Title:                      Walter Lippmann and the American Century

Author:                  Ronald Steel

Steel, Ronald (1998). Walter Lippmann and the American Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction

LOC:       98029026

PN4874.L45 S8 1999

Date Posted:      March 19, 2013

An agent of influence[1] is an individual who acts on behalf of the interests of a foreign power without openly declaring a political allegiance or affiliation, thereby increasing his or her power. Most commonly used as a term to describe covert supporters of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, agents of influence were often in positions of trust and not instantly recognized, though overt party membership as actively engaged in promoting the Communist cause. Until the US joined WWII, Great Britain had succeeded in recruiting several significant agents of influence in the US media, among them some well-known newspaper columnists and radio commentators such as Walter Winchell and Walter Lippman who peddled anti-Nazi propaganda supplied for the purpose by British Security Coordination.

Harry C. McPherson, Jr. reviewed Lippmann’s biography in Foreign Affairs (Fall 1980).

To James Thurber, in a 1943 New Yorker cartoon, Walter Lippmann was the object of respectful humor: a wife looks up from a newspaper and tells her husband, “Lippmann scares me this morning.” To Judge Learned Hand, Colonel House, and five hundred guests at a testimonial dinner in 1931, he was, in the words of Time magazine, “their Moses, their prophet of Liberalism.” To Dean Acheson, writing his memoirs, he was “that ambivalent Jeremiah.” To Woodrow Wilson, for whom Lippmann prepared several of the famous Fourteen Points, his judgment was “most unsound”; to Lyndon Johnson, it was ultimately far worse than that. The one inescapable conclusion to be drawn from his six decades as a public correspondent is that Lippmann was America’s, and perhaps the world’s, most influential journalist.



[1] See West, Nigel (2006). Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, pp. 5-6


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