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Lippmann was born in New York City to German-Jewish parents, Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann. The family lived a comfortable, if not privileged, life. Annual family trips to Europe were the rule.
At age 17, he entered Harvard University where he studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas . He concentrated on philosophy and languages (he spoke both German and French) and graduated after only three years of study.
In 1913 Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic magazine. During World War I, Lippmann became an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen PointsThe USA's President Woodrow Wilson delivered a speech to Congress on January 8, 1918 outlining Fourteen Points for reconstructing a new Europe following World War I. While many of the points were specific, others were more general, including freedom of th.
Early on, Lippmann was optimistic about American democracy. He believed that the American people would become intellectually-engaged in political and world issues and fulfill their democratic role as an educated electorate. In light of the events leading to World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough and the concomitant scourge of totalitarianismTotalitarianism is any political system in which a citizen is totally subject to a governing authority in all aspects of day-to-day life. It goes well beyond dictatorship or typical police state measurers, and even beyond those measures required to sustai however, he rejected this view. Lippmann came to be seen as Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an Institute Professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages. His works in generative linguistics contributed si's moral and intellectual antithesis: He agreed with the PlatonicFor the computing technology, see PLATO System. Plato ( Greek: Platon (c. 427 BC c. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, writer, and founder of the Academy in Athens. Plato, who is be view that the population is a great beast, a herd, that has to be controlled by an intellectualAn intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, and speculate on a variety of different ideas. In some contexts, especially journalistic speech, intellectual often refers to academics, generally in the humanities, especially p specialist class. In this sense Lippmann might be viewed as a forerunner of US neoconservatismNeoconservatism is a somewhat controversial term referring to the political goals and ideology of the "new conservatives" in the United States. Compared to other U. conservatives, neoconservatives are characterized by an aggressive stance on foreign polic. Chomsky used one of Lippmann's catch phrase for the title of his book about the media: Manufacturing Consent.
It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. In addition to his newspaper columns, he published several books. Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase " cold war" to common currency in his 1947 book by the same name.