The Press: Elucidator

Other countries might have produced such a journalist, but only in the U. S. could he exist today. In Germany or Italy he would be in prison or silent; in Russia, dead; in France, a partisan among partisans; in England, anonymous; in Japan, inconceivable. Only in a kind where the banner of a free press still proudly flaps could such a journalistic phenomenon as Walter Lippmann rise and continue to shine. Last week, however, Walter Lippmann rose and shone in a new quarter of the political firmament.

Plague to Both Houses. A journalist but his own master, a columnist but a dignified writer, a pundit almost without pomp, the master of a lucid style which thrice multiplies the effect of his political criticism, Walter Lippmann has been a marked man even among the small company of those for whom journalism is not a trade but a profession. Hence during half-a-dozen years of political crisis he has commanded, from his eight million readers, a respect and attention which the Administration in power had to regard as, at the very least, disturbing.

Actually he has disturbed not one but two antipodal regimes. Six years ago, when a Republican Administration was dying of slow political and economic tuberculosis, Herbert Hoover, sitting down to his breakfast and his worries, used to turn regularly to the editorial page of the arch-Democratic New York World to read Walter Lippmann's dispassionate discussion of his shortcomings. When in recent months Franklin Roosevelt, sitting up in bed with his breakfast and his grin, has occasionally picked up the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune, he has found no less disconcerting reading in Walter Lippmann's column ''Today & Tomorrow."

Milestones. This change of target on Lippmann's part did not coincide with his change of employment from a Democratic to a Republican paper. For the first three months of the Roosevelt Administration he was one of its strongest supporters. At the end of six months he had begun to speak of the "dictatorial spirit" of NRA, although he continued for some months to insist that "the President's statesmanship has been right." By the end of two years he reached the point of saying, "The courts will do an historic service not only to the nation as a whole but to recovery and reform, to the President and his Party, if they liquidate a major part of the centralized regulation to which the New Deal has committed itself."

When four years had nearly gone, Lippmann announced: "I am going to vote for Governor Landon;" but not with elation, not without misgivings voiced as criticism of Landon's campaign. Not until last spring, after Franklin Roosevelt launched his Supreme Court plan, did Pundit Lippmann, who had steadily grown more critical of "personal government," turn to outright condemnation.

So Lippmann alienated a large group of his former admirers, liberals who had once stood with him against Hoover, who now stand with Roosevelt against Lippmann. To them Lippmann as an opponent of the New Deal is a man convicted of treason to progressive social ideals, a turncoat, seduced not by cash but by the meretricious appeals of Bourbonism.