"Poem" on Walter Lippmann by his Harvard classmate John Reed

Note for a Planned Article

"Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy"
(comments welcome; draft, not for citation)

Lippmann image from

Lippmann, -- calm, inscrutable,

Thinking and writing clearly, soundly, well;

All snarls of falseness swiftly piercing through,

His keen mind leaps like lightning to the True;

His face is almost placid – but his eye –

There is a vision born to prophecy!

He sits in silence, as one who has said:

“I waste not living words among the dead!”

Our all-unchallenged Chief!

--Cited in Ronald Steel,
Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980) p. 28

The Reed-Lippmann mutual admiration society didn't last (Steel, p. 138). Walter -- at heart (or should I say "at mind," given his intellectual punditry, withstood by the public for perhaps too many decades) -- was essentially an establishment man, evidently not shaken (positively) by John's Bolshevik euphoria in Ten Days that Shook the World (1919)