ABSTRACT
By the end of 1965 communication between Woodley Road and the White House had virtually broken down. The administration had dug in its heels and Waiter Lippmann's increasingly strident columns were dismissed as ill-informed or even "cowardly." Lippmann by this time had virtually given up trying to influence the President or his advisers. He had become estranged from most of them, while the true believers among them discounted his criticisms as repetitive and irrelevant. Lippmann had criticized other Presidents, but never in such personal and uncompromising language as he used against Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was particularly fond of telling a story that presumably showed how detached Lippmann was from the real world. Lippmann was so distressed that he referred in his column to the administration's "hatchet men in the Senate and in the press" who defended the war by treating dissenters as "disreputable.".
