Walter

I was born in New York City to German-Jewish parents, Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann. Our family lived a comfortable, if not privileged, life. Annual family trips to Europe were the rule.At age 17, I entered Harvard University where I studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas. I concentrated on philosophy and languages (I spoke both German and French) and graduated after only three years of study.In 1913 Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl and I became the founding editors of The New Republic magazine. During World War I, I became an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points.I had wide access to the nation's decision makers and had no sympathy for communism. But, early on, I was optimistic about American democracy. I believed that the American people would become intellectually engaged in political and world issues to fulfill their democratic role as an educated electorate. In light of the events leading to World War II and the concomitant scourge of totalitarianism, I rejected this view. I came to be seen as Noam Chomsky's moral and intellectual antithesis: I agree with the Platonic view that the population is a great beast, a herd, that has to be controlled by an intellectual specialist class. In this sense I might be viewed as a forerunner of US neoconservatism. Chomsky used one of my catch phrases for the title of his book about the media: Manufacturing Consent. I was the first to identify the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. In addition to my newspaper columns, I published several books. I was the first to bring the phrase "cold war" to common currency in my 1947 book by the same name.