Twice a week after breakfast, Walter Lippmann sequesters himself in the study of his ivy-clad home on Washington's sedate Woodley Road to write his syndicated column, "Today and Tomorrow." The study is manifestly a scholar's lair. Ceiling-high, Pompeian red bookcases line three walls; the fourth is decked with framed pictures of Lippmann friends, living and dead: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Georges Clemenceau. A snow of documents mantles the oaken desk.
For an event of such intellectual moment as the birth of a Lippmann column, the setting is deceptively casual. Lippmann, a lean, angular and agile man of 69. is dressed carelessly in his writing habit: grey pullover sweater, corduroy slacks, white wool socks and loafers. He has taken breakfast with his wife Helen, a handsome woman decidedly Lippmann's intellectual peer. He has paid brief but fond attention to his French poodles, Vicky and Coquet. He has concluded thoughtful tours of three morning papers, with stops at all the international datelines. Across Woodley Road and through his study windows drifts the gay, playtime treble of his neighbors, the girls at National Cathedral School.
Lippmann scarcely notices. The coils of a creative mood have been steadily tightening since 6 o'clock, when he awakened and lay awhile in bed, reflecting. Now it is 9. In two hours or so, writing with ink in a pinched, illegible script, abbreviating wherever possible ("negotiate" becomes "nego"), he composes 750 to 1,000 carefully chosen words. He declaims his handiwork into a Dictaphone, punctuation and all: "It is not probable comma I think comma that on the whole . . ." After his staff types and checks his message, it is read over the long-distance telephone to an automatic recording device at the Herald Tribune in New York.
By then the author has left his chore behind him. His interest is that of the scholar, advancing but not selling ideas and thoughts. He is as heedless of praise as censure, has no idea how many readers attend him, and does not care: "To worry about the size of your audience is like taking your blood pressure every day."
Think, Think, Think. All these are components of a ritual that has been called "the one continuous act of cerebration" in journalism. "Today and Tomorrow" runs in the Oslo Morgenbladet, the Calcutta Hindustan Standard, the Tokyo Yomiuri Shimbun, the Fayetteville Northwest Arkansas Times and some 270 other papers in the U.S. and abroad, with a combined multilingual circulation estimated at 20 million. Lippmann's pronouncements on foreign policy are weighed with gravity, awe, annoyance, respect, and sometimes envy, by editors, pedagogues, logicians and statesmen, if not by the average reader.
Behind those pronouncements lie 45 years of uninterrupted heavy thinking. Walter Lippmann never stops thinking, not even when scrambling around the Maine rocks with Helen at their summer place near Bar Harbor. "Walter," fretted his wife one day as he tripped over a boulder, "look. Don't think." For Lippmann, this is the idlest advice. He cannot help thinking. Where other journalists run after the news, Lippmann prefers to ponder it.