Every career contains paradoxes and inconsistencies--great careers perhaps more than others. The contradictions of Walter Lippmann's career seem particularly revealing because they indicate how deeply he was involved in the complicated uncertainties of his time. He wrote continually of public opinion, yet he distrusted the expressions of popular will and always sought a counterbalance in the elevating, moderating, and uniting expression, through the designated authorities, of the "public interest." From his earliest writings to his last he argued that liberal democracy suffered from a debilitating and perhaps fatal sickness; men and women, he said, had been severed from the moorings of principle, tradition, and instruction; the lost arts of democracy had to be "revived and renewed" if democracy was to survive. He was the century's most influential political journalist and one of its finest critics of the press. He believed in the sacred character of serious journalism, once...