administration would not 
dare expand the war less than six months before the presidential election.
105
 Lippmann, T&T, "Goldwaterism at Home and Abroad," 9 July 1964.
425
delusion of American omnipotence that he sees no contradiction between a foreign 
policy which would risk great wars and a domestic policy which would dismantle the 
national power,? Lippmann wrote.  ?For in the realm of delusion, nothing is 
impossible.?
106
The North Vietnamese ?attack? on the American destroyers Maddox and C. 
Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin on 4 August 1964 caught Lippmann off guard.  
Three days before the Maddox had engaged North Vietnamese torpedo boats in, or 
near, North Vietnamese territorial waters.  On the stormy night of the 4
th
, 
accompanied by the C. Turner Joy, the Maddox made a provocative foray off the 
North Vietnamese coast?and, according to conflicting and ultimately unverified 
reports,  the ships came under fire from North Vietnamese vessels.  President Johnson 
retaliated, authorizing an air strike that decimated 25 torpedo boats at a North 
Vietnamese port and an oil storage dump at Vinh.
107
  Four days later, in a brief 
column, Lippmann described the episode as confirmation of the fact that American 
naval power was supreme in the Pacific Ocean.  The importance of American sea-
power was a favorite theme of Lippmann?s and one which he believed U.S. officials 
minimized.  Earlier that summer he?d complained to Elizabeth Farmer that he ?could 
find almost no one who thought about sea power? and its relation to the problems in 
Asia.  He added, ?I?m very interested in this because I was raised on Mahan, you 
know.?
108
  Lippmann interpreted the Tonkin incident as a ?demonstration that the 
United States can remain in Southeast Asia without being on the ground,? he 
ventured.  American naval power, as his now familiar argument went, would ensure a 
106
 Ibid.
107
 Herring, America?s Longest War: 120-121.
426
major part for the U.S. in any future settlement.  ?The more firmly the fact is 
established that our presence in Southeast Asia is primarily a sea-and-air power, the 
safer it will be to enter the negotiations which is the only alternative to an endless and 
indecisive war in the jungle,? he concluded.
109
What Lippmann did not address turned out to be far more troubling.  A day 
after that column appeared, Congress passed the sweeping Tonkin Gulf Resolution 
with unanimous approval in the House of Representatives and just two dissenting 
votes in the Senate.  It gave Johnson a blank check, authorizing him to ?repel any 
armed attack? against U.S. forces.  Legislators further stipulated that the president 
could ?prevent further aggression? and take ?all necessary steps? to protect any 
signatory of the SEATO Treaty, an umbrella defense pact which included South 
Vietnam.  LBJ later bragged that the resolution was ?like grandma?s nightshirt?it 
covered everything.?
110
  If Lippmann had objections to the far-reaching powers 
Congress forfeited to Johnson, he did not raise them at the time.
111
Several weeks after the attack, on the eve of the Democratic Convention in 
Atlantic City, NJ, Lippmann seemed eager to believe that having demonstrated its 
strength, the administration would move toward negotiations.  Two events in late-
August convinced him a change might be at hand.  On 21 August 1964, Lippmann 
phoned McGeorge Bundy from Maine.  He had heard that Henry Cabot Lodge, who 
had recently been replaced as Ambassador to Vietnam, had been quoted as saying that 
108
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 1 June 1964.
109
 Lippmann, T&T, "In the Gulf of Tonkin," 6 August 1964.
110
 See Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1990 (New York: McGraw Hill, 
1991): 240-241; and Dallek, Flawed Giant: 143-156.
111
 He strongly criticized a similar resolution, granted by Congress to Eisenhower, during the first 
Quemoy and Matsu crisis in 1955.  See Lippmann?s T&T, ?The Off-Shore Entanglement,? 12 April 
1955.
427
the solution in Vietnam would be political not military.  Lippmann inquired if this 
statement amounted to a change in policy.  ?I told him no?that we had always 
believed that in the end this was a political problem,? Bundy reported to Johnson in a 
memo.  ?He seemed content.?
112
That same day the Chicago Tribune informed officials that it planned to run a 
story based on a copy of a secret CIA analysis (received through an anonymous 
source) that urged consideration be given to a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, 
based on neutralization.  Trying to defuse the impact, officials released the CIA 
memorandum to reporters.  When the Tribune published excerpts from the document 
several days later, Lippmann phone George Ball at the State Department to ask if 
neutralization was indeed a serious object of discussion.  Ball told him, ?it was just 
one of these think pieces that are done all the time in Government by various 
individuals.  It did not reflect anything more than that.  It was a single individual?s 
idea.?
113
  It was not, he added for emphasis, a ?trial balloon.?  What was most 
interesting about this exchange was that Ball at no point indicated any sympathy with 
the content of the memorandum, which outlined a course that he had privately 
defended to Dean Rusk in the spring.  Several days later, Ball had a similar phone 
conversation with New York Times bureau chief James Reston (another neighbor and 
friend).  When Reston asked if there was any discussion of getting out of Vietnam, 
Ball replied, ?There is no talk of that kind.?
114
112
 Bundy to LBJ, 21 August 1964, NSFM, McGeorge Bundy 7/1-9/30/64, LBJL.
113
 Lippmann-Ball, Telcon, 25 August 1964, "Vietnam I (12/9/63-12/15/64), LBJL.
114
 Logevall, Choosing War, 229.  For a discussion of the leaked memo on neutralization, written by 
the CIA's Willard Mathias, see pp. 165-166; 228.
428
So much as Lippmann?s hopes were raised for a diplomatic exit in Vietnam, 
he remained focused on the campaign.  He quickly shifted roles to that of political 
adviser, recommending a vice presidential candidates to Johnson.  ?He himself 
believes that the basic quality of the man you choose is what counts,? Bundy reported 
back to LBJ, ?and he asked me to say that on this score he thought most thoughtful 
observers would be most impressed by a choice of Hubert Humphrey.?
115
  Though the 
polls showed that Americans had no strong opinion about any of Johnson?s possible 
choices, Lippmann told Bundy that the voters would focus on the vice presidential 
nominee as the moment of the election drew near. The Republican?s choice of 
William E. Miller, an obscure, upstate New York Congressman and a fierce right-
wing ideologue, made them ?extraordinarily vulnerable? Lippmann told Bundy.  
Humphrey, he added, ?has and deserves a reputation among informed men as a man 
of outstanding ability, experience, and quality to serve as your running mate.?
116
  He 
ticked off the problems with other contenders.  Senate Majority Leader Mike 
Mansfield simply was not the stuff of presidential timber, he remarked.  And, while 
he thought highly of senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, Lippmann knew it 
would not be wise or well-received if LBJ passed up the senior senator from 
Minnesota, Humphrey.
Lippmann supplemented his political counsel with ever more pointed public 
attacks on Goldwater?s ability to conduct foreign policy.  Though he stopped short of 
calling the senator a ?warmonger,? Lippmann still felt that the Arizona senator?s 
115
 Two weeks earlier, Lippmann had phoned LBJ from his summer home in Southwest Harbor, 
Maine, to discuss Johnson?s vice-presidential choices.  See, Lippmann-Johnson, 30 July 1964, 
Telephone Conversation, #WH6407.20, PNO #21, LBJL.
116
 Bundy to LBJ, 21 August 1964, NSFM, McGeorge Bundy 7/1-9/30/64, LBJL.
429
?admiration of brinkmanship? could inadvertently bring the U.S. into a military 
confrontation with the Soviets or Chinese.  Lippmann explained on 24 September 
1964, ?he is the kind of man who would be much more likely than President Johnson 
to get us into a big war . . . It is not that Barry Goldwater wants to have a war; it is 
that he denounces every alternative to war as surrender, appeasement, or cowardice . . 
. This is the specific danger of Goldwaterism in foreign affairs: an instinctive and 
impulsive preference for the ultimatum rather than for negotiation.?
117
  To Lippmann 
it was apparent: the far preferable candidate, Johnson, had spent nearly a year 
mastering the intricacies of conducting international relations.  Goldwater, by 
contrast, seemed to believe ?the foreigners who live beyond the seas are not men with 
whom we must live on this planet but abstractions who will vanish if the President 
barks at them.?
118
Coming into the crucial home stretch, the administration advertised its links to 
Lippmann with some high visibility events.  At a White House ceremony in 
September 1964, Johnson awarded the columnist a Presidential Medal of Freedom for 
a distinguished career of public service that spanned six decades.  The list of 
recipients was a Who?s Who of 20
th
 century America: Dean Acheson, Aaron 
Copland, Walt Disney, T.S. Eliot, Helen Keller, William de Koonig, John L. Lewis, 
Samuel Eliot Morrison, Edward R. Murrow, Reinhold Niebuhr, A. Philip Randolph, 
Carl Sandburg, and John Steinbeck.  The dominant feature on the medal LBJ handed 
Lippmann was a white star, which a White House press release described, was a 
?symbol of our selfless determination to maintain the freedom and democracy of 
117
 Lippmann, T&T, "On Warmongering," 24 September 1964.
430
mankind.?  The event itself symbolized Lippmann?s importance to this particular 
president.  Shortly thereafter, to reinforce the point, Johnson and Lady Bird dropped 
by Woodley Road to celebrate Lippmann?s 75
th
 birthday.  Johnson presented him 
with a new guest book, which he christened with his own signature.  NBC newsman 
David Brinkley gave Lippmann a blue button that the columnist merrily pinned on for 
the party.  It read: ?Sensation Seeking Press.?
119
One episode particularly revealed the value administration officials placed on 
associating themselves with Lippmann.  In early October, Johnson?seeking to 
answer the Goldwater campaign?s charges that he was a weak foreign policy 
president?asked Mac Bundy to draft a foreign policy speech in which he would 
outline his ideas about international relations in broad strokes.  Bundy did not believe 
this was the right format and urged caution.  He explained to LBJ that in a brief 
speech, ?One can be eloquent, but one cannot be very solid.  And it is solidity, not 
fancy phrases, that people are looking for.?  He added, ?The fact is that in 800 [to] 
1,200 words, no man can be an international statesman unless he has a fancy 
proposal?and we don?t and shouldn?t before Nov. 3.?
120
Bundy then suggested another forum for showcasing LBJ?s foreign policy acumen: a 
prime time television ?conversation? with Walter Lippmann.  He believed a half-
hour, question-and-answer format of paid political time, aired about ten days before 
the election, would draw a large audience.  ?Lippmann himself is extremely good at 
118
 Ibid.  A statement replete with irony.  He would use the same invectives against Johnson in less 
than a year.
119
 White House Press Release, 4 July 1964, POL 6-3 US, Files of Dean Rusk, RG 59, NARA II.  
Newsweek, 5 October 1964: 87.
120
 Bundy to LBJ, ?How to be a Statesman in the last month,? 4 October 1964, NSFM, McGeorge 
Bundy 10/1-12/31/64, LBJL.
431
this sort of thing,? Bundy wrote, no doubt, with the CBS Reports series in mind, ?and 
so are you.?  With some scripting, Bundy continued, the pair could cover ?4 or 5 
great issues?: peace, relations with Communism, the Atlantic Alliance, the situation 
in the Western Hemisphere, and the role of the president in making foreign policy.  
?It is true that Lippmann is regarded by some as a soft-liner,? Bundy conceded.  ?But 
to most people he is simply the wisest publicist in the country.  You could easily set 
yourself off a little bit from him on Vietnam or on national defense, and anyway the 
risk of contamination is low.?
121
The reward, Bundy pointed out, was great especially since it could dispel not 
only persistent doubts about Johnson?s grasp of foreign affairs, but Goldwater?s most 
potent attacks on Johnson?s character.  ?There is a deeper advantage here,? Bundy 
explained.  ?The one place where Goldwater may have scored a little is on the Bobby 
Baker tack.?  Baker, Johnson?s prot?g? and secretary during his years as Senate 
Majority Leader, had been the subject of a FBI investigation for his business 
practices.  The Goldwater campaign circulated rumors that Johnson was somehow 
implicated in the scandal.
122
Bundy felt that close association with the respected 
columnist would mitigate these charges. ?The readiness of a man of Lippmann?s 
standing to talk respectfully and freely with you in a campaign broadcast,? Bundy 
added, ?would work directly against this kind of propaganda.?
123
121
 Ibid.
122
 Privately LBJ believed that Bobby Kennedy had stoked rumors about the Baker case to knock him 
off the ticket in 1964.  Apparently, the Attorney General and JFK had watched the developments of the 
probe with great interest in 1963.  Some speculated they were looking to use the scandal to remove 
LBJ from the ticket for JFK's re-election bid.  See Dallek, Flawed Giant: 40-44.
123
 Bundy to LBJ, "How to be a Statesman in the last month," 4 October 1964, NSFM, McGeorge 
Bundy 10/1-12/31/64, LBJL.
432
The television interview never came to fruition, but Lippmann?s endorsement 
of Johnson in T&T was no poor consolation prize.  Long before election day, as his 
readers plainly understood, the columnist had cast his lot with LBJ.  As voters went to 
the polls on 3 November 1964, Lippmann?s column that morning assured them that 
Johnson ?is by instinct, temperament, conviction and experience a man for this 
season.  He is a man of the center with the very special gift of finding a wide 
consensus.?
124
  Faced with Goldwater, moderate Republicans defected to Johnson in 
droves, giving him one of the most lop-sided victories in modern presidential 
elections.  Two days later, Lippmann placed a call to the president at his Texas ranch, 
offering congratulations and best wishes for the four years ahead.
125
VI.
With Johnson elected, Lippmann re-examined the subject of Vietnam.  From this 
point forward he turned sustained attention to the issue, reaching a crescendo in his 
columns in 1965 and 1966.  Making his customary European rounds in November 
1964, Lippmann again met for private talks with top officials in Paris: De Gaulle, 
Edgar Faure, and Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville.  The Johnson 
administration was eager to hear about these conversations.  When he returned home 
in mid-December Bundy and Ball invited him to their offices to talk.  ?Lippmann is 
full of his European trip and will be just as glad to talk as to listen,? Bundy reported 
to Johnson, preparing the president for an Oval Office chat with Lippmann.  ?The 
124
 Lippmann, T&T, "A Man for this Season," 3 November 1964.  Bundy phoned LBJ that afternoon to 
tell the President of Lippmann's views on the elections.  See, Bundy to Johnson phone conversation, 3 
November 1964, WH6411.01, citation #6108, program #8, LBJL
433
thing he admires most is the way you have defused the [Multi-Lateral Force] crisis, at 
least from the point of view of the U.S. . . . He will be delighted to hear anything you 
want to tell him along the lines of your recent backgrounders.?
126
  For the president?s 
signature, Bundy attached a copy of a National Security Action Memorandum 
[NSAM] that outlined a policy to shelve MLF.  He suggested LBJ could show it to 
the columnist: ?He is the one truly discreet reporter I know.?
127
  This was part of 
Bundy?s concerted effort in late-1964 and early-1965 to bring Lippmann further into 
the administration?s confidences.
On December 19, Lippmann came to the White House for a long meeting 
attended by LBJ, Mac Bundy, McNamara, and deputy secretary of defense, Cyrus 
Vance.
128
  Notably, George Ball?a strong advocate of MLF?was not present.  
Lippmann talked briefly about European concerns with MLF.  Johnson showed him 
the NSAM decreeing the change in policy, essentially defusing the MLF problem.  
But the bulk of the conversation dwelt on Vietnam. On this subject the president was 
?entirely pessimistic,? Lippmann told his research assistant Elizabeth Farmer.  LBJ 
recalled an encounter with Joe Alsop, in which ?General Alsop? (as LBJ and 
Ambassador to Vietnam Maxwell Taylor dubbed him) wagged his finger in the 
president?s face as he told him ?he would go down in disgrace if he didn?t fight in 
North Vietnam.?  Johnson wanted to know more about De Gaulle?s plan, asking for 
?every word? the French leader had said during Lippmann?s meeting.  ?This is a 
125
 Lippmann-Johnson phone conversation, 5 November 1964, WH6411.09, citation #6242, program 
#5, LBJL.
126
Bundy to LBJ, "Your talk with Walter Lippmann," 19 December 1964, NSFM, McGeorge Bundy, 
10/1-12/31/64, LBJL.  In fact two days earlier, Lippmann praised LBJ for handling the MLF crisis so 
skillfully.  See Lippmann, ?Crisis that Didn?t Happen,? T&T, 17 December 1964.
127
 Ibid.  
434
commitment I inherited,? LBJ lamented after a few minutes.  ?I don?t like it, but how 
can we pull out??  Lippmann repeated what De Gaulle had told him: not with a 
million troops could the U.S. ever pacify South Vietnam.  ?What is needed,? 
Lippmann went on to tell the president and his advisors, ?is a man with the 
imagination of [Woodrow] Wilson?or the men who worked for Wilson?so that the 
problem can be set in a larger frame.?  Lippmann volunteered a kind of Fourteen 
Points for Southeast Asia?a plan outlining a post-World War II settlement that the 
U.S. had yet to achieve with Beijing, security assurances for smaller Asian nations, a 
unified Vietnam with a coalition government, and an economic stimulus package for 
newly emerging countries.  But none of the participants took up on that line.  When 
Elizabeth Farmer later suggested that perhaps Bundy could orchestrate ?such an 
enterprise,? Lippmann disagreed.  ?No, he hasn?t the imagination,? Lippmann opined, 
?his is an analytical mind.?
129
The net result was similar to the May encounter: LBJ and his advisors were 
unmoved by Lippmann?s arguments for disengagement.  The president?s tone and the 
direction of the questions made Lippmann wary.  Unlike the meeting six months 
earlier, he came away more concerned than ever that plans were afoot to Americanize 
the war.  He told readers several days later that some in the administration sought to 
make the war ??our war?? by vastly expanding the military commitment and by 
unleashing a bombing campaign against the North.
130
  It would be a ?grievous 
mistake? since in South Vietnam there were ?at stake no primary and vital? U.S. 
128
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 21 December 1964.  See also Steel?s account based on 
Lippmann?s recollections, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 555-556.
129
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 21 December 1964.
130
 Lippmann, T&T, 22 December 1964, "On Vietnam."
435
interests.  Further, the fiction that an air war?without significant infantry 
commitments?could bring Hanoi to the bargaining table revealed the ?pretension 
that there is a cheap way to win.?  An American air campaign could spark an outright 
invasion of the South, he warned; and it most certainly would have its costs.  ?There 
is no use fooling the American people into thinking that a war for villages in the 
jungles and the swamps can be a clean war in the open skies.? 
131
A week later Lippmann sounded the realist claxon in his customary, end-of-
the-year think piece.  In the quarter century since the start of World War II, the 
United States had involved itself in the ?soft regions? of the world where colonialism 
had lapsed into chaos, conflict, and civil war, he wrote.  America had lent its prestige, 
resources, and military strength in Africa and Asia, from the Congo to South Vietnam 
without fully examining why.  ?We have done so with the highest motives,? he 
concluded, ?by allowing the ideology of the cold war to take precedence in our minds 
over our own national interests.?
132
  Now was the time for reappraisal.  He also 
answered a growing chorus of critics who suggested that advocates of retrenchment in 
Southeast Asia were but a new manifestation of the old isolationists.  ?It is 
isolationism,? Lippmann wrote with sarcasm, ?if the study of our own vital interests 
and a realization of the limits of our power is isolationism? or ?as compared with the 
globalism which has become fashionable? during the cold war.  ?What of it?? he 
sniped.  ?In the outer zones of our postwar entanglements it is time to tell ourselves 
131
 Ibid.
132
 Lippmann, T&T 29 December 1964, "Globalism and Anti-Americanism."
436
that there is much at stake and that we must be guided not by the hot ideologies but 
by a cool examination and calculation of the national interest.?
133
These rumblings of discontent worried Mac Bundy.  He perceived, more 
clearly than even the president, that Johnson?s powers of suasion might not convince 
Lippmann to abandon his geopolitical principles.  Eventually he would stand and 
fight for them.  Despite the relative accord of 1964 between Lippmann and the 
administration, Bundy feared Lippmann?s public disapproval as officials moved 
closer to unleashing an air war in early 1965.  Slowing the process of Lippmann?s 
dissent would require intensive work: frequent meetings, more secret reports and 
figures, assurances that the negotiation track still was open, and the intimation that 
despite the war hawks who surrounded him, LBJ desired a peaceful way out of the 
war.  Bundy pressed Johnson to take the columnist further into his confidences.  
?Lippmann is trying hard to stay on board,? Bundy told LBJ shortly before the secret 
?Rolling Thunder? operation commenced in February 1965, ?we ought to help him 
out, within limits.  The course we are now going on is one that will need missionary 
work with him, and that in turn involves trusting him.  He is the one man in 
Washington who does not betray confidences.?
134
133
 Ibid.
437
VII.
The press at the time?and historians looking back on the episode?depicted what 
was to come as a classic capital city tale of ?seduction and betrayal?
135
: a pundit 
enamored with powerful men, conned by a charismatic, skillful politician.  It was, as 
new archival evidence suggests, more than that.  Mac Bundy orchestrated, and the 
president encouraged, a running program to keep Lippmann from publicly criticizing 
Vietnam policy until after the final decision to commit troops had been taken.  
Johnson had calculated long before that Lippmann was the keystone to good press 
relations, and he entrusted Mac Bundy to manage the columnist.  The national 
security adviser?s personal relationship with Lippmann?and in no small measure his 
links to the liberal Establishment, family pedigree, and intellect?uniquely fitted him 
to be Lyndon Johnson?s intermediary with the nation?s premier pundit.  If Bundy had 
personal doubts or pangs of conscience about this arrangement, he never verbalized 
them.
136
  He put service to president ahead of loyalty to his friend.
All the while, U.S. officials valued the public relations prestige Lippmann
conferred upon their deliberations while simultaneously rejecting the geopolitical 
134
 Bundy to LBJ, ?Two Press Queries,? 15 February 1965, NSFM, Box 2, LBJL.
135
 The title of Steel?s penultimate chapter, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 557.
136
 Much later, years after Lippmann?s death, Bundy told the historian Melvyn Small that his efforts to 
obscure the drift of U.S. Vietnam policy, cost him Lippmann?s friendship.  See Small, Johnson, Nixon, 
and the Doves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988): 41.   Francis Bator, a close 
friend of both Lippmann and Bundy and an advisor to LBJ, recalled Bundy?s predicament with 
sympathy.  ?There was a tension between Bundy and the president starting in ?65.  Bundy was pushing 
Johnson to go to the people and explain what he was doing?try and rally the country.  Whereas 
Johnson?s absolute top priority was not to do anything, say anything that would start a great debate that 
would destroy voting rights, Medicare. . . Bundy was in an impossible position.  What Johnson wanted 
him to do was to bring Lippmann aboard?somehow, in Johnson?s mind, he really hoped there was a 
way of preserving the independence of South Vietnam and preventing Hanoi from taking over, in a 
way that was compatible with the restraint that Lippmann was advocating.  And that was a non-
existent proposition.  Bundy was put in the middle, in a very difficult position between the two.?  
Interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, MA.
438
philosophy upon which he based his advice to them.  They tried mightily to minimize 
that distinction for as long as they could.  To that end, Bundy repeatedly advised 
Johnson to ask for Lippmann?s advice on how to reach a negotiated settlement.  He 
never advised him to act on it.  Rather than earnest appeals for a plausible solution, 
these were attempts to bait Lippmann into believing the administration might 
moderate its policy.  Consulting the powerful columnist now had little to do with 
hearing out the diplomatic alternatives to escalation, and everything to do with 
keeping him in line.
Lippmann?s infatuation with LBJ and his Great Society also played to the 
administration?s advantage.  Despite his powerful insights about the nature of the 
problem in Vietnam and the receding chances for a military outcome favorable to 
U.S. policymakers, his columns were filled with conflicting messages.  Lippmann 
knew that he was moving closer to a confrontation with the administration.  Before a 
December lunch with Bundy, Lippmann confided to Elizabeth Farmer that he 
expected a fight with the national security adviser over French policy and Vietnam.  
?I?m not one of [Mac?s] worshippers but I like him pretty well,? Lippmann said.  
?But one of his faults is arrogance.  And you have to hit back at an arrogant man.  
That?s why I may have to fight with him.?
137
  Disturbed by Bundy?s brashness and 
flashes of impatience with diplomatic efforts in South Vietnam, Lippmann 
nevertheless seemed willing to give his friend the benefit of the doubt.  Though 
willing to debate the war privately with Bundy, and even to write publicly that the 
best outcome was a neutral Vietnam, he did not press too hard for a military 
withdrawal in 1964 and for much of 1965.  Lippmann see-sawed.  One column 
439
insisted that the Vietnam problem required more diplomats and fewer military 
advisers, while the next sympathized with the commitments LBJ inherited in Saigon. 
The election distracted him even further.  Lippmann?s incongruous ideas about the 
war?s illegitimacy and, yet, the veracity of the men who were managing it, persisted 
into early 1965.  
Mac Bundy nurtured that ambivalence.  He doubted Lippmann could be 
intellectually converted but sensed intuitively that the columnist might be neutralized 
through association with the administration?s inner circle.  If Lippmann could be 
made to check-off on incremental gradations of escalation, he would be presented 
with a kind of de facto Americanization of the war?one which he had no choice but 
to support.  Draw Lippmann inside the team, Bundy advised LBJ.  Lead him a little 
further down the road.
137
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 14 December 1964.
440
Chapter 8: 
?Give Him More of the Same?: The Johnson Administration?s 
Efforts to Slow Walter Lippmann?s Dissent, February to July 1965
I.
Throughout the first months of 1965 the schism between Lyndon Baines Johnson and 
Walter Lippmann widened with each step toward escalation.   But the 
administration?s deception and manipulation?fortified by Lippmann?s own will to 
believe Johnson?s best intentions?delayed a complete break until the early fall of 
1965.  Though the president?s advisors did not accept Lippmann?s solution for a 
negotiated settlement, they were not eager to break with him because they feared he 
might provoke debate about their policies.  Thus, Bundy and Johnson met regularly 
with the columnist, brought him into the White House, showed him secret cables and 
statistics about how favorably the war was going.  At two critical junctures in 1965 
the administration failed to convert Lippmann to its cause, but prevented his open 
dissent.  As they initiated an air war against the North in the late-winter, Johnson and 
Bundy assured Lippmann that they would negotiate a settlement with Hanoi when the 
military situation stabilized in the South.  Lippmann accepted this explanation at face 
value, conveying it to the public. 
441
The eight-weeks from early-February to mid-April 1965 rank among the most 
decisive foreign affairs periods Lippmann analyzed in his long career, for during that 
time U.S. officials chose to Americanize the war in Vietnam.
1
  In February and 
March many of Johnson?s far-reaching policy decisions for U.S. intervention were 
made and implemented.  After the early spring of 1965, a diplomatic settlement no 
longer was feasible.  On 13 February Johnson approved the Joint Chiefs? of Staff plan 
for a sustained offensive air war against targets in the North, named Operation 
?Rolling Thunder.?  On the 19
th
 the U.S. struck Vietcong positions in Bindinh 
province?a mission against South Vietnamese targets manned, for the first time, by 
only U.S. fliers.  A week later, U.S. officials approved General William 
Westmoreland?s request for two Marine battalions to protect the U.S. air base at 
Danang. ?Rolling Thunder? commenced on 2 March.  Six days later, the Marines 
Westmoreland wanted, the first American ground combat units, arrived in Vietnam.  
Lippmann again mischaracterized the administration?s intentions in July when the 
president authorized troop increases and a fundamental change in mission status?
from defense to offense.  At the time, George Ball helped persuade Lippmann that the 
administration had opted only for a ?limited war,? sending more men to reinforce 
strategic strongholds.
Awash in these contingencies and the rapid movement of events, Lippmann?s 
geopolitical arguments against the war seemed less and less potent.  Taking a long 
1
 Among the more recent interpretations that the decision to Americanize the Vietnam War took place 
before the July deliberations, is Fredrik Logevall?s Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the 
Escalation of the War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): see especially, 
pp. 333-374. Logevall?s analysis largely agrees with Larry Berman?s assertion that the July debates 
were primarily for public relations purposes, though he places the timing for deciding to go to war in a 
period he calls ?the long 1964? running from December 1963 to February 1965.  For Berman?s 
442
view of events in Southeast Asia?one year, five years, a decade?Lippmann proved 
most formidable.  Now that the real shooting was about to begin he seemed less pro-
active and more re-active. His analysis in early 1965 never quite measured up to the 
moment.  For months, he had tried to dissuade officials from resorting to a bombing 
offensive, insisting it would strengthen Hanoi?s resolve and do little to improve the 
stability of the Saigon government.  When officials implemented that strategy, as 
reprisal for the Viet Cong attack on Pleiku, Lippmann supported in practice the air 
war that he had opposed in theory.  He waited months before publicly declaring its 
bankruptcy.  He punctuated this critical lapse in judgment with a network television 
appearance in which he badly misrepresented the nature of the bombing campaign by 
parroting McGeorge Bundy?s description of it.  Though reluctant to condemn the 
bombings, he did lobby hard for a ?diplomatic offensive? to match the military 
pressure.  As weeks rolled into months, his columns had an uneven edge?on the one 
hand, he wrote with insight about the perils of escalation while, on the other hand, 
insisting that the man authorizing it all, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was a man of peace 
flanked by war advocates. 
II.
Once, when asked to describe Charles de Gaulle, Walter Lippmann compared the 
French leader to a far-sighted man who, gazing across a large room, could pick out 
with precision details on the horizon but still stumble into the furniture right in front 
account see, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W.W. 
Norton, 1982): especially, pp. 31-78.
443
of him.
2
Lippmann meant to convey De Gaulle?s deep sense of history and insights 
into the structure of post-postwar Europe, but also the General?s indelicate political 
touch in intra-Alliance relations.  The metaphor also could be applied to Lippmann?s 
writings about the Vietnam War.  More than a decade before he?d tried to steer the 
Eisenhower administration toward a diplomatic settlement at Geneva by pointing out 
the intractable political nature of the war between Hanoi and Saigon and the strategic 
liabilities of U.S. intervention.  With Kennedy and Johnson he advised much the 
same.  But as the moment of decision arrived in early 1965 his realist analyses?
which, as American options narrowed, offered only a stark choice between 
withdrawal and escalation?brought him into open conflict with U.S. policymakers. 
In early 1965 the idea of ?neutralization,? that De Gaulle had proposed and 
Lippmann had advocated, all but disappeared from his vocabulary.  Nevertheless, he 
still believed the problem in Vietnam could not be solved apart from a regional 
diplomatic settlement for Southeast Asia.  In his first column of the year, Lippmann 
urged American policymakers to look beyond the ?small cockpit? of Vietnamese 
politics toward an act of ?bold imaginative statesmanship?: convening a ?congress? 
for peace in Asia.  Participants would include the great powers: Communist China, 
the Soviet Union, India, Japan, France, and Britain.  The congress would address the 
unresolved issues in the aftermath of the Second World War: to make peace, to help 
2
 Walter Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann (Boston: Atlantic, Little, Brown and 
Company), 1965: 213-214.  See also, Transcript of interview with Der Spiegel, ?St. Dept. & White 
House Advisor, 1964 (Jan.-June)? folder, Box 101, Acheson Papers, Harry S. Truman Library.  
Lippmann once told an interviewer: ?What I remember about De Gaulle . . . is that he was the man 
who, in the long view, was more right than anybody else I ever talked to.  He wasn?t very god at the 
short view.  The immediate subject didn?t interest him; he didn?t study the details.  But as to the long 
view, he was a genius.?  A frequent example that Lippmann offered of this ?long view? was De 
Gaulle?s belief in the necessity for Franco-German rapprochement and alliance long before most of his 
444
in the orderly transition from colonialism, ?to deal with the consequences of the 
Chinese revolution, and to create an international framework in which the Chinese 
borderlands can be pacified.?  American policymakers had to identify their program 
?with some grander conception of the future than the squalid politics of Saigon, the 
bombing of trails and depots, and the prospect of the whole enterprise crumbling 
while we hold it in our hands.?
3
This idea contained all the familiar Lippmann emphases on structure, order, 
and systems.  His vaunted realism remained a powerful tool for demonstrating the 
strategic imperatives for not Americanizing the war; but it offered few clues about 
how to resolve the difficult matter of disengagement, fewer still about the moral 
dilemmas of liquidating a position that had, for more than a decade, deeply involved 
the U.S. in a foreign civil war.  White House and State Department officials believed 
he never satisfactorily came to terms with what they perceived to be a very real 
commitment to a set of South Vietnamese who had staked all on the American 
promise to help them remain independent of Hanoi.  This was the crux of Lippmann?s 
disagreement with U.S. officials.  From April 1964 onward, in dozens of private 
meetings and an equal number of columns, Lippmann argued that the price of staying 
far exceeded that of getting out.  For U.S. officials, the conclusion was nearly the 
opposite.  The damage to American prestige incurred by abandoning their South 
Vietnamese clients, they believed, might be insuperable.  ?In that sense, there was an 
element of harsh realism in Lippmann?that he was prepared to write that 
[commitment] off,? recalled Francis Bator, a friend of the columnist and a foreign 
countrymen.  See Henry Brandon, ?A Talk with Walter Lippmann, at 80, About this ?Minor Dark 
Age,?? 14 September 1969, New York Times Magazine: SM 25.
445
policy advisor to Johnson.  ?Whereas, it had played a role?and partly because 
American reliability and credibility did, in fact, matter in the world.?
4
  Robert 
Estabrook, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, was a journalistic colleague 
who also questioned Lippmann?s call for a negotiated withdrawal.  ?I think Walter 
was a great deal more realistic than I gave him credit for at the time of Vietnam,? 
Estabrook recalled.  ?But I don?t think Walter had any empathy for the people 
involved and what this meant . . . who?s going to [be] sold out on this thing.?
5
For eight months, from May 1964 to January 1965, Lippmann?s pleas for 
disengagement had been politely received by the Johnson administration but ignored.  
In early 1965, he changed emphases.  If geopolitical arguments failed to impress the 
president, perhaps Johnson would be more sensitive to the domestic political stakes of 
waging war in Southeast Asia.  Lippmann took a January hiatus from T&T and, while 
on vacation in Arizona, pondered Johnson?s Inaugural Address and budget proposals.  
When he resumed the column on 2 February 1965 he had a new strategy: strong doses 
of positive reinforcement mixed with reminders that a war president could not have 
?guns and butter.?  Knowing full well the pressures that existed for bombing North 
Vietnam, he nevertheless wrote in a highly optimistic tone that Johnson ultimately 
3
 Lippmann, ?A Congress for Asia,? 4 January 1965, Newsweek: 9.
4
 Interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, Mass.  Nowhere in my research was this idea 
more concisely and dramatically stated that in a report from US Ambassador to India Loy Henderson 
in 1950 with officials in New Dehli regarding the Indochina problem: ?I told Bajpai that in spite of the 
difficulties involved we could not, it seemed to me, cold bloodedly abandon peoples like those of IC to 
Communist tyranny.  They had struggled long for freedom and were just as much entitled to working 
out their own destinies as peoples of larger or stronger countries.  Disastrous consequences could flow 
from [the] creation [of an] impression that democratic powers were not prepared to assist, defend 
integrity and independence [of] small, weak nations in dangerous geographical positions.  Such 
impression would give new confidence to aggressors and [a] profound sense [of] discouragement to 
their potential victims.?  Henderson to Acheson, 12 April 1950, Foreign Relations of the United States, 
1950, 6: 779 (hereinafter referred to as ?FRUS?).
5
 Robert Estabrook interview, 30 June 1978, Kern-Levering Papers, Box 1, John F. Kennedy Library, 
Boston, MA.
446
would choose to grapple with the problems at home.  ?For the first time in 25 years 
since the start of the Second World War, the main attention of the President is not 
fixed upon the dangers abroad but on the problems and prospects at home,? 
Lippmann told readers.  There existed a ?conjuncture of events abroad which makes it 
safe and prudent for the country to abate its anxiety and to pay attention to its own 
affairs.  For these affairs have been sacrificed and grievously neglected for a quarter 
of a century.?
6
Now the roles were reversed, with Johnson receiving the ?Lippmann 
treatment.?  For a brief time T&T became a dialogue of two: pundit and president.  
Rather than inform public debate about the war at this critical juncture, Lippmann 
produced several columns intended to boost Johnson?s confidence against detractors 
who wanted him to expand the scope of military operations.  These were not meant 
even to influence the advisers on the inner-circle.  These were direct appeals to the 
chief occupant of the White House, to his sense of place and self in history.  Years 
later, Bill Moyers, Johnson?s press secretary and chief of staff, described his boss?s 
ego as an ?unfillable hole.?
7
 Lippmann knew its dimensions.  Like an angler coaxing 
a prize trout to the surface, the columnist cast feathery superlatives across the op-ed 
page.
Not since his days as an editor of The New Republic, when he applauded 
Woodrow Wilson?s New Freedom legislation, had Lippmann been so effusive about a 
president?s domestic agenda.  He brandished Johnson?s credentials as a reformer, 
placing him squarely in the political lineage of Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson?s idol.  
6
 Lippmann, T&T, "The Johnson Beginning," 2 February 1965.
7
 Robert Dallek, ?Three New Revelations About LBJ,? Atlantic Monthly, April 1998: 42-49.
447
He described Johnson as a ?bold innovator,? a president uniquely prepared to carry 
the reform mantle, to bring the New Deal reforms to fruition.  ?We have rarely, if 
ever, seen at the beginning of a new administration such a coherent program, such 
insight and resourcefulness,? Lippmann exuded.  ?The President has grasped the 
nettle of race relations, of the church and state controversy, of business confidence 
and the welfare state, with a sure and skillful hand.?
8
Lippmann followed this tribute to Johnson?s domestic focus by applauding 
what he described as the president?s adjustment to the post-postwar realities in 
Europe.  LBJ?s deft defusing of the contentious Multi-Lateral Force issue, he wrote, 
signaled a fundamental change in America?s dealings with the Western European 
allies: a shift from leader and policeman to that of co-equal and collaborator.  This 
receding of over-extended American power pleased him.  In the immediate postwar 
years, the Truman Administration had fostered an unrealistic view of the U.S. as ?the 
protector, the preserver, the guide and leader of Europe? in order to win public 
support for the Marshall Plan and NATO.  Johnson, Lippmann explained, correctly 
measured the new realities and the need for shared decision-making.  He was 
prepared to scale back:  ?I count it an event of high policy to have recognized that this 
extravagant concern with European affairs will not work any longer, and does in fact 
act as a boomerang.?  The administration?s disengagement in Europe, he wrote, also 
flowed from a farsighted recognition that the Cold War rivalry with the Soviets was 
ebbing.  He?d said much the same in early 1964.  A foreign policy driven less by 
8
 Ibid.
448
exigencies abroad would allow LBJ to pursue civil rights and economic reforms at 
home.
9
Columnist Joe Alsop worried such adulation might swell Johnson?s 
considerable ego to an unacceptable level, even as he labored to deflate it.  ?I am 
mildly annoyed with Walter Lippmann for slathering the President with quite 
undeserved grease,? Alsop wrote to Jackie Kennedy after reading those columns.  
?Nothing is worse for a politician than undeserved grease.?
10
  For years on alternating 
weekdays, Alsop and Lippmann took turns on the Washington Post op-ed page 
interpreting a range of Cold War issues.  They rarely agreed.  But their positions on 
the Vietnamese war, and on Lyndon Johnson?s conduct of it, were strikingly 
different.  In the first months of 1965, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Alsop 
challenged LBJ?s manhood for not waging full-scale war in Southeast Asia.  Each 
Tuesday and Thursday, Lippmann served notice to Johnson of the costs of escalation, 
placing him in the pantheon of reform presidents whose ambitious plans were 
curtailed by war.
While Lippmann pushed the negotiation track in 1964, Alsop had been?in 
Bundy?s words??breathing absolute fire and sulfur about the need for war in South 
Vietnam.?  Months before the presidential election, Alsop told LBJ during a late-
night White House discussion, ?if you don?t commit troops you?re going to preside 
over the first real defeat of the United States in history.  There?s no other honorable 
9
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Johnson and Foreign Policy,? 4 February 1965.  As discussed in the next chapter, 
former Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson responded publicly to this column. Later that spring, with a 
unilateral intervention in the Dominican Republic and a widening bombing campaign in Vietnam, 
Lippmann would repudiate that judgment.  See, for example, T&T, ?As Others See Us,? 10 June 1965.  
For Lippmann?s reference to the idea of disengagement in 1964 see, T&T, ?The Thaw,? 2 January 
1964.
449
way out of Southeast Asia.?
11
  Bundy spent much of his time trying to keep both of 
his old friends ?on the reservation.?
12
  He often found himself, like LBJ, hemmed up 
in the middle between two powerful opinion-makers advocating vastly different 
solutions to the problem in South Vietnam.
On New Year?s Day 1965 Alsop raised the ante with a frontal assault on 
Johnson himself.  In a piece titled ?Back to Waikiki,? the columnist invoked the 
?domino theory? he had popularized in the early 1950s.  Failure to stand firm in 
South Vietnam, he wrote, would begin a chain reaction toppling successive 
governments throughout Southeast Asia and forcing America back to a defensive 
perimeter in Hawaii.  Though a familiar Alsopian theme, the tone was more strident 
than usual. Alsop went further, predicting 1965 would mark the apogee of the 
American Century: ?when the proud, ever-rising curve of American power and 
greatness at length turned sharply downwards . . . if President Johnson ducks the 
challenge in South Vietnam, as he seems to be getting ready to do.?
13
  He also lashed 
out at Lippmann and others who urged Johnson to ?forget about the Vietnamese war 
and negotiate larger diplomatic arrangements which will guarantee a bearable future 
for Asia.?  Alsop charged that ?it is ludicrous to talk about negotiating, when you are 
on the naked verge of total, final defeat.?  Against the prospect of failure in Vietnam 
10
 Joseph W. Alsop to Jacqueline Kennedy, 4 February 1965, Box 72, Joseph W. Alsop Papers, Library 
of Congress, Washington, DC (hereinafter referred to as ?LC?).
11
 Lady Bird Johnson, entry of 15 June 1964, A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart & 
Winston, 1970): 168.
12
 Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (New York: Simon 
and Schuster, 1997): 357; telephone conversation between Bundy and Johnson, 15 May 1964.
13
 Alsop, Matter of Fact, "'Back to Waikiki'," Washington Post, 1 January 1965: A13.   See also, "The 
Old Order Passeth," Washington Post, 20 January 1965: A17, where Alsop used Winston Churchill's 
death and Johnson's inauguration to contrast the legendary British leader's steadfastness against Nazi 
tyranny with what he perceived to be LBJ's lack of resolve in facing down the Communists in 
450
and what he perceived as the lack of presidential resolve, Alsop held up (as an 
example of bold leadership) John Kennedy?s determination to prevent the placement 
of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.  ?One must pray [Johnson] does not fail where his 
predecessor succeeded? in facing down Communist advances.
14
Alsop turned the screws tighter in the following weeks.  On no fewer than 
four occasions he emphasized JFK?s courage and statesmanship during the Cuban 
Missile Crisis of 1962.  Considering Johnson?s insecurities and his disdain for the 
Kennedys, it was a potent attack.  It explains, in part, Lippmann?s willingness to 
make linkages in his column between LBJ and Wilson and FDR.  Alsop?s most bald 
attempt to shame Johnson and challenge his manhood by using the Kennedy example, 
came on 8 February 1965, the day after the first air strike in retaliation for the Pleiku 
raid.  The columnist questioned ?whether this is another fruitless, one-shot stunt or 
whether the President now means business at last.?
15
  For Alsop, a clear line of logic 
ran through American interventions to preserve stability in Asia: the Korean War had 
been fought to halt Communist aggression abetted by the Soviets; before that, the 
great Pacific campaigns?Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Saipan?halted Japanese 
expansion.  Now, he argued, the U.S. must uphold the falling domino in Saigon and 
contain Communist Chinese designs.  ?Where then is our common-sense, that we 
shrink and fall back, and shrink and fall back, until the lives of millions must again be 
risked?? Alsop demanded.  ?We have waited overlong.?
16
Vietnam: "For, in a very special way, the new American President is the heir and (if he has the wisdom 
and the courage) the continuator of the old British Prime Minister."
14
 Alsop, Matter of Fact, "'Back to Waikiki'," Washington Post, 1 January 1965: A13.
15
 Alsop, Matter of fact, "'We Can' versus 'We Can't'," Washington Post, 8 February 1965: A17.
16
 Ibid. Later that spring, Alsop turned his sights on Hans J. Morgenthau a prominent political scientist 
at the University of Chicago.  Morgenthau, whose classic Politics Among Nations established him as a 
leading ?realist? observer of foreign policy, had sharply criticized the administration?s escalation of the 
451
  Lippmann considered Today and Tomorrow to be, in part, a kind of counter-
balance to Alsop?s pressure for militarization.  ?I meant to needle the president a bit,? 
he told his assistant, Elizabeth Farmer, while editing a column that referenced LBJ?s 
political heroes, Wilson and FDR. ?If Joe Alsop can needle the President, so can I.?
17
What Alsop tried to achieve noisily from the outside the administration, Lippmann 
tried to scuttle quietly as an insider. Later that spring, as their tones grew more 
war in lectures and in print.  Like Lippmann, he believed a ground war would provoke Chinese 
intervention.  But he showed less reticence at attacking Johnson and his advisors, remarking on one 
occasion that Bundy and McNamara ?were devoid of sound judgment and understanding of foreign 
policy.?  Laurence Stern, ?Highbrow-to-Highbrow Debate Set on Viet-Nam,? Washington Post, 15 
May 1965: A1.
Twice, in May and June, Morgenthau took part in highly publicized debates between 
administration officials and academic dissenters.  On 21 June 1965, he debated Mac Bundy in an event 
moderated by Eric Sevaried and televised by CBS.  Morgenthau believed that Beijing had little interest 
in invading Vietnam but would intervene if provoked by massive U.S. ground forces.  He did not make 
an argument for complete withdrawal, however, confining himself to the much weaker debating point 
that U.S. policy had failed to turn the tide of the war and that the U.S. should initiate ?face-saving? 
negotiations.  Bundy shredded these arguments, laying out the administration?s case with precision, 
and producing the political effect that the administration had a strong case. See Kai Bird?s account in 
The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy?Brothers in Arms (New York: Simon & 
Schuster, 1998): 321.
Alsop, meanwhile, used Matter of Fact to castigate Morgenthau for his ?pompous ignorance? 
of Chinese history and motivations.  He wrote that the political scientist?s argument echoed the ?be-
nice-to-Hitler group in England before 1939.? Morgenthau defended his position in a pointed letter to 
the editors of the Washington Post.  Describing Alsop?s column as expressing ?anger? rather than an 
intellectual view point, Morgenthau wrote, ?that Mao Tse-tung is not Hitler, that the position of China 
in Asia is not like that of Nazi Germany in Europe, that Viet-Nam is not Czechoslovakia, that my 
opposition to our involvement in Viet-Nam is not identical with that of the appeasers of 1938.  Anyone 
who believes that these disparate situations and issues are identical is beyond the reach of rational 
argument.? Hate mail and threats soon inundated Morgenthau.  ?The effect of the Alsop column has 
been striking and distressing,? Morgenthau wrote Lippmann a few weeks later.  ?Before its 
publication, my mail was overwhelmingly favorable and even the dissenting voices were respectful 
and polite.  Now the gates of the political underworld seem to have opened.  I receive every day letters 
with xenophobic, red-baiting, and anti-semitic attacks, not to speak of anonymous telephone calls at all 
hours of the day and night.?  It demonstrated, he concluded, ?how thin the veneer of political 
civilization is.  One man dares to overstep the bounds of what is permissible, and gets away with it, the 
underworld shakes off its restraint and joins in the hunt.?  See, Alsop, ?Pompous Ignorance,? Matter of 
Fact, Washington Post, 25 April 1965: A25. Hans J. Morgenthau to the Washington Post, ?A 
Communication,? 30 April 1965.  The Alsop-Morgenthau feud boiled over again in 1966.  In a letter to 
Gilbert A. Harrison, editor of the anti-war magazine The New Republic (which had published some of 
Morgenthau?s articles), Alsop complained of the political scientist?s ?pseudo-authoritative opinions, 
which are treated more seriously than they deserve by people who like to hear what pleases them.?  
See, for example, Hans Morgenthau to Walter Lippmann, 6 May 1965, Hans J. Morgenthau Papers, 
LC, Washington, DC.; Alsop to Gilbert A. Harrison, 11 April 1966, Box 82, Joseph Alsop Papers, LC.  
A Morgenthau article had been published in the 3 April 1965 edition of The New Republic.
452
strident, one observer suggested that Lippmann and Alsop ?provide the country with 
the nearest thing to a parliamentary debate? on the war. Alsop, interestingly, 
dismissed the notion.  ?I don?t believe that Walter and I are nearly as important 
debaters as you make us out,? he wrote Karl Meyer of the Washington Post. ?In truth, 
I don?t think we are at all important, except perhaps when we make government 
officials nervous by persistently writing about subjects they wish to shove under the 
rug.?
18
  Herein lay a rationale far different from that which animated Lippmann?s 
work, for Alsop at bottom was more the investigative reporter than an interpreter of 
macro events.
There are counter-factual propositions that may be asked in reply to Alsop?s 
notion that the Washington columnists were, by-and-large, irrelevant to the decision-
making process.  If Lippmann chose to break with LBJ publicly at the outset of 
sustained bombing, would other journalists have followed his lead?  Could he have 
provoked a wider debate?  Or, could he have galvanized the pro-diplomacy support 
that already existed in many op-ed pages nationwide?  Officials acted as if they 
believed these scenarios were distinct possibilities, none of which they wanted to 
occur.  Just a few months before Bundy had told LBJ that Lippmann was simply the 
most respected publicist in the country. Accordingly, they acted to insure that, for as 
long as possible, the man who, in David Halberstam?s words, ?more than any other 
man, determined Washington?s critical taste buds,? was distracted from their true 
17
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 2 February 1965.  See also Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and 
the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1980): 558.
18
 Joseph Alsop to Karl E. Meyer, 28 April 1965, Box 72, Joseph W. Alsop Papers, Library of 
Congress.  Though e agreed that the "American national debate in fact goes on in the press," Alsop 
confessed to Meyer that the process "mystifies me.  I suspect the best model is the quantum theory--
countless little packets of more or less correct information, each following an individually 
453
intentions.
19
   They had some help from him.  Lippmann, who had the advantage of 
access to Johnson that Alsop did not, seemed temporarily to care about his efforts at 
personal persuasion more than a carefully crafted public debate.  He was acting less 
the publicist than the private diplomat.
Battling Alsop was one matter but openly debating administration policy, as 
late as February 1965, was still something entirely different.  For one thing, 
Lippmann was still optimistic about a diplomatic solution.  Though he feared that 
administration officials were moving closer to Americanizing the war, Lippmann 
believed that other international players might bring Washington and Hanoi to the 
negotiating table.  He eagerly anticipated Soviet Premier Alexi N. Kosygin?s visit to 
Hanoi in early February.  The Soviets, Lippmann knew, had mixed motives in 
Southeast Asia.  On the one hand, Moscow must have welcomed the American 
entanglement in Saigon because it drained American money and military resources 
away from other avenues of competition with the Soviet Union.  Moreover, American 
intervention in Vietnam sharply reduced its influence and prestige in other Asian and 
African countries where Moscow and Washington bid for indigenous allegiance.  But 
if an American entanglement in Vietnam redounded to Moscow?s advantage, an 
Americanized war (hence a wider war) did not.  Here, again, two factors were at 
work.  The Soviets were fearful that American action against Hanoi would draw them 
into direct conflict with U.S. forces.  Hanoi already received considerable military 
unpredictable course, but all forming a relatively predictable and standard pattern because of the law of 
probabilities."  See also, Karl E. Meyer, ?Farewell to Washington,? 9 April 1965, New Statesman: 564.
19
 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972): 36; Bundy to 
LBJ, ?How to be a Statesman in the last month,? 4 October 1964, NSFM, McGeorge Bundy 10/1-
12/31/64, LBJ Library.  See also Halberstam?s The Powers That Be (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois 
Press, 2000, reprint).
454
assistance from Moscow and, in January 1965, signed a trade agreement which drew 
them even closer.  If Hanoi asked for help, Moscow must either reciprocate or risk 
losing face.  Worse still, U.S. action against North Vietnam might provoke Chinese 
intervention which, in turn, might necessitate that the Soviets fulfill the 1950 Sino-
Soviet mutual defense treaty.  In either case, Beijing would extend its influence even 
further into Southeast Asia?an outcome that Kosygin and co-leader Leonid 
Brezhnev found unpalatable.  Lippmann understood Moscow?s complex motives and 
reasoned that while Kosygin would probably use his visit to denounce U.S. actions in 
South Vietnam, he also would try to curb Hanoi?s ambitions.  ?The Russians have 
every interest in keeping the war from escalating?they may be coming in like Paul 
Revere to the rescue,? he told Elizabeth Farmer on the eve of Kosygin?s visit.  ?Of 
course, it will take forms that the simple-minded people here will find disturbing?
they?ll put in rockets and missiles and I don?t know what.  But that will make them 
able to say [to the North Vietnamese], ?Now you?re safe and now you negotiate.??
20
This was precisely the line that Kosygin took.  On February 4, the Soviet premier and 
the North Vietnamese leadership issued a joint statement condemning U.S. 
?aggression? in Vietnam.  Kosygin went further, linking Moscow?s support for 
Vietnam?s ?national liberation? with other such efforts around the globe.  He also 
pledged increased economic and military aid to Hanoi?including air defense 
equipment and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) far superior to anything that Beijing 
could offer.  But, having proven Moscow?s steadfastness, Kosygin sought to reign in 
his hosts.  He cautioned members of the Hanoi Politburo against provoking direct 
20
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 1 February 1965.  For background on the Kosygin visit and 
455
American military intervention.  He also probed them as to what their terms were for 
an acceptable negotiated settlement.
21
 Lippmann who closely read American 
newspapers accounts of Kosygin?s Hanoi visit, interpreted events as proof that the 
Russians were interested in convening a great-power conference in which the U.S. 
could extricate itself through diplomatic disengagement and Hanoi would be 
permitted the best chance to unify Vietnam.
22
  Such an effort would be quite similar 
to the arrangement the Russians helped broker in Laos just three years earlier?an 
arrangement Lippmann not only accepted but hoped to emulate.  U.S. officials, 
however, showed no interest in de-accelerating their plans for direct intervention.  
Rather, they were waiting for a reason to do so.
Military and political developments in South Vietnam soon moved Lippmann 
closer to the administration line than he may have found comfortable.  First, on 7 
February 1965 the Vietcong launched an attack on a U.S. helicopter base at Pleiku in 
the central highlands of Vietnam.  The raid, part of a coordinated attack on more than 
a dozen sites in the South, killed eight Americans, wounded more than 100, and 
destroyed 10 aircraft.  Three days later, another Vietcong attack on the U.S. barracks 
at Qui Nhon killed 23 U.S. personnel.
23
Russian relations with Hanoi see Logevall?s Choosing War: 322-323. 
21
 Logevall, Choosing War: 322-323; 
22
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Vietnamese Affair,? 9 February 1965.  For press coverage of the Kosygin trip 
see, ?Kosygin Hailed in Hanoi; He Praises the Vietcong,? 7 February 1965, New York Times: 1; 
?Speech at Dinner Scores U.S.,? 7 February 1965, New York Times: 6; ?Kosygin Vows Aid in Hanoi 
Defense,? 10 February 1965, New York Times: 1; Don Kirk, ?Hanoi Strategy Linked to Bid for Soviet 
Aid,? 11 February 1965, Christian Science Monitor: 5; Donald Kirk, ?Visit Echoes in Hanoi,? 15
February 1965, Christian Science Monitor: 6; and, ?After the Kosygin Mission,? 15 February 1965, 
New York Times: 26. 
23
 For an overview see George Herring?s America?s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 
1950-1975 (New York: Knopf., 1986): 128-129.
456
Lippmann offered uncritical support for retaliatory American air strikes, 
describing the Vietcong attack as a ?test of American will.?  On 9 February 1965, he 
echoed administration officials, explaining that ?had the United States refrained from 
retaliating, the Chinese and their supporters in Asia and elsewhere would have called 
it a demonstration that the United States is a paper tiger.?
24
  Lippmann also warned 
that while LBJ ?profoundly desires to avoid war,? that he could not be counted on to 
restrain U.S. power faced with ?continual and cumulative? provocations.  ?There 
should be no mistake about this anywhere,? he concluded.
25
  Lippmann assumed that 
these air strikes were part of a tit-for-tat game?like the Tonkin Gulf response?
intended principally to show U.S. resolve.  Washington, however, deemed the Saigon 
government so unstable that much more was required to preserve it than surgical 
reprisal attacks against its enemy.  Rather, Pleiku served as a pretext for a new policy, 
advocated for months by key advisers and Pentagon officials.  It marked a major 
turning point in the war: an offensive bombing campaign against North Vietnamese 
targets chosen from a gradually expanding list.
26
Lippmann never thought the military track anything more than a means to 
preserve a government in Saigon long enough to ensure a settlement.  Thus, he was 
careful not to endorse a solely military policy.  Without making direct criticisms of 
Johnson, he nevertheless worried that the administration?s policy of postponing a 
decision in Vietnam was running short on time.  In moving toward negotiations, the 
administration, he explained, had to navigate domestic criticism from the Republicans 
and the real threat that in seeking a compromise it might altogether demoralize South 
24
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Vietnamese Affair,? 9 February 1965.
25
 Ibid.
457
Vietnamese fighting morale.  Yet without articulating a policy designed to achieve a 
negotiated peace, it had allowed itself to drift into a position where it had to risk all-
out war or accept a humiliating withdrawal.  ?The military policy of holding on in 
South Viet-Nam supplemented with retaliatory strikes, needs to be accompanied by a 
peace offensive,? he told readers on 11 February 1965.  ?The choice which has to be 
decided is between a full-scale war and a negotiated truce.  I say full-scale war 
because if the choice is to seek a military solution, the country must be prepared for 
the worst.?
27
  Washington officials, however, did not share Lippmann?s concern about 
Chinese intervention?a residual fear based on the lessons of the Korean conflict. He 
concluded with another appeal to LBJ?s sense of posterity.  ?The President?s great 
predecessors like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt,? he explained, ?never 
thought that they could have a military solution without at the same time a diplomatic 
offensive.?
28
Administration officials were eager to conceal the extent to which they were 
committed to militarizing the war.  Lippmann, unwittingly, provided them a 
smokescreen.  On Monday, 15 February 1965, just two days after Johnson had 
approved the plans to commence the secret ?Rolling Thunder? Operation, the 
columnist phoned Bundy to tell him that he would be taping his annual CBS roundup 
interview in a few days.  Lippmann wanted assurances from Bundy and the president 
that there would be no major operational developments in Vietnam during the interval 
26
 Herring, America?s Longest War: 129.
27
 T&T, ?The Impending Decision,? 11 February 1965.
28
 Ibid.
458
before the program aired the following Monday.  Bundy suggested to LBJ that the 
day before the taping, Lippmann be brought in for an update; Johnson agreed.
29
Among their roughly dozen meetings in the first half of 1965, the 17 February 
1965 discussion between the national security adviser and at the White House ranks 
first in importance.
30
  Bundy convinced his friend that the retaliatory air strikes were 
temporary, limited, and intended ultimately to compel negotiations with the North.
31
He surprised Bundy by admitting that he expected U.S. air strikes to continue against 
North Vietnamese targets; he seemed to have no immediate objections.  Lippmann 
asked whether the administration planned a dramatic shift in the tempo of the 
bombing over the weekend.  ?I told him that I could not predict events precisely, but I 
asked him what he meant by anything spectacular,? Bundy reported to LBJ, ?and it 
very shortly emerged that he would not be startled by a continuation of air action 
across the 17
th
 Parallel, even if it did not result from some new spectacular attack on 
Americans in the South.?  Without so much as a hint of the massive air campaign set 
to begin on 2 March, Bundy reassured the columnist that there were no immediate 
plans to expand the offensive or to bomb Hanoi.
32
Bundy then lectured Lippmann that the present was not the time for a 
conference?a theme the columnist pursued in his previous private meetings and in a 
29
 Bundy to LBJ, ?Two Press Queries,? 15 February 1965, NSFM, Box 2, LBJ Library, Austin, TX 
(hereinafter referred to as ?LBJL?).  Johnson?s schedule kept him from sitting in on the meeting.
30
 Lippmann had come from a lunch meeting with George Ball at the State Department where the two 
men talked about divisions of opinion in the administration about Vietnam.  See the Lippmann 
Appointment Diaries, 17 February 1965, Box 240, Folder 39, Series VII, Walter Lippmann Collection, 
Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.  Hereinafter cited as ?WLC.?
31
 Bundy to LBJ, ?A Conversation with Walter Lippmann,? 17 February 1965, NSFM, 1/1-2/28/65, 
Box 2, LBJL.
32
 Ibid.
459
recent Newsweek column.
33
  Lippmann back-pedaled.  He did not press Bundy on the 
need for a conference or congress on the crisis in Southeast Asia.  He obliquely 
suggested that U.S. officials should be using diplomatic back-channels?either the 
Soviets or French?to bring Hanoi and Beijing to the peace table.  ?He said that all he 
meant was that we must use the tools of diplomacy,? Bundy reported back to the 
president.  ?I said that I fully agreed, as long as it was understood that one of the 
major tools of diplomacy was the Seventh Fleet.  He said he not only agreed but had 
repeatedly made this point.?  For two decades Lippmann had insisted that the U.S. 
naval and air presence in the Pacific Ocean?and the ability to project that power 
rapidly into Southeast Asia?made it a de facto power in that region.  Mobility and 
firepower were far greater assets than a cumbersome army of occupation bogged 
down in a guerilla war.  Thus, he had been generally supportive whenever the 
Seventh Fleet was dispatched to demonstrate American interests at Asian crisis 
points, including Taiwan.  Bundy, of course, was quite familiar with Lippmann?s 
predisposition.   By intimating that the raids were just this kind of political muscle-
flexing, he shifted the discussion to one about a precise/limited use of force to compel 
negotiations. Lippmann had no sense of the scale of the bombing for which the 
administration was preparing?that such a massive sustained air war required bases in 
South Vietnam, and that ground troops were logistically necessary to provision and 
protect those bases.  Bundy again strongly warned Lippmann off any talk of formal 
conferences since ?one of the difficulties was that the very word ?conference? 
sounded suspiciously like surrender in Southeast Asia right now.?  Lippmann assured 
Bundy he was not calling for a conference.
33
 See Lippmann?s ?Toward Peace in Asia,? 15 February 1965, Newsweek: 19.
460
Bundy also deployed a theme he would return to during the coming months: 
the president was far more optimistic of a diplomatic solution than the advisors who 
surrounded him.  In a rare moment of candor, he included himself among the 
doubters.  While LBJ was ?not the man to miss any real chance for a decent 
settlement,? Bundy recounted telling Lippmann, ?I myself did not believe there was a 
piece of paper that had any chance of being signed by both us and the Communists.?  
Lippmann agreed any negotiations would start quite far apart. Bundy gauged that his 
old friend was ?not really happy about our present posture, but just the same he is 
doing his best to support it.?  He seemed certain that Lippmann?s faith in the 
president was intact and that that impression would be conveyed on the CBS 
program.  ?I think he went away feeling that my judgment needs watching, but that 
you are just the right man to watch it,? Bundy quipped.  ?He may even be right.?
34
Until Bundy left government to head the Ford Foundation in early 1966, Lippmann 
continued to debate the war with him but did not perceive until much later the extent 
of Bundy?s deception.
LBJ proved a beguiling performer but when it came to handling the columnist 
Mac Bundy scripted, choreographed, and directed the president.  It is difficult to 
overstate Bundy?s influence on Lippmann?s commentary in the spring of 1965, not to 
mention the national security adviser?s ability to determine the timing and substance 
of the columnist?s meetings with Johnson.  To be sure, LBJ delivered his lines with 
skill: first as the fawning politician, then as an earnest man of peace, and, in the final 
act, as the confused statesman seeking counsel from the wise man.  But Bundy 
coached him, set the scene, evaluated from backstage.  He arranged every meeting 
34
 Ibid.
461
Lippmann had with LBJ, prepped Johnson on the right questions to ask, and 
conducted post-mortems by phone or in brisk memos.  Rarely did his own discussions 
with Lippmann go unreported to the president.  Bundy might be combative?or, if 
required, conciliatory?during their frequent talks in his office in the White House 
basement or over lunch at the Metropolitan Club across Lafayette Square.  But he 
knew where Lippmann stood before his columns were set in print during the first half 
of 1965.  He anticipated, with unfailing accuracy, the columnist?s successive points of 
attack and explained to the president how best to blunt them.  Without Bundy, it is 
hard to imagine how Johnson could have kept Lippmann ?aboard? for as long as he 
did.
If there were limits to Lippmann?s dissent, there also were clear limits to his 
support.  The primary question for the columnist was not whether the U.S. should get 
out, but if it could still extricate itself.  The column that he penned just before his 
meeting with Bundy argued that a sustained bombing campaign would fail to get a 
political resolution. ?Apart from the question of the morality and the gigantic risks of 
escalating the war, there is no sufficient reason to think that the Northern communists 
can be bombed into submission,? he explained.  The alternative, a land war, would be 
a ?supreme folly.  While the war hawks would rejoice when it began, the people 
would weep before it ended.  There is no tolerable alternative except a negotiated 
truce, and the real problem is not whether we should negotiate but whether we can 
negotiate.?  The administration should make a brokered settlement its ?avowed 
462
objective, an objective pursued with all our many and very considerable diplomatic 
resources.?
35
Lippmann?s confidence that he still might maneuver LBJ toward a diplomatic 
exit was matched by Johnson?s certitude that the columnist would eventually support 
militarization.  The president believed that by appealing to Lippmann?s patriotic 
lights he could be brought around to supporting sustained bombing strikes and, 
presumably, other incremental steps of escalation.  Bundy no longer shared that level 
of optimism.  His assessment of the 18 February column was succinct: ?He?s as far 
aboard as he?ll come?which isn?t very far,? Bundy told a concerned LBJ on the 
phone that evening:
LBJ: I don?t believe that a fellow like Lippmann?if he 
understands that they came across the line and aggressed 
from the other side and fired on our compound?that he 
would want us to say, ?Thank you.?  I think he?s bound to 
believe we ought to chase them off.
BUNDY: No.  He hates wars.  I had quite a fight with him 
on just that point . . . He said, ?You?ve got to remember 
this is not Korea; these people have not come across the 
line.?  And I said, ?But they have.  That?s just the problem; 
that they have come across the line.?
LBJ: I?d show him the staging area, show him the camp.  
Just say they hit the barracks.
BUNDY: He admits that happened.  But he thinks the 
South has no support and the government has no strength.  
It?s all the stuff that?s in his column this morning, which 
he?d already written [on the morning of the 17
th
 prior to 
meeting Bundy late that afternoon].  But I don?t think his 
broadcast will be bad.
36
35
 Lippmann, ?The Viet-Nam Debate,? T&T, 18 February 1965.  Lippmann?s emphasis.  It should be 
noted that Lippmann wrote this column on the morning of 17 February, hours prior to his meeting with 
Bundy.
36
 Bundy-LBJ, phone conversation, 18 February 1965, tape #WH6502.04, LBJL.
463
Far from being ?bad,? the CBS program amounted to a public relations 
triumph for the administration.  Lippmann?s assurances in front of the television 
cameras belied the doubts he raised in his columns.  During the program, broadcast to 
a national TV audience on 22 February, he offered only muted criticism of Johnson?s 
Vietnam policy. More significantly, he voiced qualified support for the bombing 
campaign.  Newsman Eric Sevaried opened the interview by asking Lippmann if 
there were advocates of escalation in the upper echelons of the administration.  As 
Bundy had predicted, the columnist suggested that among the advisors there were, but 
not the president himself.  ?Well, I think as a matter of fact, they would be found in 
the military area [McNamara], and to some degree in the diplomatic area [Rusk],? 
Lippmann said.  ?But they are not found in the interior and at the top of the White 
House.  That I feel sure of . . . I mean the President is not a war hawk.?
37
  On the 
subject of the bombing reprisals, Lippmann largely echoed Bundy?s points from his 
private briefing.  ?They really are public relations jobs, much more than they are 
military jobs,? Lippmann told viewers.  ?They?re political bombings, and they don?t 
kill many people.  I don?t think they kill anybody.  There?s no evidence that they do 
because what we bomb is wooden sheds.?
38
It was a performance that could only have delighted the president and 
Bundy.
39
Not only did Lippmann support the bombing reprisals, but he essentially 
followed the administration line on negotiations.  The U.S. would have to stick it out 
37
 Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann, 202.  Emphasis added.
38
 Ibid., 202-203.  Interestingly this was the last time Lippmann would appear in a televised forum; 
CBS canceled the series. It is not clear if government pressure may have been brought to bear on the 
network to end the series.  Lippmann seems to have become disenchanted with the format.
39
 Perhaps sensing the magnitude of this gaffe, Lippmann never taped another installment of this 
annual program that had run since 1961 on CBS.  Al Friendly and Bill Paley, president of CBS, made 
repeated overtures to Lippmann.
464
in Vietnam, gain a cease-fire (ostensibly through reprisal strikes), and then negotiate.  
?You?d have to do the diplomatic exploration which I?ve been talking about, which is 
not a conference, you?ll have to do that before there?s a cease-fire,? Lippmann said.  
?Now, one of the terms I would think indispensable to a negotiation, or any kind of 
talk, back and forth, would be that we would not withdraw while the thing was going 
on.  You see, we are faced with an ultimatum?have been from Hanoi and Peking?
that we must get out, and then talk.  Now, that we can?t do, because that means 
abandoning all our friends and all our interests and that would be scuttling the ship.?
40
Lippmann had not yet clambered overboard.
And yet Lippmann would not cede the realist convictions that had so shaped 
his view of events in South Vietnam.  These core values increasingly distinguished 
him from fellow journalists who supported militarization.  In some instances, his 
articulations of realism made him their primary target.
Several important pundits shared Alsop?s views, among them the syndicated 
columnist and Johnson crony William S. White and Washington Evening Star
columnist Richard Wilson.  White, a Texan, stood firmly in the president?s corner.  
He applauded the hawkish Republican minority in Congress, led by Senator Everett 
Dirksen, as the ?loyal opposition? which, by supporting air strikes, was performing an 
?absolutely irreplaceable . . . service.? 
41
While White cheered on the ?loyal 
opposition,? Richard Wilson attacked the pro-diplomacy clique as responsible for 
stirring au currant talk of isolationism the capital.  He singled out Lippmann and 
prominent Senate Democrats as especially egregious isolationists. ?It is a kind of 
40
 Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann, 200-201.  Emphasis added.
465
?America First? doctrine now dressed up in academically acceptable language and fit 
for discussion in the brainiest circles,? Wilson explained.  These new isolationists had 
once led the attack against the old isolationists?Ohio senator Robert A. Taft and 
former President Herbert Hoover both of whom opposed postwar American 
internationalism.  ?But now in the Senate, and from the lips of great journalists,? 
Wilson wrote days after Lippmann?s CBS interview, ?the message has been coming . 
. . that we no longer can expect to have the world run our way, that we must adjust to 
historical change, that what we once thought challenged our vital interests no longer 
does so.?
42
  This kind of talk ?lacks reality,? Wilson complained, because it abdicated 
American responsibility.  Withdrawal, disengagement, or accommodation would ?lay 
aside the responsibilities of leadership? and ?hasten, rather than delay, ultimate 
Communist Chinese domination of Southeast Asia.?
43
This accusation would increasingly be leveled at Lippmann. A major 
popularizer of postwar internationalism, he now assertively defined himself against 
American globalists.  He dedicated a column (a luxury he rarely allowed himself) to 
Wilson?s criticism.  Lippmann countered that to compare restrained internationalism 
with isolationism was ?like saying that a man who has cut back from being an 
advanced alcoholic to being a moderate drinker is a tee-totaler.?
44
  His choice of 
analogy constituted a subtle admission: Vietnam was causing him to rethink the 
premises of American internationalism in the postwar period.
45
  In two important 
41
 William S. White, ?Loyal Opposition: GOP Magnificent in Crisis,? Washington Post, 22 February 
1965: A21.
42
 Richard Wilson, ?Old Concepts Gain New Currency,? Washington Evening Star, 26 February 1965: 
A13.
43
 Ibid.
44
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Neo-Isolationists,? 2 March 1965.  
45
 A topic to be discussed at length in the following chapter.
466
regards, he distinguished the ?neo-isolationists??among whom he counted himself?
from their predecessors in the 1930s.  Though they did not share the open-ended 
goals of American globalists, Lippmann explained, the neo-isolationists were not in 
principle opposed to intervention.  Outside of Europe and select places in the Western 
Hemisphere Lippmann placed the threshold for intervention much higher.  ?The 
opposing conservative view today is that while we have important interests in the 
Asian and African continents, they are not vital interests which would justify a 
unilateral American commitment of our military forces,? Lippmann wrote.  In such 
places, he added, these restrained internationalists preferred to work through extra-
national institutions, ?the United Nations and other collective organizations.?  
Moreover, while they sought to limit the use of American military power they 
supported generous U.S. economic and technological aid.  Here, then, was the 
distinction between those who subscribed to Lippmann?s view and the old 
isolationists: ?this argument is entirely and solely about military intervention,? he 
assured readers.  ?It is not about economic assistance, technical assistance, the Peace 
Corps, cultural exchanges,? all of which he advocated.  ?It is about where and when, 
where and where not, American fighting men should be sent to intervene 
unilaterally.?
46
  Years later he explained to an interviewer, ?Well, neo-isolationism is 
the direct product of foolish globalism.  If you think you can run the world and then 
find out you can?t, you withdraw to what you can run, and they call that neo-
isolationism.?  Asked if he would flinch from that term the old columnist replied, 
46
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Neo-Isolationists,? 2 March 1965.  Both emphases are Lippmann?s.
467
?Compared to the people who thought they could run the universe, or at least the 
globe, I am a neo-isolationist and proud of it.?
47
Lippmann refused to take a narrow view of the commitment in Vietnam, even 
when looking back across decades at its roots in the American containment policy.  In 
Southeast Asia, American officials had applied the Truman Doctrine, a policy 
Lippmann believed committed the U.S. to a ?global ideological struggle against 
revolutionary Communism.?  For those who equated the ?defense of Saigon [with] 
the defense of Hawaii . . . there is no stopping point between globalism and a retreat 
into our former isolationism.?  And yet, on numerous occasions U.S. officials had 
found those stopping points; they had acted as pragmatists rather than ideologues, 
refusing to intervene in the Berlin Uprising of 1953, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, 
or the Chinese invasion of Tibet.  ?These examples show that put to the test, our 
officials have acted more wisely than they have talked,? Lippmann wrote, ?that put to 
the test, they have been statesmen and not ideological crusaders.?
48
   Lyndon Johnson, 
he still hoped, would reveal himself as one of the latter.  He gave explicit warning 
that while the U.S. could not withdraw from Saigon prior to a diplomatic settlement 
the administration should not seek to improve its position by waging a wider air war.  
He came close?whether by intent or coincidence it is not clear?to using the code 
name officials had dubbed the secret air war set to begin in days.  ?For the President 
to announce that he intends to devastate North Viet-Nam by a rolling bomber 
offensive would almost surely precipitate China, and probably also the Soviet Union, 
onto the side of North Viet-Nam,? Lippmann told readers.  ?It would be a black day 
47
 Chalmers Roberts, ?Walter Lippmann: Journalist, Philosopher,? 15 December 1974, Washington 
Post: A8.
468
in American history if the President adopted this line.?
49
  Five days later, on 2 March 
1965, ?Rolling Thunder? commenced.  
III.
In the six weeks that followed his televised interview, Lippmann waged a one-man 
campaign to get the administration to articulate the rationale behind the air war.  He 
prodded Johnson to entice the North Vietnamese to negotiate: namely, through U.S. 
recognition of the Vietcong as a legitimate political entity.  Without any kind of 
diplomatic plan in place and largely unwilling to make concessions, the 
administration, he wrote, was practicing a policy that was ?all stick, no carrot.?  His 
program to bring the administration around to the negotiation track through numerous 
behind-the-scenes meetings with LBJ and Bundy, however, suffered from the 
opposite problem: not enough ?stick.?  What he told officials in private, he hesitated 
to say in public.  When LBJ scheduled a mid-March meeting with Lippmann to 
discuss war developments, Mac Bundy readied him for the encounter.  Reflecting on 
Lippmann?s support to date, Bundy admitted, ?You have handled Walter so well in 
the past that all I really have to suggest is that you give him ?more of the same.??
50
Other journalists, of course, concerned U.S. officials.  But Lippmann?s pre-
eminent status made him first on their list of the Washington intelligentsia.  Bundy?s 
calendar during those weeks was filled with press appointments.  The New York 
Times and its Washington bureau chief James Reston?as well as the syndicated 
48
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Globalism and Isolationism,? 23 February 1965.
49
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Official Discretion,? 25 February 1965.  Emphasis added.
469
columnist Joseph Kraft?supported negotiations.  In another vein entirely, Joe Alsop, 
who had inveighed throughout February about the administration?s lack of resolve to 
fight a land war in Vietnam, now complained about its secretiveness.  He protested to 
Bundy about CIA Director John McCone?s efforts to shut off Alsop?s background 
contacts at the spy agency.  When Bundy brought the matter to the president?s 
attention, Johnson scribbled a reply: ?Mac, I think all of you give entirely too much 
attention to Joe when the world is on fire.?
51
With the world afire in those crucial weeks, LBJ, however, chose to monitor 
closely Walter Lippmann?s temperature on developments in Vietnam.  Lippmann?s 
pre-eminent status put him at the head of LBJ?s list of Washington intelligentsia.  
Johnson and Bundy communicated about or with Lippmann several times each week 
from the start of the bombing campaign through Johnson?s Baltimore address in early 
April.  They crafted diplomatic initiatives in March and April, in part, to answer 
Lippmann?s concerns that the U.S. wasn?t doing enough diplomatically.  
During this period of press scrutiny, the president also maximized the benefits 
of his still cordial relations with the columnist.  LBJ used Lippmann?s willingness to 
associate with him to augment his image as a moderate willing to hear out the doves.  
Johnson also used his special relationship with Lippmann to trump critics who 
complained of the administration?s lack of candor about its policies.  When columnist 
James Wechsler wrote about Johnson?s close ties to the pro-intervention columnist 
William S. White, LBJ placed an angry phone call to him.  ?I?ve spent 10 hours with 
50
 Bundy to LBJ, "Walter Lippmann and Foreign Policy," 15 March 1965, NSFM, McGeorge Bundy to 
the President, March-4/15/65, LBJL.
51
 Bundy to LBJ, ?Press Contacts, Week of March 15,? 20 March 1965, NSFM, McGeorge Bundy, 
Memos to the President, March-4/15/65, LBJL.
470
Lippmann for every 10 minutes I?ve spent with White,? Johnson growled, opening a 
long presidential monologue.
52
  He was particularly annoyed at Wechsler?s claim that 
White was writing Vietnam columns with LBJ?s encouragement??tacit assent in 
high places,? as Wechsler wrote.  LBJ bellowed at him, ?There?s not a human being 
in town that really gives a Tinker?s damn about what I think of his column.  If I ever 
told you the truth in my life, that?s true.?  Johnson, of course, was claiming a level of 
detachment that did not exist?neither from Washington columnists? perspectives 
nor, certainly, his own.  He rattled off the names of a half-dozen prominent pundits: 
Lippmann, Alsop, Doris Fleeson, Max Friedman, David Lawrence, and Rowland 
Evans.  ?Now I have spent more time on Vietnam?than all of them put together?
with Walter Lippmann,? he added.  ?He?s been to my house more.  He?s been to my 
office more . . . I?ve been to his home three times since I?ve been President to talk to 
him.  That?s pretty unusual for a President.?  The point, of course, was that 
Lippmann, widely-known among the Washington press as a Vietnam dove, still had 
access to the president.  In LBJ?s White House, the lines of communication were 
open.  ?And, I believe, if you saw his broadcast the other day . . . his attitude that he 
just wished we didn?t have to drop bombs.  God knows I do, too,? LBJ gushed 
onward.  ?He told Mac Bundy last night that he was still aboard?that he didn?t know 
what else I could do.?
53
Bundy knew that support was tenuous.  The columnist accepted the air strikes 
only because he?d been led to believe the president would negotiate as soon as 
possible.  But Lippmann held out no hope for preventing Hanoi?s eventual takeover 
52
 LBJ-James ?Jimmy? Wechsler, telephone conversation, 4 March 1965, WH6503.02, citation #s 
7017-7018, PNO #s 1-2, LBJL.
471
of South Vietnam, Bundy told Johnson, preparing him for another encounter with 
Lippmann.  Presciently?for Lippmann would take precisely this tack over the next 
few months?Bundy observed, ?He probably fears that you are in danger of being 
taken in by McNamara and me; I think he likes us both, but I think he remembers our 
connection to the Bay of Pigs.?
54
  For a while longer, he hoped, the president could 
cloak his intentions from Lippmann under the guise that he was seeking a diplomatic 
settlement but getting bad advice from his advisors.  To do that, Johnson would have 
to perform the perfunctory task of soliciting Lippmann?s ideas on an overall 
settlement for Southeast Asia: ?I doubt if he will be very concrete or persuasive on 
the subject,? Bundy wrote, ?any more than his French friends.?  Bundy also believed 
the president should probe Lippmann on how the administration could improve its 
image abroad while engaged in Vietnam, promoting ?peace and good works? 
elsewhere in the world.
Lippmann sensed deep insecurity on the part of key U.S. officials? about the 
cumulative decisions that were Americanizing the war.  At a British embassy dinner 
for Vice President Hubert Humphrey on 3 March, Lippmann listened as British 
General Sir Michael West debated Bundy and Walt Rostow about the results of the 
air war.  It ?will accomplish nothing,? West said bluntly.  Bundy and Rostow 
defended the policy without yielding.  When Lippmann related the encounter to his 
assistant, she replied that she thought Bundy ?saw the situation clearly enough, and 
that he was taking the course best for him??meaning that, despite his doubts, Bundy 
53
 Ibid.
54
 Bundy to LBJ, ?Press Contacts,? 20 March 1965.
472
had cast his lot with the hawks.  Lippmann agreed, replying only, ?He?s a courtier.?
55
A week later, when the national security adviser spoke before a meeting of the 
Overseas Writers group, Lippmann grew even more troubled about the 
administration?s ambiguity.  Bundy ?made the impression of a very unsure man?
very ill-at-ease?and unattractive,? Lippmann told Farmer.  ?I have the feeling 
[Johnson and his advisors] are not sure of their course, they?re feeling their way, and 
under pressure.?  Even writers with more sympathy for a military solution, like the 
columnist Richard Wilson, were overheard to say that when Bundy explained policy 
?the fog index was high.?
56
Mac Bundy still was one step ahead of the columnist.  Trouble with 
Lippmann, Bundy told Johnson, might come first from quarters other than the 
bombing.  Lippmann?s earliest and most pointed criticisms, in fact, came against the 
president?s refusal to make his case for intervention to the American public.  Bundy 
explained this to LBJ, noting that this critique derived from ?what he thinks is your 
effort to smother debate in a general consensus.?  He attached Lippmann?s latest 
Newsweek column titled, ?Can the Question of War Be Debated??
57
Lippmann?s misgivings about the administration?s efforts to squelch any 
publicity about its war aims did not arise simply from a notion that the president and 
his advisors were violating journalistic decorum.  Like his geopolitical warnings, this 
critique also was rooted in a peculiarly realist concept of the responsible use of 
power.  For Lippmann, the exercise of responsible power required a combination of 
55
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 4 March 1965.  See also Lippmann?s appointment diaries, 3 
March 1965.
56
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 11 March 1965.
473
statesmanship, pragmatism, consensus, and criticism.
58
  An important dialectic took 
place between consensus and criticism?one that made consensus itself more 
meaningful.  If this model was to work properly, American leaders had to be 
educators, too.  It was through the process of fostering debate and informing public 
opinion that they ultimately could validate their policies; and for Lippmann, 
legitimacy was central to the exercise of responsible power.  As Joel Rosenthal has 
explained, for postwar realists the consensus-criticism dialectic ?made clear the 
specific values that were to be served by responsible power, and it suggested practical 
steps and useful structures to encourage the achievement of such power.?  The 
process emphasized values that Lippmann believed essential and that recur in his 
writings: ?prudence, humility, the good-faith effort to balance ideals and self-
interests, and the preservation of freedom as expressed in the idea of democracy.?
59
Indeed, the preservation of this dialectic can be seen as one of the central aspects of 
Lippmann?s realism.  Thus, administration officials? charges that war critics like 
Lippmann?and, later, George Kennan and Hans J. Morgenthau?were obtuse or 
vague about solutions for getting out of Vietnam were patently disingenuous, 
especially when the president chose to subvert this consensus-criticism dialectic.  
Lippmann?s solutions were imprecise (and, ultimately, unpalatable to U.S. officials), 
but it is conceivable that had there been an open debate in 1964-65 it may have would 
have provided a basis for action or a point around which public opposition to 
intervention could have coalesced.
57
 Bundy to LBJ, "Walter Lippmann and Foreign Policy," NSFM, LBJL; Lippmann, "Can the Question 
of War Be Debated?" Newsweek 15 March 1965: 23.
58
 Joel Rosenthal, Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in 
the Nuclear Age (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1991): 37-65; 121-150.
474
So it was significant that Lippmann first singled out LBJ for criticism not for 
the bombing reprisals but because there were early signs the president might try to 
tamp down a debate necessary to legitimate whatever course he took in Southeast 
Asia.  In the Newsweek piece that Bundy brought to LBJ?s attention, Lippmann cited 
an early-March meeting in which Johnson had indelicately suggested that those 
American politicians and commentators who were contesting his Vietnam policy had 
no right to disagree with him.  Critics such as Senators Frank Church and J. William 
Fulbright were ??folks who don?t understand,?? LBJ complained.  Further, the great 
wars of the twentieth century, Johnson believed, had been ??brought about?? by such 
people, that is, American non-interventionists in the 1930s who had led Japan and 
Germany to believe they could threaten Asian and European nations without fear of 
U.S. retribution.  This line of argument, Lippmann told readers, had ?disturbing? 
implications since it amounted to declaring that ?debate on the vital issues of war and 
peace gives aid and comfort to the enemy.? American military intervention, he 
objected, ?cannot be left undebated, and it cannot be entrusted blindly to the President 
and Secretary Rusk and Secretary McNamara.?  With momentous choices yet to be 
decided, Lippmann argued, the President could hardly expect ?conformity and silence 
at this stage.?
60
59
 Rosenthal, Righteous Realists, 48-50.
60
 Walter Lippmann, ?Can the Question of War Be Debated?? Newsweek 15 March 1965: 23.  Here, 
Lippmann was responding, in part, to a rumor being circulated around Washington that LBJ was 
disparaging him behind closed doors.  One published report noted that when Senator Frank Church, an 
Idaho Democrat and war opponent, quoted Lippmann in arguing against expanding military operations, 
Johnson growled back, ?Frank, the next time you want a dam in Idaho, go ask Walter Lippmann for 
it!?  Lippmann told Elizabeth Farmer that it was disturbing because Johnson ?thinks you can trade 
dams against questions of war or peace.  And it is war now?a new kind of war?the first time we?ve 
fought against Asians unilaterally.  Korea was different?there was the fig leaf, if you like, of the 
U.N.?  Church later told Lippmann that the story was false and that Johnson had only offered 
respectful comments about Lippmann.  But the columnist?s response revealed deep concerns about 
475
Lippmann then tutored LBJ on another basic tenet of realism.  Though 
American public opinion could validate a certain policy, it would have no measurable 
effect on adversaries? foreign policies.  The president?s complaint rested on a ?major 
fallacy,? Lippmann explained, ?that the issues of war and peace are determined by the 
state of American opinion at home rather than by the balance of forces abroad.?  He 
added, ?I realize perfectly well that in Hanoi or Peking they may like to read Senator 
[Frank] Church?s speeches or even the dissents of an occasional journalist . . . . [But] 
what they do will be determined by the realities as they see them in Asia, not by how 
they read the Gallup poll in the United States.?
61
LBJ?s advisors hoped to deflect this new angle of attack by suggesting that the 
president demonstrate to Lippmann that behind closed doors he had heard out his 
Congressional critics, but that open dissent threatened policy because of the weakness 
of the Saigon regime.  Bill Moyers had alerted the president to the Newsweek piece 
almost a week before Bundy.  ?Well, he doesn?t understand that I?m debating it every 
night?I?ve had two [meetings] a week with all of them [Congressional leadership],? 
LBJ lamented.  Moyers suggested that Johnson show Lippmann transcripts of one of 
these closed-door sessions, ?when you were very good?when you said things I know 
he believes.  Just let him read it off the record, not for publication, and just show him 
what?s going on.?
62
  Bundy advised Johnson to meet the columnist?s complaints 
head-on during a private, White House luncheon with Lippmann.  Tell him, Bundy 
Johnson?s inability to handle criticisms and alternative viewpoints.  See Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley 
Diaries, 3 March 1965.  At the time many other prominent American commentators were far more 
lenient in allowing LBJ secretive discretion about his war aims.  The late-winter/early-spring 1965 
columns of Joseph Kraft and even James Reston are instructive in this regard.
61
 Lippmann, "Can the Question of War Be Debated?" Newsweek 15 March 1965: 23.
62
 Moyers-LBJ phone conversation, 10 March 1965, WH6503.05, citation #7051, PNO #2, LBJL.
476
urged, that the administration had made its case as openly as possible to the public 
and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.  ?They are quite free to oppose you if they choose,? 
Bundy suggested, ?but they are not free to make statements that you regard as 
damaging and pretend that they are speaking as your friends and supporters.?
63
  LBJ 
favored this direct approach.
On the afternoon of 15 March 1965, Lippmann met LBJ at the White House.  
Columnist and president strolled on the South Lawn, then returned to the Mansion for 
a discussion. Senator Frank Church, a prominent Vietnam critic, sat in for part of the 
talk.
64
  Then, Lippmann went to a private lunch with the president and Lady Bird.  
After the plates were cleared LBJ got down to business.  He handed Lippmann 
sheaves of transcripts, top-secret reports, and cables from Saigon offering a positive 
assessment of the war and the punishment being inflicted on the North.  ?I don?t 
understand why those people in Hanoi won?t negotiate with me,? LBJ bemoaned.  
Lippmann interjected that the administration had yet to spell out its intentions, much 
less the basis for negotiations.  ?Your policy is all stick and no carrot,? he said.  
?You?re bombing them without offering any incentive for them to stop fighting; in 
effect you?re giving them a choice between destruction and withdrawal.?  Holding 
back his anger?turning to Bundy?s advice to hear out Lippmann?s proposals?he 
asked for a detailed summary of the peace offensive the columnist had in mind.  
Lippmann developed the idea that a general peace conference must be called and that 
Hanoi be given a place at the conference.  In a moment of shear theatrics, Johnson 
phoned Bundy?s office.  ?Mac, I?ve got Walter Lippmann over here and he says we?re
63
 Bundy to LBJ, "Walter Lippmann and Foreign Policy," 15 March 1965, NSFM, LBJL.
477
not doing the right thing.  Maybe he?s right.?  This was a Johnsonian-sized deception.  
Just before he?d received Lippmann that afternoon, Johnson had summoned the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff to the Cabinet Room for a two-hour Vietnam update.  ?Kill more 
Vietcong,? he instructed them.
65
  LBJ knew his agenda and he wanted Lippmann to 
support it.  Lippmann stayed on until the late afternoon explaining why, without a 
major proposal for a compromise settlement, the North Vietnamese would continue to 
absorb heavy U.S. bombing.  Upon returning to Woodley Road he seemed buoyed 
with a new optimism.  ?I made quite an impression on him [with] the peace offensive 
idea,? he told Elizabeth Farmer, ?enough so that he called Mac Bundy in the middle 
of it and said, ?Maybe we?re not doing the right thing.?? 
66
Lippmann was still aboard into late March 1965, but much to Johnson?s 
dismay he was demanding a public accounting for the nearly six weeks of bombing.  
On 18 March, he wrote in Today and Tomorrow what he told Johnson privately: the 
bombing campaign was ?only a half policy . . . it is all stick and no carrot.?  The 
administration needed to set out its conditions and objectives for a cease-fire and 
eventual settlement in Vietnam.  ?Our present policy lacks the essential element of a 
true policy when armed adversaries confront each other,? Lippmann told readers.  
?The missing ingredient is a sketch of the settlement which our military effort is 
designed to bring about.?
67
   He came very close to advocating outright withdrawal?
albeit with an interval of diplomacy between the end of the military phase and the 
64
 President?s Daily Diary, 15 March 1965, pages 2-3, LBJL; Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 15-
16 March 1965.
65
 This meeting appears on the same page of the President?s Daily Diary, 15 March 1965, page 2, 
LBJL; ?Kill more Vietcong? quote cited in Logevall, Choosing War: 370.
66
 Final quote is taken from Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 15-16 March 1965.  For LBJ?s and 
Lippmann?s quotes from this episode (based on Lippmann?s recollections), see Steel, Walter Lippmann 
and the American Century: 560-561.
478
start of political concessions.  ?If we are honest and realistic, we must prepare 
ourselves for the contingency that the civil war will end in a Vietnamese deal with the 
Viet Cong, and that we shall be asked to withdraw our troops,? he wrote.  ?That 
would be a defeat in which we would lose considerable prestige, having unwisely 
engaged our prestige too lavishly.?
68
That column set in motion a frantic administration public relations program to 
manufacture a ?carrot.?  The White House wanted a plausible peace initiative, one 
which Hanoi was expected to reject but that would satisfy the domestic critics.  It 
began with a hastily sketched plan for the economic development of Southeast Asia 
introduced in late-March press conferences.  The effort culminated on 7 April 1965 in 
a presidential address delivered at Johns Hopkins University?a speech later known 
as the Baltimore Address.  These statements were intended primarily to placate 
Lippmann and the editorial board of the New York Times, which also voiced 
mounting displeasure with administration policy.
69
On the afternoon of 19 March, Lippmann met with Bundy for a follow-up on 
his recent lunch date with the president.  He pressed the national security adviser to 
consider a ?Wilsonian Fourteen Points settlement? for all of Southeast Asia.  Bundy 
demurred, telling Lippmann that perhaps something along those lines might be 
incorporated into a major upcoming presidential address on Vietnam?a speech 
Bundy likened to Kennedy?s American University Speech in June 1963.
70
  ?Since he 
envisions a single Titoist Vietnam as the best available outcome, he would like us to 
67
 Lippmann, T&T, "Vietnamese Policy Re-examined," 18 March 1965.
68
 Ibid.
69
 Other Washington columnists who followed Lippmann?s lead on the diplomacy issue were Arthur 
Krock, Joseph Kraft, and Drew Pearson.
479
come out in favor of the unification of Vietnam,? Bundy reported to LBJ.  ?This 
particular proposal seems foolish to me, certainly at this stage.?  Bundy, however, 
incorporated some of Lippmann?s proposals into the opening remarks that the 
president gave at a 20 March press conference.
71
Johnson?s ensuing statement, the first feeble attempt to define war aims, 
sounded a lot like a combination of the Tennessee Valley Authority program and a 
Marshall Plan for the states of Southeast Asia.  As the Washington Post pointed out in 
a front-page story above the fold, Johnson spoke as much to his domestic critics as he 
did his North Vietnamese adversaries.  He made vague illusions to the course ?urged 
by many diplomatic observers to spell out more of [the] ?carrot? element, to 
accompany the military stick of the present policy.?  The president hinted at 
economic aid to Saigon and Hanoi, noting that both sides ?have the right to live side 
by side in peace and independence . . . . They have a right to build a new sense of 
community among themselves.  They have a right to join, with help from others, in 
the full development of their own resources for their own benefit. . . .?
72
 Johnson 
assured Hanoi that the U.S. had no intention of unifying Vietnam under a non-
Communist government.  
Johnson would not, however, offer the kind of political package Lippmann 
wanted?his ?Fourteen Points? for Southeast Asia?but he dangled more dollars.  On 
25 March, he pledged American support for peaceful ?economic and social 
70
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 22 March 1965.
71
 Bundy to LBJ, ?Press Contacts,? Week of March 15,? 20 March 1965, NSFM, McGeorge Bundy, 
Memos to the President, March-4/15/65, LBJL.
72
 Murrey Marder, ?No Designs on Hanoi, LBJ Says: Policy Is Limited to Attaining Peace, President 
Declares,? Washington Post, 21 March 1966: A1, A14.  Marder was an occasional dinner guest at 
Lippmann?s home.
480
cooperation? in ?all Southeast Asia,? if Hanoi?s ?aggression is stopped.?  ?Wider and 
bolder programs can be expected in the future from Asian leaders and Asian 
councils,? LBJ stated, ?and in such programs we would want to help.?  The U.S. 
wanted only a return to the ?essentials? of the Geneva Agreements of 1954 for 
Vietnam, Johnson told reporters, ?a reliable arrangement to guarantee the 
independence and security of all in Southeast Asia.?
73
Lippmann was non-plussed.  The columnist told Mac Bundy that none of the 
administration?s statements indicated it was willing to live by the 1954 Geneva 
Accords and to make reunification an ?essential? principle of negotiations?a 
concession Lippmann thought vital to any negotiations.  Bundy retorted that was not 
an administration aim, that the administration interpreted the accords ?a little 
differently from the other side.?  Lippmann found his friend to be ?evasive.?
74
 Bundy 
sensed that he?d failed to satisfactorily rebut Lippmann?s criticisms.  ?I am quite sure 
he himself will press this notion in an early column,? Bundy told the president, 
adding that he already had alerted the State Department to this eventuality.
75
Bundy?s hunch proved correct.  Two days later, Lippmann dismissed the late-
March press conferences as insufficient.  ?The Administration needs to clarify its own 
position?in order to set in motion a movement for negotiation and, failing that, to 
put the onus of prolonging and widening the war unmistakably on our adversaries.?
76
In late March, when reports leaked that the Pentagon was pressing Johnson for a 
massive insertion of ground troops, Lippmann sharpened his attack, telling Elizabeth 
73
 Murrey Marder, ?Johnson Offers Economic Aid in a Peaceful Asia,? Washington Post, 26 March 
1965: A1, A20.
74
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 26 March 1965.
75
 Bundy to LBJ, "Press Contacts: March 21-27," 29 March 1965, NSFM, LBJL.
481
Farmer that he was considering writing that the ?president is losing control of the 
war.?
77
  He stopped just short of that, choosing to attack the president?s advisors, 
particularly Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara at the Department 
of Defense.  The bombing campaign could not compel negotiations, he informed 
readers, nor could Johnson?s vague allusions to New Deal-style economic reforms 
buy them.  ?If we had an American army of 350,000 men in South Viet-Nam, and 
extended the air war, we would have on our hands an interminable war without the 
prospect of a solution,? he wrote darkly.  ?To talk about freedom and national 
independence amidst such violence and chaos would be to talk nonsense.?
78
  After 
composing the column, Lippmann beamed to his assistant, ?I think I wrote something 
that will get under their skins?that?s what I want.?
79
  The next day McNamara told 
the president, ?Your friend Walter Lippmann sure stuck it in me this morning.?  LBJ 
replied, ?He?s going to do it with everyone [in the administration] . . . And he hasn?t 
got much policy, either.?
80
Most ominously, however, Lippmann used that column to begin chipping 
away at the administration?s legal justification for military intervention.  Prodded by
friends like the University of Chicago political scientist Quincy Wright, Lippmann 
challenged LBJ?s statement of 25 March which rested the American case on the 
assumption that South Vietnam was free and sovereign nation.
81
  Lippmann found it 
76
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Basis for Negotiation,? 1 April 1965.
77
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 25 March 1965.
78
 Lippmann, T&T, ?On the Way to the Brink,? 30 March 1965.
79
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 29 March 1965.
80
 McNamara-LBJ telephone conversation, 30 March 1965, reprinted in Michael Beschloss, Reaching 
for Glory: Lyndon Johnson?s Secret White House Tapes, 1964-65 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 
2001): 258.
81
 Quincy Wright to Walter Lippmann, 31 March 1965, Box 111, Folder 2280, Series III, WLC.  
Wright and Lippmann had a long correspondence dating back to the late-1920s.  The political scientist 
482
?puzzling? that the president made as his basis for ??honorable negotiations?? a return 
to the Geneva Agreements.  U.S. policy, he wrote, contradicted the principles of that 
settlement.  First, the Geneva Accords prohibited the ??introduction into Viet-Nam of 
foreign troops and military personnel as well as all kinds of arms and munitions.??  
They also stipulated, Lippmann observed, that the ??military demarcation line [of 
1954] is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a 
political or territorial boundary.??
82
  How then had Hanoi violated the South?s 
sovereignty, as the administration claimed?  Was this not essentially a civil war 
between two political factions of one nation?  
On the morning of 6 April 1965, a day before he was set to deliver a major 
speech on Vietnam at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, LBJ opened the 
morning paper to find Lippmann?s latest piece on Vietnam?headlined ?Is 
Uncertainty Necessary??  Lippmann charged that U.S. officials were failing to 
provide ?any straightforward explanation of why the administration persists in 
keeping its war aims uncertain.?  Would it continue to impose ?identical conditions 
was a steadfast Wilsonian and a defender of the United Nations.  Lippmann, though unenthusiastic 
about Wilson?s legacy, shared Wright?s emphasis on the need for extra-national organizations in the 
promotion of international stability.  On 31 March 1965 Wright submitted a letter to the Washington 
Post complaining that its house editorial on Vietnam supported the administration case which 
subverted the Geneva Agreements of 1954.  ?We profess to be fighting to preserve the freedom of a 
free people, but are actually fighting to prevent an election and to contain communism, a principle 
which its author, George Kennan, thinks is obsolete and should be succeeded by a policy of 
?disengagement.?  We fear that an election would unite Vietnam under the communist government of 
Ho and that then the dominoes would begin to fall until all of south Asia came under the control of 
communist China. . . I suggest that we abandon a policy which much of the world labels as 
?imperialism? and pursue the policy of peaceful self determination of peoples to which we are 
committed by the United Nations Charter.?  Lippmann, who?d seen an earlier draft, wrote a thank you 
reply to Wright, ?What an excellent comment of yours on Vietnam.  I learned a lot from it, and I?m 
most grateful.  Will you send a copy at once to Russell Wiggins [the pro-war editor of the Post].  He 
needs it.?  Lippmann to Wright, 1 April 1965, Box 111, Folder 2280, Series III, WLC.  The Post
printed Wright?s letter on 10 April: Quincy Wright, ?Self Determination,? 10 April 1965, Washington 
Post: A12.  He?d made a similar argument in the New York Times: Wright, ?No Right to Intervene,? 31 
January 1965, New York Times: A14.
82
 Lippmann, ?On the Way to the Brink,? T&T, 30 March 1965.
483
which must be met before it will agree to a cease-fire and the beginning of 
negotiations for an armistice??  He also attacked Dean Rusk and Bundy for recent 
press appearances in which they offered the ?stock formula? that Hanoi must ?leave 
its neighbors alone?
83
 before the U.S. would open a dialogue.  Neither man had 
elaborated on specifics, and Lippmann was losing his patience.
So was Johnson.  He immediately phoned George Ball at the State 
Department and asked him to review the draft of his upcoming speech.  Based on 
Lippmann?s latest salvo and a critical New York Times editorial, LBJ worried whether 
there was ?enough substance? regarding diplomatic initiatives with Hanoi.  ?The 
President wants to strengthen the paragraphs about negotiation in a way that would 
silence those fellows [Lippmann and The New York Times],? Ball told Mac Bundy 
over the phone a few minutes later.
84
The events of 6 April revealed the degree to which the administration intended 
the Baltimore speech principally to placate Lippmann?s criticisms about the lack of 
diplomatic initiative.  After hanging up the phone with Ball, Bundy summarized for 
the president the imperative of answering the columnist?s doubts with a bold public 
statement.  In a memorandum, remarkable both for its suggestions and its didactic 
tone, Bundy urged LBJ to bring Lippmann to the White House that afternoon for a 
sneak preview of the speech.  ?A part of our purpose, after all, is to plug his guns, and 
he can tell us better than anyone to what degree we have done so,? Bundy explained.  
Yet the speech content was still fluid and, Bundy feared, the language perhaps too 
diluted for Lippmann?s liking.  He warned LBJ that Lippmann must not be led to 
83
 Lippmann, "Is Uncertainty Necessary," T&T, 6 April 1965.
484
believe that between the working draft and the address, the administration had firmed 
its stance against negotiations.  ?The only risk I see in this is that we want to be 
awfully careful that the language we finally use is not harder than what he sees,? 
Bundy wrote, ?and for that reason it may be better to read to him from the speech and 
to slide gently past the words ?unconditional discussions.??
85
This was a tight-rope act for the president and Bundy, who hoped to allay 
Lippmann?s fears that the negotiation track was closed, without providing him more 
ammunition for what they expected to be the hard coming months of continued 
military track. LBJ, Bundy wrote, should take the offensive and press Lippmann to 
explain why he was writing so strongly for the idea of a single, Titoist Vietnam.  
After months of meetings Lippmann?s ambiguity about how to proceed irritated 
Bundy.  ?If this is his idea of a quiet way of giving it to the Communists, well and 
good,? Bundy wrote. ?But if he really is talking about independence and security of 
the peoples of the area, he must be ready to look for ways and means of insuring the 
security of South Vietnam against a complete Communist takeover.  This is what he 
never seems to face, and if he is going to advise negotiations, it seems to me he ought 
to be telling us what he expects to get from them.?
86
  Bundy also asked the President 
to ?make it clear to Lippmann that when we say we are ready to talk, we do not at all 
mean that we are ready for a cease-fire.  The fact is that we expect our military action 
to continue unless we see a prospect of a better situation in the South than we have 
84
 President to George Ball, 6 April 1965, Telcon, Vietnam I (1/5/65-5/24/65), LBJ Library; McGeorge 
Bundy to Ball, 6 April 1965, Telcon, Vietnam I (1/5/65-5/24/65), LBJL.
85
 Some of the quotations here are from Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 562.  
Additional quotes are supplemented from the original memo from Bundy to LBJ, President's 
Appointment File [Diary Backup], 6 April 1965, Box, 15, LBJL.
485
now.  Walter needs to understand this, and if he gets it straight from you, he is less 
likely to be objectionable about it.?
87
  While Lippmann rejected the escalation track 
urged by the advisors he might?with some arm-twisting?defer to the president?s 
judgment.  ?Under pressure he will admit that the Secretary of Defense is excellent,
but he will still think him wrong,? Bundy concluded.  ?He has a useful tendency to 
think the President himself is right.? 
When Lippmann arrived at the White House on the evening of 6 April 1965, 
Bundy escorted him to an ante-room off the Oval Office. There, Treasury Secretary 
Joe Fowler and several other economic advisers were conferring with LBJ.  The 
president sat on a raised pedestal posing for a sculptor who was molding his clay bust.  
Lippmann took a seat on a couch.  ?Walter, I?m going up to Baltimore tomorrow to 
give a speech, and I?m going to hold out that carrot that you keep talking about,? LBJ 
began.  Bundy handed the columnist a copy of the address which Lippmann started to 
read.  But before he got far, LBJ lit into an hour-long harangue.  ?I?m not going to 
just pull up my pants and run out on Vietnam,? he hollered at Lippmann from his 
perch.  ?Don?t you know the church is on fire over there and we?ve got to find a way 
out??  Bundy and Lippmann were then sent off to talk in another room.  Lippmann 
combed the speech but could find no enticements.  ?This won?t do you any good 
anywhere,? Lippmann sternly told Bundy.
88
  He added: ?It?s just a disguised demand 
for capitulation.  You?ve got to give the communists some incentive to negotiate . . . . 
86
 Bundy?s frustrations clouded his argument.  Lippmann, while imprecise about how to effect a 
diplomatic solution, was quite clear about what he thought would be the end game: U.S. withdrawal 
followed by a Titoist regime that would unite Vietnam under Hanoi.
87
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 562.  Bundy to LBJ, President's Appointment 
File [Diary Backup], 6 April 1965, Box 15, LBJL.
88
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 6-7 April 1965.
486
Like an unconditional cease-fire.?  They argued for a half hour about the feasibility of 
such an offer.  Bundy saw his friend off, telling him he?d see what could be done to 
change the text.
89
  Driving home up Connecticut Avenue, Lippmann thought to 
himself that LBJ?s approach was ?all horse sense and no human sense.?  The next 
morning, still fuming over Johnson?s rude treatment, Lippmann told Elizabeth 
Farmer, ?You know, the president is an ignoramus about foreign affairs?he knows 
nothing.?
90
IV.
The relationship between president and columnist never recovered from that 
episode?though it limped onward, conducted by proxy through Mac Bundy.  
Lippmann never again met LBJ in the White House, but he did not yet abandon the 
administration.  Despite the mounting animosity toward Johnson, Lippmann persisted 
in believing that the president was ?an ill-tempered dove, not a hawk.?
91
On 7 April 1965, flanked by members of the Maryland congressional 
delegation, LBJ laid out his program for Vietnam.  While it is not entirely clear how 
89
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 563.  Steel uses Lippmann?s reminiscences of 
the event.  Steel?s account gives the impression that Bundy played a more subservient role than he 
actually did.  See also, Lippmann?s Appointment Diaries for this period: Box 240, Folder 39, Series 
VII, WLC.
90
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 6-7 April 1965.
91
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 28 April 1965.  For his part, LBJ began disparaging the 
columnist in the presence of other members of the press.  On one occasion he told reporters: ?I thought 
my Baltimore speech would satisfy Lippmann.  I went over it with him, but I find out now about Mr. 
Lippmann and Martin Luther King and some others?old slow me just catches up with them and then 
they are gone ahead of me.?  Cited in Hugh Sidey, A Very Personal Presidency: Lyndon Johnson in the 
White House (New York: Atheneum, 1968): 85-86.  Rowland Evans and Robert Novak imply that 
Lippmann changed his mind about the address, deciding to attack it, though he had approved the draft 
form as ?a highly satisfying expression of U.S. policy.?  See Evans and Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: 
The Exercise of Power (New York: New American Library, 1966): 541.  For a detailed analysis of the 
press input and reaction to the Baltimore speech see Kathleen J. Turner, ?President-Press Interaction: 
487
much Johnson revised the speech to appease Lippmann, the title, ?Peace Without 
Conquest??with its Wilsonian echo?certainly meant to appeal to the columnist 
who, on several occasions, urged the president and his advisors to adopt a Wilsonian 
Fourteen Points perspective on Vietnam.
92
  In the ?Baltimore Speech,? Johnson 
maintained that peace was still possible in Vietnam: ?in discussion or negotiations 
with the governments concerned; in large groups or in small ones; in the reaffirmation 
of old agreements or their strengthening with new ones.  We have stated this position 
over and over again, fifty times and more, to friend and foe alike.  And we remain 
ready, with this purpose, for unconditional discussions.?
93
  Johnson then went on to 
outline an economic development package for the whole of Southeast Asia including 
a billion dollar investment in cooperation with Vietnam and allusions to a Mekong 
River Delta development program modeled after the New Deal?s Tennessee Valley 
Authority.
In the days after the Baltimore speech Bundy granted interviews to a score of 
Washington commentators including Drew Pearson, Hugh Sidey, Roscoe Drummond, 
and Joe Alsop.  But, as he indicated in a 10 April 1965 memo to LBJ, Bundy was 
consumed by the Lippmann problem.  The columnist had come to see Bundy on 
Friday, 9 April and seemed in a better mood about the speech though somewhat 
confused about its content. ?He even asked me whether the speech you delivered was 
Media Influence on the Johns Hopkins Address,? in Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Uses of Power, 
Bernard J. Firestone and Robert C. Vost, eds. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988): 311-324.
92
 In January 1917, President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress with his ?Peace Without Victory? 
speech that laid out Americans idealistic plans for the post-World War I era.  Lippmann had celebrated 
this speech as editor of The New Republic; see, ?America Speaks,? The New Republic, 25 January 
1917, republished in Arthur Schlesigner, Jr., Walter Lippmann: The Early Writings (New York: 
Liveright, 1970): 63-68.
93
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, Volume I, entry 172 
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1966): 394-399.
488
not very different from the draft he saw Tuesday,? Bundy wrote Johnson.  Bundy 
obfuscated, telling Lippmann that the speech had been amended after their discussion, 
?although my own recollection is that ?unconditional discussion? was already in the 
draft he saw late Tuesday.  It seemed to me useful to let him think that the speech had 
been greatly improved so that he could now be more enthusiastic about it.?
94
  Indeed, 
Lippmann believed just that, phoning Elizabeth Farmer from New York City the day 
after the speech to tell her that the final form was different from the one he?d read in 
the White House.  His talk with Bundy, Lippmann told Farmer, ?had something to do 
with the introduction? of the phrase ?unconditional discussions.?  The following 
morning Joe Alsop praised the Baltimore Address as a ?great speech . . . pursuing the 
noblest aims in the craftiest imaginable manner.?
95
  For the first time in months, 
Alsop had something favorable to say about Johnson; Lippmann interpreted it as a 
victory in his program of defending the president from the hawkish columnist.  As he 
put the Washington Post op-ed page aside, he remarked triumphantly, ?If you can?t 
lick ?em, join ?em.?
96
Though he professed to Bundy that he believed the speech somewhat 
improved the U.S. position, Lippmann remained glum about the continuing bombing 
raids, arguing that they made a settlement impossible and carried the risk of bringing 
China into the war.  Bundy told him that while the air raids were part of the present 
94
 Bundy to LBJ, "Press Interviews, April 4-10," NSF, Subject File, "Press Appointments," Box 42, 
LBJL.
95
 Joseph Alsop, ?A Great Speech,? 9 April 1965, Washington Post: A25.
96
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries 8-9 April 1965.  Lippmann felt he had tutored Bundy on a 
subject which he did not sufficiently understand: ?Look at Mac Bundy, he?s an educated man . . . and 
yet he doesn?t understand it?peace policy.  He didn?t understand how you have a peace policy while 
you fight until I explained it to him in that session? on April 6, 1965.  Are you sure he understood it 
then? asked his research assistant.  ?Oh, yes?that was the ?unconditional negotiations in the Baltimore 
speech,? Lippmann replied.  See Midgley?s entry for 28 April 1965.
489
policy, the president was ?in no hurry to ?escalate?? and that he continued to 
emphasize the ?importance of acting on every front in South Vietnam.?
97
  Lippmann 
informed Bundy that he planned to write about the differences between the two sides 
on reaching the negotiating table and working out a settlement, particularly the 
administration?s refusal to recognize the Vietcong or Liberation Front.  ?I fear Walter 
will gradually line himself up on the pro-Communist side on this one, but we will 
keep working on him,? Bundy wrote.  ?It really would be very bad for our whole 
position to allow the Viet Cong to have a separate presence in any negotiations?at 
least at this stage of the game.?
98
It was this reluctance to use diplomacy that convinced Lippmann of the 
insincerity of the Johns Hopkins speech.  While much of the press hailed the phrase 
?unconditional discussions? as a sign that LBJ?s statecraft and the negotiation track 
were intact, Lippmann soon saw it differently.  Though written for, even previewed 
by, the administration?s chief antagonist, the speech failed to please him.  Instead, 
Lippmann questioned even more deeply the legal, then the moral, implications of the 
war.
He waited almost a week before weighing in on the Baltimore address with 
two devastating columns.  His syndicated Today and Tomorrow analysis made quick 
work of the speech, dismissing it as a transparent effort to ?correct some of the 
defects of the [Administration?s] public relations.?  It lacked conviction, Lippmann 
explained to readers on 13 April, for while Johnson ?introduced a certain change in 
the tone of the official policy, it was quite evidently not intended to bring about any 
97
 Bundy to LBJ, "Press Interviews, April 4-10," NSF, Subject File, "Press Appointments," Box 42, 
LBJL.  Bundy's emphasis.
490
marked change in the course of the war . . . and it was no less evident that the 
President?s offer of ?unconditional discussions? was not meant to bring about a cease-
fire.?   Altogether, he thought it too meager: ?too little, perhaps because it is too late, 
to change the course of the war.?
99
  Johnson?s parsing of terms could not distract from 
the central issue: Was the Saigon government viable?  Two months of sustained 
bombing failed to bolster the regime or push the North closer to the peace table, yet 
the administration seemed more committed than ever to pursuing victory by military 
means.  U.S. officials were Americanizing the Vietnamese civil conflict: 
?transforming the war from a South Vietnamese struggle to put down a rebellion, in 
which we assist the government, into an increasingly American war in the whole of 
Viet-Nam, both South and North.?  Pressure would mount in the coming weeks for a 
ground war, Lippmann told readers.  And while the administration might openly 
choose that course, it remained ?reluctant and unconvinced, which in practice means 
that it will escalate the war slowly, will do a little more bombing and will send in 
more and more American soldiers.? 
100
The tandem of that Today and Tomorrow column and a Newsweek piece that 
hit newsstands the prior morning, marked an inexorable point of departure.  
Lippmann, at last, unreservedly contested militarization.  The public was being told a 
?grossly misleading? half-truth about the war.  While U.S. officials correctly asserted 
that North Vietnam was sending reinforcements into the South, they were far less 
candid about the reality in Saigon: government resistance to the Viet Cong had all but 
collapsed.  ?The basic character of the war has changed,? Lippmann wrote.  ?It used 
98
 Ibid.
99
 Lippmann, T&T, 12 April 1965, ?The Baltimore Address and After.?
491
to be a war of the South Vietnamese assisted by the Americans; it is now becoming 
an American war very inefficiently assisted by the South Vietnamese.?
101
  Johnson 
and his advisors were nearing the brink of major decision in Vietnam.  ?Having 
staked our prestige on the outcome of the civil war which is being lost in South 
Vietnam, we may find ourselves with a choice between the devil of defeat in South 
Vietnam and the deep blue sea of a much wider war in Eastern Asia,? he told readers.  
?That choice could perhaps be avoided if we remember in time that when there is no 
military solution to a conflict, there must be negotiation to end it.  In such a situation, 
only fools will go to the brink and over it.?
102
In several columns that month?leading up to and following the Baltimore 
speech?Lippmann exploited a key weakness in the administration?s justification for 
its heavy commitment to the Saigon government.  North and South Vietnam, he 
wrote, ?are not two sovereign nations but two zones of one sovereign nation.?
103
  As 
he developed this line, Lippmann reinvigorated his long-standing theme that 
escalation equated to intervention in a civil war. Bundy worried that Lippmann had 
now crossed a threshold whereby his criticism might stiffen resolve in communist 
capitals.  On 20 April, he sent LBJ a memo based on his conversations with 
Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn Thompson and Ray Cline of the CIA.  Both men 
told him that leaders in Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow ?greatly exaggerate the power of 
dissenting opinion in this country? and ?that people like Lippmann, Morgenthau, 
100
 Lippmann, T&T, 12 April 1965, ?The Baltimore Address and After.?
101
 Lippmann, ?Nearing the Brink in Vietnam,? 12 April 1965, Newsweek: 25.
102
 Ibid.
103
 Lippmann, "Is Uncertainty Necessary?"  T&T, 6 April 1965.
492
Fulbright and marching students do great damage by creating false hopes in 
unfriendly breasts.?
104
Johnson had used the Baltimore Speech to bolster his assertion that Hanoi-
sponsored infiltration of the South violated international law.  The President said, 
??the first reality is that North Viet-Nam has attacked the independent nation of South 
Viet-Nam.??  By questioning the legality of America?s involvement in Vietnam 
Lippmann threatened this most basic argument of U.S. officials.  If the bombing 
campaign were meant to compel North Vietnam to negotiate, then the U.S. must have 
a program ?which we are able to defend clearly and openly,? he wrote.  Johnson had 
repeatedly stated that the U.S. sought ??no more than a return to the essentials of the 
(Geneva) Agreements of 1954.??  Lippmann pointed out, however, that the 
resolutions?never officially endorsed by the U.S.?did not divide Vietnam into ?two 
separate nations but two temporary zones of the same nation.?
105
   The elections that 
were to have followed in 1956 never were held and?with U.S. support?Diem 
consolidated his power in the South.  U.S. officials now seemed to be suggesting that 
history had overtaken the Geneva Accords, that with the passage of ten years the U.S. 
now recognized North and South Vietnam as, de facto, two separate nations. That 
assumption, he pointed out, was not consistent with the U.S. position in Germany.  
Did the U.S. recognize two independent nations because Germany had been 
partitioned for two decades?  The administration argument further was weakened by 
the fact that it had never raised the matter of Hanoi?s aggression with the United 
104
 Bundy to LBJ, ?The Demonologists look at the Noise from Hanoi, Peking and Moscow,? 20 April 
1965, NSFM, Bundy 4/15-5/31/65, Box 3, LBJL.
105
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Unbuttoned Diplomacy,? 20 April 1965.
493
Nations Security Council as a violation of Charter Articles 39 and 51 guaranteeing 
collective security and individual self-defense.
106
There also were greater considerations at stake?more than narrow 
calculations of national interest, more than following the letter of international law.  
Lippmann made an unusually sharp admonishment?one in which he used the 
language that would come to characterize so much of his writing in the next two 
years.  It was a swipe at the policymakers who had embraced?perhaps too well?the 
calculus of national interest that Walter Lippmann himself popularized in the 1940?s.  
?I am well aware that to be concerned about our legal and moral position is regarded 
by the new school of super-realists as unworthy of a proud and tough nation,? he told 
readers.  ?But I think we have something very much to be concerned about when we 
look about us and see how we are drifting into isolation.?
107
  He meant military, 
political, and moral isolation from the community of nations. 
George Ball, a lawyer by training, moved independently to check Lippmann?s 
challenge to the legality of intervention; particularly the charge that the U.S. had 
supported free elections in Vietnam at the time of the 1954 Geneva Accords?though 
it had not signed them.  On the morning of 20 April Ball phoned Leonard Meeker, the 
State Department?s chief legal advisor, requesting that by day?s end Meeker put 
together an outline for a ?white paper on all aspects of the war in South Viet-Nam.?
108
That afternoon he asked the Historian?s Office to review Lippmann?s Post and Herald 
Tribune columns from 1950 to check his consistency in regard to the invasion of 
South Korea.  Could any of his past arguments be used to rebut his analysis of 
106
 A point which Mac Bundy and State Department officials would contest vigorously.
107
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Unbuttoned Diplomacy,? 20 April 1965.  Emphasis added.
494
Vietnam?  Had Lippmann written anything about the legal situation of a divided 
Korea?  Did he believe that the North Korean invasion ?constituted aggression 
because of the demarcation line??
109
  It was one of several government-authorized 
studies into Lippmann?s past analyses.
On 20 April 1965, Meeker dashed off a seven-page defense of administration 
policy.  He rejected Lippmann?s statement that about the Geneva Accords and 
provisions for the Vietnamese elections as ?at best incomplete, and actually 
misleading.?
110
  The U.S. had supported free elections supervised by the U.N. but did 
not endorse the Geneva provision that called for elections in Vietnam to be 
supervised by the International Supervisory Commission.  Still, Meeker cautioned 
that the president should tone down his rhetoric about the ?independent? status of 
South Vietnam.  Lippmann?s interpretation of the language of the Accords was 
correct?they did not officially sanction the creation of two sovereign nations.  
?Having in mind this history, and also the analogous situations of Germany, in 
particular, and Korea, the U.S. probably needs to be somewhat reserved in asserting 
that South Viet-Nam has become an independent sovereign state,? the counselor 
wrote.  ?Rather we should emphasize the principle of self-determination.?
111
  Though 
the memo never was introduced publicly it nevertheless helped shape later public 
speeches by LBJ and Ball who followed Meeker?s advice on this point.
108
 Ball to Meeker, Telcon, 20 April 1965, Vietnam I (1/15/65-5/24/65), LBJL.
109
 Ball to Patterson, Telcon, 20 April 1965, Vietnam I (1/15/65-4/24/65), LBJL.
110
 Leonard C. Meeker to George Ball, ?Walter Lippmann?s April 20 Article on Viet-Nam: Information 
Memorandum,? 20 April 1965, ?Viet-Nam (Misc. III),? Box 32, Records of George W. Ball, Lot 
74D272, MLR #5175, RG 59, National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, MD 
(hereinafter referred to as ?NARA II?).
111
 Ibid.
495
Most troubling for Mac Bundy was Lippmann?s dig at the president?s ?super-
realist? advisors in the 20 April ?Unbuttoned Diplomacy? column.  He wrote a hasty 
rebuttal that quibbled with secondary points but failed to answer, as he admitted a few 
days later, the ?central propositions? of Lippmann?s article.  Instead, Bundy claimed 
that Lippmann had taken a quote from President Eisenhower?s memoirs out of 
context.  Eisenhower had remarked that during the French phase of the war, possibly 
80 percent of the South would have voted for Ho Chi Minh; Lippmann had implied 
that Eisenhower was referring to the period between 1954 and 1956, when the U.S. 
opposed elections in the South because Ngo Dinh Diem did not have sufficient 
popular support.  Bundy also took exception to Lippmann?s reading of the Geneva 
Accords.  ?You say that if we now claim there are two separate and independent 
nations, we should explain why we ignore the Charter of the United Nations,? Bundy 
wrote.  ?The implication is that if there are not two independent nations the Charter 
does not apply.  But surely the Charter does apply? in the case of an attack across a 
state line or a line of demarcation.
112
Lippmann replied privately on 23 April 1965 that Bundy had dodged the main 
thrust of the column: U.S. justifications were, at best, strained to the point of 
incredulity.
113
  In a blustery column published on 22 April, he also claimed that the 
U.S. was acting unilaterally in Vietnam because it had no real support from any Asian 
power.  According to the ?domino theory,? Lippmann wrote, if the U.S. failed to 
uphold the Saigon regime it would lose credibility and influence in the region.  But 
112
 Bundy to Lippmann, 20 April 1965, White House Central File (WHCF), Name File, Box 225, 
LBJL.  
496
the Americanization of the war seemed to be producing the same results?indeed, he 
claimed, it was galvanizing anti-U.S. sentiment in the region.  ?India and Pakistan, 
India and China, China and the Soviet Union are quarreling to the point of war with 
one another,? he observed.  ?But they are united in condemning out February war.  
The Administration should put this fact in its pipe and smoke it.?
114
  Bundy sent 
another letter to Woodley Road on 28 April 1965, claiming that South Vietnam had 
possessed the ?essentials of an independent nation for many years.? He concluded, ?I 
should say that I was really quite surprised at the tone of your next column, the one 
about the opinion of Asia and the things which the President?s advisers should stick in 
their pipes and smoke . . . . A very large number of Asians are glad to see firmness 
against Communist pressure even if they do not praise it in public.?
115
By May Lippmann turned as dark and sullen as his columns, now almost 
exclusively focused on the war.  He feared especially that the price of his criticisms 
would be exclusion from the inner sanctums of the administration.  In the days before 
a pivotal trip to London and Paris, Lippmann met with Ball and Bundy.
116
  He?d 
heard rumors that the president was making off-colored remarks about him, including 
on one occasion, in the days after the Baltimore Speech, when LBJ complained to a 
group of reporters that Lippmann changed his mind more often than Martin Luther 
King, Jr.  The civil rights leader who fought for political equality guaranteed in the 
landmark 1964 Civil Rights Bill, had begun agitating in northern cities for minority 
113
 The 23 April 1965 Lippmann to Bundy letter is cited in Blum, Public Philosopher: 613-614.  
Lippmann?s reply was pointed: ?I am relieved to find that the points you raise do not go to the basic 
propositions of the article.?
114
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Falling Dominoes,? 22 April 1965.
115
 Bundy to Walter Lippmann, 28 April 1965, WHCF, Name File, Box 225, LBJL.
116
 Lippmann/Ball, 17 May 1965, Telcon, General Folder: US & Europe 11/24/63-5/31/66, LBJL.  See 
also Lippmann Appointment Diaries, May 1965, Box 240, Folders 39-40, Series VII, WLC.
497
economic parity.  Lippmann, who worked so long to achieve a diplomatic settlement 
in Vietnam, now seemed to be calling for outright withdrawal.  Just when he?d closed 
the distance with the two men, LBJ complained, they moved even further away from 
him.
117
Such frustration contributed to Johnson?s sense of being persecuted by a 
fickle press corps, and convinced him that he must exercise even greater caution.  
When the Baltimore Sun reported that LBJ would unveil nuclear non-proliferation 
initiatives at a speech commemorating the United Nation?s 20
th
 anniversary, the 
president vehemently denied it.  ?What I?m really afraid of [is] that Scotty [Reston] 
and maybe Walter Lippmann will come out with a column saying ?We are looking 
[at] Johnson [to] see what kind of leadership he gives us,?? the president complained 
to a Sun editor.  ?Then, when I just say, ?Happy Birthday,? they?ll say, ?God, he was 
disappointing, wasn?t he!??
118
As Lippmann?s attacks became more strident, he feared that he might push 
Johnson to the point that the president would cut off all communications with him.  A 
Machiavellian the equal of any in the capital, Mac Bundy quietly reassured Lippmann 
that the president?s respect and friendship ?were absolutely unaffected? by 
Lippmann?s public broodings about the war.  Bundy perfected this technique as the 
LBJ-Lippmann war of words took shape.  Each time Johnson jabbed, Bundy consoled 
Lippmann over lunch at the Metropolitan Club. Bundy knew how much Lippmann 
craved access to the powerful.  He played on that instinct.  Arriving a few minutes 
late to one of their lunch meetings, Bundy explained the president delayed him by 
117
 Bundy to the President, "Lunch with Walter Lippmann," 10 May 1965, NSFM, Box 3, LBJL.
118
 Johnson-Gerald Griffin telephone conversation; reprinted in Beschloss, Reaching for Glory: 371-
372.
498
calling twice that morning to talk about Lippmann.  Bundy relayed the president?s 
concern upon learning that Lippmann was complaining that he?d fallen out of favor at 
the White House. Bundy reassured the downcast columnist this was not so.  ?He acted 
like a man who had just received a two-quart transfusion at a moment of desperate 
need,? Bundy reported back to Johnson.  ?I have seldom seen anyone change his 
mood so fast. . . . I shall be enormously surprised if this does not lead to a better tone 
in his comments?in fact, my guess is that the next time he hits us, he will take the 
line that you are a very good and wise man who is getting bad advice?and this is of 
course what advisors are for.?
119
Despite the palpable tensions, Lippmann still wanted to offer advice to the 
administration.  At that same meeting, Lippmann went on to discuss two areas of 
concern with the administration?s handling of Vietnam in recent weeks.  He told 
Bundy there had been ?too much commotion and too much talk? coming from the 
White House during the first week of May (coinciding with the Dominican 
intervention). Johnson?s appeals to the public, to the press, and to Congress had the 
effect of making it seem like the policy apparatus was in shambles.  Bundy replied, 
?in all solemnity that I had never seen an important decision hastily or incautiously 
made in the White House, but he stuck to the view that appearances count almost as 
119
 Bundy to the President, ?Lunch with Walter Lippmann,? 10 May 1965, NSFM, Box 3, LBJL.
Johnson remarked once, "Every time I pull my seat nearer that guy, he pulls his chair further away; 
Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 560.  See also, Lippmann?s Appointment Diaries, 
10 May 1965, Box 240, Folder 39, Series VII, WLC.  Even as Lippmann?s criticisms grew more 
strident, the administration made key members available to Lippmann.  On 15 May, Lippmann had a 
long talk with Robert McNamara about the military situation in Vietnam.  Aside from Bundy?s regular 
consultations, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his wife, Muriel, ate dinner at the Lippmann?s in 
late-April.  The discussion focused on Vietnam.  See Lippmann?s Appointment Diaries for 15 May 
1965 and 23 April 1965, Box 240, Folder 39, Series VII, WLC.
499
much as reality in this field.?
120
   Lippmann also expressed concern that the views of 
dissenters were not made available to the president during critical discussions on 
Vietnam.  Lippmann, Bundy reported, said that ?at the decisive moments you got 
more forceful advice from the hardliners than from the peacemakers.?  Bundy added, 
?I said I wished I could show him all the hawk-like things you had turned aside.  I 
also tried to show him, in our discussions of Vietnam, that the political track and the 
negotiating stance were very much on our minds, and he listened with care, but I did 
not persuade him.?  Lippmann also urged Bundy to find a way to pause the bombing 
campaign over the holidays marking Buddha?s birthday.  Later that evening, the issue 
topped the agenda at the president?s meeting on Vietnam.
121
The sense that his advice still flowed to LBJ through Bundy made Lippmann 
more optimistic than events warranted.  And, for a short while, he took the course 
Bundy had envisioned (indeed shaped) attacking the men around Johnson but not the 
president himself.  Bundy served as the sole source for a column that appeared on 13 
May 1965 which noted that while key advisors such as Secretary of Defense Robert 
McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were ?seized with a grim determination 
that military action shall continue,? there was ?more agreement than one might 
suppose between the Administration and its critics.?  The column was a nearly exact 
?resume? of a lunch conversation Lippmann had with Bundy just several days 
120
 Bundy to the President, ?Lunch with Walter Lippmann,? 10 May 1965, NSFM, Box 3, LBJL.
121
 Ibid.  
500
prior.
122
  A diplomatic exit strategy had not been rejected; negotiations, he wrote 
echoing McGeorge Bundy, would soon proceed with the National Liberation Front.
123
Lippmann?s 20 May through 5 June 1965 trip to Europe?in which he hop-
scotched from Paris to London and back to Paris?plunged him again into pessimism 
about the prospects of avoiding full-scale war and the erosion of support within the 
Western Alliance.  Six months earlier his visit to these capitals included wide-ranging 
discussions about Southeast Asia, MFL, British monetary problems, and Franco-
American relations.  Without exception, Lippmann?s meetings on this journey 
focused on grave concerns about escalation in Vietnam and about American 
unilateralism.  Lippmann had written for months about the strategic perils of fighting 
the war.  But the stark possibility of diplomatic isolation seemed to affect him as 
nothing else that spring.
In London, Lippmann found only shallow support for the air war and deep 
concern about greater escalation.  Prime Minister Harold Wilson had tried to turn 
Johnson away from bombing in mid-February but had been firmly rebuffed.
124
During a brief conversation at his office in the House of Commons on 26 May 1965, 
Wilson told Lippmann that Johnson?s Baltimore Speech?with its vague allusions to 
negotiations?gave him enough latitude to support U.S. policy and still retain control 
of his new Labour government at home.  He added, however, that if U.S. officials
expanded the bombing campaign to Hanoi and Haiphong ?Britain?s support of 
122
Lippmann, ?One Man?s Estimate,? T&T, 13 May 1965.  See also the Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley 
Diaries, 12 May 1965.
123
 Lippmann, ?One Man?s Estimate,? T&T, 13 May 1965.
501
America would be very difficult to continue.?  The next day Lippmann met with 
Minister of Defense Denis Healy, who confirmed that there was an ?undercurrent of 
unhappiness? in the public endorsement British officials had extended to Johnson?s 
Vietnam policies.  This unease was exacerbated by a British government study that 
proposed to liquidate the U.K.?s commitments in one or two of three primary theaters: 
Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia).  Later that 
evening, Lord Plowden, formerly the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, 
reiterated the point.  If Britain reduced its commitments abroad America would have 
to increase its involvement in these regions, Plowden told Lippmann.  To do so, it 
?must not become stuck in a land war in Indo-China.?
125
Tepid support in London contrasted with outrage and grim prognostications in 
Paris.  Lippmann met with key French officials, including the three highest-ranking 
members of government.  They were deeply concerned with the widening air war in 
Vietnam.  On 24 May 1965, Jean Monnet had a long talk with Lippmann at his office 
on the Avenue Foch.  Monnet was highly agitated about the U.S. decision to send the 
Marines into Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.  Coupled with the air war in 
Vietnam, Monnet told Lippmann, ?it looked as if Johnson had lost control of the 
military forces.?
126
  Prime Minister Georges Pompidou echoed that concern a week 
later.  He opened a half-hour discussion with Lippmann by noting that Franco-
American relations were ?very much set back? because of events in South Vietnam 
124
 For Wilson?s unsuccessful effort on 11 February 1965 to talk Johnson out of escalation, see 
Logevall, Choosing War: 339-340.
125
 Entries for 26-27 May 1965, Appointment Diaries, European Trip Spring (20 May-5 June 1965), 
Box 240, Folder 40, Series VII, WLC.
502
and the Dominican Republic.
127
  Lippmann?s longtime friend, Thomas K. Finletter, 
the U.S. ambassador to NATO also sharply criticized the administration.  Finletter 
confided to Lippmann that ?within the privacy of [the NATO] organization the 
[European] feeling against Johnson was very, very severe.?
128
  While French sources 
decimated Lippmann?s optimism that a diplomatic settlement could be reached, they 
did not materially change his predications about escalation.  Much of what they told 
Lippmann merely confirmed his own ideas about unilateral intervention in Southeast 
Asia?ideas he?d held and expressed for nearly two decades.
Prospects for avoiding a large war, French sources explained, were now non-
existent.  The French journalist Jacques Chaffard, a Vietnam expert who wrote for Le 
Monde, told Lippmann that to win the war the U.S. would have to insert several 
hundred thousands troops and fight for at least five years.  At that, it would be only a 
?temporary victory because a political solution with the Viet Cong is the only 
conceivable way of making a settlement.?  During their talk in Lippmann?s room at 
the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Chaffard explained that his articles for French newspapers?
which drew highly pessimistic conclusions about the chances for American success?
were being censored when they appeared in the U.S.  He also recounted a story about 
the Bundy brothers that underlined the Johnson administration?s schizophrenic 
conduct of the war.  While visiting McGeorge Bundy at the White House, the national 
security adviser told Chaffard that the U.S. would be willing to use French diplomatic 
contacts to hold discussions with the Viet Cong.  At the State Department, Bill Bundy 
126
 Entry for 21 May 1965, Appointment Diaries, Box 240, Folder 40, Series VII, WLC.
127
 Entry for 29 May 1965, Appointment Diaries, Box 240, Folder 40, Series VII, WLC.
503
told Chaffard that under no circumstances would there be discussions with the VC 
?until there was a military victory.?
129
The chief architects of French foreign policy were equally blunt.  During a 
wide-ranging talk with Couve de Murville at the Quay d?Orsay, the French foreign 
minister predicted that the U.S. commitment would soon include ground forces that 
would exceed 100,000 by year?s end.  When French officials studied the situation, 
Couve told Lippmann, their greatest problem was ?that it was too easy to predict what 
was going to happen and that so far all their predictions had come true.?  The war 
would drag on for years, Couve speculated, and in the process the U.S. would wreck 
the industrial structure of North Vietnam.  Much the same would happen in the South.  
?At the end of it,? Lippmann recorded in his diary, ?when we do somehow or other 
get out of it ([Couve] couldn?t imagine just how we?d get out?we?d just get tired of 
it?we can?t be driven out), the country would be in such condition that it would fall 
right into the hands of China, and the ultimate objectives of the war would be lost 
anyway.?  Couve knew the Chinese recognized this fact and because of it would be 
intransigent in any negotiations.  While the U.S. busied itself by ?reducing this part of 
the world to a pulp,? Couve told Lippmann, China would sit on the sidelines.  
Chinese diplomats, whom Couve contacted, told him they would not pressure Hanoi 
to negotiate with Washington until the Americans ??have dirtied their faces a good 
deal more.??
130
French President Charles de Gaulle warned Lippmann that America was on 
128
 Entry for 2 June 1965, Appointment Diaries, Box 240, Folder 40, Series VII, WLC.
129
 Entry for 24 May 1965, Appointment Diaries, Box 240, Folder 40, Series VII, WLC.
504
the verge of becoming an imperial superpower.  On 31 May 1965, during lunch at the 
Elysee Palace, the General?ruminating in characteristically broad strokes about 
history?believed that the greatest problem facing the world was not the German 
problem, not Soviet Communism, nor even Communist Chinese expansion.  The crux 
of unrest in international affairs was the question of whether the United States would 
become an imperial power now that it had the strength to be one.  ?The chief 
underlying issue in America was between the old America, which was really anti-
imperialist,? De Gaulle told Lippmann, and the policies of America as guided by the 
Johnson administration, ?which was in fact imperialist whether anyone stood by 
[Washington] or not.?
131
Morose French predications about a diplomatic settlement in Vietnam had a 
shattering effect on Lippmann?s morale.  McGeorge Bundy anticipated it and tried 
again to pre-empt Lippmann.  Bundy spoke with him shortly after his return in early 
June; he knew immediately that the visit to Paris had unnerved the columnist.  
Phoning Ball, Bundy reported that the columnist ?was going to write an article and 
explain everybody [in the Alliance] has lost confidence? in the administration?s 
Vietnam policy.  Bundy said the president wanted to refrain from denouncing 
Lippmann but asked what would Ball think about having Dean Acheson ?talking to? 
Lippmann.  Exactly what this would have produced is not clear.  Bundy seemed to 
have in mind a private chat.  Ball doubted that could be arranged but seemed certain 
that Acheson would relish the chance to rebuff his old nemesis.  Ball wondered 
130
 Entry for 29 May 1965, Appointment Diaries, Box 240, Folder 40, Series VII, WLC.
131
 Entry of 31 May 1965, Appointment Diaries, Box 240, Folder 40, Series VII, WLC.
505
whether it was worth such attention, ?dramatizing what Walter had in mind,? but he?d 
check into it.  He added that Lippmann had come back ?more depressed than before? 
about the situation in Europe.  Ball?s wife, Ruth, had seen the columnist the previous 
day and he?d predicted that ?nobody would speak to him? after he published his 
ideas.  ?We won?t like what he?ll be saying in the next few days,? Ball told Bundy.  
He agreed to speak to Dean Rusk before soliciting Acheson?s help.
132
  As it turned 
out, Acheson already was preparing to present Lippmann with his version of events?
and in a way far more public than a lunch at the Metropolitan or a visit to Woodley 
Road.
133
On the morning of 9 June 1965, Lippmann retired to his study in the old 
rectory house to pen a column that he knew would escalate his widening conflict with 
the administration.  Though he had made many pointed criticisms throughout the 
spring, most were directed at the men counseling the president.  This time the 
columnist aimed squarely at LBJ.  His meetings with European officials convinced 
him of a ?swelling tide of dissent and doubt and anxiety about the wisdom and 
competence with which United States foreign policy is being conducted,? he 
explained in opening.  The events of the spring of 1965, a sustained air war in 
Vietnam and intervention in the Dominican Republic, had shaken and ?stupefied? 
European observers. In neither case had Johnson bothered to consult the allies, 
something Europeans considered as ?ominous? because it portended an ?unlimited 
globalism? and ?rough unilateralism.?  U.S. policy in South Vietnam was sheer 
132
 M. Bundy/Ball, 8 June 1965, Telcon, General Folder: US & Europe 11/24/63-5/31/66, LBJL.
133
 See Chapter Nine.
506
spectacle: by unleashing a massive air war, the victor of the 1964 campaign, ?with the 
applause of the Goldwater Republicans,? had thoroughly adopted the strategy voters 
overwhelmingly had rejected. The president?s performance revealed a ?pride of 
power which so often in the newly powerful becomes impregnated with the messianic 
illusion that single-handedly [American officials] can impose their kind of peace 
upon the rest of the world and expand their kind of freedom to all mankind.?  In his 
more ?cheerful? moments, Lippmann supposed, the spring of 1965 might be Lyndon 
Johnson?s ?Bay of Pigs? from which he may learn ?wisdom from his failures.?
134
Lippmann knew the course upon which he embarked likely would lead to his 
marginalization.  ?I?ve been pulling my punches,? he told Elizabeth Farmer, his 
research assistant in early June.  ?I?m just going to have to take out after Johnson?s 
foreign policy and show that it doesn?t work.?  Farmer tried to offer consolation: 
?That won?t be hard,? she said.  ?No,? Lippmann replied, ?but it won?t be pleasant 
either.?
135
  So began the public feud that would, for the next two years, become the 
subject of dinner party conversations and a source of fascination for members of the 
Washington press corps. 
V.
Even as they crossed the Rubicon during their well-publicized deliberations in July 
1965, U.S. officials wondered how they might alleviate Walter Lippmann?s concerns, 
how they could deflect his public attacks.  Mac Bundy?s hastily assembled agenda, 
134
 Lippmann, T&T, 10 June 1965, "As Others See Us."
135
 Quoted in Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 569.
507
drafted during the first afternoon of those talks, is instructive.  Bundy outlined six 
principal questions officials would face if they decided to expand the war.  Lippmann 
had asked most of them for months.  How would the decision to insert large numbers 
of ground troops change the nature of the war and how were officials to explain it in 
political and military terms?  How could the U.S. combine a peace offensive with 
stronger military actions?  The hardest came last: ?What are our war aims?  What is 
the answer to Walter Lippmann?s questions on this point??
136
  As it turned out, 
Lippmann?s optimism, his desire to keep his insider status, and his lack of 
understanding about events on the ground inside South Vietnam once more played to 
the Johnson administration?s advantage.  Even as the president and his advisors made 
the fateful decision to increase troop levels to 125,000 and (secretly) broaden their 
scope of operations, Lippmann still wanted to believe a way out could be had.  
Johnson?s 29 July press conference?like the behind-the-scenes phone calls and 
meetings?punched all the right buttons, contained the reassuring phrases for which 
Lippmann and other key media persons had been clamoring.  For a second time the 
old columnist was fooled. 
During this decisive month Lippmann temporized his criticisms, even 
avoiding a prominent television forum for debating Vietnam policy.  When Alfred 
Friendly of CBS called in mid-July to ask Lippmann if he wanted to tape a half-hour 
network special on Vietnam with Eric Sevaried, he declined.
137
  Lippmann, who lived 
by a strict schedule, probably did not welcome the prospect of leaving his summer 
camp at Southwest Harbor, Mt. Desert Island, just off the coast of Maine to tape a 
136
 ?Meeting Agenda: Possible Items for Discussion,? 22 July 1965, Bundy?s memorandum in FRUS, 
1964-1968, Vol. III: 217-218.
508
show in Manhattan.  But he seemed also to have made the purposeful decision to ease 
off the pressure on the administration, something that did not accord with dissecting 
Vietnam policy before a national TV audience.  From his retreat house in July, with 
Bundy and Ball still consulting him on the progress of internal talks about the war, he 
seemed to reverse course.  The desultory realist incantations were replaced by 
accolades for Johnson?s statesmanship.  He even described the debate about Vietnam, 
which he knew was nearing its climax, as being one of ?unusual good temper and 
courtesy considering the fact that it is taking place in war time and that the stakes are 
high.?  He singled out LBJ for praise, predicting ?high marks from historians for 
having preserved freedom of discussion in such a critical time.?  He continued, ?It 
would have been easy as it must have been tempting for him to beat the tom-toms and 
silence his critics by saying that they were giving aid and comfort to the enemy . . . 
[but] Lyndon Johnson did not succumb.?
138
   Walter Lippmann hadn?t yet been cut 
off from the inner circle?or so he thought?and for that he seemed ever grateful.
Convinced that the administration was on the verge of another key decision on 
the road to a major war, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chief of Staff Carl 
Marcy urged Chairman J. William Fulbright to develop an alternative strategy with 
the columnist throughout the spring of 1965.
139
  Lippmann and Fulbright had been 
social acquaintances since the 1940s when Fulbright was elected to the Senate.  The 
senator and his wife, Betty, lived near the Lippmanns in Northwest Washington, D.C. 
and the couples opened their homes to one another. Fulbright was a regular at 
137
 See Lippmann Appointment Diaries, July 1965, Box 240, Folder 39, Series VII, WLC.
138
 Lippmann, ?The Acid Test,? 5 July 1965, Newsweek.
139
 Randall Woods, Fulbright: A Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 373-374.
509
Lippmann?s cocktail parties and at their gala mint julep party each June.  When 
Fulbright faced a critical re-election campaign, Lippmann warmly endorsed the SFRC 
chairman?s ?indispensable? part in leading the country out of isolationism in the 
1940s.  ?There is no one else who is so powerful and also so wise,? Lippmann wrote 
in 1962, ?and if there were any question or removing him from public life, it would 
be a national calamity.?
140
  According to Lippmann?s research assistant, their alliance 
was harmonious if not entirely compatible.  ?Fulbright he secretly patronized 
terribly,? Elizabeth Midgley recalled.  ?He did not think very highly of Fulbright?s 
brain.  But he agreed with him [on Vietnam], and they were friends, and Mrs. 
Fulbright and Helen Lippmann were friends, which helped.?
141
  Yet Lippmann and 
Fulbright?s partnership failed to produce a more vocal core of dissent in the U.S. 
Senate.
Members of the small clique of Democratic senators with whom Lippmann 
socialized eventually broke with the administration but, in 1965, failed to effect a 
cohesive and sustained opposition to LBJ?s Vietnam policies.  Among this group 
were Ernest Greuning of Alaska, Wayne Morse of Oregon, and Frank Church of 
Idaho.  In the spring of 1965, using a Lippmann column as his inspiration, Church 
delivered an address on the Senate floor denouncing the bombing campaign.  
Afterward, Johnson was reported to have scolded him, ?Well, Frank, next time you 
140
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Fulbright,? 12 October 1961.
141
 Elizabeth Midgley (Farmer), interview with author, 28 February 2001, Washington, D.C.  See also, 
Midgley?s diary account of 11 January 1965.  When Midgley reported to Lippmann that her contacts 
were critical of Fulbright for not sufficiently moving to oppose escalation, the columnist replied, 
?Well, we all know Bill Fulbright is lazy.?  
510
want a dam in Idaho, go ask Walter Lippmann!?
142
  Greuning and Lippmann had 
known one another since the 1920s but had never been particularly close.  
Nevertheless, they found common ground on Vietnam.  As early as May 1964, 
Greuning had read with approval Lippmann?s columns on neutralization.  One in 
particular elicited his ?heartiest congratulations.?  The Alaska senator told Lippmann, 
?there may be some difficulties in achieving ?negotiations, but they aren?t 
comparable to the incredible disasters that will befall us if we attempt to fight this 
war.?
143
  Personal differences, however, caused Greuning to draw back from an 
alliance with Lippmann.  For one thing, the senator still stung from a debate he and 
Lippmann had over disarmament in the 1920s.  Greuning took the then-New York 
World editor?s private letters as personal attacks.  Moreover, Greuning?an intensely 
moralistic man?harbored a strong distaste for Lippmann?s 1930s affair (and eventual 
marriage) with Helen Byrne Armstrong, then wife of Hamilton Fish Armstrong.  As 
Greuning?s biographer put it, though the senator found Lippmann to be ?very bright? 
and agreed with his criticisms of Vietnam policy, Greuning ?shied away from 
embarking on a major foreign policy crusade with a man he ?couldn?t stand.??
144
Still, even as a lone critic Greuning laced many of his speeches on the Senate Floor 
with quotes from Lippmann columns, reading more than a half-dozen T&T 
installments into the Congressional Record.
145
142
 See Elizabeth Midgley Diaries, 4-6 March 1965.  Steel writes that this story turned out to be false.
143
 Ernest R. Greuning to Walter Lippmann, 28 May 1964, Box 74, Folder 481, WLC.
144
 Robert David Johnson, Ernest Greuning and the American Dissenting Tradition (Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press, 1998): 247-248.
145
 See Greuning?s letters to Lippmann, Box 74, Folder 937, Series III, WLC: Greuning to Lippmann 
26 January 1966; Ibid., 18 May 1966; Ibid., 26 May 1966, Ibid., 2 June 1966; Ibid., 17 June 1966; 
Ibid., 21 July 1966; Ibid., 22 July 1966; Ibid., 4 October 1967.
511
As SFRC chairman, Fulbright had more power than any of the others to thwart 
Johnson; accordingly, Lippmann worked most closely with him. They agreed to put 
forward a solution that they believed would protect major cities in the South and 
bring the North to negotiate without provoking a larger war.  It was a plan that 
George F. Kennan and retired General James Gavin would resurrect in early 1966.
146
On 8 July, Lippmann recommended to T&T readers a ?pull-back of our forces from 
the defense of villages and small towns? to strongholds in the cities along the coast.  
U.S. officials should then encourage Saigon to negotiate with the Vietcong and 
Hanoi.  He?d advised much the same plan more than a decade before for the 
beleaguered French army fighting the Viet Minh.  From these ?enclaves? the U.S. 
could provide ?sanctuary? for its Vietnamese clients and preserve enough diplomatic 
clout to arrange a settlement.  ?There will not be much glory in such a strategic 
retreat,? Lippmann admitted.  ?But it would not be a surrender . . . . It would extricate 
us from a war that cannot be won at any tolerable cost.?
147
Mission mattered more than strict numbers so Lippmann accepted temporary 
troop increases to facilitate a retreat to these ?enclaves.?  In mid-July he wrote that 
the ?buildup of American ground forces in South Vietnam is probably the best thing 
the President can now do . . . a far better thing to do than would be an attempt to win 
by all-out bombing.?
148
  Lippmann knew part of the compulsion to fight it out in 
Vietnam was due to U.S. expenditures mad to construct several massive military 
146
 For more on Gavin, see Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the 
Vietnam Era (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 342-344.
147
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Ordeal of Decision,? 8 July 1965.
148
 Lippmann, "An American War," T&T, 15 July 1965.
512
installations in South Vietnam.  The enclave strategy would allow the U.S. to retain 
control of such facilities as the sprawling military complex at Cam Rhan Bay.  While 
offering this kind of support Lippmann urged Johnson to articulate his war aims.  If 
the president chose to move to the enclaves he still would have to mobilize, 
Lippmann thought, in order to buildup these strongholds.  To do that LBJ would have 
to win public support.  ?There is a foreboding that we are launched on a course of 
which neither the President nor anyone else sees an end,? he wrote.  ?Things have 
gone too far for the President to dismiss this foreboding by repeating once more that 
our only object is to defeat aggression and that we will do whatever is necessary to 
halt it.?
149
  Through a White House aide, Joe Alsop communicated to the president his 
displeasure about Lippmann?s plan.  He felt ?terror? that LBJ would ?settle for 
Lippmann?s line of building a series of coastal defenses.?  Alsop dismissed the idea 
as a ?contraption rather than a firm policy decision.?  As Douglas Cater told LBJ, 
such advice was relative: Alsop probably would consider any plan a ?contraption? if 
it failed to prosecute the war far into North Vietnam.
150
Alsop?s anxiety was unnecessary.  For the enclave strategy was, in practice, 
precisely the tactic that U.S. policymakers had used since April and now were 
supplanting with a much more vigorous plan.  At the time that Fulbright and 
Lippmann were pushing the defensive enclave strategy, Johnson was preparing to 
authorize U.S. troops to conduct offensive search and destroy missions.  As 
Fulbright?s biographer, Randall Woods, rightly observes, the fact that the SFRC 
149
 Ibid.
513
chairman and eminent columnist regarded their strategic stronghold plan as an 
?imaginative new initiative demonstrated just how isolated they were from the 
decision-making process and how out of touch they were with what was really 
transpiring in Vietnam.?
151
   In reality, not since the Eisenhower years?when he?d 
been relegated to being a back-bencher?had Walter Lippmann?s insider status 
slipped so low.
Lippmann knew the decision regarding the mission of a larger ground force 
was coming soon.  The Washington Post tracked the White House meetings of 22-27 
July with a series of page-one articles.  It was justifiably wary of the high-profile 
debate, ?evidently sought to demonstrate that [Johnson?s] impending plans are 
undergoing unusual deliberation.? By advertising these consultations, the president 
?was laying groundwork to gain wide national support for the decisions? of this 
Vietnam working group.
152
  Whether it would be a full or partial mobilization, the 
?crucial question nevertheless is what the President intends to ask this large American 
army to do,? Lippmann explained to op-ed page readers.  ?Will he give it a mission 
that can be accomplished?  Or will he send it on a fool?s errand, as all our previous 
missions in South Viet-Nam have proved to be?the conquering and occupation of 
the villages and the countryside by American soldiers??
153
  Either the troops were to 
be sent to protect strategic strongholds in preparation for a political settlement or they 
were to be the ?vanguard of a crusade to push communism back of the 17
th
 Parallel, 
150
 Douglas Cater to President Johnson, 26 July 1965, ?Lunch with Joe Alsop,? Reference File, 
Vietnam Box 1, LBJL.
151
 Woods, Fulbright: A Life: 373-374.
152
 Murrey Marder, ?President?s Viet Talks Broadened,? 23 July 1965: A1, A21.
514
to teach China a lesson, to prove that Americans always win their wars.?  Even at this 
eleventh hour, Lippmann insisted, it was not too late for Americans to ask and to be 
told what kind of war this was to be.  He urged Johnson to make a statement.  
Otherwise, he wrote, ?there is no assurance that the country will not be nudged and 
jostled?as it has been for a decade in Indochina?until it slithers and slides into total 
war.?
154
For hawks and doves alike there was something hopeful to take away from the 
president?s 28 July 1965 press conference?a purely Johnsonian offering.  LBJ 
appeared at mid-day in the East Room of the White House before a throng of national 
media.  Lippmann watched the live telecast from his summer home.
155
  In announcing 
a troop increase to 125,000 and his decision to defer calling up the military reserves, 
the President stressed American resolve.  ?We did not choose to be the guardians at 
the gate, but there was no one else,? LBJ told his countrymen.  ?Nor would surrender 
in Viet-Nam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only 
feeds the appetite of aggression.?  And, yet, he also outlined a major diplomatic 
initiative, inviting U.N. help with a letter to Secretary General U. Thant and restating 
his government?s commitment to negotiate.  ?We do not want an expanding struggle 
with consequences that no one can perceive, nor will we bluster or bully or flaunt our 
power,? Johnson said.  ?We are ready to move now, as we have always been, to move 
from the battlefield to the conference table . . . . We are ready to discuss [Hanoi?s] 
proposals and our proposals and any proposals of any government whose people may 
153
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Larger War,? 22 July 1965.
154
 Ibid.
515
be affected, for we fear the meeting room no more than we fear the battlefield.?  
Significantly, he avoided the language Lippmann found so offensive in the Baltimore 
Speech, when LBJ had defined the principal U.S. objective as a ?free and independent 
South Viet-Nam.?  Rather, this time he placed emphasis on the right of the 
Vietnamese people ?to shape their own destiny in free elections in the South, or 
throughout all Viet-Nam under international supervision.?
156
  This is exactly the 
phraseology that the State Department lawyer Leonard Meeker had prescribed in 
response to Lippmann?s April attacks on U.S. legal justifications for intervention.
Most importantly for Lippmann, LBJ assured Americans that there was no 
change in mission for this expanded force.  He noted that the U.S. would expect 
Saigon to bear more of the burden, ?to substantially increase [South Vietnam?s] own 
effort, both on the battlefield and toward reform and progress in the villages.?  During 
the lengthy question-and-answer period a reporter probed further.  Did the troop 
increase signal ?any change in the existing policy of relying mainly on the South 
Vietnamese to carry out offensive operations,? with American forces performing only 
an ?emergency back-up role??  LBJ gave his most succinct answer of the afternoon.  
?It does not imply any change in policy whatever,? he replied.  ?It does not imply any 
change of objective.?
157
Lippmann held Today and Tomorrow over an extra day to prepare a response.  
On 30 July he interpreted LBJ?s announcement as a sign that the administration had 
155
 Lippmann Appointment Diaries, 28 July 1965, Box 240, Folder 39, Series VII, WLC.
156
 Murrey Marder, ?Peace Talks Invited by President,? 29 July 1965, Washington Post: A1, A12; see 
also the full text of LBJ?s remarks reprinted in the same issue of the Post: A8.
516
opted for a ?limited and defensive strategy.?  The policy would be a holding 
maneuver, he wrote, not a search-and-destroy operation.  The 125,000 figure, he 
assured readers, was ?absurdly inadequate if our objectives were the reconquest of 
South Vietnam.?  That, he wrote, would take more than a million troops.  The 
American position was ?strengthened and improved? by signs LBJ had turned away 
from wider escalation: an ?unlimited and illimitable war? and greatly expanded 
bombing offensive.
158
The evidence presented for public consumption was not the only thing leading 
him to such a conclusion.  In addition to Johnson?s press conference, Lippmann 
received private assurances that the troop increases were for defensive purposes only, 
in order to preserve American bargaining power for a negotiated settlement.  The 
administration?this time with George W. Ball as the point man?tried to convince 
him that it was moderating its policy, relying less on military solutions and more on 
diplomatic initiatives. The Undersecretary of State played a significant part in the
rouse.  During the deliberations a week earlier, when the topic of how to pitch a troop 
increase to the press came up, there was this enlightening exchange:
Moyers: I don?t think the press thinks we are going to 
change basic policy, but the requirements to meet that 
policy.
LBJ: That?s right and we ought to say it.
157
 Transcripts of Johnson?s remarks and question-and-answers, 29 July 1965, Washington Post: A8, 
A9.
158
  Lippmann, T&T, "Realism and Prudence," 30 July 1965.
517
Ball:  I hope we can avoid a debate on whether it is a 
change.  We always lose on this.  We are becoming co-
defendants with South Vietnam.
159
Late on the morning of 30 July 1965, Ball checked with Mac Bundy how the 
?President wants to play? the decision to the press.  Bundy told Ball ?to say this is not 
[a] great change of policy,? but merely a ?continuation of a policy with military 
developments . . . and military clarifications.?
160
  Within the hour, Ball began placing 
a round of phone calls from his State Department Office to reassure key press figures 
that the new policy did not amount to a change in mission.  Lippmann was first on his 
list.
An hour after receiving Bundy?s instructions, Ball had Lippmann on the line 
to confirm the columnist?s recent speculations that LBJ had opted for a limited war.  
Ball described LBJ?s announcement as a ?breakthrough,? intimating that the president 
had kept the hawks in abeyance.  During the fifteen-minute conversation, Lippmann?s 
neighbor and longtime friend made it sound as though Johnson had acquiesced to the 
logic of the columnist?s enclave strategy and had instructed the Pentagon to accept a 
limited mission?one which circumscribed a larger American incursion to securing 
defensible positions along the Vietnamese coast.  LBJ clearly understood the 
implications of the decisions he was making, Ball said. ?This does not mean that we 
don?t have some tough times ahead,? he confided to Lippmann, ?but it does mean the 
President is still in control of the situation . . . things [are] not yet in the saddle.?
161
159
FRUS, 1964-1968, Volume III: 219.
160
 Bundy/Ball, 30 July 1965, Telcon, Vietnam II 5/26/65-10/30/65, LBJL.
161
 Ball/Lippmann, 30 July 1965, Telcon, Vietnam II 5/26/65-10/30/65, LBJL
518
Lippmann received the news enthusiastically.  He agreed that the president 
had ?made quite an advance? with his statement.  In his column that morning he had 
praised the ?realism and prudence? of LBJ?s appeal for U.N. involvement in 
Vietnam?perhaps even oversight of an all-Vietnam election.  In doing so, he told 
readers, the president had ?launched a strong diplomatic campaign for a negotiated 
peace.?
162
  Moreover, LBJ?s effort to distance himself from the rhetoric of an 
independent South Vietnam, showing his willingness to abide by the principles of the 
1954 Geneva Accords, ?opens the door wide in principle to a negotiated 
settlement.?
163
  Ball confirmed that impression, telling Lippmann that Johnson was 
?determined not to leave any stone unturned? in reaching a negotiated settlement with 
Hanoi.
When Lippmann inquired whether the administration?s new plan meant that 
the U.S. would embark on an ?elaborate offensive,? Ball replied, ?No.?  There was no 
change in mission.  U.S. forces, he said, would be used to patrol and in ?searching out 
attack zones.  The Vietnamese will continue to fight the Viet Cong.?  Ball again 
confirmed Lippmann?s assumptions, agreeing with the substance of that morning?s 
T&T, in which the columnist stated that ?high U.S. government officials have let it be 
known that we do not intend to comb the countryside to eliminate the Viet Cong from 
the villages, but rather to confine ourselves to conventional military action.? 
Lippmann thought Ball?s news to be ?very comforting.?
164
Unbeknownst to Ball, Richard Rovere, author and correspondent for The New 
162
 Lippmann, T&T, 30 July, 1965, "Realism and Prudence."
163
 Ibid.  Lippmann's italics.
519
Yorker?Lippmann?s friend and house guest?listened silently on another phone 
receiver.  Rovere was in Southwest Harbor discussing his ideas for a biography of 
Lippmann which he planned to write.  He?d spent several futile days trying to get 
Lippmann to recollect his past?a task Lippmann was never fond of under the best of 
circumstances.  The columnist had seemed especially distracted as reports swirled in 
the press that the LBJ Administration was about to make a commitment of anywhere 
from a quarter-million to one million troops.  Lippmann had motioned his guest to 
listen in on another extension and, after hanging up, expressed relief at Ball?s news.  
Years later the substance of Ball?s words still stuck in Rovere?s mind: ??Well, Walter, 
you?ve won.  The troops are going, but they won?t be fanning out all over the place,?? 
Rovere recalled Ball saying in a reassuring tone.  ??There?ll be no search-and-destroy.  
They?ll be there only to secure Saigon and a few other places that we know we can be 
defended without heavy casualties.??  He added for emphasis: You?ll be pleased to 
know . . . they are going, but on this limited mission.?
165
Within days, as the magnitude of the commitment became apparent, 
Lippmann became ?furious? with the Undersecretary.  The episode suggested a level 
of naivete that did not accord with Ball?s reputation as one of the administration?s 
most perceptive players.  Rovere told an interviewer in 1969, ?I?ve never known 
whether Ball was duped somehow or whether the whole State Department might have 
been.?  By July 1965, Walter Lippmann understood quite clearly that LBJ was quite 
capable of lying when it suited his purposes; he also knew that Johnson was liable to 
164
 Ball-Lippmann, Telcon; T&T, ?Realism and Prudence,? 30 July 1965.
520
tell the Defense Department one story and the State Department another entirely and 
even, perhaps, instruct the Defense chiefs to misinform the diplomats.  But what was 
unforgivable was that Ball could be baited by such a lie and then, as Rovere recalled 
Lippmann complain, ?get on the phone to circulate it.?  For the rest of his life 
Lippmann referred to that episode as an encapsulation of how LBJ had corrupted 
once-honorable men and, ultimately, provided the kind of motivation that spurred the 
columnist to support Richard M. Nixon against Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968?on the 
basis that the ?new Nixon? was a more honest candidate.
166
In retrospect, it seems that Ball was performing damage control at the 
administration?s bidding.  With the die cast?with the arguments made?Ball, ever 
the team player, resolved himself to supporting the troops in the field.  His role as the 
administration?s ?in-house critic??as the voice of dissent meant to assuage the fears 
of the intellectuals?was one he seemed content to accept.
167
  He would press his 
case, but not too hard; always, as he put it, ?within the four walls of the 
Administration.?
168
  But as his phone call to Lippmann suggests, Ball became more 
directly complicit in the wake of the July decisions.  For months the Undersecretary 
participated in meetings between LBJ, his principals, and Lippmann, and, without 
exception, noted afterward that the president remained utterly unconvinced by the 
165
 See Rovere?s account in his posthumously published memoir, Final Reports: Personal Reflections 
on Politics and History in Our Time (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1984): 208-210.
166
 Richard Rovere, Oral History Interview I, 6 May 1969: 21-22, LBJL; see also Rovere?s Final 
Reports: 209.
167
 In Choosing War, Fredrik Logevall suggests Ball was complicit in acting the role of an in-house 
critic, knowing full-well that his arguments carried no weight and that his dissent was merely an 
intellectual exercise that legitimated the staged July 1965 ?decisions.?  See especially, pp. 267; 394.  
For a less critical view of Ball, see Berman, Planning a Tragedy: 45-46; 85-89.
contrast with Berman.
521
columnist?s arguments for neutralization and disengagement.  Now, somehow, 
Lippmann?s cautionary pleas for retreat to strategic strongholds had triumphed?  
Deceived or not, and irrespective of his motivations, Ball was playing according to 
the administration?s game plan, which gave high priority to the task of smoothing 
Lippmann?s feathers and calming his fears.  Ball and Lippmann continued to meet 
well into 1966 but, as he would report to LBJ (only lightly touching upon this period 
in his memoirs), their exchanges became more confrontational as Ball fell in line 
behind the policy decisions of July 1965 and Lippmann, with even greater vigor, 
questioned U.S. war aims.
169
VI.
Despite Lippmann?s deep doubts about escalation, the first half of 1965 marked a 
period of continuity in his relationship with the Johnson administration.  From start to 
finish, U.S. officials tried to convince Lippmann that despite the gradual 
Americanization of the war they sought to negotiate a peaceful settlement in Vietnam.  
From start to finish, too, Lippmann proved gullible.  He foresaw the costs of 
escalation like few other critics.  He also correctly gauged the difficulty of 
negotiation?especially after the bombing began.  But he naively accepted official 
explanations that a diplomatic settlement was the end goal.  The program to keep 
Lippmann in tow started in earnest during the White House meetings with Bundy, 
shortly before the start of Rolling Thunder.  These frequent consultations continued 
168
 George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982): 430.
522
through July and George Ball?s reassurances after the decision to increase 
dramatically the numbers and mission of combat troops in-country.  At these two 
critical junctures, using both deception and obtuse promises, officials got Lippmann 
to interpret their actions publicly in a favorable light.  With surprising ease Johnson 
and his advisors were able to militarize the war exponentially between February and 
July 1965, while minimizing the debate.  Walter Lippmann?s uneven commentary 
aided their efforts.
Lippmann?s excessive confidence in his ability to persuade Johnson, one-to-
one, to avoid war had troubling implications.  Undeniably, Lippmann?s desire for 
access contributed to the piecemeal pace of his break with LBJ.  That said, it must be 
pointed out that the lengths to which Bundy and the president went to obscure the 
direction of policy in Vietnam suggests that neither believed Lippmann?s fealty could 
be bought with invitations to private White House dinners.  More subtle (and even 
more pernicious) than his drive for access, was the double-standard Lippmann applied 
to debating administration policy.  For, while he decried the president?s refusal to 
make a public case for intervention, his own failure to face up to the administration 
publicly in early 1965 helped to ensure the absence of a thorough-going national 
dialogue during the critical decision-making period.  He opted for a kind of personal 
journalism fraught with ethical pitfalls, circumscribed by self-imposed limits on his 
dissent.  Lippmann believed that constructive criticism from the inside would have 
more weight than dissent from outside.  And, in this sense, he closely resembled 
George Ball, though the difference was Lippmann eventually took his criticism 
169
 Ball only hints at the confrontations that followed with Lippmann?a subject covered in the next 
chapter. See, Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: 431.
523
outside the ?four walls of the Administration.?  But in early 1965, he seemed to 
believe it to be a more effective crisis strategy than the time-consuming and imprecise 
task of rousing public opinion.  He was wrong. In these critical months, when 
Lippmann?s instinct for access and his serene faith in his skills as a private diplomat 
conflicted with his fundamental doubts about intervention and the true aims of 
policymakers, the former most often prevailed.  Though less culpable than key 
Democratic senators and the quiescent British government of Harold Wilson?
Lippmann contributed to the ?permissive context? in which the Johnson 
administration escalated the war in Vietnam by stealth.
170
The administration?s program to placate Lippmann produced immediate 
success but it had a Faustian denouement.  Mac Bundy and LBJ managed to stanch 
Lippmann?s immediate doubts about the bombing policy but they never fully 
converted him to their cause.  By affording him early and intimate access they 
magnified his later sense of disillusionment, of having been lied to, indeed, misused.  
Upon realizing that he?d suffered this mistreatment the columnist never recovered his 
composure.  The realist analyses of the war that made Lippmann such a formidable 
critic steadily yielded to turgid diatribes in late-1965.  Hot emotion overcame cool 
reason.  His focus shifted from the policies to their architects.  Once careful to show 
170
 I borrow the term ?permissive context? from Logevall, who draws a similar conclusion in his study, 
Choosing War: 336.  In going to war, he writes, ?LBJ had help from his opponents, from those who 
had always been against an Americanized war.  The permissive context of the earlier months was still 
there in the late winter and early spring [of 1965], and it mattered more now, because the shooting was 
about to start.  Some critics of escalation spoke out against American policy, and the administration 
worried a great deal about how to respond to them . . . But the most important ones, the Senate 
Democratic leadership and the British government, time and again in those critical weeks showed 
themselves unwilling to state publicly what they believed privately, to challenge the administration?s 
interpretation of the stakes, of the risks, of the costs.  In that way, these dissenters, helped carry out the 
deception, helped perpetuate the illusion of American consensus and Anglo-American unity on the 
524
readers the weaknesses of the entire structure of the Vietnam enterprise, he now 
inveighed against the principal decision-makers.  The attacks intensified first against 
the war advisors, then, with added bile, against Lyndon Johnson himself.
conflict and thereby helped bring about the tragedy that was the Second Indochina War.?  See also, 
pp.402-403.
525
Chapter 9: 
At War: Pundit Versus Policymakers and Pro-War Opinion 
Leaders, July 1965 and After
I.
Having failed to co-opt Walter Lippmann, Lyndon Johnson and his advisors then set 
out to silence him.  White House aides and the State Department?s Policy Planning 
Council combed decades of his work, searching for past inconsistencies to use against 
him.  Frustrated by Lippmann?s continuing criticism, President Johnson no longer 
harbored any hope of getting his support.  In a December 1965 meeting he declared to 
advisers, ?You have no idea how much I?ve talked to the Fulbrights and Lippmanns.  
They?re not coming aboard.?
1
  After that LBJ rarely missed private or public 
opportunities to portray Lippmann as senile, traitorous, and cowardly.
2
  For his part, 
Lippmann did not go quietly.  But breaking with a President was not an easy thing to 
do, especially one so adept at bullying, browbeating, and cajoling.  Lippmann, who?d 
known many chief executives, spent most of 1965 breaking with LBJ in piecemeal 
fashion.  Only in the months after the July troop commitments, however, did his 
dissent solidify.  He blamed Johnson?s escalation of the war, in part, on his flawed 
1
 ?Notes of Meeting,? 17 December 1965, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. 3: 
644-645 (hereinafter referred to as ?FRUS?).
2
 See Ronald Steel?s account in Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 
and Company, 1980): 576-579.
526
character?LBJ?s ?messianic megalomania,? as he described it in late-1966.  He also 
wrote of Johnson?s ?credibility gap,? telling readers that the President?s ?compulsive 
passion for secretiveness? led him to choose a ?deliberate policy of artificial 
manipulation of official news . . . to stifle debate about his aims and policies.?
3
Ever since, this ?war of words? between Lippmann and President Johnson has 
fascinated historians.
4
  This episode is worthwhile to recount and to expand upon?
not the least because of its entertainment value.  Rarely had an American President 
feuded so publicly with anyone, much less the most prominent journalist of the era.  
But having fixed on the personal recriminations between Johnson and Lippmann, 
scholars have missed the implications of their feud.  With the use of new archival 
materials?this chapter examines some of the core inferences that may be drawn from 
this breakdown in the relationship between Lippmann and Washington officials.  To 
start, it should now be clear to the reader that American intervention in the 
Vietnamese civil war culminated rather than initiated what had been a long, 
incremental process of Lippmann?s rejection of global containment.  Not only is this 
demonstrated in the continuity of Lippmann?s writings during the Cold War but it is 
symbolized, too, by developments in his relations with key insiders.  Two cases 
receive special scrutiny here: McGeorge Bundy, a longtime Lippmann friend and his 
3
 See, for example, Walter Lippmann?s T&T columns: ?Manila Madness,? 17 November 1966; ?Mr. 
Johnson?s Quagmire,? 8 December 1966; ?The Credibility Gap I,? 28 March 1967; ?Credibility Gap 
II,? 30 March 1967.  
4
 Steel?s penultimate chapters are about the Lippmann-Johnson feud and makes for interesting reading.  
Yet, while explaining the controversy in a lively manner, the account neglects an analysis of the long-
standing reasons for the break between the pundit and President.  The important roles played by lesser 
government officials also receive light treatment: George Ball, Walt Rostow, and Robert Kintner, 
among them. Steel depicts Bundy as being far less autonomous and assertive on the issue of handling 
Lippmann than the official record demonstrates.  Others historians have been less inclined to adopt the 
?personal feud? approach.  See, for example, Lloyd Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the 
Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995): 195-199. Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge 
527
single most important government contact; and George Ball, who shared the 
columnist?s reservations about Vietnam, but nevertheless would not publicize his 
dissent. The war hastened Lippmann?s break with the foreign policy establishment, 
but Vietnam alone did not make him stand apart from the prevailing view.
II.
The Johnson administration?s war on Walter Lippmann began, like Americanization 
of the Vietnam War, by stealth.  After a late-May 1964 White House meeting, in 
which Lippmann advised LBJ and his top advisors to seek a negotiated withdrawal 
from South Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy asked his NSC assistant Gordon Chase to 
review Lippmann?s past columns.  Chase focused on Lippmann?s analyses at Cold 
War crises points: Berlin, Korea, the Taiwan Straights, French Indochina, Loas, and 
Cuba.  Compared to all Lippmann had written, he reported to Bundy, the four thick 
folders of photostats he?d collected were a ?drop in the bucket.?  Lippmann?s themes 
were consistent and rigorous: U.S. power was limited and could not support global 
containment; neutralism was the proper course for most Asian countries; and 
American strength in these peripheral places was in the air and on the sea?ground 
commitments should be avoided.  While the evidence supported the ?charge that 
Lippmann?s frequent inclination, when the going gets rough for the U.S., is to ?cut 
and run,?? Chase explained, the columnist?s position on Vietnam in 1964 was in line 
with his earlier writings.  ?Lippmann?s present posture on Southeast Asia seems quite 
consistent with his posture on similar issues in the past,? Chase wrote, ?i.e., the U.S. 
Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), offers more of a 
528
should not get ?entangled?; and when it does, it should ?disentangle.??
5
  Bundy quietly 
filed the information away?and seems never even to have raised these themes during 
his numerous meetings with the columnist.  Indeed, until late-1965 the administration 
would not risk alienating the columnist by assaulting his past record.  As late as June 
1965, Johnson told Mac Bundy he did not want to attack Lippmann?at least not 
before the big decisions were made that summer.
6
  As indicated in the preceding 
chapter, that strategy worked?officials kept Lippmann off balance until after the 
crucial troop increase and change in mission.
Bundy?s was the first of several government studies into Lippmann?s past 
writings.  Later efforts by the State Department and White House, it was hoped, 
would produce a public response to Lippmann by a prominent source outside the 
administration.  By early 1965, State Department officials managed to enlist the 
ablest and most authoritative of Lippmann?s domestic critics to counter his assertions 
that the military phase of the Cold War was passing and that the U.S. should pare its 
overseas commitments.  A brief note from Henry Owen, then Walt W. Rostow?s 
deputy director on the Policy Planning Council, interrupted an old diplomat?s annual 
winter holiday at the Mill Reef Club in Antigua.  ?If you should decide to write a 
letter about the lack of will in Europe, while safely isolated from harmful influences 
in Washington, here is the target to shoot at,? Owen wrote on 4 February 1965.  He 
enclosed that morning?s Today and Tomorrow installment, ?Johnson and Foreign 
Policy,? in which Lippmann argued that the U.S. ought to relinquish its ?extravagant? 
perspective on Bundy?s role in this process; see especially, pp. 309-310; 314-316.
5
 Gordon Chase to McGeorge Bundy, 7 June 1964, ?Walter Lippmann,? [Folder 1 of 4], Box 7, Files of 
Gordon Chase, National Security Files (NSF), Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, TX 
(hereinafter referred to as ?LBJL?).
529
role as policeman and protector in Western European affairs.
7
  Dean G. Acheson?
former secretary of state and a principal architect of the Marshall Plan and NATO?
hardly needed such priming.
Lyndon Johnson, as had Kennedy, called on Acheson as his leading elder 
statesman.  Acheson was deeply disturbed that Vietnam drew so much attention away 
from European problems.  He regularly sent memos to LBJ about how to preserve the 
Atlantic Alliance, but he knew that by 1965 the issues most important to him received 
only passing attention from the President.
8
  At about that time, Lippmann began 
defending Johnson from those who accused the administration of a weak foreign 
policy in Europe.  The ?passivity? critics saw in Johnson?s foreign policy, he wrote, 
was part of the adjustment to the evolution of European affairs.  The postwar period 
was ending and it was natural that Western European states should seek to reassert 
control over European affairs.  Johnson?s cautious approach, highlighted by his deft 
scuttling of the contentious Multi-Lateral Force issue, signaled to Lippmann a 
fundamental change in America?s dealings with its European allies.  In the immediate 
postwar years, the Truman administration had fostered an unrealistic view of America 
as ?the protector, the preserver, the guide and leader of Europe? in order to win public 
support for the Marshall Plan and NATO.  Johnson, Lippmann explained, correctly 
took stock of the new realities: ?I count it an event of high policy to have recognized 
that this extravagant concern with European affairs will not work any longer, and 
6
 McGeorge Bundy/Ball, 8 June 1965, Telcon, General Folder: US & Europe 11/24/63-5/31/66, LBJL.
7
 Henry Owen to Dean G. Acheson, 5 February 1965, Papers of Dean G. Acheson, ?Europe Foreign 
Aid-NATO? folder, Box 101, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence MO; Lippmann, 
?Johnson and Foreign Policy,? T&T, 4 February 1965.
8
James A Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York: 
Simon and Schuster, 1998): 415-417.
530
does in fact act as a boomerang.?
9
Even by Acheson?s standards, his rebuke to this particular Lippmann 
argument was blunt.  His July 1965 Saturday Evening Post column appeared under 
the provocative title, ?Isolationists Are Stupid.?  Acheson singled out Lippmann as a 
?commentator whose judgments over the years have been unusually error-prone.?
10
He argued that American interests were inextricably linked with the affairs of Europe.  
To bring the point home, he purposefully echoed Lippmann?s Atlantic Community?
a concept he?d made popular prior to U.S. intervention in World War I.  Geography 
(the Atlantic), trade, economy, politics, religion, and culture united them.  Twice 
America had gone to war to preserve European order when it was threatened by 
hostile powers.  Most importantly, Acheson argued, ?the basic political truth of today 
is that equilibrium is not attainable within the area of the old geographical conception 
of Europe.  Germany demonstrated this twice and, now, the Soviet Union has made it 
unmistakably clear . . . The truth is that within the politics of reality the United States 
is essential to political equilibrium and progress in Europe, and Europe is essential to 
the larger political entity to which both Europe and America are inescapably 
bound.?
11
  No political idea is more firmly held in the U.S. or in most European 
capitals, Acheson wrote, ?than the interdependence of our interests.?  Acheson was 
responding to the threat that he perceived from De Gaulle (and, by extension, 
Lippmann who agreed with so many of the General?s policies), that the French leader 
would cajole and manipulate Adenauer and Germany into becoming a tool of his 
9
 ?Johnson and Foreign Policy,? T&T, 4 February 1965.
10
 Dean G. Acheson, ?Isolationists Are Stupid,? Saturday Evening Post 238 (No. 15), 31 July 1965: 12, 
15. Collected as a Lippmann clipping in the White House Confidential File, Oversize Attachments, 
1966, Box 171, LBJL.
531
grand strategy to reduce U.S. power in Europe.
12
  To yield to De Gaulle or reduce 
U.S. force structure in Europe would be to cede leadership and influence.  Acheson 
would accept neither.  He portrayed De Gaulle?s provocations as a vain kind of 
grasping to restore France to its old glory; the doubts of commentators such as 
Lippmann he dismissed as mischievous lapses in responsibility.  ?The escapists, the 
new (though mostly old) isolationists are still with us,? he concluded.  ?But let us 
recognize them for what they are?echoes from our colonial past.?
13
During the spring of 1965, Acheson had sent drafts of his Saturday Evening 
Post article to several confidants, including the his Georgetown neighbor and 
columnist Joe Alsop.  Alsop judged it a ?superb? rebuff to Lippmann?s pitch for 
accommodation in Europe.  ?But I beg you to hire special guards for P Street before 
the piece appears,? warned Alsop.  ?The error-prone old commentator is not a bomb-
throwing type himself, but his wife is; and if you are unguarded, you will be 
bombed.?
14
  Unlike Alsop, Acheson never publicly challenged Lippmann?s criticisms 
of American policy in Southeast Asia.  But at a crucial moment he encouraged LBJ to 
escalate the war.
15
  In July 1965, Acheson urged LBJ to choose a military solution, in 
spite of the persistent cries of war critics.  He summarized his advice in a note to Erik 
Boheman, a former Swedish ambassador to America.  ?Whenever the spirits of my 
colleagues wilt, I encourage them by urging them to realize their blessings by 
contemplating the exchange of our allies, deplorable as they may be, for the bundle of 
11
 Ibid., 15.
12
 See Chace, Acheson: 406-408.  As Chace points out that Acheson exaggerated this threat.  German 
leaders were not enthusiastic about a Bonn-Paris alliance.  
13
 Ibid.
14
 Joe Alsop to Dean Acheson, 19 March 1965, Box 71, Joseph W. Alsop Papers, Library of Congress, 
Washington, DC (hereinafter referred to as ?LC?).
532
horrors the Russians are punished with,? he told the Swedish diplomat, ?or swapping 
the obstacle of the democratic political system with Walter Lippmann and the Teach-
Ins for the one which bit Mr. K in the seat of his pants.?
16
  LBJ, who sought only 
confirmation for a decision he?d already reached, welcomed the ?wise mens?? logic.  
He soon adopted Acheson?s line on Lippmann, too, dismissing him as an isolationist 
and a ?political commentator of yesteryear.?
17
Acheson articulated and amplified the notion?widely shared in the 
Washington intelligentsia?that by the 1960s Walter Lippmann?s talk of American 
retrenchment was a kind of formula for a broad retreat back to the Western 
Hemisphere, a contraction of American responsibilities and power.  Acheson was not 
alone in accusing Lippmann of being a ?neo-isolationist.?  Over the years, American 
officials came to distrust his analyses?depicting him as a nineteenth-century geo-
politician out of touch with the realities of twentieth-century superpower relations.  
The establishment paragon John J. McCloy, having read Lippmann?s criticisms of 
Vietnam policy, dismissed him as having been ?notoriously wrong on almost every 
important issue, beginning back in the days of Hitler.?
18
15
 See Chace?s account in Acheson: 419-420.  Also Acheson?s letter to Harry Truman, 10 July 1965, 
Acheson-Truman Correspondence, HSTL.  See also Bird?s The Color of Truth: 337-339
16
 Acheson to Erik Boheman, 17 July 1965, in David S. McLellan and David C. Acheson, eds., Among 
Friends: Personal Letters of Dean Acheson (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1980): 270.
17
 See, for example, Johnson quoted in the 5 June 1967 Newsweek: 64.
18
 Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New 
York: Simon and Schuster, 1992): 587.  McCloy had a long memory.  In September 1941, Lippmann 
wrote, that by focusing a military buildup that played to America?s technological and economic 
strengths, the Roosevelt administration would send a clear signal of U.S. resolve to Germany and 
Japan. ?All popular doubts, political confusions, all ambiguity should be removed by a clear decision 
to shrink the Army and concentrate our major effort upon the Navy and the air force, and lease-lend,? 
he concluded.  See, Lippmann, T&T, ?The Case for a Smaller Army,? 20 September 1941, Washington 
Post: 11. Seeking to scuttle such public calls for down-sizing troop levels, General George Marshall 
met with FDR in the White House and made the case for expanding the Army?which Roosevelt 
accepted.  Marshall later recalled that it was a memo that Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy 
helped draft that made an impact on the President.  ?Abandonment of maximum effort in any form 
533
So much as the effort to marginalize Lippmann in late-1965 to 1967 was 
White House-driven, it also afforded individuals inside and outside the administration 
a chance to vent frustration with Lippmann?s dissent.  These sometimes primal 
expressions drew sustenance not only from reactions to his well-publicized opposition 
to Vietnam policy but from the longer, contrarian cast of Lippmann?s Cold War 
analyses.  In the interwar years, he?d shared goals similar to those of Acheson, 
McCloy, and other liberal Establishment figures.  But after 1947, many of the same 
people who had believed in Lippmann?s utility as a popularizer of American 
internationalism savaged him for failing to embrace global containment.  These 
criticisms took two forms, both aptly articulated by Walt W. Rostow, McGeorge 
Bundy?s eventual successor as national security adviser.  In a memo for Secretary of 
State Dean Rusk, Rostow described Lippmann as a nineteenth-century throwback 
who conformed to the strategic doctrine of his youth??Alfred Mahan, Teddy 
Roosevelt, and the Great White Fleet? that emphasized sea power and spheres of 
influence.  Lippmann?s understanding of international affairs had neither anticipated 
would be considered a step toward appeasement, for a negotiated peace is at the root of the Lippmann 
article?not a complete victory,? McCloy wrote.  See Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal 
and Hope, 1939-1942, Volume 3 (New York: Viking Press, 1963-1967, 4 volumes). This citation was 
dredged up years later by Henry C. Owen, director of the Policy Planning Council at the State 
Department: ?Wisdom Revisited,? Walt Rostow to President Johnson, 2 February 1967, Box 323, 
WHCF PR-15-4, Folder 9/3/66-7/14/67, LBJL.
For more on McCloy?s assessment of Lippmann see, Memorandum of Conversation?
President Kennedy and Chancellor Adenauer, Washington, D.C, November 21, 1961, FRUS, 1961-
1963, Vol. XIV, Berlin Crisis, November-December 1961: 614-616.  Adenauer recollected these 
events in a meeting with John Kennedy.  Kennedy had used the topic of a Lippmann column to open a 
delicate discussion about U.S. fears of a West German-Soviet rapprochement during the Berlin Crisis 
of 1961.  In the column, Lippmann suggested that West Germany might move toward a policy of 
neutrality in the U.S.-Soviet dispute in order to extract reunification from the Soviets.  He feared this 
would serve the Soviets? ultimate objective which was to alienate West Germany from the Western 
Alliance.  JFK asked Adenauer for his opinion of ?Lippmann?s view.?  Adenauer recounted McCloy?s 
advice.  Do not ?worry about Lippmann?s prophecies,? the High Commissioner told Adenauer, 
?because they always prove false.? Though he once became ?excited? by the content of Lippmann?s 
columns, Adenauer told Kennedy that he now shared McCloy?s evaluation.  For emphasis, he added 
that ?he would wager his head? that the columnist?s latest prophecy was false.?
534
nor adjusted to the intricacies of nation building or the revolutionary changes wrought 
by nuclear weapons, Rostow believed.  Worse still, Rostow argued, Lippmann 
consistently chose to ?appease? Communists by advising diplomatic retreat rather 
than military resolve in East-West confrontations.  ?An acceptance of the Lippmann 
Doctrine now?as in the cases of Greece, Berlin, Korea, and the Cuban missile 
crises,? Rostow warned Rusk, ?would undermine the stability of the Free World 
everywhere and endanger our own safety by making the mainland of Europe and Asia 
safe hunting ground for the Communists.?
19
III.
Even as the administration conscripted Dean Acheson to publicly debate the 
columnist, Mac Bundy?s role as chief tactician in the White House operation to limit 
Lippmann?s dissent became less relevant by the day.  Though Bundy tried to keep 
open the lines of communication with Lippmann into early 1966, when he left 
government to head up the Ford Foundation, their relationship strained under the 
weight of Vietnam.  Lippmann?s appointment diaries record no meetings with Bundy 
during the second half of 1965.
20
Lippmann perspective on the war shifted during these months?reaching a 
new level of stridency.  By this time, he surmised the administration was doggedly 
19
 Walt W. Rostow to Dean Rusk, ?A Reply to Lippmann,? 4 January 1966, ?Chronological File, 
January-May 1966,? Box 319, Subject and Country Files, 1965-69, Papers of the Policy Planning 
Council (S/PC), Lot 72D139, RG 59, National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, 
MD (hereinafter referred to as ?NARA II?).  Rostow was replying to a Lippmann column in which he 
argued that Vietnam lay squarely within the Chinese sphere of influence.  See T&T, ?The President in 
the Morass,? 4 January 1966.
535
determined to stay the course.  He worried that the military commitment would 
become so vast that Chinese intervention would become inevitable.  He wrote that 
Vietnam had ?isolated? America from the world.  ?[The] American example,? 
Lippmann opined, ?was once our greatest external asset in human affairs . . . [now] 
we are in danger of being bedazzled with the illusion that the ultimate solution of the 
intractable issues of the world is enough bombing to pulverize the opposition.?  The 
dynamics of international politics preoccupied him less as he turned his sights on the 
war?s domestic costs and, increasingly, on the decision-makers themselves.  He 
warily observed the protests on college campuses across the country, describing them 
as ?self-defeating? and ?misguided.?  Dissenters and draft-card burners, however, 
?come from a nation which expects to understand what its government is doing; from 
a nation which is not habituated to obedience and the idea that it must listen to its 
superiors and not talk back.?
21
  Lippmann told his research assistant, Elizabeth 
Farmer, that Johnson had ?outmaneuvered? realist critics of the war that spring?
himself, Morgenthau, and Kennan?and now the Left held the floor in the anti-war 
movement.  Since it appeared that ?we?re going to trade American lives for 
Vietcong,? Lippmann predicted to Farmer, student dissent ?will coalesce with what 
is?not pacifism in the pure-minded way?but the American feeling of hating the 
casualties.?
22
Lippmann was especially critical of the administration for not preparing the 
20
 Lippmann Appointment Diaries, Series VII, Box 240, Folder 39, Walter Lippmann Collection, 
Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (hereinafter referred to as ?WLC?).
21
See for example the following: Lippmann, T&T, ?The Declining Great Powers,? 14 October 1965; 
Lippmann, T&T, ?On the Student Demonstrations,? 26 October 1965;
536
public for his Vietnam policies in an open debate.  Johnson pre-empted discussion of 
his war aims, Lippmann wrote insightfully, by adopting the foreign policy of his 
Republican critics and then, ?with his real opposition confined to the leaders of his 
own party, he silenced them in personal argument.?  In early 1966, he warned that the 
Vietnam War would siphon off Great Society funds just as the nation was ?bursting at 
the seams and falling apart.?  He had seen the same happen to reforms under 
Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.  The New York City 
power outage, water shortage, transit and newspaper strikes, the Watts riots in Los 
Angeles?all were convincing proof that America?s greatest task lay at home: ?to 
rebuild and remake the environment of our increasingly urbanized society.?  He 
added, ?in so many places the pollution of water and air are reminders that we are 
confronted with something greater and essentially different than we were in the other 
wars.?
23
A few days after that column, on 20 January 1966, Bundy met Lippmann for a 
final lunch conversation.  He was scheduled to depart the White House five weeks 
later and both men knew this was an ending of sorts.  It was, by Bundy?s account, the 
most cordial and easy talk he?d had with Lippmann in a long time.  He was slow to 
broach the topic of Vietnam, instead easing into the conversation by complimenting 
his old friend on several columns he?d written about regional development in Latin 
and South America.  Bundy assured Lippmann that the President, upon reading them, 
had requested a study from the NSC staff.  ?Walter had a more sophisticated view of 
22
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley Diaries, 19 November 1965.
23
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Guns-Versus-Butter Stereotype,? 18 January 1966.
537
this problem than I had expected,? Bundy reported back to LBJ, ?and I am inclined to 
think that his columns were a kind of shorthand for some quite interesting and 
important ideas.?
24
Their ?main business,? of course, was the war. They quickly rediscovered, in 
Bundy?s words, that they had ?radically different views of the reality of the situation 
there.?  Lippmann stuck to his consistent theme: the U.S. had intervened in what was 
a civil war instigated more by the Diem regime?s repressive policies than by the 
Hanoi government.  Bundy countered that in a moment of candor the members of the 
North Vietnamese Politburo would tell him different.  He accused Lippmann of 
?saying what the French intellectuals said,? while the evidence pointed the other way.  
Lippmann asked for proof, prompting Bundy to promise to assemble figures and 
statistics.  Lippmann also defended his core proposition, that the U.S. could not and 
should not conduct a ground war in Asia.  He quoted what MacArthur was reported to 
have said to John Foster Dulles: any President who sends the U.S. army to fight on 
the Asian mainland ought to have his head examined. ?He thinks the best answer is to 
let the place go Communist as gracefully as possible,? Bundy reported to Johnson.  
?He seldom is quite so candid in public.?  Still, Bundy pressed Lippmann to focus on 
the damage inflicted on the Vietcong, to stop ?looking at our troubles and not the 
troubles of the enemy.?  Give me hard evidence, Lippmann asked again.  Bundy 
promised to see what he could do.  ?He does have deep emotional feelings about 
Vietnam, and I don?t think I changed them,? Bundy concluded, ?but I think he went 
24
 Bundy to LBJ, ?Conversation with Walter Lippmann,? 20 January 1966, NSF, Bundy Memos to 
President (Jan. 19-Feb. 4, 1966), Box 6, LBJL.
538
away feeling somewhat better about the good sense of the Administration.  We shall 
see.?
25
Several days later, the columnist disproved Bundy by answering him in print.  
No Saigon government would ever reunite the country, Lippmann wrote.  He 
supported the Gavin strategy of pulling back to coastal cities, in practice a ?holding 
operation pending the eventual negotiation? of an American withdrawal.  Lippmann 
could not have made it clearer: ?This is not a policy for a glorious victory . . . It is a 
formula for liquidating a mistake, for ending a war that cannot be won at any 
tolerable price, for cutting our losses before they escalate into bankruptcy, and for 
listening to common sense rather than to war whoops and tom-toms.?
26
While aware that his actions as Johnson?s national security adviser 
compromised his relationship with Lippmann, Bundy defended his position.
27
  Just 
days before he left office he wrote a memorandum for his personal files that critiqued 
Lippmann?s two central arguments: the strategic futility of winning the Vietnamese 
War and its marginal importance to U.S. interests.  The ?Lippmann Thesis,? as Bundy 
called it, stated the U.S. should not wage a land war in Southeast Asia, principally 
because Chinese power would overwhelm it or force it to commit the majority of its 
military forces.  Bundy countered, ?The truth is that in Southeast Asia we are stronger 
than China.?  The U.S., he argued, was not assuming a new role there; rather World 
War II had made America the ?dominant power in the Western Pacific.?  He quipped 
25
 Ibid.
26
 Lippmann, T&T, ?Well, What Can He Do?? 25 January 1966.
539
that ?Sukarno and Mao have never made Lippmann?s error? of underestimating 
American power in the region.  Bundy also implied that Lippmann?s emphasis on the 
military problems of escalation neglected the political dimensions of the struggle in 
South Vietnam.  ?It is not the mass or momentum of China which creates our 
problem,? Bundy wrote.  ?It is a peculiarly vicious and skilful form of attack upon all 
order that is not Communist.?  While escalation and direct confrontation posed a 
?grave danger,? Bundy believed the U.S. possessed an ultimate measure of strength: 
?immediate presence,? ?moral justification,? and ?staying power.?  The war?s human 
and material losses were terrible, he conceded.  But, ?if the basic questions of interest, 
right, and power are answered, the casualties and costs are to be accepted.?
28
Ultimately, Bundy?s defense of Vietnam policy?and the crux of his dispute 
with Walter Lippmann?may be found in his Stimsonian roots.  Hoover?s Secretary 
of State and FDR?s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson created and embodied the 
American Establishment, influencing men like John McCloy, Robert Lovett, Dean 
Acheson, and John Foster Dulles.  Mac Bundy fit comfortably into this lineage.  From 
an early age his father, Harvey Bundy, ?Colonel? Stimson?s closest aide, raised his 
sons to see the world through ?Stimsonian eyes.?  As Bundy?s biographer, Kai Bird 
points out, those who shared this perspective held complex, often contradictory, aims.  
They fought interventionary wars to protect Wilsonian ideals of national sovereignty.  
27
Melvyn Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 
1988): 41. Bundy late admitted to historian Melvyn Small that his less-than-candid behavior cost him 
Lippmann?s friendship.
28
 McGeorge Bundy, ?Untitled Notes,? 15 February 1966, McGeorge Bundy Personal Papers, Box 2, 
LBJL.  Also quoted in Bird, The Color of Truth: 346-347.  Bundy wrote this memo on the same day 
that Lippmann excoriated Dean Rusk and William Bundy (then undersecretary of state for Asian 
540
Self-righteous yet pragmatic, they resorted to legalistic tactics and international law 
while often wielding American power unilaterally or under exclusive American 
control.  They hoped to dominate world markets but not to oversee a vast territorial 
empire.  ?More often than not they could convince themselves that if they sometimes 
behaved like imperialists,? Bird concluded, ?they were nevertheless imperialists by 
invitation.?
29
  All of which justified unilateral intervention in order to preserve order 
and stability in a dynamic world.  Such a philosophy was the antithesis of 
Lippmann?s which presupposed that order and stability derived only from 
collaborative policies abroad and, in any case, could not be Washington-directed.  
Lippmann spent the entire Cold War challenging the Stimsonian-Wilsonian tradition 
in American policy.  For all their personal commonalties, his and Bundy?s core 
beliefs about the America?s mission abroad were irreconcilable.
Though Bundy could not soften Lippmann?s line on the war, his departure 
evoked warm accolades from the old columnist.  As dissembling as Mac Bundy had 
been, there also was a measure of civility and respect in his exchanges with 
Lippmann?an intense ?father-son? relationship, as Lippmann?s research assistant 
later described it.
30
  Lippmann wrote not one but two favorable columns when Bundy 
departed for the Ford Foundation late that winter.  Bundy?s role in the Kennedy and 
Johnson administrations, Lippmann explained to readers, was like that of a ?staff 
officer . . . who orders and orients the torrent of information the President must 
affairs) for shaping policies that isolated the U.S. diplomatically and threatened war with China.  See 
Lippmann?s T&T, ?Confrontation with China,? 15 February 1966.
29
 See Bird?s discussion, The Color of Truth: 23-25.
30
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley, interview with author, 28 February 2001, Washington, DC.
541
master in order to reach his decisions.?  He counted as Bundy?s predecessors, Colonel 
Edward House and Harry Hopkins, confidants of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin 
Roosevelt, respectively.  The implication was clear: Bundy had an enormous 
influence over the course of foreign policy during his tenure.  And, yet, Lippmann 
avoided Vietnam in this tribute piece, focusing instead on Bundy?s administrative 
capabilities.  ?I have heard it from both of the Presidents whom Mr. Bundy has served 
that . . . he has shown an incomparable ability to reduce complex problems to the 
choices which the President must make in deciding the issue,? Lippmann concluded.  
?Someone will have to step into Mr. Bundy?s shoes and show whether he can fill 
them.?  A couple of months later, Lippmann declared that since Bundy?s departure 
there had been a ?virtual dissolution? of the President?s foreign policy staff.  
Johnson?s foreign policy?highlighted by a full-scale war in Vietnam and an 
?irreconcilable quarrel? with France over the makeup of NATO?no longer had the 
?essential balance? Bundy once provided.
31
Time changed Lippmann?s perspective on Bundy and his part in American 
escalation of the Vietnam War.  ?I had assumed we were in agreement,? Lippmann 
later confided to his biographer, ?but I discovered that we weren?t.  It came as a great 
surprise to me to learn?and it slipped out only gradually?that he was much more 
pro-war than I knew . . . [Mac was] very cagey, a person who, I now feel, was not in 
31
 Lippmann, T&T, 1 March 1966, ?Mr. Bundy?s Shoes?; 3 May 1966, ?Presidential Foreign Policy.?  
Francis Bator, Johnson?s senior European affairs and economic advisor (and one of Bundy?s recruits to 
the NSC staff), objected to this characterization.  Bator phoned Lippmann to tell him that his column 
?is inconsistent with the facts.?  Lippmann replied, somewhat skeptically, ?If I?m wrong, I?m 
delighted.?  Bator to President Johnson, 3 May 1966, ?Call to Walter Lippmann about President?s 
Foreign Policy Staff,? Box 358, WHCF, ExPr, Folder PR18 4/7/66-6/9/66, LBJL.
542
the open, not clear about where he stood.?
32
  Twice in 1965?at key turning points 
during escalation?Lippmann swung wildly between justifiable gloom about a large
war and unrealistic hopes that the administration would withdraw U.S. forces.  More 
than any other man in government, including the President and George Ball, Mac 
Bundy bore responsibility for raising Lippmann?s false optimism in the critical 
months of 1965.  That said, by trying to read the best possible outcome from the 
February bombings and July troop increases?Lippmann conflated administration 
intentions with his own wishes.  It is doubtful that Bundy could have misled 
Lippmann so completely if there did not exist?underneath Lippmann?s cool, rational 
critique of the war?a desperate faith that American leaders would choose a peaceful 
resolution to the crisis.  Seduction, after all, is the art of eliciting submerged desires.
The war effectively ended their friendship.  Though a final break never came, 
Bundy?usually so conscientious about visiting sick friends?never visited Lippmann 
during his extended convalescence in a home on New York City?s upper East side.  
Only after Lippmann?s death in December 1974, did he make a conciliatory gesture.  
Bundy, then President of the Ford Foundation, organized a service in the foundation?s 
theater where friends gathered to watch television clips of Lippmann?s old interviews.  
A sherry reception followed the showing.  Louis Auchincloss, Lippmann?s lawyer 
and closest associate in his final years, recalled waiting outside the room as Mac 
Bundy greeted guests at the entrance.  Phyllis Byrne Cox, Helen Lippmann?s sister, 
turned to him and asked, ?Why are we standing in a line??  When Auchincloss 
explained it was a receiving line and Bundy, as host, was at the head of it, Cox 
declared, ?Well, I?m certainly not going to shake his hand.  McGeorge Bundy is a 
32
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 575.
543
murderer!?  She stalked off, muttering that Bundy was a war criminal.  When he 
made his way to the front of the line, Auchincloss told his friend, ?You ought to kick 
Phyllis?s ass out of here because she just called you a murderer!?  Mac Bundy replied, 
?Louis, if you threw everybody out who thinks that I?m a murderer we?d have the 
place to ourselves.?
33
  While he kept a sense of humor about that period of his life, 
there was a bitterness to it.  Bundy?s close associates remember that he would ?clam 
up? about the war which had affected even his most personal relationships.  His 
interventionist position, one friend recalled, even pitted him against his wife, Mary, 
and their children?all of whom opposed the war.
34
Years later, Bundy insisted that any study of Lippmann?s writing on the 
Vietnam War must differentiate between the validity of the outcome the columnist 
predicted and the weakness of the solutions he prescribed.  ?I used to have lunch with 
Walter all the time,? Bundy told an interviewer, ?and the discussion always came 
33
 Louis Auchincloss, Interview with author, 12 March 2002, New York City.
34
 Bird ably covers his period of Bundy?s life in The Color of Truth; see especially, pp. 350-409.  The 
recollection about Bundy?s family comes from two sources.  First, the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and 
Louis Auchincloss interview with author, 12 March 2002, New York City.  Second, Auchincloss?s 
treatment of Bundy?s actions during the Vietnam era in the novel, Honorable Men (Boston: Houghton-
Mifflin Company, 1985).  The novel?s main character, Chip Benedict, a New England blue-blood who 
can trace his ancestry in America back 300 years, serves as special assistant to the Secretary of State 
and is a firm supporter of the war even after he leaves government.  Auchincloss who, during our 
interview, discussed the impact of the war on Bundy?s professional career but also on his family life.  
In an argument with his son and daughter, the fictional Chip Benedict reveals the patrician basis for his 
support of U.S. intervention:  ?Had I been President, I should never have instituted so massive a 
military presence on the Asian mainland.  It can hardly be justified on economic grounds, and probably 
not even on grounds of national security.?  When one of his children interjects that the war is little 
more than ?wickedness,? Benedict replies, ?I do not believe that it is wicked.  On the contrary, I 
believe it?s rather noble . . . To me there is something fine about coming to the rescue of the little guy 
who?s getting kicked around.  Stepping in between the victim and the bully, even when the victim 
happens to be no great shakes.  That to me is the perennial role of America.? And a little later, ?All I 
am saying is that Hanoi is forcing red rule on a people that have neither asked nor voted for it.  It 
strikes me that that is an evil thing to do.  To oppose an evil thing, even by force, may be 
impracticable.  But to me it cannot be wrong.  If a thousand men die to prevent the murder of one, it 
may be foolish, but it is still fine!?  See, Honorable Men: 242-243.  Auchincloss based the novel on a 
character he first developed in his collection of short stories, The Winthrop Covenant (London: 
Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1976): especially, 211-246, ?The Penultimate Puritan.?
544
apart on some kind of overreach in his argument, which allowed me off the hook of 
thinking about whether my own argument was any good.?
35
  Bundy was constantly 
irritated by what he believed to be Lippmann?s reluctance to face the hard choice of 
backsliding on the commitment to Vietnam versus making a stand.  Some of this 
tension was inherent.  Officials in the stream of events face choices head-on while the 
commentator, who has the luxury of evaluating them at (relatively) some greater 
distance, also sees them from a different angle.  Francis Bator, LBJ?s adviser on 
NATO and France and a friend of Bundy and Lippmann, largely shared Lippmann?s 
broad emphasis on a lower-key, collaborative, coalition-minded approach to U.S. 
foreign policy.  But on a practical level, he described it as ?overtones and mood 
music stuff.?  Bator continued, ?I don?t mean to put it down because it?s important 
but I think . . . given the slate of options available to the U.S. government week-by-
week, month-by- month, one-by- one?at that level of concrete-ness?it?s not at all 
clear to me that Lippmann would have said, ?No, you?re doing that wrong.??
36
Bundy?s complaint about Lippmann?s lack of specificity had some merit.  
Like other critics of the war, such as Hans J. Morgenthau and George F. Kennan, 
Lippmann did not devote much column space to the mechanics of getting on the track 
toward a ?political solution? in Vietnam.  His realist critique of escalation, moreover, 
appeared callous to some U.S. officials who thought he minimized the human costs of 
withdrawal from the South.  Nor did he give much weight to the idea that a pullout 
would irreparably harm U.S. prestige?a key consideration for many U.S. officials.  
Here, his realist calculation of the national interest was at its weakest for it was so 
35
 See Fredrik Logevall?s discussion, ?First Among Critics,? The Journal of American-East Asian 
Relations 4 (No. 4, Winter 1995): 374.
545
vague it offered little in the way of policy guidance. Lippmann never quite seemed to 
grasp that if U.S. officials substituted different integers?American prestige or 
domestic political considerations rather than sheer military capacity ?into his power-
commitments ratio, they might arrive at an aggregate that they believed to be a 
rational justification for war.
Granted Lippmann?s imprecision, he was not optimistic about the prospects 
for a political solution.  Bundy?s observations at the time to Johnson, and his later 
reminiscences, subtly suggest the columnist was na?ve in this respect.  That 
implication is false.  Lippmann did not?at any time from 1963 on up?have a 
sanguine view of America?s ability to extricate itself from Southeast Asia without 
collateral damage to its influence in Asia.  He simply did not agree with U.S. officials 
that the costs of disengagement would be insurmountable.  Repeatedly, especially in 
the spring of 1965, he noted in print that while the military situation was unstable 
neither side had much of an incentive to come to the bargaining table.  Nor did he 
believe, as he told Bundy and others in private conversations (and also put in print), 
that the U.S. and South Vietnam could pursue a diplomatic solution on equal terms 
with the Hanoi and China.  No, Lippmann knew there would be a price to pay for the 
unwise decision to engage American money, troops, and prestige in the Vietnamese 
civil war.  As early as May 1964 he told the principal architects of U.S. policy that the 
war was un-winnable and that withdrawal through a negotiated settlement, though 
unpalatable, was the only answer.  ?We can?t expect to get out gloriously from a 
mistake,? Lippmann warned a national television audience in February 1965.  A few 
weeks later he wrote that a withdrawal ?would be a defeat in which we would lose 
36
 Francis Bator, interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, MA.
546
considerable prestige, having unwisely engaged our prestige too lavishly? but, that in 
the long run, it would be far more acceptable to a protracted war.
37
  Lippmann?s 
meetings with French officials in Paris in May of 1965 confirmed these long-held 
ideas (not, as Bundy and Alsop both insisted, instigated them.)  In the final analysis, 
the key difference between Lippmann and U.S. officials, including Mac Bundy, was 
that from the fall of 1963 forward the columnist was willing to accept the 
international and domestic political consequences of an American withdrawal.
IV.
The war debate?s corrosive effects also eroded Lippmann?s longtime friendship with 
George Ball, offering historians a window onto the degrees of dissent that existed 
within official Washington.
Like Lippmann, Ball was an ardent Atlanticist; as such, both men engaged in 
frequent discussions about American-Western European issues.  One of their long-
running disagreements was over the question of who was the greatest French 
statesman of the postwar years: Jean Monnet, Ball?s favorite and friend, or Charles 
De Gaulle, Lippmann?s idealized leader and confidant.  Their good-natured jousting 
was animated.  Ball believed Lippmann to be correct in arguing that De Gaulle had a 
superior sense of history and that he ?could see farther than any man in our time.?  
Ball countered, however, that the General turned his gaze toward the past.  
?Overlying all his accomplishments has been a sense of nostalgia, a groping back 
37
George Ball to Dean Rusk, 31 May 1964, Memorandum, Folder: Top Secret Documents, Box 23, 
Records of Undersecretary George W. Ball, 1961-1966, Lot 74D272, NARA II.  For Lippmann?s 
quotes, Walter Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 
1965): 205; and Lippmann, T&T, 18 March 1965, ?Vietnamese Policy Re-examined.?
547
toward a past that can?t be recovered or even imitated,? Ball once told Lippmann.  He 
described De Gaulle as a ?twentieth-century Don Quixote, seeking to preserve old 
forms and restore old patterns,? to retrieve France?s glory.
38
  By the end of the debate 
on Vietnam, after hundreds of thousands of American troops were deployed, Ball 
used similar logic to describe Lippmann?s geopolitical objections to the war, urging 
his friend to put aside his intellectual arguments or risk prolonging the war.
Ball worked hard in his retirement to craft his image as a Vietnam dissenter.  
He was rewarded for his efforts.  In a score of monographs and textbooks, scholars 
portray him as the lone, principled, official figure who rejected a military solution in 
Vietnam.  Larry Berman?s Planning a Tragedy, a landmark book on the Johnson 
administration?s decision-making process for escalating the war, portrays Ball in a 
sympathetic light.
39
  Berman?s account is dismissive of the notion that Ball acted as 
an ?institutionalized devil?s advocate,? an in-house gadfly whom LBJ encouraged to 
dissent to create the illusion of a full-debate.  Ball, whom Berman quotes at length, 
claimed it was the other way around: LBJ invented and applied that label to Ball ?to 
create the impression that there was no dissent in top circles.?  Academics, he wrote, 
had fostered ?myths? that his ?long-continued efforts to extricate us from Vietnam 
were merely a stylized exercise by an in-house ?devil?s advocate? . . . Not one of my 
colleagues ever had the slightest doubt as to my intense personal convictions.?
Perhaps Ball?s convictions cannot be debated; how he acted upon them can 
be.  Ball?s objections to the war were always confined within the parameters set by 
38
 Ibid., 96.
39
 Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W.W. 
Norton and Company, 1982).  Ball contributed extensive interviews and allowed Berman to quote from 
548
the administration and, it appears, tempered by his own ambitions to become 
Secretary of State.  Recently, scholars have again suggested that Ball understood his 
role in the debate process and that he was content to play that part.  He failed to back 
up his insightful memoranda with sustained argumentation in key meetings with 
Johnson.  Nor did he try to build a consensus among important State Department 
officials.  All of which suggests that Ball, as Frederick Logevall observes, ?was 
himself a conformist, willingly accepting the assignment? Johnson allotted him; and 
further, ?always making clear that he would remain the loyal insider regardless of 
what policy decisions emerged.?
40
  Ultimately, he ?put loyalty to Johnson before 
principle; his hatred for the war was outweighed by his desire to stay on the team.?
41
New archival materials tend to confirm the latter analysis.  When judged by 
his response to Lippmann?s increasingly critical columns, for instance, Ball?s 
reputation as a legitimate dissenter is cast into ambiguity.  From April 1965 to March 
1966?even as Ball made his private case to limit expansion of the war?he sought to 
mitigate Lippmann?s criticisms, and to reconcile him to an increasingly militarized 
policy.  He consulted with Bundy about how to best deflect Lippmann?s attacks.  
Eventually, he became the administration?s mouthpiece in attacking his old friend?s 
geopolitical objections to the war as relics of a bygone era.  It was a theme that 
articulated many of the administration?s theretofore inchoate frustrations with its 
leading critic.  Others in the bureaucracy soon latched onto it.
In late January 1966, George Ball cleared with McGeorge Bundy a speech he 
the then-unpublished manuscript of his memoirs, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: 
W.W. Norton, 1982).
40
 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): 267, 394.
549
planned to deliver at his alma mater during a meeting of the Northwestern University 
Alumni Association.  Bundy passed it along to LBJ for comments and suggestions 
late on a Friday night, noting that it articulated the administration?s case for Vietnam 
in a way that few previous speeches had; Bundy also thought it would be well-
received because of its source.  ?This is an unusually thoughtful and comprehensive 
speech,? Bundy told LBJ.  ?We have needed something like this for a long time, and 
coming from [Ball] it is particularly helpful in light of recent gossip about his own 
current tactical views.?
42
Ball?s speech at Northwestern University on 30 January 1966, reviewed by 
Bundy and the President was most important because it addressed serious advocates 
of military disengagement, aiming squarely at the geopolitical arguments Lippmann 
had levied for more than two years against intervention in Vietnam.  Ball?s carefully-
chosen words left little doubt about whom was the target.  As such, he mailed 
Lippmann a copy the day before he delivered the address.  The speech, he explained, 
was a ?lawyer?s effort to argue the administration?s position on Vietnam.  You may 
find the section dealing with this sphere of influence approach more advocacy than 
analysis?and perhaps not wholly fair but I want to sharpen the issues.?
43
 The speech 
was received widely as a long-overdue attempt to offer a coherent rationale for 
American involvement in the war.  A story by New York Times correspondent Max 
Frankel, identifying the Undersecretary as the Administration?s in-house critic of 
41
 Ibid., 402.
42
 Bundy to LBJ, 28 January 1966, NSFM: Bundy Memos to the President, Jan. 19-Feb. 4, 1966, Box 
6, LBJL.
550
Vietnam, ran with the headline, ?Viet-Nam Repudiation Impossible, Ball Says.?
44
Their private debates had been acrimonious for months but this public rebuke?
coming from the President?s most unlikely mouthpiece?stung Lippmann.
45
Ball told members of the Northwestern University Alumni Association that 
the U.S. could not back out of its commitment to fight in Vietnam, ?without tearing 
and weakening the entire structure on which the world?s security depends.?  He 
rejected arguments that the war was a civil war, since it had few of the attributes of an 
indigenous revolt.?  ?Rather,? Ball said, ?it is a cynical and systematic aggression? by 
Hanoi, ?one further chapter in the long and brutal chronicle of Communist efforts to 
extend the periphery of Communist power by force and terror.?  He also rejected the 
notion that the U.S. should negotiate with the National Liberation Front, which he 
described as a ?fa?ade fabricated by the Hanoi regime to confuse the issue and 
elaborate the myth of an indigenous revolt.?
46
So it went?for each reservation Lippmann had raised over the last year, Ball 
made a rejoinder.  Negotiations with the NLF were impossible because it did not 
represent the people of South Vietnam; the character of the conflict was one of overt 
aggression by the North, similar to the Korean War.  Finally, Ball answered 
Lippmann?s geopolitical points.  Certain ?thoughtful critics? of the administration?s 
Vietnam policy insisted South Vietnam was not a vital ?line of demarcation? like 
43
 Ball to Lippmann, 29 January 1966, Box 2980, Pol. 27 (Military Operations, Viet-S), RG 59, NARA 
II.
44
 George W. Ball, ?Northwestern University Speech,? Box 16, Ball Records, 1961-1966, Lot 74D272, 
RG 59, NARA II.
45
 Elizabeth (Farmer) Midgley, interview with author, 28 February 2001, Washington, DC.  Ball?s own 
assessment in his memoirs indicates that there was a falling out between the two men; The Past Has 
Another Pattern: 430-431.
551
Berlin or the Korean peninsula; that it was irregular in that it failed to conform to 
geopolitical realities; that with the passing of colonialism the Western powers had ?no 
business mixing in the affairs of the Asian mainland.?  Ball added, these critics 
?imply that . . . we should not try to prevent Red China from establishing its 
hegemony? in Southeast Asia because of its relative power and long dominant 
cultural hegemony.  ?They claim, therefore, that Southeast Asia lies within the 
Chinese sphere of influence,? he told listeners, summarizing an argument he?d heard 
from Lippmann numerous times, ?and that we should let the Chinese redraw the lines 
of demarcation to suit themselves without regard to the wishes of the Southeast Asian 
people.?  This view exaggerated Chinese influence, and accorded China a ?status it 
had never been able to achieve by its own efforts,? he concluded.  To allow a 
?Bamboo Curtain? to descend over the peoples of Southeast Asia would amount to a 
disavowal of the fundamental tenets of Western policy in the postwar era: the rights 
of sovereignty and self-determination.
47
  To argue that Chinese geographical 
propinquity determined the extent of its influence, Ball continued, was an old way of 
looking at a dynamic situation.  ?At a time when man can circle the earth in 90 
minutes, there is little to support such a liberal commitment to 19
th
 century 
geopolitics,? Ball said.  ?It is a dubious policy that would permit the accidents of 
geography to deprive peoples of their right to determine their own future free from 
external force.  The logic of that policy has dark implications.  It would rationalize 
the greed of great powers.?  It was far out of tune with the ?aspirations of 20
th
 century 
46
 Ball, ?Northwestern University Speech.?
47
 Ibid.
552
man.?
48
On March 2, 1966, a little more than a month after Ball?s Northwestern 
University Speech, Lippmann asked him to lunch to talk about the Vietnam problem.  
He found that Ball had fully shifted from being a dubious devil?s advocate to a 
resigned supporter of military policy.  According to Ball?s report to LBJ, the 
Undersecretary told Lippmann, ?that the time had passed when any of us could afford 
to attack the policies now being pursued in South Viet-Nam.?  LBJ, Ball argued, ?had 
made his decisions with the full benefit of an adversary procedure.?  Lippmann had 
presented his ?geopolitical views as to spheres of influence? in private and in print; 
Ball had ?seriously challenged some of the steps as they were taken.?  Now, with 
troops in the field, it was time for Lippmann to get on the team.
49
Ball made his argument by showing Lippmann top secret reports on Viet 
Cong casualties, arguing that at those high rates the VC fighting forces would 
eventually disintegrate.  The Administration was, Ball insisted, ?presented with a 
situation and not a theory.?  With more than 200,000 troops already in the country 
and several thousand casualties ?we had no option but to carry on the war until we 
had achieved our political objectives.?
50
Lippmann listened, his discouragement and ?sorrow? apparent, but without 
the impatience or angry outbursts that had punctuated past conversations.  He pushed 
for the Kennan-Gavin strategy to hold strategic cities along the coast.  Ball countered 
48
 Ibid.
49
 Ball to the President, "Reports of Recent Conversations on South Viet-Nam," 3 March 1966, 
Vietnam (Ball's memoranda), Box 22, Ball Records, Lot 74D272, NARA II.
50
 Ibid.
553
that it would fail, suggesting that when Chiang Kai-Shek pursued such a strategy it 
?resulted in the loss of China.?  The U.S. would end up like the Generalissimo: 
?without cleaning up the countryside he was nibbled to death and driven out.?
51
  That 
opinion marked an abrupt turn-around for Ball.  Just seven months earlier, he had 
jubilantly informed Lippmann that the strategic stronghold strategy was precisely the 
tactic LBJ had settled upon when authorizing his summer 1965 troop increases.
52
Undeterred, the columnist took to the attack in the meeting.  The so-called 
peace offensive had been a ?fraud? because the administration refused to negotiate 
with the Viet Cong who, Lippmann said, ?were the actual enemy in the civil war.? He 
snapped at Ball, revealing his frustration with administration charges that he was an 
uninformed observer of Vietnam.  ?You don?t know a thing more than I do about this 
in spite of your access to intelligence,? he charged.  Ball hit back, ?very hard, saying 
that for the first time in our long acquaintance I found [Lippmann] na?ve.?  The issue 
of negotiations with the VC was a ?red herring,? Ball said; a mere obstacle that Hanoi 
set up to win a substantive concession: recognition of the insurgency.  The President 
would negotiate, Ball told Lippmann, ?when, and if, the other side was ready to 
negotiate.?
53
The Undersecretary then appealed to Lippmann?s strong desire to avoid 
enlarging the war by bringing in China or Russia.  Ball warned that LBJ would be 
?under terrific pressure? from the hawks to expand the bombing campaign.  He 
lectured Lippmann to ?best serve the cause he believed in by counseling moderation 
51
 Ibid.
52
 See discussion in previous chapter.
554
in the bombing offensive while at the same time giving no encouragement to Hanoi 
and the Viet Cong by continuing to argue against the war.?  Lippmann?s refusal to 
tone down his commentary and lend his pen to support the cause ?was not only futile 
but dangerous,? Ball explained.  ?Whatever he said was not going to lead the United 
States to discontinue its military efforts and none of us could afford the luxury of 
philosophical argument that had no practical effect except to prolong the fighting.?  
At the conclusion of lunch Ball again implored his friend, ?not to try to sustain an 
intellectual position that had no chance of being carried out?at the risk of a longer 
war.?  ?That,? Ball told Lippmann, ?is not your style as a responsible leader of 
opinion.?
Lippmann, in print, seemed only more confirmed in his convictions.  Little 
more than a week later he wrote a blistering piece about Secretary of State Dean Rusk 
who, in a statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, elaborated on 
some of the ideas Ball touched on in his speech.  Rusk seemed to deny the existence 
of spheres of influence in international politics, particularly China?s in Southeast 
Asia.  Geopolitics, Lippmann told readers, was a basic and accepted fact of 
international affairs.  Spheres of influence, by whatever name they were given 
(FDR?s for Latin America was the ?Good Neighbor Policy?), were fundamental 
diplomatic facts, like gravity itself, or ?just as the existence of two sexes is a fact.?  
But Rusk told the senators ?with great moral fervor? that spheres of influence were 
?inadmissible? in weighing foreign policy options.  Lippmann explained that the 
53
 Ball to President Johnson, ?Reports of Recent Conversations on South Vietnam.?
555
Secretary had bought into the Wilsonian notion that ?all sovereign states . . . [were] 
alike in their right to exercise influence in the world.?  It put Rusk in the indefensible 
position of denying the reality of the power of the world?s most populous nation and, 
as if that was not enough, that the U.S. frequently acted on its military and economic 
power in its own backyard.  ?We were too pure for such worldly things as spheres of 
influence,? Lippmann quipped.  Exactly how the State Department justified 
America?s recent ?meddling? in the internal affairs of Cuba, Guatemala, the 
Dominican Republic, and Panama, ?Mr. Rusk was too dainty to say.?
54
Ball stayed on for another six months, despite Lippmann?s prodding that he 
should resign in protest.  ?I don?t understand you,? Lippmann complained.  ?Feeling 
as you do, you should resign and make your opposition public.?
55
  Instead, Ball 
confined his doubts inside parameters Johnson deemed acceptable?always, he wrote 
later, ?within the four walls of the administration.?  Over the years, he developed a 
rather elaborate justification for not resigning.  As Ball portrayed it in his memoirs, 
such a resignation would be an act of ?self-indulgence.?  So long as there was a 
chance to reverse, or even to slow, escalation, Ball recalled, he decided to stay the 
course.  Ball answered Lippmann ?by pointing out that, throughout his long year?s of 
writing, he had disparaged protests that did not help a cause.?
56
  But the 
undersecretary of state stayed on long after he knew the crucial step had been taken in 
July 1965, more than a year after the point of debate, even by his own calculations, 
had been surpassed.  It caused a ?slight cloud,? as Ball described it long after 
54
 Lippmann, T&T, 10 March 1966, "The Frustrations of Globalism."
55
 Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern, 430-431.
556
Lippmann?s death, to fall across their friendship.  More significantly, Ball?s efforts to 
keep Lippmann in line provide hard evidence of the limits of his own dissent.  The 
fa?ade of the dissenter?s role that he later propagated obscured his own flawed record.  
For if the old columnist made the mistake of cozying up to LBJ in the beginning, 
Ball?despite his deep doubts and eloquent memos?refused to make a public break 
with the administration in the end.  He left government quietly for the Wall Street 
firm Lehman Brothers in September 1966, taking him far away from LBJ?s 
Washington and the familiar surroundings of his Woodley Road neighborhood.
57
V.
Symbolic of the turmoil the war stirred in official Washington, was the semi-public 
spectacle of capital?s two leading pundits engaged in a finger-pointing squabble about 
whom was cozier with the White House. Alsop wrote a four-part series in late April 
1967, based on a cache of captured North Vietnamese documents that purported that 
Hanoi had no intention of negotiating a settlement.  The evidence showed 
conclusively, Alsop argued, that the North was intent on waging a long war of 
attrition, inflicting maximum casualties on U.S. forces.  It already had deflected, 
moreover, Soviet entreaties in early 1966 to go to the peace table.  Hanoi, Alsop 
added, was skillfully playing Beijing and Moscow to support its war effort.  ?Now we 
really know Hanoi?s approach to the crucial problem of negotiations,? he gloated.  ?It 
56
 Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: 431.
57
 Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 574.  Steel interviewed Ball for the book, though 
he is hardly mentioned except in a passing reference to those administration officials who quietly left 
557
is very different from the approach of the virtuous but uninformed Americans who 
have so often told us we could easily negotiate a settlement in Vietnam without 
accepting total defeat.?
58
A few days later, in one of his final Today and Tomorrow columns, Lippmann 
excoriated ?correspondents very close to the White House? who were writing that the 
war ?has become such that there is no way of negotiating a settlement to it.?  
Lippmann thought it was a counsel of despair because ?to accept the theory that a 
solution is not negotiable is to declare that political control of the war has been lost 
and there is nothing to do but let her rip.?
59
  Alsop, by process of elimination, 
concluded the column to be a personal attack on him and dashed off a letter that 
morning.  ?To be blunt about it, the President got angry with me long before he got 
angry with you,? he scolded Lippmann, who was advising LBJ when Alsop became 
the Johnson administration because of the war.  Ball's memoirs, which offer a long defense of his 
decision not to resign in protest, seem directed at Steel's less-than-complimentary conclusions.
58
 Joe Alsop, Matter of Fact, ?Now We Really Know?III, 28 April 1967, Washington Post: A25; 
?Now We Really Know It,? 26 April 1967, Washington Post: A23.  See also, Alsop, ?Now We Really 
Know?I,? 24 April 1967, Washington Post: A19; and Alsop, ?Now We Really Know?IV,? 1 May 
1967, Washington Post: A17. Alsop and Lippmann also were bitterly divided over the practicality of 
negotiations.  In a letter replying to a Lippmann column in early January 1967, Alsop wrote, ?The 
Americans who ?stop the bombing to get talks? . . . will not have blood on their hands because they 
have gone to the negotiating table.  We should be ready to go to the negotiating table any time that 
Hanoi is willing to do so.  They will have blood on their hands, rather, if the resulting respite is used by 
the North Vietnamese to reinforce their units in the South and to launch a new war, as I am sure it will 
be used.  Advocates of a bombing pause will then ?be responsible for making useless the past 
sacrifices of our soldiers,? Alsop concluded.  Lippmann retorted with a one-line note, ?It?s not clear to 
me how there can be a negotiating table with no respite in the war.?  See Alsop to Lippmann, 11 
January 1967, and Lippmann to Alsop, 14 January 1967, Series III, Box 50 Folder 38, WLC.  The 
column Alsop appears to have been responding to was: Lippmann, T&T, 10 January 1967, ?Harrison 
Salisbury in Hanoi.?  ?We are warned,? Lippmann wrote, that peace talks are ?a trick to obtain a 
respite by an enemy who is on the verge of defeat.  We are told that during the respite Hanoi will build 
up a still larger army, and that then the blood of our soldiers will be on the hands of the President or of 
anyone else who begins to negotiate.? 
59
 T&T, ?An Insoluble War?? 2 May 1967.  According to Lippmann?s research assistant, Lippmann 
was singling out a New York Times Magazine article by Max Frankel, not Alsop.  See Elizabeth 
Midgley Notebook, 4 May 1967.  This is confirmed by a letter from Lippmann to Alsop on 4 May 
558
persona non grata at the White House late in 1964.  ?And although I feel quite 
differently from you about the war in Vietnam, I have made no attempt whatever to 
resume an old friendship with the President, although semi-invitations to do so have 
been proffered through third parties.?
60
  Alsop attached a lengthy memorandum 
summarizing the captured North Vietnamese documents indicating that Hanoi would 
not make a diplomatic settlement which Lippmann had been advocating since 1963.  
Rather than accuse him of ?propagating? White House views, Alsop wrote, it would 
be ?more appropriate to deal with the effect of such evidence on all the things that 
have been said and written about this rather important subject.?
61
Alsop?s support for American prosecution of the Vietnam war never flagged.  
?Joe was an obsessive man by nature,? observed the co-author of his memoirs, ?and 
[Vietnam] was an obsession that, in the end, got the better of him.?  He believed 
American intervention to be justified as an antidote to Communism in the region.  In 
his estimate, intervention preserved American power and prestige in Asia, an 
increasingly significant part of the world.  In 1967, Alsop wrote, ?The Pacific is soon 
(maybe within thirty years) due to become another great world lake quite on par with 
the Atlantic.  And the U.S., a land bridge between the two world lakes, cannot really 
afford to opt out of history in the Pacific.?
62
  Even after the TET offensive in 1968, 
1967.  ?I respect you too much to talk back to you so indirectly,? Lippmann assured Alsop.  See WLC, 
Group 326, Series III, Box 50, Folder 38.
60
 Joe Alsop to Walter Lippmann, 2 May 1967, Box 1, Folder A (1967), Robert F. Kennedy Senate 
Correspondence, 1964-1968, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA (hereinafter referred to as 
?JFKL?).  
61
 Ibid.
62
 Joseph W. Alsop with Adam Platt, I?ve Seen the Best of It: Memoirs (New York: W.W. Norton and 
Company, 1992): 473.  See especially, the epilogue written by co-author Platt who edited the 
manuscript, published after Alsop?s death in 1989, pp. 471-480.
559
Alsop remained absurdly optimistic about the chance for military victory.  At a dinner 
party, as W. Averell Harriman and Israeli Ambassador Yitzak Rabin were discussing 
concerns about Soviet influence in Yemen, Alsop interjected, ?Everything will be all 
right in the Middle East as soon as we have won in Vietnam.?  When Harriman 
objected that the two were not connected Alsop replied, ?We cured Berlin by standing 
firm in Cuba.?  Harriman exploded at the columnist, ?You?re a damn fool . . . like a 
trotting horse with blinders [that can] only see one situation.?
63
  Harriman warned 
Alsop that his columns encouraged the ?isolationists to forget about the rest of the 
world; if [Alsop?s] advice was followed we would lose more than we would ever gain 
in Vietnam.?  Disdained by many younger colleagues who opposed the war and 
resented Alsop?s four-star treatment by U.S. officials in Saigon, he also became an 
easy target for lampoons about war enthusiasts.  By war?s end, Alsop?s reputation 
was irretrievably lost.  John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard economist, former 
ambassador to India and a critic of the war, observed that along with Johnson, Alsop 
was the ?leading non-combatant casualty of Vietnam . . . From a much-feared 
columnist, warrior and prophet he has become a figure of fun.  It was the war that did 
him in.?
64
  In late-1974, just weeks after Lippmann?s death, Alsop retired his Matter 
of Fact column; four months later, Saigon fell.  
Alsop remained militantly skeptical of Lippmann?s emphasis on diplomacy.  
Years afterward, an interviewer asked Alsop to recall the foreign policy advice 
Washington?s leading pundits gave to the Kennedy administration during its 
63
 W. Averell Harriman, Memorandum for Personal Files, Conversation at Polly Wisner?s with Joe 
Alsop and Others, 6 March 1968, Box 586, W. Averell Harriman Papers, LC.
560
tumultuous first year.  The conversation came around to the Berlin crisis.  ?I can tell 
you what Walter said,? he shot back.  ?He said, ?We?ll go into a closet and think until 
it?s all blown over.??
65
  It was vintage Alsop?an abrasive, combative, and  
?passionately subjective? Vietnam supporter, whose debate with Lippmann about the 
war symbolized their polarized views on the greater issue of global containment.
VI.
Early in 1966, as McGeorge Bundy prepared to leave government, White House staff 
and the Policy Planning Council (PPC) members, began sifting through years of 
Lippmann?s writings to amass?as one official put it??the continuities and character 
of the Lippmann opposition.?  They focused primarily on the major cold war crises 
which, in almost every case, the columnist counseled negotiation and 
accommodation.  The hundreds of pages of material that researchers dredged up that 
spring and summer purported that Lippmann was a fair-weather friend and a first-rate 
appeaser.  What the administration had in mind?whether to use his failed predictions 
in officials statements to embarrass him or to turn them over to an outside source to 
use?is not readily apparent.  It is equally unclear if Johnson authorized these studies 
himself.  No Presidential directive survives in the documentary record.  Still, LBJ 
knew his advisors were ferreting out these details at least as early as May 1966, when 
Walt Rostow dashed off a memo outlining Lippmann?s positions on ten postwar 
64
 Joseph Alsop, I've Seen the Best of It (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989): 474.
65
 Interview with Joe Alsop (1979), Box 1, Kern-Levering Papers, JFKL.
561
foreign policy events.
66
  Johnson did nothing to discourage these activities which the 
White House soon dubbed, the ?Lippmann Project.?
67
Over at the State Department, the Policy Planning Council?s director (soon to 
be national security adviser), Walt W. Rostow, and his hand-picked successor, Henry 
Owen, busied themselves with how to publicly answer Lippmann.  Most 
disconcerting for this group was Lippmann?s heightened emphasis on the danger of 
direct confrontation with China.  In his first column of the new year, Lippmann 
pressed officials to de-link South Vietnam from their program of containing China.  
He hit Johnson hard.  The President, Lippmann wrote, was ?on the verge of making 
the kind of ruinous historical mistake which the Athenians made when they attacked 
Syracuse, which Napoleon and Hitler made when they attacked Russia.  He is on the 
verge of engaging this country in a war which can grow into a great war lasting for 
many years and promising no rational solution.?
68
  He also accused Dean Rusk and 
Robert McNamara of committing themselves to the ?fallacy that South Vietnam is the 
Armageddon of the conflict with communism.?  While it was ?essential? that the PRC 
be contained until its ?revolutionary ardors have cooled,? Lippmann wrote that 
American unilateralism in Southeast Asia threatened the foundations of a containment 
alliance.  Instead of arousing resistance to Chinese expansion, U.S. policy was driving 
the ?containing powers? of Asia (India, Japan, the USSR, and Pakistan) away from an 
66
 Walt Rostow to LBJ, ?Lippmann?s Positions Over the Past 20 Years,? 9 May 1966, PR18 (Publicity, 
1966), Box 83, White House Confidential File, LBJL.
67
 The Lippmann Project materials, gathered by both the State Department Policy Planning Council 
staff and a team of White House researchers, are scattered through two boxes in the LBJL.  See the 
Fred Panzer Files, Box 377, ?Walter Lippmann?; and the White House Confidential File (Oversized 
Attachments), Box 171, ?Walter Lippmann Project,? in three sections with appendices. See also, 
Robert Kintner to President Johnson, 12 August 1966, Box 358, WHCF, ExPr, Folder PR 7/24/66-
9/26/66, LBJL.
68
 Lippmann, T&T, 4 January 1966, ?The President in the Morass.?
562
alignment with the U.S.  
Lippmann struck a raw nerve in the administration.  Walt Rostow prepared a 
response that day.  ?Lippmann remains loyal to the concept which was revolutionary 
in his youth,? Rostow wrote Rusk, ?namely, that the U.S. should assume from the 
British the responsibility of controlling the sea approaches to the United States. But 
he regards any extension of our responsibilities beyond the limits set by Admiral 
Mahan, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Great White Fleet as ?unnatural.??
69
  Rusk asked 
Rostow to substantiate his claims.  A member of Rostow?s Policy Planning Council 
staff began to research Lippmann?s columns from the late-1940s and during the 
Kennedy years, surmising that on ?the basic question of containment vs. retreat? he 
preferred the latter.  Over the next month, Rusk received updates from his special 
assistant, Ernest K. Lindley.  An interim draft of a PPC paper, ?Dissent by Public 
Opinion Leaders on Issues of Confrontation Since 1946,? was prepared for Rostow?
including a discussion of Lippmann?s opposition to the 1947 bill to aid Greece and 
Turkey and the Truman Doctrine.
70
  Several months later, in his new role as national 
security adviser, Rostow apprised LBJ of Lippmann?s positions on 10 major crises 
with Communist powers since the end of World War II.  In most cases, Lippmann 
advised mediation and accommodation rather than a military confrontation.  ?[It] 
probably won?t tell you anything you don?t know,? Rostow wrote, ?but I thought you 
69
 Rostow to Rusk, ?A Reply to Lippmann,? 4 January 1966, LBJL.
70
 See the following items, copies of which were found in Fred Panzer?s Office Files, Box 377, LBJL: 
Ernest K. Lindley to Dean Rusk, ?Quotations from Walter Lippmann,? 10 January 1966; Ernest K. 
Lindley to Dean Rusk, ?More Regarding Lippmann,? 28 January 1966; Alec France (PPC) to Ernest K. 
Lindley, ?Review of Lippmann Position? (interim draft), 25 January 1966;  Alec France to Ernest K. 
Lindley, ?Review of Lippmann Positions? (sequel to memo of January 25, 1966), 14 February 1966;
and Alec France to Walt W. Rostow, ?Dissent by Public Opinion Leaders on Issues of Confrontation 
Since 1946 (interim draft),? no date.
563
might like to keep it handy.?
71
Johnson?s performance at the Honolulu Conference with South Vietnamese 
prime minister Nguyen Cao Ky confirmed Lippmann?s worst fears.  During the 
February 1966 meeting Johnson made a new American military and economic 
commitment to Ky in exchange for the South Vietnamese leader?s (reluctant) promise 
to reform the Saigon government economically, socially, and politcally. The 
President told the press that he wanted no more ?high-sounding words,? but must 
have ?coonskins on the wall.?  The final conference communiqu?, the so-called 
?Declaration of Honolulu,? expressed solidarity between Washington and Saigon in 
the war?s ultimate aims: ?defense against aggression, the work of social revolution, 
the goal of free self-government, the attack on hunger, ignorance, and disease, and the 
unending quest for peace.?
72
Lippmann read the Honolulu declaration as a commitment to unlimited war.  
This time Lippmann singled out Dean Rusk and the chief of the Asian affairs office, 
William Bundy, for special criticism.  While he did not dispute the idea that 
containing China was ?necessary to the peace of the world and a vital interest? of the 
U.S., he criticized the unilateral tactics of American officials.  In responding to 
Stalinist Russia in the postwar years, American leaders had carefully constructed a 
strong alliance system in Western Europe, Lippmann explained.  But in Asia, due to 
the ?miscalculations and blundering? in Vietnam, the U.S. had ?alienated and indeed 
neutralized all the great powers? around the Chinese periphery?India, Pakistan, and 
71
 Walt Rostow to Lyndon Johnson, ?Lippmann?s Positions Over the Past 20 Years,? 9 May 1966, 
White House Confidential File, Box 83, PR 18 (Publicity, 1966), LBJL.
72
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon Johnson, 1966, Volume I: online at 
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu ; item 54, 8 February 1966, ?Joint Statement Following Discussions in 
564
Japan.
73
  American policy in Southeast Asia, Lippmann concluded, was akin to 
setting out ?to contain Stalinist Russia by ignoring the British, the French, the Italians 
and the Germans and . . . to make our stand against Communism by the defense of?
let us say?Bucharest.?  Alliances mattered; spheres of influence mattered more.  
Vietnam, Lippmann believed, lay inside China?s reach as a great power.
74
.  
This time Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs William Bundy, fired 
off a response?a three-page memo on the morning of 15 February 1966 for the 
President sent through his brother, McGeorge Bundy.  William Bundy rejected the 
idea that the Honolulu conference had amounted to a pledge to fight an unlimited war 
that would vastly increase the chances of Chinese intervention.  He also took 
exception to Lippmann?s argument that the U.S. had chosen to contain China 
unilaterally, citing the existence of the SEATO and ANZUS treaties.  He described as 
a ?gross exaggeration? Lippmann?s charge that the war had cost the support of 
important allies such as India, Pakistan, and Japan.  None of these countries had been 
prepared to police their regions militarily before Vietnam, Bundy added.  Vietnam 
had not prevented participation from Japan and India so much as it ?stirred them to 
doubts about their previous lack of responsibility.?  Although there had been some 
public opposition in these key countries, ?underneath it all, both Japan and India, at 
all levels would be horrified if we had done what Mr. Lippmann advocates and 
allowed Vietnam to go under.? Bundy struck a recurrent theme, complaining of 
Lippmann?s ?extra-ordinary ignorance of Asia.  In the past he strongly opposed our 
Honolulu with the Chief of State and the Prime Minister of Vietnam?; quote from item 55, 8 February 
1966, ?The Declaration of Honolulu?; see also Dallek?s discussion, Flawed Giant: 352-356.
73
 Lippmann, T&T, 15 February 1966, ?Confrontation with China.?
74
 Ibid.
565
resistance to Japanese ambitions in World War 2.  His knowledge of attitudes in such 
key countries as Japan and India is entirely second-hand and based largely on the 
misleading noises that come from intellectual circles.?
75
Beyond contributing to the domestic dissonance, Lippmann?s columns had an 
unsettling effect on key Southeast Asian governments.  During a post-Honolulu 
Conference good-will tour to Thailand, Laos, South Vietnam, and six other countries, 
Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey and Ambassador-at-Large W. Averell Harriman 
were confronted by diplomats worried about what Lippmann was writing.  Thai 
Foreign Minister Thanat Khomen, who had read Lippmann columns urging 
negotiations with Hanoi, raised his government?s ?concern that [the U.S.] might be 
contemplating negotiations which would recognize the Viet Cong as a legitimate 
participant in its own right,? Humphrey cabled to LBJ.  ?It is startling to realize how 
much damage is done in this part of the world by the Lippmann columns,? Senator J. 
William Fulbright?s hearings, and campus protests.  Humphrey and Harriman assured 
Thai leaders of LBJ?s resolve, describing Lippmann?s views as ?the vocal complaints 
of a small minority.?
76
  In Seoul, South Korea, President Chung Hee Pak complained 
that the dissent of influential U.S. commentators and key senators cast doubt on 
American intentions in South Vietnam.  Harriman and the vice President heard 
similar complaints from Australian and New Zealand officials, as well as from the 
Ferdinand Marcos government in the Philippines.
77
  Harriman summarized the 
75
 William Bundy to LBJ, ?Walter Lippmann?s Column of February 15,? 15 February 1966, National 
Security Country File, Vietnam, Volume 47, LBJL.
76
FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVII, Mainland Southeast Asia, Regional Affairs, ?Telegram from 
Humphrey to LBJ, Bangkok, 15 February 1966.
77
 See Harriman?s files pertaining to the trip in boxes 549-551 of the Harriman Papers at the LC.  A 
number of declassified top secret cables are among these papers.
566
underlying doubts of government officials throughout the region in a White House 
debriefing with President Johnson and Congressional leaders on 24 February 1966: 
?Our allies want to be sure we?re going to stick.  Lippmann and The New York Times
have contributed to this feeling.?
78
Administration officials blamed Lippmann?s criticisms for emboldening the 
North Vietnamese to spurn negotiations.  During this period the administration, with 
Harriman as its chief liason, tried to win editorial support for its Vietnam policies 
from the Times and the Washington Post.  While LBJ met privately with Times
Chairman Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, Harriman delivered a ?blunt? message to the 
paper?s editors: ?the more people oppose the President?s policies, the longer it [will] 
be before North Viet-Nam [will] come to the conference table.?  He repeated a story 
that Washington Post editor Russ Wiggins conveyed of meeting a Viet Cong 
representative during a trip to Moscow.  ?He had a file full of Walter Lippmann and 
the Times? critical articles, plus accounts of demonstrations, etc., which had 
convinced him the American people would compel the United States to withdraw 
from Viet-Nam.?
79
  Recently-opened archival materials suggest U.S. officials? 
concerns may have been justified.  In late-1968, Chinese leader Mao Zedong 
discussed Lippmann?s dissent with North Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van 
Dong.  Such criticisms, Mao assured Pham, indicated a deep split among the 
American elite.  ?[Lippmann] says that the United States has already fallen into a trap 
in Vietnam and that the current problem is how to find ways to climb out of that 
78
FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. IV, Vietnam (1966), Notes of Meeting, Washington, 24 February 1966: 258.
79
 Harriman to Jack Valenti, ?Memorandum on Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, 20 August 1965, Box 519, 
Harriman Papers, LC.  See also, Harriman to LBJ, ?Memorandum for the President, 11 March 1966, 
Box 550, Harriman Papers, LC.
567
trap,? Mao explained.  The PRC leader encouraged Pham Van Dong to apply military 
pressure on South Vietnam while pursuing negotiations.  Deep political divisions 
within American society, its global responsibilities, and fears, like Lippmann?s, that it 
was too over-extended would work to Hanoi?s advantage at the conference table, Mao 
said.  ?[Lippmann] is afraid that the United States may fall into other traps,? Mao 
emphasized, encouraging the North Vietnamese to fight a little longer.  ?Therefore 
your cause is promising.?
80
Without Mac Bundy to act as an emissary, Lippmann ceased to communicate 
with the administration.  Much of that was due to the fact that the man who took 
Bundy?s post held ideas about the war that were diametrically opposed to 
Lippmann?s.  Walt Rostow?s congenial personality belied his irreducible, fervent, and 
combative core: ?a fanatic in sheep?s clothing,? Deputy Assistant Secretary of 
Defense Townshend Hoopes recalled.  Rostow was an enthusiastic militarist.  On an 
ascending scale of the use of military force, Lippmann may have been a three, Bundy 
a seven, Rostow was a ten?needle pegged in the red.  ?Systematic combativeness,? 
his friend Francis Bator described it.
81
In 1966, what separated Rostow from most officials was that he was 
astonishingly upbeat about America?s chance for success in South Vietnam.  During 
World War II, Rostow worked with George Ball on the Strategic Bombing Survey in 
London.  Ball described him as ?an articulate amateur tactician.?  The experience 
convinced Rostow of the efficacy of air power and bombing.  In the 1950s as a 
80
 Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), Mao Zedong Conversation with Pham Van Dong, 
17 November 1968, Virtual Archive, http://wwics.si.edu .  
568
professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he 
became fascinated by the notions of counter-insurgency and of nation-building.  
When, in 1956, he sent Lippmann the text for a speech he planned to deliver at the 
Naval War College the columnist balked at Rostow?s advocacy of waging war in 
developing countries against non-conventional forces.  ?I am rather troubled by your 
admonition that we must be prepared for a war anywhere including guerilla war,? 
Lippmann replied.  ?Do you really think that is a feasible military objective??
82
Rostow?s book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(1959) made him an academic celebrity and brought him to John Kennedy?s attention.  
He joined JFK?s administration as an assistant to McGeorge Bundy, specializing in 
Southeast Asia.
If there was one thing for which Rostow, the respected MIT economist, was 
known and in which he excelled (sometimes too well) it was this?parsing odds, 
massaging statistics, discerning patterns, delving into the bleak numbers flowing from 
Saigon and extracting from them a positive trend or up-tick.
83
  During the Kennedy 
years, but especially during the Johnson administration, this was an asset but also his 
greatest liability.  He had a reputation for thinking a little too well of his ideas, an 
unerring belief in their rectitude; some colleagues noted that he lacked the skepticism 
and intellectual flexibility essential for the high posts he held.
84
  When Bundy left as 
national security adviser he recommended to LBJ that Bill Moyers replace him.  He 
81
 Francis Bator, interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, MA.  This was Bator?s analogy 
and it roughly fit Rostow?s own estimate of his position on the war vis-?-vis these two other men; Walt 
W. Rostow, interview with author, 26 March 1998, Austin, TX.
82
 Lippmann to Rostow, 26 September 1956, WLC; reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 587.
83
 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972): 156.
84
 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest: 156-160; Townshend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention
(New York, McKay, 1973): 61.
569
was ?dumbfounded? when Johnson chose Rostow, a man whom Bundy believed had 
to decide an issue ?before he thought about [it].?
85
  Even Rostow?s sympathetic 
colleagues recoiled at his tendency to extrapolate, generalize, re-arrange facts to fit 
his macro theories.  Rostow had a ?very universalist conception of what containment 
entailed,? Bator recalled.  ?And really, he thought?and I don?t mean to impugn it?
but the ?Free World??  That really makes it a little too homogeneous running from 
South Vietnam to Indonesia to Malaysia and to Angola and wherever and London.  
There?s really a lot of room.?
86
  Others were far less reserved in their judgments about 
the positive war reports Rostow brought to Johnson.  George Ball recalled Rostow 
had a facility for ?inventing abstractions that sounded deceptively global and 
profound.?
87
  He?s ?the American Rasputin,? Averell Harriman told Soviet 
Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.  In the spring of 1966, while waiting with Harriman 
outside the Oval Office, the national security adviser merrily exclaimed: ?The 
President is going to stick it out!  The bombing will escalate.  He will agree to take 
out the oil storage [near Hanoi].?  Harriman, a principal Vietnam negotiator who was 
awaiting LBJ?s instructions for discussions with Soviet Foreign Minister Alexi 
Kosygin, was taken aback.  
?What next?? he asked.
Rostow: ?Haiphong harbor.?
Harriman: ?What about the Soviets??
Rostow: ?Oh, they won?t do anything.?
Harriman protested that hitting such high profile targets might provoke a 
85
 Bird, The Color of Truth: 348-349.
86
 Francis Bator, interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, MA.
570
major international incident.  JFK looked down the ?nuclear barrel? in Cuba, 
Harriman told Rostow, and, fortunately, Khrushchev backed off.  It was not in 
American interests in Vietnam ?to get to that point again.?  Rostow replied calmly, 
?Oh, yes, we will probably have to get there because it is only in extreme crises that 
some settlement will come.?
88
In choosing Rostow as national security adviser LBJ wasn?t looking for a 
logician to rethink the problems of intervention; he wanted an optimist to tell him 
what was going right.  Rostow was his man?especially at a time when the old 
Kennedy hands were leaving the administration and criticizing the war at a safe 
distance from Cambridge.  ?[Rostow?s] going to be my goddamn intellectual and I?m 
going to have him by the short hairs,? LBJ growled.
89
 To the end, Rostow remained 
loyal long after LBJ and he had left office.  He once equated LBJ in retirement as 
Lincoln after the Wilderness Campaign, or some other dark moment of the Civil 
War?a man determined to persevere in his struggle.  More than 35 years later?
when he was still teaching economics at the University of Texas at Austin?Rostow 
was the war?s most zealous apostle, insisting that the American intervention in that 
tiny country gave the rest of Southeast Asia the security needed to develop 
democratic governments.  In the early 1990s, he pointed to the booming ?capitalist? 
economies of Southeast Asia as proof of his assertions.  In making this argument, he 
was polite?neither contentious nor defensive.
90
  He explained his position with such 
87
 Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: 458.
88
 Harriman, ?Memorandum of Conversation with President,? 30 May 1966, Box 520, Harriman 
Papers, LC.
89
 LBJ on Rostow, quoted in Bird, The Color of Truth: 348.
90
 Walt W. Rostow, ?The Case for the Vietnam War,? Parameters, Winter, 1996-1997: 39-50.  Rostow 
maintained this position until his death in February 2003.  See his obituary: Todd S. Purdom, ?Walt 
Rostow, Adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, Dies at 86,? 15 February 2003, New York Times: A23.
571
certitude, however, the listener or reader could not be faulted for wondering if 
Rostow was describing a history that was part of a parallel universe.
In 1966, Rostow viewed Lippmann?s emphases on accommodation and 
negotiation with Communist powers as weakness.  He?d seen Lippmann advise 
diplomatic settlements with the Soviets; he was by no means eager to hear the same 
advise about the Chinese and other Asian Communists.  Lippmann ?backed away 
from confrontation systematically,? Rostow recalled years later.  ?I thought he was 
dangerous in that sense.? Rostow claimed that others, like President Kennedy, were 
hesitant to look to Lippmann for guidance in Vietnam after he chose diplomacy over 
military confrontation in Berlin, Cuba, and Laos.  ?Lippmann did not talk about these 
crises except to say, ?Give up,?? Rostow recalled.  ?He didn?t understand Russian 
Communism at all.  Either that or it was something in him that could not stand up to 
the school yard bully.?
91
As Rostow saw it, ethnocentricity and bigotry also colored the arguments of 
war dissenters and it was a weakness to exploit.  He believed Lippmann?like Ball 
and Kennan?to be wedded to Atlanticism.  The columnist belonged, as Rostow put 
it, to ?that little Western European club of gentlemen.?  He identified Lippmann not 
merely as a Europeanist, but as an elitist who knew little and cared less about the 
developing world.  In 1966, ?the intellectuals were against us? in Vietnam, Rostow 
said.  ?And part of it was racial: ?Why are you out there with these people and care 
whether they are under Communism or a dictatorship of some sort?  They?re 
swinging from the trees . . . And you?re wasting white men?s blood for them.? 
91
 Walt W. Rostow, interview with author, 26 March 1998, Austin, TX.
572
[Lippmann] was always a racist.?
92
  At the time, Rostow had advised Johnson to 
adopt a kind of race strategy to deflect attention from the poor results in Vietnam and 
divide left-leaning intellectuals.  He recommended that LBJ launch a ?major political 
battle before the public? on civil rights legislation.  He hoped to silence prominent 
war critics?principally Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright and Lippmann?not 
only by temporarily robbing them of their cause but by marginalizing them for their 
less-than-progressive domestic reputations.  By focusing public opinion on civil 
rights, and race relations at home, Rostow told LBJ, ?We ought to be able to mobilize 
a considerable part of the liberal community and isolate Fulbright, [Senator Wayne] 
Morse and Lippmann.?
93
When Johnson began suggesting in public that anti- war liberals and 
intellectuals did not prize freedom for Asians as much as they did for Americans and 
Europeans, Lippmann charged the administration practiced its own kind of Kipling-
esque racism by becoming an imperial Asian power.  Nor did he believe the strategy 
of explaining rising dissent on race prejudice worked?for the very people Johnson 
targeted had been leaders against racial discrimination in America and had been at the 
forefront of extending foreign aid to under-developed nations.  These were far 
different undertakings than the project of nation-building in South Vietnam.  ?It is 
na?ve and dangerously silly to think we can treat Vietnam as if it were another 
Appalachia,? Lippmann warned.  ?We must not fool ourselves into thinking we can 
shoulder what the old imperialists used to call the white man?s burden . . . though we 
do not regard ourselves as imperialists, we are playing an imperial role.?  And, in 
92
 Interview with author, 26 March 1998, Austin, TX.
573
what was at dig at Rostow and his entourage, he added, ?That is why the latter day 
disciples of Kipling and the apostles of the white man?s burden in Asia are poor 
advisers.?
94
In March 1966, Presidential assistant Fred Panzer revived the idea of 
assembling a team of White House aides to research Lippmann?s considerable body 
of work.  He began from the premise that Lippmann had contradicted himself in print 
on numerous occasions.  ?Granted nobody is perfect, granted that consistency is the 
hob-goblin of little minds,? Panzer wrote Bill Moyers, ?a review of Lippmann?s 
shifting statements puts one in the mind of Dryden?s ?man so various that he seemed 
not to be one, but all mankind?s epitome.?
95
  Unlike Bundy?s 1964 investigation, 
Panzer planned to uncover Lippmann?s inconsistencies and use them to rebut him in 
public.
Henry Owen, the PPC?s new director, enthusiastically endorsed the 
?Lippmann Project,? suggesting that it should be expanded to include other prominent 
critics like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright and 
George F. Kennan, the father of containment.  ?The main point to bring out,? Owen 
told LBJ, ?is that this criticism reflects less distaste for this or that specific U.S. 
policy than a basic aversion, on the part of overly sensitive and fidgety journalists and 
intellectuals, to the two qualities most needed for an effective foreign policy: guts and 
93
 See Rostow to LBJ, 25 May 1966, NSF, Memos to the President, Box 7, LBJL.  Quoted in Randall 
Woods, Fulbright: A Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 434.
94
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The White Man?s Burden,? 28 April 1966.
95
 Fred Panzer to Bill Moyers, ?Walter Lippmann,? 17 March 1966, White House Central File, EX-FG 
1, Box 14, LBJL.
574
patience.?
96
  In fact, the White House kept tabs on at least one other prominent 
intellectual who criticized the war: Hans J. Morgenthau.
97
The White House ?Lippmann Project? developed along lines similar to those 
laid out by the research of the Policy Planning Council in January 1966.
98
  The 
President?s special advisor for media relations, Robert Kintner, assigned two full-time 
researchers and one assistant to the task of culling through stacks of Today and 
Tomorrow. By mid-August 1966, Kintner had forwarded a draft to LBJ at his Texas 
ranch.
99
  Many of the synopses in the final White House summaries?including the 
focus on ten cold war crises from the Bill to Aid Greece and Turkey to the Berlin Air 
Lift and the Cuban Missile Crisis?contain identical language.  But almost as soon as 
it began, the Lippmann Project fizzled because of fears that by devoting so many 
resources to answering the columnist the administration might hurt its case by 
drawing attention to his criticisms.  Moreover, by December 1966, the word was out 
that Lippmann was quitting his column in the spring of 1967.
The largely factual information drawn from Lippmann?s past columns, as well 
as some anecdotal asides, assembled by White House and State Department 
researchers made their way into some of Johnson?s speeches?most notably an 
96
 Henry Owen to President Johnson, 11 June 1966, ?The Anatomy of Criticism (and what to do about 
it),? Chronological File, June-August 1966, Box 320, Subject and Country Files, 1965-1969 
(Vietnam), Papers of the Policy Planning Council, (S/PC), Lot 72D139, RG 59, NARA II.
97
 Greg Russell, Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft (Baton Rouge: Louisiana 
State University Press, 1990): 67.  The Johnson administration began a ?Project Morgethau,? to 
discredit the scholar.  Morgenthau later claimed that McGeorge Bundy and Zbigniew Brzezinski were 
the administration spokesmen whom LBJ sent out to rebut his arguments.  Russell cites an 
administration-inspired article by published by Freedom House in 1967 that attempted to smear 
Morgenthau?s reputation by lumping some of his earlier positions with those of pacifists, communists, 
and traitors.
98
 Steel mentions the ?Lippmann Project? is passing, but devotes only a sentence to explaining what it 
was.  
575
official state dinner for the President of Turkey.
100
  It also made grist for editorialists 
in several publications?including Howard K. Smith and Stanley Evans a columnist 
for the Indianapolis News.
101
  The most explicit attempt to link Lippmann to a past of 
appeasement was made in a column that administration officials planted in the AFL-
CIO Free Trade Union News.  The editors republished in its entirety a Lippmann 
column from 19 May 1933 in which he interpreted a major address by the new 
German Chancellor Adolf Hitler as proof that ?[Hitler] does not wish to disturb the 
peace.?  Reading the best possible interpretation of a speech that dealt strictly with 
foreign policy, Lippmann concluded that ?we have heard once more, through the fog 
and the din, the hysteria and the animal passions of a great revolution, the authentic 
voice of a genuinely civilized people.?  Despite the Nazi?s ?ruthless injustice of the 
treatment meted out to the German Jews,? Lippmann warned that Germany could not 
be ignored or outcast from European politics without disastrous results.  This was, of 
course, before the time of annexation, expansion, and ethnic cleansing.  Many readers 
at the time, and especially in hindsight, found the column offensive.  Upon reading it, 
Lippmann?s friend Felix Frankfurter didn?t speak with him for three years?and then 
only to complain bitterly about how Lippmann misread Hitler.
102
  The AFL-CIO 
editors concluded that Lippmann?s analyses of early Nazi foreign policy somehow 
disqualified him from sound judgment in Vietnam.  ?History has proved Lippmann 
utterly wrong on Nazi Germany,? the editors wrote?sounding much like members of 
99
 Kintner to President Johnson, 12 August 1966, Box 358, WHCF, ExPr, Folder PR 7/24/66-9/26/66, 
LBJL.
100
 See Section VII of this chapter.
101
 No author, ?Lippmann and His Critics,? undated, White House Confidential File, ?Walter 
Lippmann Project, Oversize Attachments (1966), Box 171, LBJL.
102
 See Steel?s account of the reaction to the column in 1933: Walter Lippmann and the American 
Century: 330-333.
576
the White House staff.  ?Unfortunately, this lesson has not taught him greater insight 
into or caution regarding the nature, aims and methods of totalitarianism.  Thirty 
years later he repeats his error in underestimating the destructive dynamism and 
aggressive designs of world Communism.?
103
The heckling and crude innuendo Johnson and other officials projected at the 
76-year-old journalist soon boomeranged.  The perception that the President was 
persecuting Lippmann damaged the administration?s image.  When plans for 
Lippmann?s retirement and departure for New York City became public, many 
observers believed the President had run him off?not an entirely untrue estimate of 
the situation.
104
  When Herblock of the Washington Post published a mirthful account 
of the administration?s program against the columnist, ?The War on Lippmann,? 
several LBJ aides realized the time had come to repair the public relations damage.
105
Herblock marveled LBJ?s barbs and several other attacks made by his aides.  ?If Mr. 
Lippmann were a less modest man, the attention lavished on him by this Chief of 
State would be enough to turn his head,? Herblock wrote. ?And if he and Mr. Johnson 
had lived in the days of Thomas More and Henry VIII, he would have lost his head 
completely.?  The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist accompanied the piece with a 
caricature of Lippmann sitting at his typewriter, seemingly unaffected, as an enraged 
LBJ hurled thunderbolts at him.  ?It would be hazardous to predict the future of The 
103
 ?Walter Lippmann?Wrong Then, Wrong Now,? May 1966, AFL-CIO Free Trade Union News, 
White House Confidential File, Oversize Attachments (1966), Box 171, LBJL.
104
 This view was held not just by the American press: see, Louis Heren, ?Walter Lippmann Chooses 
Exile,? 9 May 1967, London Times: 10.
105
 Herblock, ?The War on Lippmann,? 7 May 1967, Washington Post: C1, C5.  Herblock?s piece was 
part of a special ?Outlook? section dedicated to the problems of Vietnam policy.  Other contributors 
included Richard N. Goodwin, former Presidential aide, who wrote an opinion piece on ?The 
Necessity of Being a Dissenter.?  
577
War on Walter Lippmann,? Herblock concluded.  ?But on past performance, we can 
guess that the President, undaunted by the possibility of a conflict widened to bring in 
other members of the press, will push on at all costs.?
106
LBJ?s press handlers took the warning from the capital?s flagship newspaper 
at face value.  Weeks before Lippmann quit Today and Tomorrow, Robert Kintner, a 
former network television executive turned public relations adviser to LBJ, proposed 
a ?decrease in the ?President?s engagement? or the ?engagement by any of the 
Administration?s spokesmen? with Walter Lippmann.?  He cited the Herblock article 
and cartoon.  In part, Kintner?s strategy was a bid to curry favorable coverage from 
the major papers including the Washington Post where editorial control had passed 
from the pro-war Russ Wiggins to Lippmann?s choice, Benjamin Bradlee.  It was not 
yet clear which direction Bradlee and the Post editorial board would lean on the war.  
Kintner believed he had convinced Bradlee to publish a less-than-flattering series on 
war critics and student demonstrators.  ?If there is the feeling the Administration is 
carrying on a campaign against dissent, and incidentally against Lippmann,? Kintner 
explained, ?this opportunity can either be lost or minimized.?
107
  Johnson?s 
speechwriters agreed: ?lay off Lippmann for a while . . . we are on the verge of 
making him a martyr.?
108
  Kintner found little to commend the President?s method of 
public humiliation.  As Lippmann receded into the mists of retirement, Kintner 
suggested to LBJ, the President should cultivate hawkish supporters in the press.  
Kintner, who?d started out as a columnist in the 1930s, recommended his former 
106
 Herblock, ?The War on Lippmann.?
107
 Robert Kintner to LBJ, 8 May 1967, White House Central File (EX FG 1), Box 14, LBJL.
108
 George Christian to John Roche, 12 May 1967, White House Central File (Name File), Box 225, 
LBJL.
578
writing partner, Joe Alsop.  ?With Walter Lippmann moving to New York and also 
living abroad, I am sure that Joe Alsop will more and more emerge as one of the most 
important forces in this particular column area,? Kintner wrote.  ?He is among [the] 
most ardent supporters of your Vietnam policy and ?carries the torch? not only in his 
column but by word of mouth.?
109
In hindsight, the administration?s obsession with Walter Lippmann 
magnified?even exaggerated?his importance.  LBJ, as was his tendency, perceived 
the threat to be larger than life.  The administration?s program against Lippmann 
distorted the reality?which was that the columnist?s influence on the debate was 
diminishing.  For one thing, Lippmann?s stock had been in long free-fall with 
Washington policymakers, where he traditionally had exercised most of his influence.  
By counseling negotiation and accommodation with Communist powers at the height 
of the Cold War?while simultaneously advocating a retrenchment of ?over-
extended? American commitments?Lippmann gradually began to speak to a smaller 
and smaller audience.  His views on containment diverged so greatly from those of 
Washington officials?a group as diverse as Acheson, McCloy, Bundy, and 
Rostow?that, by the 1960s, he was widely dismissed as a ?neo-isolationist.?
110
  Like 
Asia specialists, reporters who wrote about Vietnam were not inclined to follow his 
lead because it was generally assumed his knowledge of Vietnam was shallow.  
109
 Robert Kinter to LBJ, 12 January 1967, White House Central File (Name File), Box 225, LBJL.
110
 Alec France to Ernest K. Lindley, ?Review of Lippmann Positions? (sequel to memo of January 25, 
1966), 14 February 1966; and Alec France to Walt W. Rostow, ?Dissent by Public Opinion Leaders on 
Issues of Confrontation Since 1946 (interim draft),? no date, located in Fred Panzer?s Office Files, Box 
377, LBJL.  For Lippmann?s answer to charges of neo-isolationism, see Lippmann, T&T, ?The Neo-
Isolationists,? 2 March 1965; Chalmers Roberts, ?Walter Lippmann: Journalist, Philosopher,? 15 
December 1974, Washington Post: A8. See also, Lippmann?s interview with Henry Brandon: ?A Talk 
with Walter Lippmann, at 80, About This ?Minor Dark Age,? 14 September 1969, New York Times: 
SM25.
579
Journalistic colleagues also held lingering concerns about Lippmann?s early alliance 
with Johnson.  Some suspected that Lippmann?s wrathful prose?at its core?had as 
much to do with feelings of personal betrayal as it did with fundamental concerns 
about the objectives of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.  So far as public opinion was 
concerned, broadcast footage of the war made a far greater negative impact than the 
ratiocination of a Washington columnist?a lesson Johnson would learn only in the 
months after Lippmann retired.  Lastly, Lippmann?s tendency to mud wrestle with 
Johnson in 1966-1967?moving away from a strategic critique of the war?
consummated the process of his decline.  The analytical quality of his columns?as a 
totality?dissipated.  He was no longer the man whom, as David Halberstam recalled, 
had for so long ?shaped Washington?s critical taste buds.?
111
  Nevertheless, Johnson?s 
war on Lippmann?much as Herblock had anticipated?became a metaphor for his 
relations with the press.
VII.
The criticisms Lippmann directed at Lyndon Johnson?s policies in 1965 paled in 
comparison to the emotional, intensely personal attacks he authored against LBJ in 
1966 and 1967.  His influence with officials exhausted, his access cut-off, his contacts 
departed from government, his repetitive message on the war thudding dully onward, 
Lippmann?s tone changed.  ?What is being tested is whether the generation now in 
command in Washington have the intelligence to use American power wisely and 
effectively, or whether they think they can kill mosquitoes with tanks and build a 
111
 Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest: 26. See also, Halberstam?s sketch of Lippmann in The 
580
Great Society with B-52s,? Lippmann wrote in January 1967.  ?What is being tested 
is the competence and common sense of a handful of men who, acting furtively and 
by subterfuge, have pulled the levers and pressed the buttons in a war they denied 
they intended to engage in.?
112
  Lippmann internalized the war; personalized it.  Thus, 
when he wrote later that fall that Johnson?s dismal job approval ratings were but ?a 
mere indication . . . [of] the quality and depth of the feeling of having been misled 
and having been had,? the lines between public opinion and Lippmann?s own 
seething resentment were indistinguishable.
113
  Even though Lippmann would never 
?come onboard? to support the war, Johnson (no doubt still fearing the power of 
Lippmann?s pen) waited until Lippmann had announced his retirement in the spring 
of 1967 before attacking him in public forums.  Lippmann?s break with the President 
epitomized the bad turn in the administration?s relations with Washington journalists.  
Even before that, during the summer of 1966, New York Times Washington bureau 
chief James B. Reston thought that Presidential-press relations were at a nadir he had 
not experienced in his decades of work in the capital.  ?The White House gang talks 
incessantly of Lippmann?s being ?senile? and the ?little Scotch bastard? [a reference to 
Reston],? he explained in a mournful letter to his friend Chester Bowles.  ?There may 
be something in the latter charge, but if Lippmann is senile, senility may be what we 
need to get us out of some of our troubles.?
114
The passions that fed Lippmann?s analyses of events in Vietnam confirmed 
many of his long-held assumptions that American globalism was a disruptive force in 
Powers that Be (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; first edition Knopf, 1975): 367-372.
112
 Lippmann, T&T, ?War Shrouds U.S. Role in Asia,? 19 January 1967.
113
 Lippmann, "The Tax Revolt," 23 October 1967, Newsweek: 25.
581
international affairs.  He vocalized these ideas freely, no longer trying to couch them 
in less displeasing terms to policymakers.  As early as April 1966 he warned that the 
U.S. was ?playing an imperial role? in Southeast Asia, filling the vacuum left by the 
receding British and French empires.  ?We must not fool ourselves into thinking that 
we can shoulder what the old imperialists used to call the white man?s burden,? of 
policing and ruling Asians.  Good relations with Asian nations, Lippmann wrote, 
started with the complete liquidation of the ?colonial system? once imposed by the 
?Western white man.?
115
  Later that fall, with more than 450,000 U.S. troops in 
Vietnam, he charged American officials with ?invading the continent of Asia.?
116
After Johnson?s 1967 State of the Union Address, Lippmann wrote that the President
had set the nation on an ?imperialist course? by attempting to conquer and occupy all 
of South Vietnam?then to ?run the country until a new South Vietnamese society 
can be put together.?  Lippmann feared U.S. diplomatic isolation and confrontation 
with China ?if we advance towards a self-appointed imperial destiny in Asia.?
117
So much as Lippmann?s strong convictions about the war led him to rethink 
American internationalism, they also contributed to a coarseness in his columns and, 
as well, an obsession with LBJ?s personal flaws that undermined the value of his 
message.  His commentary suffered.  His Newsweek columns offered numerous 
114
 James B. Reston to Chester Bowles, 31 July 1966, Box 32, Individual Correspondence File, James 
B. Reston Papers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL.
115
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The White Man?s Burden,? 28 April 1966.  He was responding to the charge that 
Rostow, particularly, leveled against war dissenters: racism was their prime motivation.  Tom Wicker 
of The New York Times, had just written a story in which LBJ expressed the opinion that ?one reason 
domestic criticism of the war is rising is because too many Americans, particularly liberals and 
intellectuals, do not prize freedom for Asians as highly as freedom for Americans and Europeans.?  
Lippmann found it a ?curious way? to explain dissent by claiming that race prejudice motivated anti-
war activists?many of whom were at the ?forefront of the struggle against racial discrimination in this 
country and have been in the forefront of the struggle to extend foreign aid to the underdeveloped 
nations of the world.?
582
examples.
118
  While Today and Tomorrow aimed at an elite audience, the Newsweek
pieces were written for a general readership.  Often, they contained boiled down 
material from his syndicated columns.  Shorter, sparer, given to broader themes, they 
became the format in which Lippmann took off the gloves in his street brawl of words 
with LBJ.  Even as T&T wound down in the spring of 1967, the Newsweek column?
usually set as the lead piece in the magazine?kept Lippmann in the public eye a 
while longer.
The war and Lyndon Baines Johnson were one and inseparable for 
Lippmann?a trend that only accelerated in early 1967.  As Vietnam began to siphon 
off funds from the Great Society, causing further erosion of public support, Lippmann 
no longer described the crisis in terms of the geopolitical competition involving 
Washington, Beijing, Hanoi, and Moscow.  Rather, he began to redefine the war 
within the context of LBJ?s inner demons.  ?The crucial struggle of the war is now 
being fought in the breast of Lyndon Johnson,? Lippmann told readers.  He was ?a 
complicated human being.  There are at least two spirits wrestling within him.  One is 
that of the peacemaker and reformer and herald of a better world.  The other is that of 
the primitive frontiersman who wants to nail the coon-skin to the wall, who wants to 
be the biggest, the best, the first, a worshipper of what William James called the 
bitch-g oddess, success.?
119
  Closely acquainted with LBJ?s habits and traits, 
Lippmann knew the war was the defining event not only for the administration for the 
116
 Lippmann, T&T, 17 November 1966, ?Manila Madness.?
117
 Lippmann, T&T, 17 January 1967, ?Alternatives.?
118
 To get a sense of this progression from critiquing the policies to critiquing the persons, see 
Lippmann?s following Newsweek pieces: ?The President?s Hard Decision,? 17 January 1966; p. 13; 
?The Misconceived War,? 6 June 1966, p. 19; ?The Temptation of Lyndon Johnson,? 27 February 
1967, p. 21; ?The American Promise,? 9 October 1967, p. 21; ?Defeat,? 11 March 1968; ?Negotiation 
in Paris,? 3 June 1968, p. 21.
583
man in charge.  He added, ?It is the second spirit which is now tempting him, and on 
the outcome of the ordeal depends more than it is pleasant to contemplate.?
120
Several weeks later, Lippmann escalated the public feud with Johnson by 
writing a pair of columns on the ?credibility gap.?
121
  This was the buzz-word the 
widely used by the press to describe the administration?s less-than-candid discussion 
of major policy decisions in Vietnam.  In his years in Washington, Lippmann told 
readers, that the President-press relationship never had been in such a shambles.  He 
accused Johnson of manufacturing consent from its early days, but especially after the 
February 1965 bombing campaign in Vietnam, ?It is the result of a deliberate policy 
of artificial manipulation of the news,? he wrote.  ?The purpose of this manipulation 
is to create a consensus for the President, to stifle debate about his aims and policies, 
to thwart deep probing into what has already happened, what is actually happening, 
what is going to happen.?
122
  He quoted Bill Moyers who had told James Reston that 
the President was sometimes not forthcoming because he needs to preserve 
??latitude?? in the decision-making process ??to make . . . the best possible decision.??  
Lippmann found disturbing possibilities in a process that preserved the President?s 
?options? while depriving Congress and the public of the right to deliberate a course 
of action.  ?In exactly this way the Nation has been committed to a big war about 
which nothing was debated and explained,? Lippmann wrote, ?while the President?s 
secretly chosen decision was handed down by fiat.?  Such a process threatened the 
119
 Lippmann, ?The Temptation of Lyndon Johnson,? 27 February 1967, Newsweek: 21.
120
 Ibid.  Scholars have largely agreed with Lippmann?s assessment that the President had a personal 
obsession with winning the war in South Vietnam.  See, for instance, Logevall?s account in Choosing 
War: especially, pp. 391-393.  See also, Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 
1961-1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 281-284.
121
 The term was coined by the Washington Post?s Murrey Marder, who had written extensively on the 
Vietnam War.  Marder was frequent guest at Lippmann?s cocktail parties.  
584
adversarial procedure, the right of the independent press, and the ?fundamental 
American principle that true opinion arises from honest inquiry and open debate and 
that true opinion is necessary to free government.?  All this was jeopardized, 
Lippmann added, by the ?pathologically secretive? President who believed it was ?his 
right to manipulate the news in his own political interest.?
123
LBJ fired back, using the forum on a state dinner at the White House honoring 
the visiting President of Turkey to mark the twentieth anniversary of the bill to aid 
Greece and Turkey?the genesis of the Truman Doctrine.  Johnson referred 
deprecatingly to Lippmann?s position on the aid bill by quoting selectively from old 
T&T columns that he attributed to ?a commentator who is still with us.?
124
  The 
columnist, LBJ implied, shirked the Communist challenge in Turkey just as he was 
advocating the administration do in South Vietnam.  Lippmann responded by 
reprinting the full text of his first column on the subject.  Titled, ?Policy or Crusade,? 
Lippmann?s 1947 column clearly differentiated between his support for a specific 
policy of aid to those two countries and his opposition to the globalism implied in 
President Harry Truman?s statement to Congress.
125
  John Roche, a Johnson aide, 
wrote a letter to the editor to the Washington Post dismissing the idea that Johnson 
had targeted Lippmann?but, nonetheless, noted that a close examination of 
122
 Lippmann, T&T,  ?The Credibility Gap?I,? 28 March 1967.
123
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Credibility Gap?II, 30 March 1967.
124
 The dinner was held on 3 April 1967 at the White House.  Story recounted in Herblock?s ?The War 
on Lippmann.?  See ?Toasts of the President and President [Cevdet] Sunay of Turkey, 3 April 1967, in 
The Public Papers of the Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson , 1967 (Volume I): 418-419.  Johnson?s 
extend remarks were: ?Mr. Truman was accused or arrogance, of wanting to play ?world policeman.?  
In the words of one commentator, who is still with us, the Truman Doctrine was a disastrous 
entanglement in an anti-Communist crusade which could only lead to a much wider war.  Some of us 
refused to believe this.  Indeed, one of the proud moments of my life was on May 7, 1947, when I rose 
in the House to support President Truman and his supposedly ?disastrous? policy of containment.?
585
Lippmann?s record would bear out the validity of such an attack.  If Walter Lippmann 
?runs out of thoughts on ?credibility,?? Roche quipped, ?he might rerun some of his 
[columns] for us.?  Soon after, a White House official jested with reporters, ?God is 
not dead; he is alive and appears in the Washington Post twice a week.?  Later, at a 
press dinner in which Johnson took a noticeably more light-hearted tone with his 
assembled antagonists, he departed from his script to speak coldly of a ?political 
commentator of yesteryear.?  The passages were, Herblock observed, ?words of lead 
that bore the unmistakable LBJ brand.?
126
Part of this tension resulted from the fact that Lippmann and Johnson were 
such dissimilar individuals.  Like most unlikely partnerships?among nations, in 
business or between spouses?once it started to come undone the bitter 
recriminations flew.  Lippmann knew Johnson to be a shrewd politician, but never 
seemed to be able to put the earthy Texan?s gregarious traits into perspective.  
According to Francis Bator, Lippmann focused on the showman aspect of the 
President?s personality and badly under-estimated Johnson?s analytical skills, his 
?first-rate? intellect. ?In Act One mode anything went?LBJ could repeal the law of 
gravity.  Literal truth was irrelevant,? Bator explained.  ?Anybody who didn?t 
understand that was a bit of a fool.   And he?d use that to sort of cajole, bully, 
browbeat, influence people.?  Johnson decided policy, however, in ?Act Two mode,? 
Bator recalls, a side that Johnson did not put up for display.  In this forum LBJ was 
?fact-minded, evidence-minded, highly consequential, very concerned about what the 
alternatives were, what the consequences were,? Bator said.  ?Cautious, incremental, 
125
 Lippmann, T&T, 6 April 1967, ?Personal Privilege.?  The original T&T column on the Truman 
Doctrine, ?Policy or Crusade?? was published on 15 March 1947.
586
and doing that with an absolutely first-class mind.  Very smart?there wasn?t anyone 
who was smarter.?  Lippmann was one of many ?put off and bamboozled? by Act 
One.  ?And people who never saw him in Act Two mode would simply have no sense 
of what he was really like,? Bator added.
127
  Indeed, from the historical record there is 
little indication that Lippmann ever saw Johnson other than in the Act One mode.  In 
the Johnson-Bundy combination with Lippmann, usually Johnson ranted and Bundy 
rationalized.  The one time Lippmann observed Johnson in a reflective mood?recall 
the December 1964 White House meeting?the columnist came away with 
foreboding about the President?s true intentions in Vietnam.  The significance of their 
mismatched personalities and Johnson?s resort to antics was that Lippmann was led to 
believe that he could be more effective in his role of advisor than he actually was; 
there was, he thought, clearly room for a Presidential mentor on foreign affairs topics.  
But McGeorge Bundy?s and the President?s mastery of Lippmann in 1964, and 
especially into the spring and summer of 1965, revealed the situation to be precisely 
opposite.  
Lippmann?s visceral dislike of Johnson diminished some of his most 
important insights.  The Vietnam War challenged him to rethink the validity and 
morality of the goals to which American policymakers aspired.  It opened his eyes to 
a special kind of American economic and cultural imperialism that slowly took shape 
in the postwar years.  He mused at one of the war?s central contradictions: the sheer 
ineffectiveness of American military might in Vietnam contrasted vividly with the 
126
 Ibid.
127
 Francis Bator, interview with author, 25 January 2001, Cambridge, MA. Historian Robert Dallek 
tangentially touches on the subject of Johnson?s intellectual capacity, when he discusses Johnson?s 
587
pervasive globalization of the ?American way of life.?  ?An irresistible tide of 
Americanization is flooding the world,? he wrote, ?with our airplanes and computers 
and supermarkets, our household appliances, with ready-made clothing, with 
mechanical entertainment, carrying along with it what is convenient and pleasant in 
our lives and also much of our vulgarity.?
128
  Yet, he chose to ascribe the 
international backlash against this trend to foreign?particularly Western European?
misgivings about the occupant of the White House rather than the materialistic values 
of the liberal capitalist society that the American President merely embodied.  Thus, 
in the same column, Lippmann wrote of the ?dislike and distrust of Johnson?s
America.?
129
  He continued, ?It stems in the last analysis, I believe, from a feeling of 
having been let down.  There is a growing belief that Johnson?s America is no longer 
the historic America, that it is a bastard empire which relies on superior force to 
achieve it purposes, and is no longer providing an example of the wisdom and 
humanity of a free society.  There is, to be sure, envy, fear, rivalry in the worldwide 
anti-Johnsonism.  But the inner core of this sentiment is a feeling of betrayal and 
abandonment.  It is a feeling that the American promise has been betrayed and 
abandoned.?
130
American missteps no longer derived from innocence or naivete about 
international affairs, Lippmann could admit.  But he stopped short of a soul-searching 
review.  Content to wage a verbal war with the nation?s leader, Lippmann did little to 
delve into the impetus and moral implications of America?s globe-bestriding policies.
personal insecurities, frequent emotional outbursts, and unusual displays of paranoia during the 
Vietnam period.  See, for example, Flawed Giant: 281-284.
128
 Lippmann, "The American Promise," 9 October 1967, Newsweek: 21.
129
 Ibid.  Emphases added.
588
To the end, Johnson and Lippmann slugged it out.  During his final press 
conference?delivered at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.?Johnson
outlined the schedule for his first day of retirement at the LBJ Ranch.  ?I am going to 
sit on the front porch in a rocking chair for about 10 minutes.  And then I am going to 
read a little and write a little,? the President told reporters.  ?Then I am going to put 
on my hat and go out and find Walter Lippmann.?
131
VIII.
Lippmann?s position on the war also differentiated him from other prominent 
?realist? observers of the conflict.  American diplomat and scholar George F. Kennan 
and the French commentator Raymond Aron also challenged the wisdom of U.S. 
intervention in Vietnam.  While they offered typically realpolitik objections to the 
war?that it was not in American interests to intervene, that it drained limited U.S. 
resources, that it upset Washington?s global policy?each of these three men arrived 
at those conclusions at different times and for different reasons.  Aron and Kennan 
interpreted the Vietnam War primarily as a threat to the continuity of American 
protective policy in Western Europe?that it would siphon the military power and 
moral prestige necessary to maintain a leadership role in the Alliance.  Lippmann 
agreed, although he also saw Vietnam as the outcome of an inherently flawed 
containment strategy?a notion that neither Kennan nor Aron fully shared.
130
 Ibid.
131
 ?President?s News Conference at the National Press Club,? 17 January 1969, Washington, DC, 
Public Papers of the Presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1968-1969), document #696, available 
online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/site/docs/index_pppus.php .  
589
In the 1950s and 1960s, Kennan reached agreement with some of Lippmann?s 
positions on U.S. foreign policy in the Pacific region, though here the diplomat was 
not diametrically opposed to militarized containment in ?peripheral? countries.  In 
1960, when the Quemoy and Matsu problem became a campaign issue and was 
debated in the second of Nixon and Kennedy?s televised debates, Kennan largely 
sided with Lippmann?s earlier 1958 position on the islands? relative lack of strategic 
importance.  He acknowledged Chiang Kai-shek?s intent to embroil the U.S. in a 
general war with China by stationing his troops on them; a problem compounded by 
Eisenhower?s lack of initiative to alleviate the problem.  ?To compare these 
insignificant islands, as some people now do, with Berlin?one of the world?s great 
capitals, the residence of several million people, and a natural symbol of the fortunes 
of the cold war?is the greatest nonsense,? Kennan observed, a plain reference to 
what Joe Alsop was arguing at the time.  ?It may be true that if pressed and put on the 
spot we would have to defend these islands.  But is it unavoidable that we be thus 
pressed and always put on the spot?  Is there nothing we could do to lessen the 
likelihood??  He suggested that the U.S. could not solve those problems in a moment 
of confrontation and crisis.  ?The answer lies in what we do in the in-between 
periods, when the problem is not agitated by others and when there is some 
possibility of initiative on our part without the loss of dignity.  The Eisenhower 
administration has, so far as I can see, done precisely nothing; and I see nothing in 
Mr. Nixon?s statements to give hope that he has any idea of doing any more.?
132
  He 
132
 Kennan to Lippmann, 18 October 1960, WLC, Box 81, folder 1202.  See also Kennan?s attached 
letter to the New York Times of 12 October 1960, which he sent but which the editors rejected.  The 
letter attacked Nixon for his unyielding position in the second debate with Kennedy on the U-2 
incident and his refusal to express regret over it, as well as the administration?s general posture toward 
590
added, ?the answer must be sought where many people least wish to seek it: in our 
political relations with the Chiang regime itself.?
Still, Kennan?s ideas about waging containment on the Asiatic periphery 
turned slowly.  His position was close to that of Aron and British officials who 
worried that the war would drain American military resources from Western Europe 
and create a ?grievous disbalance? in U.S. containment policy.
133
  He did not perceive 
of Vietnam necessarily as an example of a larger containment policy gone awry.  
During the Americanization of the Vietnam War in 1965, Kennan kept mostly quiet 
in public though he did write Lippmann several brief notes acknowledging his 
agreement with this or that T&T column.  When Kennan did speak out in late-1965 
and 1966, he qualified his criticism.  His solution was to advocate the ?enclave? 
strategy that Lippmann had supported in 1954 for the French and resurrected in 1965 
for the Americans.  
Two problems plagued Kennan?s analysis, however.  First, he tended to over-
estimate Chinese influence in Hanoi and, thus, viewed the war not as a conflict 
between rival nationalist regimes in North and South Vietnam but as principally a 
great power struggle.  Second, Lippmann and Kennan readily agreed that the 
Vietnamese War was a wasteful and costly endeavor but, unlike Lippmann, Kennan 
could not bring himself?until much later in 1967-68?to support the call for a 
complete American withdrawal from the South.  In late 1965, he still rejected the idea 
Taiwan and the off-shore islands.  ?It is sad to have to point out that the true task of statesmanship,? 
Kennan wrote, ?especially in the present precarious state of the world, is not to strike truculent 
attitudes, not to demonstrate how ?tough? one can talk to the Russians or how close one can play to the 
edge of military complications, but rather to see, urgently, what can be done to halt and reverse a trend 
of world events which is leading rapidly in the direction of catastrophe of incalculable dimensions.?  
See Lippmann?s reply of 21 October 1960, WLC, Box 81, folder 1202.
591
of a troop withdrawal, observing that ?no one can question the thesis that a precipitate 
withdrawal representing the total capitulation of our entire proposition in that region, 
would be one of the worst alternatives before us.?
134
Kennan warned against ?a 
panicky and ignominious withdrawal that could only present our adversaries with a 
gratuitous bonanza.?
135
A year later, that view had softened somewhat, when he wrote a Washington 
Post article that noted Hanoi?s victory ?would probably be something less than the 
automatic extension of Chinese power that many of us fear.?  Nevertheless, Kennan 
doubted the usefulness of negotiations, which Lippmann had advocated for more than 
two years.  ?I wonder, however, whether negotiation?particularly early negotiation 
between Hanoi and ourselves?is the only, or even the most promising, way out of 
this situation,? Kennan wrote in the New York Times in late-1964.  He proposed a 
series of reciprocal unilateral actions to create a ?simmering down? period where U.S. 
troops would be pulled back to coastal cities and halt search-and-destroy missions in 
the countryside.
136
Lippmann approved of Kennan?s overview, no doubt siding with his concerns 
about the imbalance of power the war created in Europe and elsewhere.  However, 
having recently given up on the enclave proposal himself (principally because the 
troop mission already had been expanded beyond recall), he doubted Kennan?s 
prescription would work: ?I am very much afraid that the President has got beyond 
133
 George F. Kennan, ?An Authority on Communism Says We?re Letting This One Area Disbalance 
Whole Policy,? 12 December 1965, Washington Post: E1.
134
 Kennan, ?An Authority on Communism Says We?re Letting This One Area Disbalance Whole 
Policy?: E1.
135
 George F. Kennan, ?A Fresh Look at Our China Policy,? 22 November 1964, New York Times 
Magazine: 27, 140.
136
 Ibid.
592
the point of no return in the distortion of our foreign policy by this Vietnam war.?
137
Privately, Kennan confided to Lippmann his concerns about the ?deficiencies of our 
present leadership,? zeroing in on Secretary of State Dean Rusk.  The old diplomat 
despaired of the shortcomings of his former colleague: a lack of ?understanding for 
world realities and their true relationship to one another; of smugness and total 
absence of humility; of a dreadful inability to relate military effort to political 
purpose; and of an obsession with the danger of appearing weak?an obsession which 
is itself the surest sign of inner weakness.?
138
  On this point both men agreed.
In contrast to what Lippmann wrote about the war after July 1965, Aron?s 
perspective on Vietnam in the mid- to late-1960s was cool and detached?avoiding 
shrill attacks on American ?imperialist? motives current among Europeans and 
revisionist scholars.  Ultimately, Aron interpreted the war as the culmination of a 
series of poor judgments, miscalculations, and surfeits of arrogance.  Aron?s 
commentary contained a persistent ambivalence about American intervention in 
137
 Lippmann to Kennan, 16 December 1965, WLC, Box 81, folder, 1202.
138
 Kennan to Lippmann, 19 December 1965, WLC, Box 81, folder 1202.  Like Kennan, Lippmann 
singled out American leaders for hubris, ignorance, and personal moral failings when assigning blame 
for Vietnam.  He was especially hard on Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara.  In 
1967, he described the Secretary of State as ?a very sincere man whose education stopped in about 
1944, and who has not learned any ideological or general principles of foreign policy since then . . . 
Everything that?s happened since then?the whole of China and the whole of Asia has gone through a 
revolution?hasn?t affected him at all; it?s still the same old thing applied to the original Second World 
War concepts . . . that you fight wars against aggression and thereby end war.?  Of McNamara 
Lippmann said that he was ?an enormously able man? who lacked ?political judgment, which means 
that he has very little human sensibility?intuition . . . I think his greatest fault, though, is really that he 
is an organization man.  He?s there, and he doesn?t really agree with the policy of escalation that we 
are pursuing, but he actively carries it out.  And I?m sorry to say I don?t think he can bear the idea of 
not being Secretary of Defense.?  On LBJ?s leadership on the Vietnam issue, Lippmann observed, 
?Our foreign policy has become a matter like putting a bill through the Senate, of placating this group 
and placating that group and bombing enough so that they won?t object and then they won?t object and 
they?re pleased and they?re?that?s the way the darned thin is run.?  Johnson ?is conducting the war 
exactly as he?well, from what he learned as leader of the Senate.?  See, ?Transcript of Walter 
Lippmann?s Radio Interview of 19 November 1967 on the Public Broadcast laboratory Sunday,? a 
copy is in the papers of George Ball, Box 25, Mudd Library, Princeton, NJ.  See especially pp: 12-13; 
17; 18-19.
593
Vietnam that lasted until long after the critical decisions had been taken and the war 
had been set on its course.  He admitted years later that he wished he had focused 
more attention on the American involvement in Southeast Asia during the 1950s and 
1960s.
139
  When he did address Vietnam, he tended to write about containment as if it 
was animated by the same rationale, as it had been when Kennan put it to paper in 
1946-1947.  That view did not square with the post-1950 global conception of the 
policy which, in fact, had become normative?even if Aron saw it as an aberration.  
Unlike many European commentators, Aron refused to condemn the start of 
Operation Rolling Thunder?the opening stages of a long and devastating air war 
against North Vietnam.
140
  In large measure Aron tempered his eventual frustrations 
with U.S. policy describing the U.S. descent into war as unwitting.  He refused to 
contribute to the intellectual milieu around him that ?exalted? Hanoi?s successes and 
decried U.S. ?imperialism.?
Most of all, Aron feared a defeat in Vietnam would erode U.S. moral, 
political, and military authority in Western Europe and dangerously destabilize the 
superpower equilibrium.  In early 1967, he made precisely that point to one of the 
war?s most fervent U.S. enthusiasts, the columnist Joe Alsop.  Vietnam, the Le Figaro
columnist explained, ?is costing you enormously on the moral and political plane.  
You respond that this is a European reaction, that is to say essentially parochial.  
139
 Raymond Aron, Memoires (Paris: Julliard, 1983): 593.
140
 Raymond Aron, ?Bombarders Contre Partisans,? 20 March 1965, Le Figaro.  Aron argued that 
Hanoi could not claim the bombing violated international law because juridical cannon did not extend 
protections to ?a country which organizes subversion or tolerates the organization of subversion in a 
neighboring country.?
594
Perhaps you are right, but despite everything Europe remains one of the fundamental 
stakes of the conflict between the two systems of thought and social organization.?
141
Reviewing U.S. policy in Vietnam, Aron judged that intervention had 
occurred because U.S. policymakers has misapplied the containment policy, choosing 
to fight a war they could not win, in a place for which, ultimately, there was no need 
to fight.  Importantly, while he argued that the Vietnam War reflected poorly on the 
decision-makers, he did not believe it served to repudiate the concept of containment 
itself.  Escalation, Aron described as a series of ill-conceived ?half-measures?; 
improvisations, rather than a grand scheme which, taken in their sum, committed the 
U.S. to fight a losing war.  ?In this respect the American style resembles that of the 
governments of the French Fourth Republic, despite their differences,? he wrote.  
?Perhaps it springs from the nature of democratic government in the absence of 
outstanding leaders.?
142
  In the final analysis, after culling The Pentagon Papers, 
Aron attributed American intervention to four factors: first, ?hubris,? particularly the 
refusal to heed intelligence that had demonstrated the power of Hanoi?s nationalist 
appeal; second, a burdensome U.S. obsession with using counter-insurgency 
techniques against the Communists; third, a ?conviction . . . that the United States 
would jeopardize its role throughout the world if it accepted defeat anywhere . . . a 
sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?; and, fourth, the ?perhaps inevitable corruption? of 
U.S. Cold War leaders.  ?The extension of containment to Asia and its militarization 
owe less to the article by ?X? . . . than to historical circumstances, some of them like 
141
 Raymond Aron to Joseph Alsop, 25 January 1967, Archives Personnelle Raymond Aron, Cote, AP 
88, Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron, at L?Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences 
Sociales, Paris, France.  See also Alsop?s letter of 18 January 1967.  For more on the Aron papers, visit 
http://www.ehess.fr/centres/crpra/pages/archives.html .
595
the Korean campaign, semi-accidental, others determined by technology [the arms 
race], and yet others probably due to bureaucratic decisions, vested interests, and the 
results of unwise decisions,? Aron concluded.
143
  Thus did the French commentator 
seek to counter both the revisionist, New Left criticism that U.S. imperialism 
animated the Vietnam commitment and, as well, the realists who emphasized the 
Wilsonian habits that drove American policy there.
Aron?s strength?and in true contrast to Lippmann?s late writings on 
Vietnam?was his ability to write dispassionately about Vietnam and the chief U.S. 
policymakers who directed actions there?some of whom (Rostow, Bundy, and Ball) 
he knew personally.  Lippmann?s most perceptive writing on the war came before the 
immediate period of escalation; Aron?s came in terms of gauging the war?s aftermath.  
This was, in part, as much a function of Aron?s refusal to romanticize leaders as it 
was attributable to his being a disengaged ?outsider.?  Lippmann?s tendency to vest in 
?great? individuals great expectations not only prohibited a true measure of their 
ability to fulfill those hopes but also devalued systemic factors that contributed?
sometimes decisively?to their shortcomings.  Lippmann initially attacked U.S. 
intervention in Vietnam on two grounds: first, as a grotesque outgrowth of globalized 
containment; second, as a kind of bastardized imperialism.  Toward the end of his 
brilliant de-constructions of official rationale for intervention in Vietnam, however, 
he made a significant shift that diminished his overall critique of containment.  In 
bitterly attacking the policymakers, the columnist implied that it was the decision-
makers who were to blame rather than the bankrupt policy itself?this, after writing 
142
 Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945-1973, translated by 
Frank Jellinek (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1974): 105.
596
for two decades about the inherent flaws of containment.  Aron never made the 
mistake of personalizing the war.  But he also approached it with far less personal and 
political baggage than did Lippmann.  Lippmann?s actions as a facilitator and private 
diplomat during this period also reveal another difference between the men in terms 
of how they functioned as commentators.  His analytical framework for judging U.S. 
decision-making in Vietnam did not limit his dissent.  It proved powerful and 
insightful.  His desire to maintain his access and, as well, his tendency to read the best 
into bad developments did act to brake his dissent.  But, ultimately, neither prevented 
it.
IX.
By attacking President Johnson and principal policymakers in 1966 and 1967?
shifting away from the strategic weaknesses of their policies?Lippmann also 
speeded his marginalization and diminished his effectiveness as a critic because he 
moved away from the strategic internationalist foundations of his critique.  His 
emphasis on the limits of U.S. power, the strategic pitfalls of intervention, and the 
necessity of finding a diplomatic solution to the civil conflict in Vietnam, proved 
powerful and enduring.  Government officials spent considerable time sifting through 
his long record in a vain attempt to produce evidence with which to rebut Lippmann?s 
central claims that the war was neither winnable nor worth fighting.  Though they 
rejected his premises, moreover, they found in his 20 years of Cold War columns a 
discernable pattern of preference for diplomatic engagement rather than military 
143
 Aron, The Imperial Republic: 106-107; 302.
597
confrontation, generally, and a refusal to intervene in Asia, specifically.  Vietnam 
marked no discernable break from his overall assessment of global containment.  
Lippmann?s critique was not that of the New Left and offered no extended analysis of 
the roots of American imperialism.  That said, in failing to ask pertinent questions 
about these issues, Lippmann?whether by design or inadvertence?mitigated his 
own part in creating a foreign policy culture which, in his lifetime, shed nascent 
isolationism and embraced unchecked globalism.
For years, U.S. officials understood that the columnist?s criticisms would not 
diminish as America took a more active role in Vietnam.  None knew this better than 
Lippmann?s friend, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy?perceiving that 
Lippmann would argue first for a diplomatic settlement and accommodation with 
China through an international conference and, failing that, the withdrawal of the 
American military and political presence in South Vietnam.  Bundy did his best to 
delay the inevitable.  According to archival records, the columnist?s opposition 
surprised no officials?they certainly did not view his dissent as an abrupt change 
from his past.  It wasn?t.  It fell within the broad pattern of analysis that Bundy, John 
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, George Ball, Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk, John 
McCloy, and many others had come largely to mistrust.  
The attempts to marginalize Lippmann in the mid- 1960s can best be 
understood in the wider context of officials? long-simmering doubts about 
Lippmann?s Cold War commentary.  The backlash against him was not retribution 
exacted for turning against the Vietnamese programs implemented by the foreign 
policy elite so much as it was a reaction to his cumulative judgments on global 
598
containment (of which Vietnam was but a single manifestation).  Lippmann?s ideas 
about the Cold War began from a different starting point, were informed by a stream 
of perspectives outside the Washington-centric worldview of U.S. officials, and by 
the time of American intervention in Vietnam, constituted grave challenges to the 
rationale of U.S. global strategies.  American unilateralism violated his distinctive 
emphasis on collaborative diplomacy and spheres of influence.  The price of his 
opposition was steep: complete foreclosure on his access to the powerful and the 
dissolution of long-standing friendships.  
599
Chapter 10: 
Walter Lippmann and the Cold War: Diplomacy, Public Dialogue, 
and Useful Patterns
I.
In the days after Lippmann passed away in New York City on December 14, 1974, 
eulogists were plentiful and unsparing in their praise.  ?A journalist without peer, 
Walter Lippmann was a political philosopher who has left an indelible print on his 
times and a legacy of wisdom for future generations,? the New York Times editors 
wrote.
1
?We have lost a great American,? President Gerald R. Ford said in a press 
statement.  ?As a newsman, political analyst, and author, Walter Lippmann played a 
major role for more than half a century in the development of public dialog and in 
shaping a new standard of journalism.  Mr. Lippmann?s contributions to the good 
society which he envisioned for his country will be long remembered.?
2
Americans, however, forgot with their customary rapidity.  The process had 
begun even before Lippmann?s death.  When the columns stopped coming in the late-
1960s, he fast disappeared from the public consciousness.  Lippmann died relatively 
obscure to the readers who once relied so much on his judgments.  The publication of 
his authorized biography, just six years later, prompted one observer to lament that 
1
 ?The Ablest Mind . . .?,? 15 December 1974, New York Times: 24.
2
 Gerald R. Ford, 14 December 1974, ?Statement on the Death of Walter Lippmann,? Public Papers of 
the Presidents: Gerald R. Ford (1974): 749.  
600
the interval since his death might as well have been six decades.
3
  How did one 
describe Walter Lippmann to the ?hot tub generation??  His official biographer, 
Ronald Steel, expressed fascination that Lippmann could so abruptly ?cease to exist 
as a public figure.?
4
   In 1985, the U.S. Postal Service put Lippmann?s image on a six-
cent stamp, thereby imparting a sense of finality to his rapid displacement from his 
locus as the manufacturer of opinion to the margins of public memory.  Lippmann?s 
chiseled profile, captured in orange-vermilion, took its place in a series 
commemorating great Americans of yesteryear: Pearl Buck, Sequoyah, Henry Clay, 
and George Mason. 
There was something self-induced about this national amnesia. By the time 
Lippmann retired, Americans were both weary and wary of him.  He traveled 
among?even if he had not entirely belonged to?the postwar ruling elite, that 
patrician class of ?wise men? against whom a generation of young Americans had 
rebelled in the 1960s.  Though he did not share all of the elite?s ambitions, Lippmann 
undeniably helped them shape the nation?s image of itself as an actor beyond its 
borders.  He?d crafted the dialogue about the course U.S. officials would follow after 
World War II and he popularized some of the organizations and programs that 
speeded American global hegemony.  His social and intellectual ties to the Cold War 
elite, who led the nation into the tragedy of Vietnam, were not completely absolved 
by his opposition to that war. 
Lippmann?s doubts about participatory democracy?principally the public?s 
ability to contribute to the foreign policy-making process?seemed less relevant, 
3
 Henry Allen, ?Chronicling Walter Lippmann: Ronald Steel and the Guru of Yesterday?s News,? 11 
601
indeed distant, to late twentieth-century Americans whose lives were transformed by 
the opening of their society.  The civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s and 
a coinciding communications revolution affected profound change in attitudes toward 
wider public input on national issues.  In the 1920s Lippmann?s influential Public 
Opinion despaired that the public was little more than a willful despot, incapable of 
contributing to the foreign policy debate.  His sequel, The Phantom Public, 
memorably analogized the public?s understanding of national issues to a deaf man 
watching a game from the back row of stands at the ballpark.  Lippmann?s public 
spectated rather than participated in the great debates of the day.
5
  Furthermore, 
Lippmann?s books engaged 1920s concerns about the purpose and structure of a 
largely unprofessional and unorganized press in a new mass society.  But by the 
1990s the organization and dissemination of information no longer seemed 
insuperable problems; in fact, precisely the opposite threat existed, as corporate 
mergers narrowed ownership control of media outlets.  The professionalization of the 
press and rapid technological improvements led by television and the Internet, created 
information that, generally speaking, was more reliable and accessible than the 
system in place at the beginning of Walter Lippmann?s career.  The challenge in this 
increasingly egalitarian society was not one of transmission but, rather, reception?
the ability to process and act upon an immense flow of data.
6
September 1980, Washington Post: D1, D13.
4
 Allen, ?Chronicling Walter Lippmann,? 11 September 1980, Washington Post: D1, D13.
5
 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan Company, 1922): 29- 32; 398-418. 
Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan Company, 1925): 13. For a contemporary 
response to Lippmann, see John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927).  For a modern appraisal, see James W. Carey, 
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin-Hyman, 1989).
6
 Carey, Communication as Culture: especially, 79-80; Christopher Lasch, ?Journalism, Publicity and 
the Lost Art of Argument,? Gannett Center Journal, Spring 1990: 9.  See also, Michael Schudson, The 
602
As the Cold War consensus between the Democratic and Republican parties 
fell into disrepair in the post-Vietnam years some observers yearned for the days 
when the ?wise men? forged foreign policy.
7
  But one astute critic pointed out that 
these mythical overseers exercised less influence upon postwar consensus than often 
was assumed.  The pre-Vietnam consensus was systemic in nature, developing from a 
corporate process that merged the ?interests, interactions and compromises of highly 
practical politicians,? wrote Samuel P. Huntington.  A sound foreign policy did not 
materialize because of the ?ratiocination of a Lippmann-like intellect.?
8
  In any event, 
no one quite filled Lippmann?s lofty role as moderator of the debate.
Nor did American leaders internalize what commonly is depicted as 
Lippmann?s defining foreign policy message.  His ?realist? view of U.S. vital 
interests?emphasizing the limits of American power?did not resound with U.S. 
officials precisely because it circumscribed the very moral and ideological 
considerations to which they were drawn again and again.  Indeed, the two decades 
after Lippmann?s death offered a stark reminder that his geopolitics ran against the 
grain of deeply-held American beliefs and traditions traceable to the early republic: 
Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995): 170-188.  For problems that have beset 
the modern media, notably the rise of adversarial relations between press and government in the pos-
Vietnam era, see Schudson, The Sociology of News (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003): 90-114.
7
 See for example the largely uncritical book by Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six 
Friends and the World They Made?Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: 
Simon and Schuster, 1986).
8
 Samuel P. Huntington, ?Coping with the Lippmann Gap,? Foreign Affairs, 66 (No. 3), 1988: 453-
477, quotation on 475.  Huntington believes that Lippmann misstated the problem of American foreign 
policy in the twentieth century by arguing that ?insolvency and inconstancy? represented unnatural 
aberrations in the history of U.S. diplomacy.  The period between the Monroe Doctrine and the 
Spanish-American War, which Lippmann held up as the ideal, coincided with American isolation.  The 
years of "solvency" from the mid-1940s to the late-1960s, over which Lippmann presided, also were 
not natural: they were an age of American dominance.  ?Neither isolation nor hegemony is natural or 
possible now,? Huntington writes, ?and some gap between capabilities and commitments may be 
inevitable.?  But, he adds, such ?insolvency? has been a condition managed by consensus among 
American leaders.
603
manifest destiny, exceptionalism, humanitarianism, and, especially, the missionary 
impulse to bring democratic government to foreign peoples.
9
  In 1977, the Jimmy 
Carter administration made an abortive attempt to make human rights and morality 
the touchstone of American foreign policy.
10
  Carter?s successor, Ronald Reagan, 
used bellicose rhetoric to re-energize the nation?s sense of self and purpose by casting 
the Cold War competition in Wilsonian terms.  In 1983, speaking before a group of 
evangelical ministers, Reagan described the Soviet Union as ?the focus of evil in the 
modern world.?  America?s efforts to topple Communist regimes, Reagan continued, 
were part of a righteous struggle ?against the aggressive impulses of an evil 
empire??a battle between ?right and wrong and good and evil.?
11
  Lippmann would 
have assailed such language as cheap demagoguery, as he likely would have 
questioned Reagan?s renewed militarization of the Cold War.  But one prominent 
scholar of international relations later wrote that Reagan?s military, economic, and 
rhetorical exertions caused the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and 
ushered in a worldwide ?democratic revolution.?  Under this view, the fortieth 
president acted as a moralist and global populist who, like no president since 
Woodrow Wilson, made ?American leadership of a world community of democratic 
nations following free-market practices? the core element of his foreign policy.
12
9
 Tony Smith, America?s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the 
Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); see also, Anders Stephanson, 
Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995): 
especially, 112-129.
10
 See for example, Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter 
Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986).
11
 Ronald Reagan, ?Remarks at the Annual Convention and National Association of Evangelicals,? 8 
March 1983, Orlando, FL, Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald W. Reagan (1983).  Available on-
line at: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/1983/30883b.htm .
12
 See Smith?s discussion of Reagan?s Wilsonianism in America?s Mission: 266-307, quotations 268-9.
604
Lippmann?s admonishments registered even less with a public under the spell 
of rhetoricians like Reagan.  Instead, his warnings seemed to contradict many 
Americans? experiences of prosperity and strength in the post-World War II years.  
Beware the hubris and arrogance of newly-acquired power?he?d warned countrymen 
and women from the 1940s to the 1960s?but especially the temptation to remake the 
world in America?s image.  What followed in relatively short order after Lippmann?s 
death were years of unimagined U.S. economic and military preponderance.  The 
once implacable Soviet threat dissolved leaving behind petty thugs like Slobodan 
Milosevic and Saddam Hussein who, while capable of inflicting local suffering and 
instability, could not thwart American regional power.  Opportunities abounded for 
overseas U.S. corporate expansion, even in the last great Communist power, the 
People?s Republic of China.  Commercialism and technology during the late-
twentieth century carried out a globalization of American culture far more swiftly and 
completely than any army of occupation could ever have taken it.  By the late-1990s, 
Lippmann?s message of limits seemed only an echo from a quaint, fast receding time.
II.
Reflecting on the closing of the ?American Century,? writer and journalist Richard 
Reeves summed up the nation?s perennial foreign policy problem this way: ?We can?t 
figure out where America ends and the world begins.  So we are willing and usually 
able to take on the whole world?often for no particular reason or for reasons we will 
figure out and explain later, after the deed is done.?  Does America, Reeves asked, 
605
control its power or does power control it?
13
  This question was classic Lippmann, 
and one with which the columnist struggled for 50 years, in thousands of columns. 
Lippmann answered it by advancing a conceptual model to frame discourse 
about the Cold War in which he urged U.S. officials to channel American power into 
a course of restrained, responsible, strategic internationalism.  That framework, 
examined in the preceding chapters, rested on five key principles that Lippmann 
stressed in his postwar writings: (1) the necessity of the permanent participation of 
the U.S. in international politics, commensurate with its relative power and influence; 
(2) an acute awareness of the limits of American power; (3) the conviction that 
Washington must craft Cold War policy within a collaborationist framework; (4) the 
rejection of anti-Communist ideology (and, as well, the subordination of ideology to 
geopolitics in explaining Soviet intentions); and, (5) an explicit emphasis on using 
diplomacy to resolve core conflicts between the Atlantic Alliance and its Communist 
rivals.
Strategic internationalism set Lippmann apart from most contemporaries and, 
indeed, many who have followed.  He had a much more ambitious purpose than 
simply defining ?national interests??or, in his oft-repeated phrase, ?balancing power 
with commitments.?  His approach derived from unique cultural and moral 
components and it had specific cultural and moral objectives: the preservation of 
Western values and traditions, unity of national purpose, and the restraint of power.  
Lippmann sought to excise peculiarly American parochialisms, namely, 
exceptionalism, the democratic-missionary impulse, presumptive innocence, and, at 
13
 Richard Reeves, ?It?s Hard to Tell Where America Ends and the World Begins,? 3 September 1999, 
Universal Press Syndicate.
606
times, omnipotence.  He believed them to be domestic ?habits? of thinking traceable 
to the republic?s founding, which were projected outward in the twentieth century.  
They provided the impetus for a slew of provincial attitudes and actions: manifest 
destiny; the self-righteous indignation at European great power politics; unilateralism; 
the notion that America must make the world safe for democracy; and manifestations 
of pacifism and isolationism such as the disarmament and ?outlawry of war? 
movements.  To be understood properly, Lippmann?s geopolitical orientation must be 
viewed within the context of his opposition to these parochialisms and his 
commitment to a restrained internationalism.
14
There was a ?cosmopolitan? component of this internationalism that made 
Lippmann?s rendition of realism less nationalist than many of his contemporaries.  D. 
Steven Blum has suggested that a defining current that ran through Lippmann?s 
political philosophy was this cosmopolitanism: his sensitivity to foreign cultures, his 
catholicity of learning, his faith in science and modernity.  As Blum explained, 
Walter Lippmann?s ?views were unconstrained by the preoccupations and prejudices 
of his homeland; that he was receptive to diverse currents of opinion from abroad; 
that the values, ideas, and interests of many societies were interwoven with his 
methods and conclusions.?
15
  Lippmann also evinced a clear understanding of the 
14
 See for example, Greg Russell?s discussion in Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American 
Statecraft (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990): 228-230; 234.  ?To a considerable 
degree, Lippmann?s recourse to diplomatic strategies . . . represented the only realistic means by which 
to salvage his cosmopolitan sympathies.  The balance of power and the stabilization of alliance 
systems functioned as self-activating restraints on the irrational resort to imperialism or belligerence by 
aggressive nations on either side of the Atlantic.?  And, Russell adds, ?At the height of the Cold War, 
and with the concept of massive retaliation in mind, Lippmann warned of the militarization of 
American diplomacy that would substitute a temporary monopolization of nuclear power for a more 
constructive diplomatic approach to resolving the territorial and political questions that lie at the center 
of Soviet-American strategic differences.?
15
 D. Steven Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitan in a Century of Total War (Ithica, NY: Cornell 
University Press, 1983): 11.  Biographer Ronald Steel describes this cultural palette of ideas and 
607
influence of domestic culture and politics on international relations.  In his earliest 
books, Drift and Mastery and A Preface to Politics, Lippmann derided Jeffersonian 
notions of small and self-sustaining communities and championed a Hamiltonian 
conception of the nation?one that appreciated the interconnectivity of modern 
American society.  His critique of American foreign policy?rejecting centrism, 
unilateralism, and moralism?followed a parallel construction that stressed the 
nation?s inescapable links to the new international order.
16
  In rejecting native 
ideologies, Lippmann believed that American leaders would mature and bring the 
nation to its rightful, responsible position as a citadel of Western values
17
 in a century 
torn by fascism and totalitarian Marxism.
Evolving alongside Lippmann?s cosmopolitanism was a pragmatic and 
strategic sense of how to organize and exercise power.  From his youth, Lippmann 
perceived the world based upon the grand strategy and geopolitical theory of Alfred 
Mahan and, later in life, on the ideas of military strategist Nicholas Spykman.
18
Realpolitik and classical diplomacy held a powerful attraction for him?from his first 
description of a ?pool? of Anglo-American sea power in 1919, to his post-World War 
II concept of the four principal powers, and beyond.  In June 1964, frustrated with his 
unsuccessful attempts to get the Lyndon Johnson administration to seek a diplomatic 
ascribes it to Lippmann?s tensile but pliant mind; that is, as a unique kind of ?intellectual flexibility.?  
Steel?s interpretation, however, implies far less continuity in Lippmann?s core values and beliefs.  He 
suggests (with admiration) that Lippmann?s ability to keep his writing fresh derived from his ability to 
?jettison? old ideas in favor of new ones.  Such analysis leaves little room for understanding his 
subject?s enduring political habits.  Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 79.
16
 Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitan in a Century of Total War: see especially pp. 11-16.
17
Among these he counted, civil liberties, individualism, human rights, and economic liberalism.
18
 See, for instance, Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interests of America in Sea Power, Present and Future
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898); Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French 
Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898); Nicholas Spykman, 
America?s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: 
608
solution in South Vietnam, Lippmann exclaimed to his research assistant that 
America was a sea power and had no business fighting a land war in Asia.  ?These are 
the things I?ve been trying to get people to realize,? he said, ?I was raised on Mahan, 
you know!?
19
  The logic of great power politics shaped his writing during the years 
leading up to U.S. intervention in World War I, in The Stakes of Diplomacy
afterward, and in scores of his New Republic editorials in between.  It provided the 
foundation of his post-World War II plans for American internationalism.  
Much of the framework for his analysis of postwar international politics was 
crafted in opposition to what he believed to be the excesses of Wilsonian diplomacy 
and on behalf of his fervent determination not to ?lose the peace? as the nation had 
done after World War I.  In doing so, Lippmann militated against what Wilsonians 
defined as a core American value: the notion that America could best preserve its 
interests by exporting its democratic values and institutions around the world.  Ever 
since Lippmann attacked this assumption, historians and latter-day pundits have 
portrayed him as the high priest of political realism.  They read in those famous lines 
from U.S. Foreign Policy, a cold, steely calculus of the ?national interest? divorced 
from values, ideas, or moral considerations?that is, a guiding rationale that considers 
solely relationships of power.  Even Lippmann?s contemporaries blushed at what they 
believed to be an over-simplified and naked linkage between power and policy that 
the columnist seemed to be advocating.  Critics jibed at the simplicity of the 
Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1942); and Spykman, The Geography of Peace, edited by Helen R. 
Nicholl (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1944).
19
 Elizabeth Midgley Diaries, I June 1964.
609
argument, noting that the U.S. Foreign Policy could be reduced to one line: Don?t bite 
off more than what you can chew.
20
That kind of analysis, however, blurred the careful distinction he drew 
between means and goals.  What Lippmann had in mind in U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. 
War Aims, The Cold War, and thousands of columns thereafter was something more 
complex and supple.  Lippmann knew the balance of power.  He hoped to put this 
familiar concept into the employ of enlightened internationalism: ending colonialism, 
organizing international politics through extra-national institutions, increasing 
cultural exchange, and stressing the interconnectivity of domestic and international 
politics, trade, education, culture, and the flow of ideas.  Lippmann?s rendition of 
realpolitik struck an essential balance, merging internationalist aspirations with a 
hearty mistrust of American idealism and parochial habits?isolationism, 
exceptionalism, omnipotence, and xenophobia.  Over time, Lippmann?s implicit 
argument on behalf of these ?regulators? of American policy became implicit.  At 
bottom, strategic internationalism was a means of organizing and structuring great-
power relations and the conduct of American diplomacy?to make the world system 
and U.S. participation in it efficient, orderly, and stable.
21
But for all its emphasis on organization there also was a moral component to 
Lippmann?s approach.  It was this: that the application of American power abroad 
20
 For negative reviews of Lippmann?s book, see Albert L. Guerard, Review of U.S. Foreign Policy, 26 
June 1943, The Nation; Raymond Moley, ?Hoover-Gibson, and Lippmann,? 17 June 1943,  Los 
Angeles Times: A4.  Steel?s assessment faintly echoed 1943 critics: ?In essence [U.S. Foreign Policy] 
seemed to mean simply: don?t bite off more than you can chew.  Its corollary seemed equally simple: 
don?t chew more than you can swallow.?  Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 406.
21
 Again, D. Stephen Blum notes, ?As much as the balance of power codes were couched in a language 
of military strength, they also were de facto regulators of . . . adventurism, imperialism, or belligerence 
from this side of the Atlantic.?  See Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitan in a Century of Total War: 
137.  
610
(particularly military force) had to be made accountable and responsible to the 
citizenry from which that power derived.  Lippmann was neither a man of the Left 
nor a voice for the people; in truth, he greatly mistrusted the distorting effect public 
opinion played in major policy decisions.  Despite these misgivings, however, he also 
realized that only through a process of public dialogue and consensus could officials 
legitimate their policies.  He was critical of President Kennedy, but especially 
Johnson, because of the failure of both presidents to educate the public about their 
war aims in Southeast Asia.  To wit, Lippmann publicly criticized Johnson first in the 
spring of 1965?not on the issue of sustained bombing of North Vietnam?but 
because he sensed that the president and his advisers were preparing to subvert the 
dialogue-consensus process.  Lippmann offered a construct within which U.S. 
officials could exercise power successfully but he demanded that their actions be 
responsible, ultimately accountable, to the public from which their authority derived.  
To deny that Lippmann?s analytical framework had such a dimension is to 
miss entirely its central aim: to help Americans?a people inexperienced in world 
leadership?to adjust to the nation?s altogether abnormal postwar power.  
Lippmann?s belief in the restrained, responsible use of power also made him sensitive 
to the conflicting interests and needs of the community of nations.  The classic 
example of this was Lippmann?s contention that American Cold War practices were 
best validated through state-to-state consultation and collaboration; conversely, they 
tended to be de-legitimated by American unilateralism.  Washington?s foreign 
policies, he believed, ought to be further constrained by a reasonable consensus 
among the community of nations?particularly America?s Atlantic Alliance partners.  
611
This implied, too, a policy was sound not merely if the United States had sufficient 
power to achieve its designs, but whether the policy met a certain standard of 
responsible leadership and had moral authority as expressed by international sanction 
and cooperation.  American globalism, Lippmann explained in the spring of 1965, ?is 
nothing but the old isolationism of our innocence in a new form.  Then we thought we 
had to preserve our purity by withdrawal from the ugliness of great power politics.  
Now we sometimes talk as if we could preserve our purity only by policing the globe.  
But in the real world we shall have to learn to live as a great power which defends 
itself and makes its way among other great powers.?
22
Lippmann refused to countenance using his balance of power schema 
cynically to shroud unilateral American expansionism.  His strategic internationalism 
had regulatory as well as actuary emphases. His was not?as Eric Alterman has glibly 
written?an ambivalent philosophy which provided Washington imperialists a means 
to implement global containment.
23
  Quite the contrary is true.  Lippmann?s strategic 
internationalism not only preserved American security, it also meant to contain 
American ambitions.  By providing a system of regional alliances and a plan for 
postwar American defense, Lippmann offered policymakers grappling with vastly 
expanded responsibilities a formula to advance U.S. interests, a map with which to 
navigate the world, a channel in which to route safely their sometimes excessive 
energies.  Lippmann knew, however, that the search for security and the grasping for 
empire?as he once lectured his friend Arthur Schlesigner, Jr.?were often two sides 
22
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Unfinished Debate,? 17 April 1965.
23
 Eric Alterman Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics
(New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1992): especially, pp. 37-38.
612
of the same coin.
24
  Therefore, he realized that his system must also restrain American 
advances.  His response to containment, and to Vietnam specifically, reflected this 
sensibility.  Venture forth into the world, Lippmann exhorted policymakers and the 
public, just don?t try to remake it in your own image.  Take responsibility for 
international development and reconstruction, but do it in a collaborative manner that 
fosters independent allies not subservient client states.  Ensure American national 
security but not unilaterally.  Having lived through two world wars Lippmann 
believed it prudent to enact policies to protect America in what he knew to be a 
dangerous world.  He knew enough, however, also to insist that the world be 
protected from America?s embrace and, ultimately, that the U.S. be shielded from its 
many temptations and own best intentions.
25
Lippmann?s fidelity to this conceptual framework?particularly his emphases 
on realpolitik and classical diplomacy?provided the cornerstone of his Vietnam 
commentary.  As the core chapters of this study demonstrate, Lippmann never 
believed the Vietnam problem President Lyndon Johnson inherited was insuperable?
though he did not believe the disengagement that he counseled would be easy or cost-
free.  He tried to persuade President Johnson to get out of Vietnam, knowing full well 
the history of U.S. involvement, the amount of American treasure and lives expended 
24
 Lippmann to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 25 September 1967, reprinted in Blum, Public Philosopher: 
615-616.  Lippmann was responding to Schlesinger?s ?Origins of the Cold War,? published in the 
October 1967 issue of Foreign Affairs.
25
 See Blum?s stimulating but brief discussion of this aspect of Lippmann?s thought: Walter Lippmann: 
Cosmopolitan in a Century of Total War: 138-140.  Ironically, it was Kennan among all the realists 
who seems to most thoroughly have inculcated this part of Lippmann?s critique.  Forty years after 
penning the X-Article he would write: ?It could, in fact, be said that the first thing we Americans need 
to learn to contain is, in some ways, ourselves: our own environmental destructiveness, our tendency to 
live beyond our means and to borrow ourselves into disaster, our apparent inability to reduce a 
devastating budgetary deficit, our comparable inability to control the immigration into our midst of 
great masses of people of wholly different cultural and political traditions.?  See Kennan?s essay 
?Containment Then and Now,? Foreign Affairs 65 (No. 4, Spring 1987): 889.
613
there, the stakes of international prestige, and the domestic political price.  His 
argument was that the cost of winning the war in any meaningful sense was too high 
to justify, and that a nimble diplomacy that united Vietnam (even if it were ruled from 
Hanoi) and detached it from the Cold War struggle would provide a tangible victory 
for Washington.
Lippmann?s counsel in the critical years of 1964 and 1965 was no mere 
soliloquy.  He had a track record on which to run?one of advising each 
administration, from Truman onward, against a series of pivotal decisions that 
deepened America?s commitment in Southeast Asia.  U.S. intervention and escalation 
of the war in Southeast Asia occurred in ?phases? during a roughly 20-year period; 
Lippmann argued against each of the critical decisions that prolonged and intensified 
U.S. involvement.
 Truman: Permitted the French to reoccupy Indochina and attempt to reassert 
colonial control.  Later, his administration assumed the financial cost of 
Paris?s war to put down the Viet Minh.  Officials also refused to extend 
diplomatic recognition to the People?s Republic of China and, during the 
Korean War, pursued a policy of rollback and accelerated U.S. aid to 
Indochina.  Lippmann: Rejected U.S. support for colonial powers and 
lobbied hard for the dissolution of the old European empires.  He attacked the 
Truman administration?s willingness to underwrite French colonial re-
assertion.  He argued that interventions on the ?periphery? of the Soviet Union 
and, later, the People?s Republic of China could have disastrous 
614
consequences.  Further, Lippmann advised that the U.S. offer diplomatic 
recognition to China and pursue a ?wedge? strategy to increase tensions 
between Moscow and Beijing.  He vigorously criticized the administration?s 
prosecution of the Korean War above the 38
th
 Parallel, raised concerns about 
provocations of Chinese security interests, and warned that the Korean 
conflict would spark a series of clashes with Beijing over other Southeast 
Asian countries.
 Eisenhower: Refused to intervene with ground forces in Indochina in 1954, 
but by ignoring the Geneva Accords of 1954 and helping to foster the Ngo 
Dinh Diem regime in South Vietnam the U.S. administration created the 
political pretext for later intervention.  Lippmann: Lippmann praised 
Eisenhower?s decision not to commit ground forces to relieve French forces at 
Dienbienphu.  But he disagreed with U.S. diplomatic strategy, arguing that a 
major-power settlement (creating a coalition government that included 
Vietnamese Communists) was the only avenue to resolve the Indochinese war.  
He rejected the creation of SEATO as a dangerous contraption for committing 
the U.S. to future military intervention in Southeast Asia.  The best possible 
outcome, he wrote in 1954, was a united Vietnam?most likely a nationalist-
communist state run from Hanoi but independent of Beijing.  He viewed the 
conflict in Vietnam as a civil war and not as a communist insurgency of 
Soviet or Chinese aggrandizement.
615
 Kennedy: Pursued an enhanced (though limited) policy of trying to achieve a 
military victory, while refusing to allow the Diem government to negotiate 
with Hanoi.  He authorized the coup against Diem.  And, unlike his decision 
to support neutralization in Laos, he refused to pursue military disengagement 
from South Vietnam.  Lippmann:  Encouraged Kennedy to get a diplomatic 
settlement for the entire region as early as 1961?a neutralization plan later 
pushed by De Gaulle (and popularized by Lippmann) for Vietnam.  He 
warned in September 1963 that the U.S. could not wage successfully a proxy 
war in Southeast Asia.  He also counseled against abandoning or replacing 
Diem.  The conflict in Vietnam, he wrote, was un-winnable in a military sense 
and victory, in any meaningful terms, would come at a price that U.S. officials 
could not afford to pay.  
Time and again Lippmann lined himself up on the side opposite of 
intervention.  Between the late-1940s and 1963, on at least half a dozen occasions in 
which major policy decisions further committed the U.S. to action in Vietnam, 
Lippmann advised disengagement.  Time and again American leaders ignored his 
advice.  At any one of these junctures the chance to liquidate the Vietnam 
commitment was attainable?though progressively the price became higher.  This 
was the difference between LBJ?s decision and all the rest.  And Lippmann knew it.  
But he believed he held an advantage with Johnson that he did not possess with the 
previous three presidents: he had greater access and (he thought) influence with this 
president.  He believed he could convince Johnson to use his massive 1964 electoral 
616
victory as a mandate to seek accommodation in Asia, to develop a d?tente with the 
Soviets, and to focus resources on a lasting social reform at home.  He was proved 
wrong.  Lippmann?s conceptual framework, insightful though it may have been in 
ferreting out the dangers of U.S. intervention, underestimated the persistence of Cold 
War anti-Communist ideological bonds on Johnson and his key advisers.
26
In retrospect, history showed Lippmann to be prescient in opposing American 
intervention in South Vietnam.  There is no better illustration of this claim than to 
juxtapose his warnings against intervention in 1954, 1963, and 1965 with what 
President Kennedy?s and President Johnson?s Secretary of Defense Robert 
McNamara wrote decades later in his mea culpa.  McNamara conceded two of the 
fundamental propositions Lippmann used to oppose the war: (1) Vietnam fell far 
outside America?s vital interests; and (2) sending a large U.S. army into Southeast 
Asia was a strategic mistake of appalling proportions.  ?We both over-estimated the 
effect of South Vietnam?s loss on the security of the West and failed to adhere to the 
fundamental principal that, in the final analysis, if the South Vietnamese were to be 
saved, they had to win the war themselves,? McNamara wrote of the principal 
decision-makers.  ?Straying from this central truth, we built a progressively more 
massive effort on an inherently unstable foundation.?
27
  In public and in private, 
26
 On the role of ideology generally in see, Michael Hunt, Ideology and United States Foreign Policy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).  For a useful discussion of the ideological roots of the 
Cold War, see Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the 
Cold War, 1917-1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). Fredrik Logevall argues that among a 
number of variables leading to escalation (one of which was an anti-communist mindset), the primary 
factor was Johnson?s conflation of national interest with personal interest.  See, Choosing War: The 
Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam.  Berkeley, CA: University of California 
Press, 1999: 389-395.
27
 Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Random House, 
1995): 333.  In his final chapter, McNamara lists eleven ?lessons of Vietnam??a good many of which 
Lippmann pointed out before full-scale intervention in 1965.  These included: U.S. policymakers? 
misjudgments of the geopolitical aims of the North Vietnamese, Vietcong, China and the USSR; the 
617
McNamara has insisted that the ?domino theory? had a complete hold on the vision of 
Washington policymakers and the foreign policy intelligentsia in the postwar years.  
While McNamara may have been truthful in making that assertion, it nevertheless 
was a sweeping statement.  Decades after the war ended, the former secretary of 
defense could admit he made mistakes though he steadfastly refused to recognize that 
some of his contemporaries who opposed the war made insightful, ultimately correct, 
counter-arguments at the time.
28
  Lippmann was one such observer.
Standard accounts of Lippmann?s foreign policy analysis suggest this period 
was his ?finest hour? because he set aside his realpolitik to argue with 
uncharacteristic emotion about how intervention violated American ?values.?
29
  This 
is an inaccurate portrayal of events.  The true strength of Lippmann?s opposition to 
the Vietnam War derived from three constant beliefs: first, America had no vital 
interests at stake in Southeast Asia; second, it could not win a favorable military 
outcome in what amounted to an intractable civil war; and, third, by using diplomacy 
weakness of conventional forces against unconventional tactics; failure to conduct an open debate 
about the purpose and risks of large-scale intervention; failure to keep the public and Congress 
apprised of developments in South Vietnam and about why the U.S. pursued the policies it did; failure 
to realize that the U.S. does not (in McNamara?s words) ?have the God-given right to shape every 
nation in our own image or as we choose?; the failure to create an international coalition for 
intervention; and, lastly, the failure to accept the reality that there may have been no ?acceptable? 
solution to the problem in South Vietnam.  See McNamara?s list, In Retrospect: 319-335.
28
 Robert McNamara, phone conversation with author, 22 January 2002, Washington, DC.  McNamara 
maintained that the domino analogy permeated official thinking.  Allowing that his memory might be 
incorrect, McNamara also maintained that Lippmann never addressed the issue.  ?There are two 
lessons I talk about [in his books In Retrospect and Argument without End] that I?m not sure Lippmann 
ever addressed.  The first was this notion?that none of us ever talked about enough at the time?of 
falling dominos . . . that we accepted this theory without ever examining it.  I don?t remember 
Lippmann talking about that in print.  Now my memory may be wrong.  The second point I make is 
that we did not examine enough the question of whether we had the wherewithal to pursue and win a 
military victory in Vietnam.  I don?t remember Lippmann addressing that at the time, either.?  
Lippmann receives only fleeting mention in In Retrospect.
29
 Steel refers to Lippmann?s opposition to Vietnam as ?a strange capstone? to his career.  His final 
years in Washington were marked by an ?emotional revulsion to what he viewed as imperial 
ambitions.  He wanted his country to pursue its own high ideals.?  Steel, Walter Lippmann and the 
American Century: quoted on p. xvi; for more on Steel?s interpretation in this respect, see pp. 575; 
618
to broker a settlement and foster a united, independent (even if communist) Vietnam, 
the U.S. could maintain, perhaps augment, its influence in the region.  Lippmann was 
the earliest and most formidable critic of the war because of the profundity of these 
three assertions.  American officials dared not dismiss him lightly.  Revisionist 
historians who have written about this episode have the story backward.  In fact, 
Lippmann?s assertion that by embracing Wilsonian designs Washington, not Moscow, 
was the superpower that acted with a global ideology, anticipated a key argument of
the revisionist historians who, nevertheless, decades later attacked his realism as an 
enabling mechanism for U.S. expansion!
30
Based on their long experience with Lippmann, U.S. officials?McGeorge 
Bundy chief among them?realized that the columnist could not be co-opted, so they 
decided on a program to delay his public dissent. By breaking with the administration 
because of escalation in Vietnam, Lippmann did what Bundy, McNamara and other 
key U.S. officials?despite their own nagging doubts?countenanced but did not do: 
Lippmann put his core beliefs ahead of concern for personal reputation.  Though 
misled by the national security adviser and President Johnson, Lippmann stood 
against the administration?s policies in Vietnam on the grounds of geopolitics, 
classical diplomacy, and his cosmopolitan sympathies.  Some officials, like George 
Ball, who refused to split publicly with LBJ, argued that with troops in the field 
579-580; 582.  For Steel?s comment about Lippmann arguing for American ?values,? see Henry Allen, 
?Chronicling Walter Lippmann,? 11 September 1980, Washington Post: D13.
30
 The political scientist Stanley Hoffman makes just this point in passing in his review of Cold War 
literature, ?On the Origins of the Cold War,? published in, Janus and Minerva: Essays in the Theory 
and Practice of International Politics (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1987): 207-223.  
?Whereas it was the Soviet Union that behaved according to a classical theory of power politics, it was 
the United States that behaved not at all like a classical great power playing a balance of power game 
but like an ideological power with a global vision.  The United States behaved, then, in the way we 
thought the Soviets were behaving.  In this respect, incidentally, the real father of revisionism, the one 
619
critics like Lippmann had no choice but to rally around the flag and support the cause.  
Lippmann refused to join the team.  He sacrificed his privileged status as an insider 
by refusing to abandon his core convictions that American intervention in Vietnam 
violated his concept of strategic internationalism, misconstrued the nation?s primary 
interests, and broke the government?s covenant with the people to use power 
responsibly.
III.
Lippmann?s efforts to publicize these ideas and to shape policy, and how U.S. 
officials and foreign leaders reacted to the columnist, provide the context for another 
major aspect of this study: Lippmann?s role-playing as a prominent Cold War public 
figure. New sources within the official record reveal with greater clarity the 
relationship between Lippmann?s private consultations and his public writings; a truer 
measurer of his influence on the small but powerful audience of foreign statesmen on 
both sides of the Cold War divide; how U.S. policymakers measured their plans 
against Lippmann?s ideas; the degree to which they relied on Lippmann, not just for 
information, but to elevate the public status of their policies; and why, ultimately, 
they granted him access?even when they discounted his core analyses of Cold War 
containment strategies.
Having developed a conceptual framework for writing about the Cold War (an 
analytical role in and of itself), Lippmann proceeded to engage in five other functions 
that ultimately sought to shape both the discourse about the Cold War and Western 
who first criticized the tendency of the United States to face the world with a set of principles of its 
own, was Walter Lippmann, in his writings about the Cold War in 1946 and 1947.?  Quoted on p. 212.
620
Alliance policies themselves.  He achieved varying degrees of success in these role-
playing endeavors.
 Using his conceptual framework of strategic internationalism, Lippmann 
attempted to set an agenda about various Cold War topics of debate within the 
domestic and international discourses.  
In both apparent and subtle ways, Lippmann was fantastically successful at 
shaping the parameters of Cold War debate because he mastered both the language of 
discourse (often inventing it) and the means of disseminating the information.  In U.S. 
Foreign Policy, he offered a definition of a sound international approach which 
balanced ?commitments with available power??an argument made in language with 
which diplomats were familiar and which also was accessible to a larger public.  With 
the publication of The Cold War, he gave the nascent Soviet-American conflict a
name that stuck.
31
  He devoted his column, Today and Tomorrow, almost exclusively 
in the postwar years to international problems.  Between 1945 and 1967, Lippmann 
wrote more than 2,300 installments which, by about a 4-to-1 margin, addressed 
foreign policy issues.  These were widely syndicated in both the U.S. and, because of 
such outlets as the International Herald Tribune, in many foreign capitals as well.  
Furthermore, the diplomats with whom Lippmann cultivated such a close relationship 
in Washington often included his observations in their dispatches back to their 
respective foreign offices.  Added to Lippmann?s columns, were scores of magazine 
31
 He later claimed to have taken the name from the French phrase for the ?phony war? in late-1939 
and early-1940, ?le froid guerre.?  See Steel?s account, Walter Lippmann and the American Century: 
445.  Lippmann?s emphasis on a ?cold war? rather than a ?hot war? served to amplify his belief that it 
621
articles, speeches, several books, and a number of television and radio interviews.  
Lippmann embraced new media technologies and exploited them.
For Lippmann, the Soviet-American conflict was primarily a great power 
confrontation caused by clashing national security imperatives rather than opposing 
political ideologies?and it was this conception that he relentlessly promoted in his 
columns.  It is no small irony that Lippmann?s disagreements with prominent realists 
helped to craft some of the fundamental paradigms used to debate containment policy 
by his contemporaries and later interpreters of the Cold War.   In rebutting the 
containment thesis of the prominent American realist, George F. Kennan, Lippmann 
introduced the idea that the Cold War could principally be managed through astute 
diplomatic maneuvers rather than military mobilization.  In a long-running trans-
Atlantic dialogue with the French commentator Raymond Aron, again a prominent 
realist, Lippmann touched on another central question about the origins of that 
conflict: Was ideology a controlling determinant in the Soviet-American rivalry?  
Was conflict inevitable because liberal capitalism and Marxism were irreconcilable?  
On this question, Lippmann?s framework for debate was inconclusive.  He clearly 
believed that a modus vivendi?a way of living together, if not in harmony, with the 
Soviets?was attainable, by addressing core national security concerns of both 
Moscow and Washington.  He believed, too, that the Kremlin acted on historically-
rooted interests rather than Marxist teachings.  But his subordination of ideological 
influences to geopolitical imperatives in discerning the decision-making patterns of 
foreign leaders did not accord with his own long-running criticisms of the Wilsonian 
was principally a great power conflict that could be steered by diplomatic maneuvering rather than 
military confrontation.
622
motivations of American officials.  He never satisfactorily reconciled this 
discrepancy.
 Lippmann acted as an educator of both domestic and foreign public opinion 
about the Cold War.
While many observers professed surprise, Lippmann?s rapid passing from 
public consciousness was both logical and instructive.  Average Americans were not 
his target audience.  General public education was a secondary objective for 
Lippmann, who aimed primarily at an elite audience of U.S. policymakers, foreign 
diplomats and leaders, and a small, highly-educated, engaged public.
Lippmann was not like other journalists who used access to produce scoops or 
to manufacture news stories.  This approach derived, in some measure, from the ideas 
he expressed in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public?that, in the modern world, 
it was the intellectual?s role to supply policymakers with analyses of data and
syntheses of information.  In Lippmann?s flow chart of discourse, the arrows pointed 
upward more often than they pointed to audiences below.  Where the mythical 
general public or average citizen could be instructed, he believed, was in choosing 
wise leaders to make foreign policy decisions.  Thus, though he had a wide readership 
in a syndication net that reached many millions of potential readers, part of 
Lippmann?s approach to public education involved a kind of trickle-down process.
On the one hand, he could appeal directly to his readers and instruct them on the 
policy alternatives available on any given issue.  But by shaping official debate and, 
perhaps, by persuading decision-makers to adopt his ideas, he also might ultimately 
623
shape public opinion by promoting reasoned official explanations of American 
policy. 
Though Lippmann had an elitist view of government and harbored grave 
doubts about the process of participatory democracy, he never lost respect for the 
importance of this educational process.  The public, he knew, needed to be kept 
engaged to promote an internationalist foreign policy and to avoid a backslide toward 
isolation.  Most important of all, Lippmann believed that only by educating that 
public about American interests, could officials legitimate their exercise of power.  It 
is in this respect that Lippmann?s fidelity to democratic government is beyond 
reproach: foreign policy decisions were best made by the few, he believed, but the 
authority from which that decision-making drew its legitimacy was conferred by the 
informed consent of the many.
 Lippmann sought access to U.S. and Western Alliance officials not just to be a 
court intellectual or a tutor serving up neutral facts, but to participate in and 
shape Cold War policy itself.
In this aspect, Lippmann?s record was far less spectacular and, by some 
measures, an abject failure and troubling precedent.  Lippmann, in addition to his 
public writings, acted behind-the-scenes to interject his ideas in policy debates.  
When he could, he made these arguments in person; where he could not, he tried to 
cultivate surrogates in the decision-making process.  Consequently, in working with 
U.S. officials, Lippmann sought out the choke points in the bureaucracy?those 
officials who acted as the gatekeepers regulating the flow of information.  McGeorge 
624
Bundy (like Colonel Edward House before him) exemplified the kind of contact 
whom Lippmann targeted.  Over the years, Lippmann enjoyed far more access than 
he did influence.  He can truthfully be said to have shaped only one major U.S. Cold 
War policy: the development of the Marshall Plan which he publicized in his column 
and worked for behind the scenes with key State Department officials, including 
George F. Kennan.  His influence at another critical juncture?the Cuban Missile 
Crisis?was contingent and somewhat accidental.  Far more often, U.S. officials 
simply rejected his advice on Cold War issues: German partition, West Berlin, and 
American intervention in Vietnam, among them.
Nor, aside from Kennan (who shared many of Lippmann?s approaches to 
international politics to begin with), is there convincing evidence to suggest that 
Lippmann converted or significantly moved any principal American policymaker 
toward his concept of strategic internationalism.  Nevertheless, for personal political 
reasons and not because they fundamentally shared his approach to the Cold War, 
Washington officials kept an open dialogue with him.  Lippmann retained a 
remarkable (though not perfect) record of independence from these officials; 
nevertheless, he routinely violated his own admonitions to fellow journalists to keep 
their distance from policymakers as a necessary prerequisite to preserving one?s 
objectivity.
32
  Occasionally, officials persuaded him to adopt their causes but he 
32
 Walter Lippmann, Conversations with Walter Lippmann (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 
1965): 161-163.  For more on Lippmann?s ideas about the role of the columnist, see his ?Address to 
the National Press Club, Washington, DC,? 23 September 1959 (on the occasion of his 70
th
 birthday).  
Several drafts of this speech are available in the Walter Lippmann Collection at Yale: Series VI, Box 
231, Folder 491.  See also, Lippmann?s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 
Washington, DC, 16 April 1948.  Drafts of this speech are in Series VI, Box 227, Folder 367.
625
nevertheless retained his core convictions about the weaknesses of their global 
containment policy.
Here, the standard literature again offers an imperfect conclusion about 
Lippmann?s behavior during the period of escalation in Vietnam, roughly from early 
1964 to the summer of 1965.  Contrary to the interpretation forwarded by Lippmann?s 
principal biographer, I argue that Lippmann was not meaningfully ?seduced? or co-
opted by the Johnson administration.  Rather, what the record shows is that Lippmann 
consciously and consistently engaged in a running behind-the-scenes debate with U.S. 
officials believing that he could influence key decision-makers (primarily President 
Johnson) to settle for a diplomatic strategy in Southeast Asia.  Part of his tactic was to 
avoid direct confrontations in print, knowing full well that once provoked Johnson?s 
defensiveness would override the president?s capacity to make an full, open 
reappraisal.
33
  Only after his efforts at private persuasion failed did Lippmann take the 
case fully public.  Lippmann was guilty for possessing too sanguine an estimate of his 
ability to convert policymakers to a diplomatic course, for underestimating the power 
of anti-Communist ideology on Washington?s decision-making, and, ultimately, for 
contributing to what one historian has described as a ?permissive context? for 
escalation.
34
 Lippmann consciously used his column to perform public relations tasks for 
U.S. leaders, who placed a premium on this facet of his work.
33
 Logevall, Choosing War: 389-395 on the effects of Johnson?s keen personalization of the war.  
Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1998): 277-278; 281-284.
34
 ?Permissive context,? see Logevall, Choosing War: 336.
626
As the Cold War evolved, Lippmann proved useful to Democratic presidents 
who, to deflect domestic criticism and to convey their foreign policy mettle, 
associated themselves with his cachet as an establishment figure and as an 
internationally-recognized foreign policy expert.  This trend persisted even though 
Lippmann?s critique of global containment became more pointed.  Kennedy 
administration officials debated how best to use Lippmann?s talents.  Would he make 
a better diplomat than publicist?  In one of his first actions as special assistant to the 
president, Arthur Schlesigner, Jr., suggested that President Kennedy name the 
columnist as his Ambassador to France.  Lippmann was a shrewd choice for he knew 
France, its language, and its history, and he sympathized with French President 
Charles De Gaulle.  Admired by Paris officials, Lippmann would have been an 
effective intermediary between Kennedy and De Gaulle during a period in which 
American and French foreign policies conflicted.  But in mid-memorandum 
Schlesinger answered his own query.  He assumed?incorrectly, it turned out?that 
Lippmann would decline. But he wondered if the proposal should be made anyway: 
?In which case (without being unduly Machiavellian about it) the offer would 
increase even more, if possible, his enthusiasm for the new dispensation? as an 
administration insider.
35
  Schlesigner zeroed in on the paramount consideration: ?that 
the Administration may need him more here?that he would help more as a columnist 
than as an Ambassador.?  
35
 Arthur Schlesigner, Jr., to President Kennedy, 1 February 1961, ?Walter Lippmann and Paris,? 
President?s Office Files, Staff Memos (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), Box 65, John F. Kennedy Library, 
Boston, MA.  Schlesinger keenly understood Lippmann?s sense of exclusion from the Eisenhower 
administration and his great enthusiasm to return from his Eisenhower exile as a Kennedy insider.  As 
it turned out Lippmann would have accepted the post if Kennedy had proffered it: Steel, Walter 
Lippmann and the American Century: 525. 
627
Here, Schlesigner had it exactly right.  Lippmann?s value as a respected ally 
and powerful advocate in Washington far outweighed the benefits that might be 
conferred if Kennedy dispatched him to Paris as a government official.  Besides, 
Lippmann?s long-standing special relationship with De Gaulle and other European 
officials offered U.S. officials the benefits of Lippmann?s public relations talent and
his quasi-diplomacy skills.  They could have their cake and eat it, too.  President 
Kennedy and his advisors used Lippmann to probe Soviet Premier Nikita 
Khrushchev?s intentions on Berlin and Laos in April 1961; they debriefed him after 
his meetings with De Gaulle to better understand the General?s nuclear policies.  
Administration officials also relied on Lippmann to publicize neutralization in Laos; 
and they later persuaded the columnist to offer a public rationale for their decision not 
to share nuclear technology and divide weapons control among Western Alliance 
partners.  President Johnson believed he needed Lippmann far more than Kennedy?
to legitimate his administration?s foreign policies and, during the 1964 campaign 
season, as a powerful ally against the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party.  
Officials consulted Lippmann on a range of issues from domestic politics to Gaullist 
policies in Europe to Vietnam.  So concerned was President Johnson with 
Lippmann?s favorable commentary that he assigned National Security Advisor 
McGeorge Bundy to track Lippmann?s positions and keep him in line with 
administration policy.
Why U.S. officials valued Lippmann speaks volumes about the dynamics of 
politics at home during the Cold War.  They courted the nation?s foremost 
commentator?not for his insights on international relations, his solutions to crises, 
628
nor even principally his special access as a private diplomat in foreign capitals?but 
most often for his ability to deflect the political criticisms of conservatives and to sell 
administration programs to a sometimes dubious domestic public.  His column, 
moreover, was a convenient place to float policy trial balloons and, because 
Lippmann held no official status, if pressed, U.S. officials could disassociate 
themselves from him. Most significantly, policymakers respected his ability to steer 
public debate.  Wary of crossing him, they expended considerable time and energies 
to co-opt him, even though none of the principals who occupied the White House, 
managed the Pentagon, or directed the State Department from 1947 to 1967 shared 
his fundamental analyses of the Cold War.  The lengths to which U.S. officials went 
to keep Lippmann ?on the team? opens a window on yet another arena of the Cold 
War they were determined to win?the contest to shape the domestic and 
international debate about containment policies. 
 Lippmann acted as an unofficial liaison, a private minister without portfolio to 
promote diplomatic discussion among Cold War allies, neutrals, and 
adversaries.
At the time of Lippmann?s death, the London Times noted, ?Above all else, 
[Lippmann] sought to improve the channels of communication, not only between the 
government and the press, and the press and the reader, but also in diplomacy. In a 
way he became an integral part of the political and diplomatic world, especially in the 
traffic of ideas.?
36
  This facet of Lippmann?s role-playing distinguished him from all 
other American journalists.  It provided him a thorough grounding in the international 
629
context of U.S. Cold War policies.  His cultivation of foreign sources began early in 
his career, but became important especially after his move to Washington, DC, in 
1938.  Lippmann?s appointment diaries and his close associates confirm that his 
sources were principally foreign diplomats.  Two special relationships have received 
treatment in this study: Lippmann?s quasi diplomacy with French leader General 
Charles De Gaulle and a string of French officials from the foreign ministry, and 
Lippmann?s contacts with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Soviet embassy 
officers in Washington, DC.  
Lippmann held De Gaulle in high regard because he shared with him a similar 
conception of power politics and history.  The French leader greatly influenced 
Lippmann?s interpretation of events in postwar Germany and in Vietnam as well.  
The columnist acted as a facilitator and popularizer of many of the General?s ideas in 
Washington.  When Paris and Washington conflicted over nuclear policy and NATO, 
Lippmann acted as a private ambassador who, at times, more accurately portrayed De 
Gaulle?s designs and ambitions than official U.S. diplomats.  Not only the General, 
but a series of French ambassadors, from Henri Bonnet in the late 1940s to Charles 
Lucet in the mid-1960s, were vital sources for Lippmann.  Herve Alphand was an 
especially close confidante.
Lippmann met twice with Khrushchev during the height of tensions over 
Berlin during the 1958-1962 period.  Khrushchev was impressed by Lippmann?s 
independent views on West Berlin and Germany and, on several occasions, 
authorized republication of Today and Tomorrow columns in the Soviet press.  The 
Soviet embassy kept close tabs on what the columnist wrote believing that 
36
 ?Mr. Lippmann,? obituary, 16 December 1974, London Times: 15.
630
Lippmann?s close ties to National Security Adviser Mac Bundy predisposed him to 
being a spokesman for administration policies.
37
  Lippmann, used such political 
capital to his advantage during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, by publicly 
proposing a missile base barter to resolve the nuclear impasse.  The Soviet side seized 
on the idea, thinking Lippmann was making a formal offer on behalf of the 
administration.  Horrified that the columnist would publicize such a plan, Kennedy 
administration officials scolded him but, nevertheless, agreed to such an 
arrangement?though they hid the details from the public.  In debriefing Soviet 
officials, Lippmann impressed upon them the domestic political sensitivity of the 
Turkey missile trade.
De Gaulle and Khrushchev were not isolated examples.  Lippmann 
maintained key contacts in the British Foreign Office and, for more than 50 years, 
met with high-level London officials all the way up to Prime Ministers Winston 
Churchill, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson.  Lippmann?s meetings with Indian 
leader Jawaharlal Nehru and other high-ranking Indian diplomats in New Delhi and 
Washington, DC, led the columnist to argue repeatedly that India should be cultivated 
as regional power and balance against Soviet and Chinese power.  Officials in foreign 
capitals from continental Europe to Moscow to Beijing read his columns carefully for 
hints at the direction of U.S. policy.  As the preceding chapters demonstrate, some 
foreign leaders expressed concerns that Lippmann?s tendency to counsel negotiations 
37
 It is instructive that the domestic political frameworks of both Kremlin leaders and Washington 
officials, shaped their reaction to Lippmann?s 25 October 1962 column.  The Soviets thought it 
altogether normal that a prominent journalist would be used as an official channel for government 
policy.  U.S. officials, acculturated to much more adversarial role with the press, expressed surprise 
that the Soviets would interpret Lippmann?s proposal as an official overture.  Indeed, only Llewellyn 
?Tommy? Thompson, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, suggested this possibility during the ExComm 
631
with Communist powers revealed a lack of resolve in Washington.  From the 
viewpoint of U.S. officials, association with Lippmann also conferred a good measure 
of esteem in the European capitals where Lippmann was welcomed.  In a subtle way, 
providing access to Lippmann signaled European leaders that moderate policies were 
given consideration within Washington?s Cold War councils.  
The practical effect of Lippmann?s travels, sources, contacts was the 
cultivation of an intellectual mindset far broader than most contemporaries.  
Lippmann was American by birth but a citizen of the ?Atlantic Community? (a term 
he coined) by virtue of the way he operated as a quasi-diplomat.  Earlier than most, he 
understood the cultural affinities?social, political, and religious customs?as well as 
the trade and security interests that bound together the nations on the continents of 
Western Europe and North America and along the Atlantic rim. He believed that the 
Soviet-American rivalry was yet another phase of the millennium-old clash between 
Western Christian and Eastern Orthodox cultures, and that the Cold War itself was 
finite and small in the full scope of history.  At a time when U.S. officials spoke of 
the division between the ?Free World? and ?slave society?, Lippmann purposefully 
chose the terms ?the West? (or ?Western Alliance?) and ?the East.?  He avoided 
language that put the entire world into two ideological camps: democratic versus 
communist.   He rejected the idea that anything so cohesive as the ?Free World? ever 
existed between Tokyo, Saigon, Jakarta, New Delhi, Tel Aviv, Pretoria, Bonn, Paris, 
London, and Washington.  Though the Cold War would end, he insisted, the Western 
Alliance that emerged to wage it would prove a lasting entity.  While he opposed 
discussions.  No other participant seemed to give it serious consideration.  Ned Lebow and Janet Stein, 
We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994): 442, fn #158.
632
excessive, American-heavy military structures in Europe, he nevertheless supported 
economic, political, and social exchange and integration.  
In the final analysis, Lippmann was American-Euro-centric, not because of his 
personal affinities for France and England (which were considerable), nor because he 
kept a personal diplomatic network there; but because he thought the future of 
Western civilization was bound to the collaborative efforts of America and the major 
European powers.  He understood and identified Russia (Orthodox), China (Sinic), 
and India (Hindu/Muslim) as great powers, but also as alien civilizations?ultimately, 
irreconcilable to Western customs, values, and ideas.
38
  To find a modus vivendi with 
these competing systems, the Atlantic Community partners would have to forge 
lasting cooperative bonds.  Lippmann always maintained that America?s primary 
mission?part and parcel of preserving its national security?was to promote that 
partnership.  Inasmuch as Lippmann?s career was weighted toward any one activity, it 
was as a diplomatist: facilitating public dialogue within the Atlantic Alliance and, 
then, among the alliance, neutral nations, and the Soviet bloc; and, as a private, 
unofficial diplomat, promoting pathways of communication for officials.
IV.
?I?m not a real believer in bringing people up to date,? the author and Lippmann?s 
lawyer Louis Auchincloss replied, when asked six months after the September 11, 
2001, terrorist attacks what Lippmann?s perspective on the new world order might be.  
38
 Lippmann first had broached this idea in U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, 
Brown, and Company, 1943): 87-93.  Samuel Huntington addressed this theme in his controversial 
book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 
1995), see especially pp. 301-321.
633
Auchincloss?s answer seemed proper for someone who, as a novelist, had studied 
Lippmann?s life?developing a character who inhabited a finite, fictional story.
39
  But 
history is prologue to the present and for the historian there exists an impulse (some 
might argue, a duty) to relate his subject to the present.  Indeed, while I wrote and 
researched this study the September 11 terrorist strikes were carried out against the 
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  The attacks devastated Americans? sense of 
security.  For perhaps the first time since their nation became a superpower, 
Americans came to know that though their immense power conferred many privileges 
invulnerability was not one of them.  
The nature of the threat to U.S. security changed slowly over the course of the 
decade between 1991 and 2001?though most Americans had been largely unaware 
of it.  A ?superpower? rival had been replaced by shadowy terrorist ?cells? supported 
by a network of finance and intelligence that wound through dozens of European, 
South Asian, and Middle Eastern countries.  These terrorists waged war against the 
U.S., growing steadily more brazen: the 1993 World Trade Center bombings; the 
Kohbar Towers bombings in 1996; the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in 
Kenya and Tanzania; the October 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.
40
  On the morning 
39
 Auchincloss patterned his book, The House of the Prophet, after the columnist?s life.  Interestingly, 
the historian Arthur Schlesigner, Jr., who was present for the same three-hour interview was eager to 
bring Lippmann up to date and stressed his relevance in a complex world.  Interview with author, New 
York City, 12 March 2002.
40
 Lippmann?s 50-year-old admonitions about the responsible use of power?specifically the inherent 
dangers in aligning American power with corrupt, reactionary, unstable, or warring regimes for 
geopolitical advantage?resonated as post-Cold War threats pierced the triumphalism of the 1990s.  
The clients whom Washington underwrote to fight proxy wars and counter-balance Soviet influence, 
eventually used American power for their own ends.  Two instances come to mind, particularly.  First, 
in the 1980s, the U.S. funneled hundreds of millions in military hardware and technology to Saddam 
Hussein, a brutal dictator whose military employed chemical and biological weapons against Iranian 
troops and civilian ethnic minorities in Iraq.  Only when Baghdad launched an invasion of neighboring 
Kuwait in 1990 (menacing half the world?s oil supply in nearby Saudi Arabia) did the U.S. cut off aid, 
declare Hussein the ?Hitler? of the region, and punish him with a ground and air war that killed some 
634
of September 11, 2001, the post-Cold War era ended and, with it, so had the twin 
policies Washington had employed for more than a half century: deterrence and 
containment.  A policy of preemptive war replaced them.  How would Lippmann 
have reacted to this new development?  What course would he chart in the post-9/11 
world?  Was his approach to foreign policy still relevant? 
Lippmann likely would have rallied around the George W. Bush 
administration in the weeks after the terrorist strikes, though his support would have 
been reserved.  It certainly is conceivable that he would have endorsed the reprisal 
that toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in November 2001?an action 
with wide international approval?as necessary to restoring American national 
security.  It is equally plausible that Lippmann would have opposed the invasion of 
Iraq in March 2003?for lack of evidence, for wont of a clear explanation to 
Americans and the international public, and, ultimately, for the Wilsonian tenor of the 
Bush administration?s public determination to impose democratic reforms in 
Baghdad.  Lippmann is likely to have argued that in its effort to convert Iraq to 
democracy, the U.S. allowed its perceived interests to far exceed its capabilities. 
200,000 troops and civilians, without deposing him.  For a convincing case that Lippmann would have 
opposed the first Gulf War, see Philip Geyelin, ??Today and Tomorrow? in the Gulf,? 6 January 1991, 
Washington Post: C2.
The second example?American aid to mujahdin fighters in the Soviet-Afghan War?had 
even greater bearing on the roots of terrorism which emerged in the 1990s.  The CIA trained and 
equipped thousands of ?freedom fighters??Muslims recruited from various Afghan tribes and foreign 
countries?to fight a guerilla war against the Soviets that Washington underwrote with billions of 
dollars worth of U.S. military hardware, intelligence, and expertise.  The policy worked in the short 
term, bogging down the Soviet Army in a bloody, protracted, and ultimately, un-winnable war.  But 
when the Soviets left Afghanistan after 12 years of fighting, many of these CIA-trained fighters joined 
the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime in Kabul.  In the 1990s, the country was a haven for 
terrorists bent on exacting revenge on Washington for its prosecution of the Gulf War in 1991 and 
expanded presence in the region.  One of these terrorists, a wealthy Saudi sheik named Osama bin 
Laden, who had been a CIA star during the Soviet-Afghan war, set up training camps for Islamic 
militants who carried out the above mentioned attacks on American interests. For a thoroughly 
readable account of one man?s battle to fund the Afghan rebels, see George Crile, Charlie Wilson?s 
635
Indications that intelligence data had been manipulated to justify the war would likely 
have elicited an acid response from the columnist reminiscent of his attack on Lyndon 
Johnson?s ?credibility gap.? 
Lippmann would have scrutinized the idea of preemptive war?the so-called 
Bush Doctrine?unveiled by the administration in 2002.  Speaking to graduating 
Army cadets at West Point Military Academy, President Bush declared on 1 June 
2002, ?If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.  We 
must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats 
before they emerge . . . In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the 
path of action.  And this nation will act.?
41
  The President then promised that the U.S. 
would maintain force levels sufficient to ?dissuade potential enemies from pursuing a 
military buildup? to challenge American power.  In mid-September 2002, the Bush
administration refined these ideas in its ?National Security Strategy of the United 
States of America? (NSS) statement.  The document noted that ?we will not hesitate 
to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting 
preemptively.?
42
  It also set out a three-part statement of goals: ?We will defend the 
peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants.  We will preserve the peace by building good 
relations among the great powers.  We will extend the peace by encouraging free and 
open societies on every continent.?
43
  Lippmann would have seen the necessity of the 
War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic 
Monthly Press, 2003).
41
 Mike Allen and Karen DeYoung, ?Bush: U.S. Will Strike First at Enemies,? 2 June 2002, 
Washington Post: A1; Elisabeth Bumiller, ?U.S. Must Act First to Battle Terror, Bush Tells Cadets,? 2 
June 2002, New York Times: A1. 
42
 David E. Sanger, ?Threats and Responses: Security; Bush to Outline Doctrine of Striking Foes First,? 
20 September 2002, New York Times: A1.
43
 Bush had enunciated these goals first at West Point; see, Allen and DeYoung, ?Bush: U.S. Will 
Strike First at Enemies,? 2 June 2002, Washington Post: A1. This passage was lifted verbatim and used 
636
first initiative, welcomed the second initiative, but gravely doubted the promotion of 
the third.
Trying to place the Bush Doctrine in historical perspective, the historian John 
Lewis Gaddis recently has argued that hegemony, unilateralism, and even preemption 
have a long history in American foreign policy.
44
  We could reasonably expect that 
Lippmann (as he had in U.S Foreign Policy in 1943) also would have looked to the 
past and drawn lessons from the policies of the Founders.  After all, America?s 
greatest diplomat, John Quincy Adams, crafted a foreign policy to secure the 
continent that included the ?pre-emptive? seizure of Spanish-controlled Florida; a 
precedent followed by Presidents James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. 
Taft, and Woodrow Wilson in places like the Mexico (and what is now the modern-
American Southwest), the Caribbean, and Latin America.
45
  But Lippmann, as he had 
in 1943, would draw a clear line between the imperative of securing the homeland 
from foreign attack and the far more extravagant goal of preempting security 
challenges by intervening in ?failed? states and recreating them in America?s image.  
What worked for Adams in the 19
th
 Century?a hemispheric policy of preemption 
and unilateralism to consolidate power?did not automatically apply to the early 21
st
Century when, as the lone world power, Washington needed to conserve limited 
resources to meet multiplying global challenges.  Lippmann might well have recalled 
the words of Adams himself, who clearly understood the dangers of a foreign policy 
that made no such distinctions.  ?Wherever the standard of freedom and independence 
in the preface of the NSS statement in September 2002.  Full NSS statement available on the White 
House web site: http://whitehouse.gov .
44
 John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 2004).
637
has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers 
be,? Adams told a 4 July 1821 audience.  But America ?goes not abroad, in search of 
monsters to destroy.?  While the nation ?might become the dictatress of the world: 
she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.?
46
Will Lippmann?s strategic internationalism enjoy a renaissance or be 
consigned to the past, a relic perhaps to be subsumed by the still deeper Wilsonian 
currents of the American Century?
47
 Surveying the history of U.S. foreign relations in 
the twentieth century, the political scientist Tony Smith argued that the nation?s 
greatest diplomatic triumphs resulted from the promotion of ?American liberal 
democratic internationalism? abroad?democratic principals, free trade, human 
rights, foreign aid, and extra-national organizations.
48
  Smith hypothesized that 
Wilsonian diplomacy achieved the order and stability that ?realist? critics (Lippmann 
among them) believed only inhered in a balance-of-power system.
49
  Yet, Smith?s 
analysis lacked the smug triumphalism of other post- Cold War retrospectives and, 
45
 See Gaddis?s discussion in Surprise, Security, and the American Experience: especially, pp. 15-33.
46
 John Quincy Adams, An Address Delivered at the Request of the Committee of Arrangements for 
Celebrating the Anniversary of Independence; Upon the Occasion of reading the Declaration of 
Independence,? 4 July 1821, Washington, DC (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1821): 32.
47
 It is interesting to note that Foreign Affairs, which marked its 75
th
 Anniversary in 1997, chose 
Lippmann?s U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, as one of the five ?most significant? books on 
diplomacy published since the journal?s inception in 1922.  The venerable publication practically 
canonized Lippmann as a founding father of modern realism?choosing as companions in its pantheon 
of ?significant books??George F. Kennan?s American Diplomacy and Henry Kissinger?s memoirs.  
The selections led one to the conclusion that no one had hatched a new foreign policy approach in 
more than a generation.  See, David C. Hendrickson, ?Significant Books of the Last 75 Years,? 
Foreign Affairs 76 (September/October 1997): 221-222.  
48
 Tony Smith, America?s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in 
the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994): 344-345.
49
 Smith, America?s Mission: 103-106.  Smith dismisses Lippmann?s criticisms of Wilsonian collective 
security, suggesting that Lippmann went too far in his argument that Wilson?s ?reluctance to back 
commitments with force? undermined his postwar peace plan and contributed to the origins of World 
War II. Smith does not persuasively rebut the argument, however, that Wilson had failed to educate the 
American public about its vital national interests in European order and stability?a prerequisite for 
preparing the public for a commitment to either the League of Nations or stronger bi-lateral alliances.  
Moreover, Wilson?s collective security principle?even if America had joined the League?provided 
638
too, the arrogance conveyed in the ?war on terror? which implied that America?s 
national interests were coterminous with that of all the other nations.
50
  While the 
expansion of democracy benefited American national security, there were obvious 
limits to what its promoters could achieve.  Smith advocated a selective approach?
one that merged support for democratic institutions where they might take root, with a 
realpolitik cognizance to know where they would not.  ?Washington?s first 
responsibility, then, is to keep its own house in order,? Smith concluded, ?and 
maintain the links of solidarity among consolidated democratic states.?
51
Lippmann would not at all have found objectionable the responsible exercise 
of American power (using its example as a ?good society? to persuade others to 
emulate it) and the promotion of stronger ties within the Atlantic Alliance and with 
other democratic governments.  As a Cold War diplomatist he would have known 
how to achieve these objectives.  ?Money and power are, of course, indispensable in 
the conduct of foreign policy,? Lippmann wrote a half century ago. ?But without 
diplomacy to prepare the way and to soften the impact and to reduce the friction and 
allay the tension, money and power are double-edged instruments.  Used without 
diplomacy they may, and they usually do, augment the difficulties they are employed 
to overcome.  Then more power and money are needed.?
52
  In a complex world?
where Washington still must carefully discern legitimate national security objectives 
and work closely with foreign governments to achieve them?American leaders 
would do well to heed that cautionary counsel.
no structure to enforce the peace.  The League?s impotence in the face of Japanese militarism in 
Manchuria in the early 1930s, was but one example.
50
 For example, Francis Fukuyama?s The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 
1992).
639
51
 Smith, America?s Mission: 343.
52
 Lippmann, T&T, ?The Undiplomatic Department,? 13 January 1954.
640
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