U.S. journalism's best-known pundit left his camp in Bernard, Me. a little while ago and returned to his ivy-covered home in Washington. He did not have any fresh-caught fish. What he had was a fat, prickly and impressive essay on U.S. foreign policy. Looking a little old, with heavy pouches under his eyes, 58-year-old Walter Lippmann—author of 19 books, New York Herald Tribune columnist since 1931—sat down to put together his thesis, which he called The Cold War. Two secretaries hovered beside him. Western Union stood by to pick up his copy daily at 1 o'clock and transmit it to New York, while Mr. Lippmann, in red silk Chinese trousers and a grey-&-black silk shirt, sat at his antique desk and wrote. By this week, enough of his columns had appeared to indicate the trend of his thoughts.
Not All God's Chillun. He took as his target the now well-known article by "X" which recently appeared in the magazine Foreign Affairs. "X" was George Kennan, top State Department planner and Russian expert. The State Department denied that the article inspired the Truman Doctrine, but the thinking behind both was certainly cut from the same cloth.
Kennan, in brief, recommended "a policy of firm containment [of Russia] . . . with unalterable counterforce at every point where the Russians show signs of encroaching"—until the Soviet Union either "mellows" or collapses. Kennan detected in Soviet power "seeds of its own decay." He also believed that the U.S., meanwhile, could show the world that it was a nation of "spiritual vitality." If it could only hold, therefore, the U.S. and democracy would win out.
To Pundit Lippmann, this conception and plan "is fundamentally unsound . . . 'a policy of holding the line and hoping for the best' . . . [which] cannot be made to work unless we get all the breaks . . . [i.e.] the Soviet Union will break its leg while the U.S. grows a pair of wings." Asked Lippmann: "Do we dare to assume that?"
A Seething Stew. "[It] would mean that for ten or 15 years Moscow, not Washington, would define the issues." It would also mean asking Congress for a blank check for money and military forces to apply "counterforce" at a moment's notice—impossible to conceive of under the U.S. constitutional system, "even more unsuited to the American economy, which is unregimented and uncontrolled.
"The policy can. be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets ... a coalition of disorganized, disunited, feeble and disorderly nations, tribes and factions around the perimeter of the Soviet Union . . . [which] cannot in fact be made to coalesce . . . a seething stew of civil strife.
"Worst of all, the effort to develop such an unnatural alliance of backward states must alienate the natural allies of the U.S."
Those natural allies, said Lippmann, "are the nations of the Atlantic community . . . the British Commonwealth, the Latin states on both sides of the Atlantic, the Low Countries and Switzerland, Scandinavia and the U.S."