Walter Lippmann (23 September 1889-14 December 1974) was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator who was best known for conceiving the terms "Cold War" and "stereotype."
Biography[]
Walter Lippmann was born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City in 1889, the son of wealthy Jewish and Republican parents. Lippmann attended Harvard and became a member of the Socialist Party of America, serving as secretary to Socialist Schenectady mayor George R. Lunn before becoming a journalist. He served as a US Army intelligence captain in France during World War I before becoming an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson, helping draft his Fourteen Points speech. Lippmann came to serve as research director of Wilson's postwar board of inquiry, and he critiqued both media and democracy, identifying the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas, coining the term "stereotype", and arguing that the basic problem of democracy was the accuracy of news and protection of sources. Lippmann criticized Franklin D. Roosevelt's qualities as a 1932 presidential candidate, and he later stood by his assessment, arguing that the New Deal was improvised after Roosevelt's victory. He received Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 and 1962, having reported on the possibility of the US trading its Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Lippmann died in New York in 1974.