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Disengage, Neutralize, Withdraw. For years the Lippmann headlight has focused on U.S. foreign policy. He stands a head above the field. A few other columnists, notably Joseph Alsop (TIME, Oct. 27) and Roscoe Drummond, regularly thrash through the international thicket, but they go mainly as temporal critics and observers. Lippmann is critical, too, in an Olympian, undisputatious manner transcending shifts in the policy line, substitutions in the diplomatic team and, all too often, the hard practicalities of statesmanship, which must daily translate fine theories into action.
Pundit Lippmann has evolved a foreign policy of his own, which rests on his premise that 20th century diplomacy is no more than a chain of tragic errors leading to war. Lippmann's contemporary recipe for the survival of liberty: disengagement from Russia and Red China, neutralization of nations not big enough or ambitious enough to enter the power fight, and, ultimately, withdrawal of West from East. At times even his closest friends have read Lippmann and muttered, "Appeasement." There is, in a Lippmann way, a quality of isolationism about his policy. He prefers the word "accommodation." "The world," he has written, "will have to be big enough to let differing systems of life and of government exist side by side."
This Lippmann conviction even embraces Red China. He thinks that Communist China should be seated in the United Nations, and that the U.S. should pull Chiang Kai-shek off Quemoy and Matsu. On Germany, he rejects the U.S. "standpat" policy and the holding of free elections on both sides of the German partition, endorses "confederation" of East and West Germany and withdrawal of Russian and Allied occupation troops, leaving two neutralized German fractions to work out their own common denominator. He is undismayed by the fact that many of his readers might find it hard to distinguish between his solutions and those preferred by the Kremlin.
Getting into Trim. Columnist Lippmann has spent a lifetime getting into cortical trim for his continuous act of cerebration. The only child of well-to-do German-Jewish parents living in New York City, he was encouraged in his appetite for art, scholarship, travel abroad, and the intellectual ferment of the time. As a brilliant Harvard undergraduate, he fell into step briefly with the Fabian Socialists, a tepid movement whose very tepidity appealed to him. After graduation with honors ('10), Lippmann served a hitch as secretary to the Rev. George R. Lunn of Schenectady, New York State's first Socialist mayor. In 1914 he helped found The New Republic. During World War I he became, successively, a member of The Inquiry, Wilson's clandestine architects of the terms of peace, an intelligence agent in France, and the author of an interpretation of Wilson's Fourteen Points.