Anthony Lewis

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Anthony Lewis (1927 – March 25, 2013) was an American public intellectual and journalist.

He was twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and was a columnist for The New York Times.

He is credited with the inception of legal journalism in the United States. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter told an editor of The New York Times, "I can't believe what this young man accomplished early in Lewis' career as a legal journalist."

There are no two justices of this court who have such a keen understanding of these cases." Nicholas B. Lemann, dean of Columbia University School of Journalism, said at his funeral: "He was one of the first liberal voices in American history."

Early years

Lewis was born Joseph Anthony Lewis of New York City on March 27, 1927, to Kassel Lewis, who worked in textile manufacturing, and Sylvia Surut, who became the head of the nursery school at the 92nd Street Y. He and his family were Jewish. He attended Horace Mann School in the Bronx, where he was a classmate of Roy Cohn and graduated from Harvard College in 1948. He served as the Harvard Crimson's managing editor when he was at Harvard.

Personal life

Lewis married Linda J. Rannells, "a tall, blithe student of modern dance," Gay Talese says on July 8, 1951. In 1982, the parents had three children and divorced.

Lewis migrated from New York to Cambridge as a New York Times columnist. In 1984, he married Margaret H. Marshall, an attorney in private practice who later became General Counsel at Harvard University and Chief Justice of Massachusetts.

Lewis and his wife were longtime residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lewis died on March 25, 2013, aged 86 years old, from renal and heart failure two days before his 86th birthday. A few years ago, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

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Career in journalism

Lewis worked for The New York Times after his college graduation. Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign began in 1952 and he continued to serve with the Democratic National Committee on Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign. He returned to journalism at the Washington Daily News, a daily newspaper. He wrote a series of articles on Abraham Chasanow, a US Navy civilian employee who had been barred from service due to reports by anonymous informers that he was connected with anti-American subversives. In 1955, Lewis Moore received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

Lewis was a Washington bureau chief for The New York Times earlier this year. He was selected to cover the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard Law School from 1956–57. In 1963, he received his second Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the United States Supreme Court, adding to his category National Reporting. The citation specifically highlighted the court's reasoning in Baker v. Carr, a Supreme Court decision that found that federal courts could have power over legislative redistricting in those states, as well as the decision's effect on specific states.

Gay Talese characterized Lewis in his Washington years as "cool, lean, well-scrubbed looking, vibrant, and brilliant" in his 1969 memoir of The New York Times. Lewis became a member of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's social circle, but not so much in the opinion of Max Frankel, one of the paper's editors.

Lewis wrote Gideon's Trumpet, the story of Clarence Earl Gideon, the prosecutor in Gideon vs. Wainwright, the 1963 case in which the Supreme Court found that states were required to have counsel for serious defendants facing four months of imprisonment. It hadn't been out of print at Lewis' death when it was first published. It received the 1965 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, and the Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1980 was adapted as a television film. Lewis was only insignificant in the film.

In 1964, Lewis wrote Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution, a memoir about the civil rights movement. Mr. Lewis wrote Make No Law, an account of The New York Times' vs. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court decision that changed American libel law. The court in Sullivan found that public officials suing their official conduct had to demonstrate that the allegations were made with "actual malice," implying that they were aware of their falsity or having significant subjective doubts regarding their authenticity.

Lewis was sent by the Times in 1964, where he was bureau chief with responsibility for broad coverage of politics, culture, and, in the words of one editor, "ballet, jazz, Glyndebourne, la-da London society, diplomacy, the British identity, you name it." In 1969, he moved to New York and began writing a twice-weekly opinion column for the Times. He continued to write these pieces, which appeared under the heading "At Home Abroad" or "Abroad at Home" depending on his byline, until he retired in 2001. Though his interests were diverse, he often concentrated on legal issues, promotion of compromise between Israel and the Palestinians, and condemnation of the Vietnam and South Africa's apartheid regime. In the United States' reaction to the September 11 attacks, he told his last column on December 15, 2001, that civil rights were in jeopardy.

He recalled two lessons in his years as a columnist.

Lewis replied after Henry Kissinger's words as "always incorrect" Lewis said, "probably because I wrote in a very uncomplimentary way about him." I didn't like him. "He did things that were extremely harmful to human beings."

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Awards

• 1955: Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting
• 1963: Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting
• 1983: Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award
• 1983: Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College
• 2001: Presidential Citizens Medal by Bill Clinton
• 2003: American Civil Liberties Union's Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty
• 2008: National Coalition Against Censorship honor for work on First Amendment rights and free expression