Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) has been hailed as the greatest journalist of his age. Drawing on conversations with Lippmann and on exclusive access to his private papers, Ronald Steel reveals for the first time the extraordinary story of Lippmann's largely unrecognized additional role in twentieth-century history: his active involvement behind the scenes with presidents, politicians, and powerbrokers in helping to shape the very events he wrote about, events that changed the fate of nations. In this absorbing biography, Ronald Steel meticulously documents the philosophies and politics, the friendships and quarrels, the trials and triumphs of this man who for six decades stood at the center of American political life. Lippmann's experience spanned a period when the American empire was born, matured, and began to wane, a time some have called "the American Century". No one better captured its possibilities and wrote about them so wisely and so well, no one was more the mind, the voice, and the conscience of that era than Walter Lippmann: journalist, moralist, public philosopher.

Biography : General
History : General