A philosopher and a journalist

Walter Lippmann in his study.-PUBLIC AFAIRS/AMERICAN EMBASSY, NEW DELHI

The thoughts of Walter Lippmann, the American political columnist, on diplomacy remain relevant for India.

"THE fate of men will be decided in the long run by restless thinkers who, like Lippmann, are not afraid to stand up and rock the boat... This is precisely why we had - and why we are fortunate that we have - a Walter Lippmann to prod us and remind us constantly that our aim, perhaps, is not always steady or consistent with our professional goal, and that a respect for truth should be the supreme principle of an open society... " James Reston wrote of Lippmann, his friend and mentor.

"He wasn't a prisoner of the news, he merely used it as a peg for his political philosophy. He did not interview presidents and secretaries of state as often as they interviewed him." He was the most influential columnist of the day. Reston himself was the most insightful interpretative reporter of all times. But Lippmann was a deeper thinker. He learnt philosophy from George Santayana and William James at Harvard and helped found the New Republic in 1914. A feud there drove him to join The World in New York in 1922, to the dismay of his friend Harold Laski who wrote to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, unjustly, "daily journalism corrodes soul". After he left The World in the 1930s, Lippmann was seldom in a newspaper office. He began to write a column for the New York Herald Tribune, "Today and Tomorrow", which eventually appeared in more than 250 newspapers around the world, including The Hindu and The Indian Express when Frank Moraes was its editor.

Two gifts explain the wide readership the philosopher-journalist commanded. One was his ability to cut through the maze and grasp the essentials. The other was simple, lucid prose. He saw things from afar. When the Soviet Union exploded the H-bomb, journalists could write on little else for the next few days. Lippmann wrote, instead, on the promise that the European Economic Community held. It is now a restive European Union often in the news. The bomb is passe.

Ronald Steel's work Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980) is one of the finest biographies written in the last half-century, sympathetic, yet critical. He explains the secret of Lippmann's greatness as well as his moral flaws. He believed in responsible journalism. The critic must suggest an alternative. "Responsibility consists in sharing the burden of men directing what is to be done, or the burden of offering some other course of action in the mood of one who has realised what it would mean to undertake it."

However, as Steel remarks, "his ivory tower was equipped with a swift-moving elevator". He hated the noise and dirt of politics, but yearned to influence its course. "Influence was Lippmann's stock-in-trade." He got close to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Disenchantment followed each seduction. All his life he wrote speeches and statements for public figures and praised them in his column. This was not a man who spoke the truth to power in detachment, but an outsider who wanted to be an insider in the game and play it on his own terms. A Bengali saying describes his manner - "dhori mach, na chui pani" - to catch the fish without wetting the hands.

That, of course, is an impossibility. To mix metaphors absurdly and consciously, he sometimes burnt his fingers even as he wet them, sacrificing professional ethics in the process. In an interview with Richard Rovere on February 6, 1965, he gave advice that every journalist should heed: "Newspapermen cannot be the cronies of great men. Once a man, even if you have known him more or less as a crony for years, becomes something like a Governor - much less a President - it's all over. You can't call him by his first name anymore. I've known several Presidents whom I know by their first names long before they were President, and I would never think of calling them by them when they got into the White House. I think it is advantageous for the President to be able to talk to somebody who won't exploit him, or betray him, or [to whom he can] talk his mind, and it's certainly an 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."

By then, the "air space" between him and Johnson had become very thin. Reston wrote: "One of the many things that intrigued me about him was that he didn't always live by the principles he recommended with such zeal and clarity. He was always lecturing me on the virtue of detachment - of avoiding personal involvement with influential officials or politicians. `Cronyism is the curse of journalism,' he would say. But actually, he was more involved with them than any other major commentator I knew. When he got out of Harvard, he worked briefly with the socialist Mayor of Schenectady. He was in President Theodore Roosevelt's political circle; he was an assistant secretary of war during the First World War; he wrote General Pershing's Aid to the Allies speech in 1940; he went to the Versailles peace conference in 1919 as an adviser to Colonel House and President Wilson; he showed up in London during the first Roosevelt term and helped rewrite U.S. policy at the failed world economic and monetary conference. And even during his last days in Washington, he was working privately with President Johnson and even drafting speeches for him in the vain hope of getting him out of the Vietnam War."

Reston himself was no better. Lippmann and he took turns flattering the Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg into delivering a speech in January 1945 burying isolationism and advocating "a hard and fast treaty between the major allies" to ensure "collective security". Reston contributed largely to the draft after it was shown to him and praised it in The New York Times as "wise and statesmanlike". John F. Stacks writes in his biography of Reston, Scotty, that he obviously felt "no need to recuse himself from commenting on an event in which he had been a participant". He adds: "Reston had not been the only reporter Vandenberg consulted before his speech. One other was Walter Lippmann, who frequently crossed the line between journalist and participant by writing speeches for politicians he admired. Lippmann, no slouch at trumpeting his own influence, embroidered his role over the years, telling his biographer, the historian Ronald Steel, that he and Reston had actually written the speech for Vandenberg. Steel says he never saw any documentary proof of this assertion and that he had simply accepted Lippmann's version as the truth."

Stacks describes Lippmann as "often remote, sometimes cruel", altogether a man "full of himself", an "elitist" to the core. But Reston's admiration of his mentor was undiminished by awareness of his failings and mistakes. "His main contribution was that, more than anyone I knew outside the government, he defined the central issues for decision, but he wasn't satisfied with that. He wanted to be judged by his answers to the complicated political controversies of the age, which was odd because his answers were not always as good as his questions. ... Admittedly, he made mistakes. He was curiously insensitive to the menace of Hitler from 1933 to 1936 and thought the war would not touch America if we kept strictly out of it. He opposed the idea of a united Europe because he feared it would be dominated by Germany."

On July 5, 1938, Lippmann wrote from Paris: "Barring incidents that cannot be foreseen... there would seem to be no great probability of war in the near future... Neither Germany, nor her uneasy partner, Italy, has the resources to conduct a great war". When Franklin Delano Roosevelt first stood for election as President in 1932, Lippmann found him charming, but slippery, which was true. But he also said that he was a "highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions... He is an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything". He is, rather, "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President". For the next 42 years while he lived, neither friends nor critics forgot this classic misjudgment.

To his dying day, Lippmann said that this was true of FDR - in 1932; a plausible view then. There was a graver lapse of which he was equally unrepentant. On February 19, 1942, FDR authorised the War Department to set up military zones on the West Coast and remove any person it chose. The army gave people of Japanese descent 48 hours to dispose of their homes and businesses - which were bought by speculators for a song - handed them into trucks and shipped them to federal "relocation centres" in remote areas. Some 120,000 people, the majority of them American citizens, were confined to barracks surrounded by barbed wire fences with searchlights mounted on watch towers. Predictably, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the action. In such situations, judges always do, everywhere (vide Prejudice, War and the Constitution by Jacobus tenBroek & Ors; University of California Press; 1968). As predictably, most liberal newspapers were silent. No such action was taken against German or Italian-Americans on the East Coast. Lippmann enthusiastically lauded the action and fanned hysteria. He could be arrogantly unrealistic and irresponsible. In 1946 he asked Truman to resign and turn over the White House to the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

All of which only proves that even the wise err grievously, stumble and fall. He craved influence, enjoyed the attention lavished on him but he was no job-seeker. He sought to influence people to promote the policies he believed in, not to advance his personal career or fortunes. He turned down in 1945 an offer of a job in the State Department to run its information and propaganda activities. Lippmann's letter to Secretary of State James Byrnes, declining the offer, pointed out that public relations was no substitute for sound policy. It was not a "kind of advertising which can be farmed out to specialists in the art of managing public opinion" when it was in fact "inseparable from leadership, and no qualified public official needs the intervention of a public relations expert between himself and the people". PROs of men in power and the men themselves do not realise this.

Lippmann is lauded for the enduring truths he uttered on foreign and domestic affairs and for being so right on the most important issue that faced the world at the end of the Second World War - establishing a global order that reckons with the interests of the Soviet Union and thus ensures peace. He was almost unique in keeping his head during the Cold War when most lost theirs, and he was right and realistic about the United Nations when others hypocritically claimed for the world body a role it was not meant to perform.

Lippmann wrote: "There is no more difficult art than to exercise great power well, all the serious military, diplomatic, and economic decisions we have now to take will depend on how correctly we measure our power, how truly we see its possibilities within its limitations. That is what Germany and Japan, which also rose suddenly, did not do; those two mighty empires are in ruins because their leaders and their people misjudged their newly acquired power, and so misused it... Nothing is easier, too, than to dissipate influence by exerting it for trivial or private ends, or to forget that power is not given once and forever but that it has to be replenished continually by the effort which created it in the first place. The wisdom which may make great powers beneficent can be found only with humility, and also the good manners and courtesy of the soul which alone can make great power acceptable to others. Great as it is, American power is limited. Within its limits, it will be greater or less depending on the ends for which it is used."

This was not the advice that American policymakers wanted to hear, as Steel records. To their mind, a proper world was one open to American economic and political influence. They did not like what was happening in Eastern Europe in 1945-46. Whereas Stalin looked on a communist government in Warsaw as a guarantee of Soviet security, American officials saw it as a betrayal of the Yalta accords. Washington insisted on free elections in Eastern Europe as a test of Soviet intentions. But from Moscow's point of view, as Lippmann wrote that fall, "our interest in free elections appears as a British-American protection and encouragement of those East European and Balkan factions which are hostile to the Soviet Union". The Russians had reason to question, he noted, "whether our political interest in that orbit is what it professes to be, or is the cover for an intervention designed to push them back to where they were in 1939". At that time the Soviets had not yet imposed communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. Elections in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had produced non-communist governments, while those in Bulgaria had satisfied Western observers. The same strategy is being followed now in West Asia in the name of "democracy".

Stalin's characteristically ruthless reaction alarmed Lippmann; the pressures on Turkey and Iran particularly. But more often than not, he swam against the tide and distrusted public opinion. "The common interest very largely eludes public opinion entirely and can be managed only by a specialised class," he wrote in Public Opinion (1922). Thirty-three years later, he wrote in his poorly received book The Public Philosophy:

"The unhappy truth is that the prevailing public opinion has been destructively wrong at the critical junctures. The people have imposed a veto upon the judgments of informed and responsible officials. They have compelled the governments, which usually knew what would have been wiser, or was necessary, or was more expedient, to be too late with too little, or too long with too much, too pacifist in peace and too bellicose in war, too neutralist or appeasing in negotiation or too intransigent. Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this century. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decisions when the stakes are life and death."

He was, doubtless, slow to realise the Nazi threat. It seems that Munich (1938) alerted him. British indifference to Soviet overtures in 1938-39 for a united front against Hitler sowed the seeds of distrust during and immediately after the war. "In sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler [at Munich], Britain and France were really sacrificing their alliance with Russia." The Nazi-Soviet Pact, partitioning Poland, followed in 1939 on the eve of Hitler's march into Poland bringing Britain into the War.

His book U.S. Foreign Policy (1943) began with a formulation that ranks as a classic. "The thesis of this book is that a foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitment and the nation's power. The constant preoccupation of the true statesman is to achieve and maintain this balance." It was followed in 1944 by U.S. War Aims, in which he urged respect for the security interests of the USSR after the War.

As early as in 1944 he wrote that an independent Poland could survive "only if it is allied with Russia". If the Poles annexed territory that was German, they would need outside help to hold on to that territory. Only Russia could provide that. Therefore, he underlined, Poland had to come to terms with Russia, "to terms which make Russia the principal guarantor of the western boundary". Stalin knew this, the Germans knew it, and so did the moderate Poles. "But right-wing Poles, encouraged by sympathisers in London and Washington, thought the Russians could be excluded." To Lippmann this was a fantasy, Steel remarks. There could be "no future for a Poland governed, or even influenced, by those Poles who, even before they are liberated from the Nazis, conceive themselves as the spear point of a hostile coalition against the Soviet Union".

The concept of spheres of influence had acquired malodour but its connotation went unexamined. It cannot be a euphemism for domination, but it can serve as a basis for non-interference mostly by one power and, correspondingly, very largely by the other whose "sphere of influence" is thus respected - provided it does not undermine the independence of the country under its sphere of influence. "What we were faced with at Yalta was how to make good our principles in territories that Stalin held," Lippmann later wrote. "Stalin had the power to act, we had only the power to argue." The Yalta accords recognised a fait accompli: "The West paid the political price for having failed to deter Hitler in the 1930s, for having failed to unite and rearm against him." The U.S., he pointed out, had no qualms about its own dominance in Latin America.

Lippmann's hour came when George F. Kennan propounded the doctrine of containment in his famous article "The sources of Soviet conduct" published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 under the pseudonym X. Lippmann refuted it point by point in 14 successive columns, the first of which appeared on September 2, 1947, with a brilliance Kennan himself admired. More, he disavowed his doctrine later. Kennan had advocated that "the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies".

Kennan's later disavowal of military content was disingenuous. His policy received the National Security Council's imprimatur in NSC-68. He claimed that he felt "like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster" (George F. Kennan Memoirs 1925-1930; page 356). He admitted to "egregious errors" but attributed the reaction to "misunderstandings" by Lippmann.

But, as Steel records, he did not disavow "the military interpretation" at that time when he could well have done so. Reston wrongly asserted that it was Lippmann who recanted. Lippmann's articles were published in a collection entitled The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (Hamish Hamilton; pages 48; 2 sh.6 d.). To read the critique now is to understand the greatness of its author.

These excerpts are of contemporary relevance, besides throwing light on the avertable tragedy that the Cold War was:

"My criticism, I hasten to say at once, does not arise from any belief or hope that our conflict with the Soviet government is imaginary or that it can be avoided, or ignored, or easily disposed of. I agree entirely with Mr. X that the Soviet pressure cannot `be charmed or talked out of existence'. I agree entirely that the Soviet power will expand unless it is prevented from expanding because it is confronted with power, primarily American power, that it must respect. But I believe, and shall argue, that the strategical conception and plan which Mr. X recommends is fundamentally unsound, and that it cannot be made to work, and that the attempt to make it work will cause us to squander our substance and our prestige." It corroded the American psyche.

"The United States cannot by its own military power contain the expansive pressure of the Russians `at every point where they show signs of encroaching'. The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidising and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependants and puppets. The instrument of the policy of containment is therefore a coalition of disorganised, disunited, feeble or disorderly nations, tribes and factions around the perimeter of the Soviet Union." This came to pass with the pacts Dulles forged.

"We may now consider how we are to relate our role in the United Nations to our policy in the conflict with Russia. Mr. X does not deal with the question. It would take us to the destruction of the U.N. The Charter and the organisation of the United Nations are designed to maintain peace after a settlement of the Second World War has been arrived at. Until there is a settlement of that war, the United Nations does not come of age... which will not come to an end until the great powers have agreed on peace treaties, the United Nations cannot deal with disputes that involve the balance of power in the world. The balance of power has to be addressed and settled in the peace treaties by the great powers themselves...

"Until such a settlement is reached, the United Nations has to be protected by its supporters from the strains, the burdens, the discredit, of having to deal with issues that it is not designed to deal with. The true friends of the United Nations will, therefore, be opposed to entangling the world organisation in the Soviet-American conflict. No good and nothing but harm can come of using the Security Council and the Assembly as an arena of the great dispute, or of acting as if we did not realise the inherent limitations of the Charter and thought that somehow we could by main force and awkwardness use the United Nations organisation to overawe and compel the Russians. All that can come of that is to discredit the United Nations on issues that it cannot settle and thus to foreclose the future of the U.N., which can begin only if and when these issues have been settled."

The U.S did precisely that from 1946, until the non-aligned began paying it back in its own coin in the U.N. General Assembly by steamrollering resolutions by brute majority. Currently, the U.N. subserves U.S. interests handsomely.

Crucially, "the policy of containment, as Mr. X has exposed it to the world, does not have as its objective a settlement of the conflict with Russia. It is therefore implicit in the policy that the U.N. has no future as a universal society, and that either the U.N. will be cast aside like the League of Nations, or it will be transformed into an anti-Soviet coalition. In either event the U.N. will have been destroyed. Mr. X has reached the conclusion that all we can do is to `contain' Russia until Russia changes, ceases to be our rival, and becomes our partner."

Lippmann lectured to the diplomat: "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. Nevertheless, there have been settlements. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them did. 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.

"The method by which diplomacy deals with a world where there are rival powers is to organise 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. 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 things. He means that, whatever they think, whatever they want, whatever their ideological purposes, the balance of power is such that they cannot afford to commit aggression. A genuine policy would, therefore, have as its paramount objective a settlement which brought about the evacuation of Europe. That is the settlement which will settle the issue which has arisen out of the war. The communists will continue to be communist. The Russians will continue to be Russians. But the Red Army will be in Russia, and not on the Elbe."

Fundamentally, this is the lesson India has yet to grasp in its diplomacy. These sagacious words are very relevant to our situation, having faced Cold Wars with Pakistan, China and other neighbours, no less. Nehru's accent was not on negotiation and settlement but on confrontation and containment; witness his talks with Zhou Enlai in April 1960 in New Delhi and with Ayub Khan at Munee in September that year. The nation grew up on Nehruisms and Nehru was no expert on foreign policy, any more than his colleagues in the Congress whom he pitied, if not despised, as being ignorant of world affairs, as Nirad C. Chaudhuri pointed out in an article aptly entitled "They were ignorant of international policies" (The Times of India, February 28, 1982).

It was a fair assessment of men who imagined in August 1942 that Japan and its German ally could win the war despite not only the Soviet Union's but the U.S.' entry into the war. In fact the tide had begun to turn before their very eyes. Within months, if not weeks, they realised the havoc they had wrought by their reckless gamble.

Nehru had another assumption even in the early years of independence - India would be at "the centre" of Asian affairs. Diplomacy is about settlement, as Lippmann pointed out, and settlement entails compromise and concession based on the acceptance of the truth that the other side has interests as legitimate as one's own and the task is to reconcile rival interest by settlement and thus ensure peace. But compromise did not come naturally to Nehru. Like the neocons in the U.S., the "neo-realists" in India today have learnt no lessons from Nehru's failures. Branding the hardliner as a "romantic" or "idealist", they perpetuate his errors in grosser form shorn of the sterling qualities Nehru undoubtedly had.

Lippmann belongs to an era that produced intellectual giants like Hans J. Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, not to forget others like Louis Halle. They moulded an intellectual climate. But it had little impact on the ones in power. It is hard-headed realists like Morgenthau and Lippmann who won laurels for their brave and consistent opposition to the war in Vietnam. History and archival disclosures have vindicated their stand on compromise with the Soviet Union. They confirm the view held by writers such as these. The Soviet Union had no plans for world domination or conquest of Europe. Its constant objective was to arrive at an understanding with the United States. This remains Russia's main objective even now. The Soviet Union sought to split Western Europe from America and enlist the Third World on its side. Its objective was parity with the U.S., its methods were brutal and aggressive. The U.S. did not wait to negotiate as Churchill advised.

The Cold War that ensued was not due to a misunderstanding but a failure to arrive at a reconciliation of interests. Unlike our neocons - less equipped intellectually than their American counterparts - they did not believe that morality had no place in politics but rather believed in a realistic morality in an imperfect world. They believed that while the national interest must shape policy that very interest required a realistic understanding and accommodation of the interests of others.

In December 1959 Lippmann came to India and "spent a good deal of time with Nehru" who, Ronald Steel records, "persuaded Lippmann that the West should help develop India as a model for the Third World". Lippmann needed no persuasion. In the third of the series of four articles published in The Hindu (November 19, 20, 21 and 22, 1958), he had advocated precisely that. "India is the key country," he wrote in the article entitled "West must underwrite India". The last article in the series was entitled "No military threat to U.S. from Russia". Later, a series of three articles appeared in The Hindu (April 21, 22 and 23, 1961). Reading them today it becomes clear that Khruschev was using Lippmann to convey a message - he was planning "a show-down on the German question", but posed no military threat. There followed his summit with Kennedy in Vienna and the erection of the Berlin Wall. As Stalin realised, so did Khruschev - bluff and bluster are no help in negotiations.

No less relevant are Lippmann's writings on domestic policies. The Indian state has so aggrandised itself that its influence is now all-pervasive. All rival centres of power, potential challengers to its moral authority are enfeebled. Walter Lippmann described the conditions for the success of democracy with deep insight. Addressing the University of Rochester on June 15, 1936, he said that one of the reasons why democracy "has worked in America is that outside the government and outside the party system, there have existed independent institutions and independent men. Foremost among the independent institutions has been the Judiciary, with its power to review the actions of the Legislature and the Executive. But the judiciary has not stood alone outside the political government and the parties. There have been others, notably the free churches, the free press, the free universities, and, no less important to the preservation of democracy, free men with sufficient secured property of their own, farms, factories, shops, professions, savings, which were protected by the law and not dependent upon the will of elected or appointed officials."

The plight of our universities, ravaged by meddlesome Governors and Chief Ministers, and the three Akademis in New Delhi - the Sahitya Akademi, the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Lalit Kala Akademi - not to forget government-funded think tanks, tells its own tale.