All Over the Lot

Two questions arise in connection with the publication of Walter Lippmann and His Times, edited by Marquis Childs and James “Scotty” Reston (Harcourt, Brace, $3.95). The first is: what has Mr. Lippmann done to earn the tribute of twelve respectful essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday? (It can’t just be his age: after all, the distinction of reaching the allotted Biblical span can happen to anybody if his glands are in good working order.) The second question is: if a septuagenarian Lippmann is worth a literary triumph, are the assembled authors (who include such willfully blind people as psychiatrist Carl Binger and Iverach McDonald, the foreign editor of the Times of London) capable of distinguishing what is good from what is bad in the Gargantuan output of a man who has been all over the lot in the journalistic world for a full half-century?

My own answer to Question Number One is that Mr. Lippmann, whether septuagenarian or not, is distinctly worth honoring for parts of two books, The Good Society, which came out in the thirties, and Essays in the Public Philosophy, a product of the nineteen fifties. As to Question

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Two questions arise in connection with the publication of Walter Lippmann and His Times, edited by Marquis Childs and James “Scotty” Reston (Harcourt, Brace, $3.95). The first is: what has Mr. Lippmann done to earn the tribute of twelve respectful essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday? (It can’t just be his age: after all, the distinction of reaching the allotted Biblical span can happen to anybody if his glands are in good working order.) The second question is: if a septuagenarian Lippmann is worth a literary triumph, are the assembled authors (who include such willfully blind people as psychiatrist Carl Binger and Iverach McDonald, the foreign editor of the Times of London) capable of distinguishing what is good from what is bad in the Gargantuan output of a man who has been all over the lot in the journalistic world for a full half-century?

My own answer to Question Number One is that Mr. Lippmann, whether septuagenarian or not, is distinctly worth honoring for parts of two books, The Good Society, which came out in the thirties, and Essays in the Public Philosophy, a product of the nineteen fifties. As to Question