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.”
