The Press: Farewell to Washington

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Though he has lived in Washington for the past 29 years, Walter Lippmann still calls New York home. Last week he let it be known that he is going back to the city where he wrote books on politics, contributed to the New Republic, and was the last editorial-page editor of Joseph Pulitzer's World.

Lippmann feels not so much that he is deserting Washington, but that Washington has deserted him. When he arrived in the latter days of the New Deal as the World War II clouds were gathering, he found the capital was the only place for a columnist to be; today he thinks that as a source of world news the city is drying up. "I'm not leaving because of Lyndon Johnson," he says. "Of course I don't like the White House. I think its influence is bad. But that might be a reason for staying. I stayed through the McCarthy era, and that was worse. We decided on this before Johnson went off the deep end."

The move to New York does not mean that Lippmann, 77, is retiring. "I'm going on writing," he says rather ominously, "in the same way about the same things."