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{{Short description|American journalist (1927–2013)}}
{{Other people|Anthony Lewis}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=November 2024}}
{{Infobox person
| name               = Anthony Lewis
| image              = Anthony Lewis discussion, RIT NandE Vol17Num4 1985 Oct24 Complete (Lewis crop).jpg
| caption            = Lewis in 1985
| birth_name         = Joseph Anthony Lewis
| birth_date         = {{Birth date|1927|3|27}}
| birth_place        = New York City, U.S.
| death_date         = {{Death date and age|2013|3|25|1927|3|27}}
| death_place        = [[Cambridge, Massachusetts]], U.S.
| other_names        = 
| known_for          = [[Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting]] (1955)
| alma_mater         = [[Harvard University]] ([[Bachelor of Arts|AB]])
| occupation         = Journalist
| spouse             = Linda J. Rannells (1951–1982; divorced; 3 children)<br>{{Marriage|[[Margaret H. Marshall]]|1984}}
}}
'''Joseph Anthony Lewis''' (March 27, 1927 – March 25, 2013) was an American [[public intellectual]] and journalist.  He was a two-time winner of the [[Pulitzer Prize]] and was a columnist for ''[[The New York Times]]''. He is credited with creating the field of legal journalism in the United States.

Early in Lewis' career as a legal journalist, Supreme Court Justice [[Felix Frankfurter]] told an editor of ''[[The New York Times]]'': "I can't believe what this young man achieved. There are not two justices of this court who have such a grasp of these cases."<ref name=nytobit>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/us/anthony-lewis-pulitzer-prize-winning-columnist-dies-at-85.html|title=Anthony Lewis, Supreme Court Reporter Who Brought Law to Life, Dies at 85|date=March 25, 2013|access-date=March 25, 2013|newspaper= The New York Times|first=Adam|last=Liptak}}</ref> At his death, [[Nicholas Lemann|Nicholas B. Lemann]], the dean of [[Columbia University School of Journalism]], said: "At a liberal moment in American history, he was one of the defining liberal voices."<ref name=crimsonobit>{{cite news|last=Fandos|first=Nicholas P.|title=Anthony Lewis '48, Pulitzer Winner and Crimson Mentor, Dies at 85|url=http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/3/26/Lewis-Reporter-Dies-Journalist/|access-date=March 27, 2013|newspaper=The Harvard Crimson|date=March 26, 2013}}</ref>

==Early life==
Lewis was born Joseph Anthony Lewis in [[New York City]] on March 27, 1927, to Kassel Lewis, who worked in textiles manufacturing, and Sylvia Surut, who became director of the nursery school at the [[92nd Street Y]].<ref name=marshall>{{cite news|title=Margaret H. Marshall, a Law Partner, Is Wed to Anthony Lewis, a Columnist |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/24/style/margaret-h-marshall-a-law-partner-is-wed-to-anthony-lewis-a-columnist.html |access-date=March 27, 2013|newspaper=The New York Times|date=September 24, 1984}}</ref><ref name=lavoie>{{cite news|last=Lavoie|first=Denise|title=Anthony Lewis wrote for The New York Times and the Washington Daily News. He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Lewis died Monday at age 85.|url=http://news.msn.com/obits/pulitzer-prize-winning-columnist-anthony-lewis-dies|access-date=March 27, 2013|newspaper=MSN|date=March 26, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130327010120/http://news.msn.com/obits/pulitzer-prize-winning-columnist-anthony-lewis-dies|archive-date=March 27, 2013|url-status=dead}}</ref> He and his family were [[Judaism|Jewish]].<ref name=cousin>{{cite news|last=Wildman|first=Sarah|title=Anthony Lewis's Cousin Remembers His Kindness to a Young Journalist|url=http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/26/anthony-lewis-cousin-remembers-his-kindness-to-a-young-journalist.html|access-date=March 29, 2013|newspaper=The Daily Beast|date=March 26, 2013}}</ref><ref>[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-01-23-op-14498-story.html Los Angeles Times: "Of Secrecy and Paranoia: What Is Inman's Real Story?" by Suzanne Garment] January 23, 1994 |''Inman named five journalists who had treated him badly: Safire, Tony Lewis, Ellen Goodman, the cartoonist Herblock and Rita Braver. All five are Jewish''</ref> He attended the [[Horace Mann School]] in the Bronx, where he was a classmate of [[Roy Cohn]], and graduated from [[Harvard College]] in 1948. While at Harvard, he was managing editor of ''[[The Harvard Crimson]]''.<ref>{{cite news|title=R. Scot Leavitt Named Crimson President J. Anthony Lewis Chosen Managing Editor|url=http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=470434 |access-date=March 27, 2013|newspaper=The Harvard Crimson|date=December 3, 1946}}</ref>

==Career in journalism==
Following his college graduation, Lewis worked for ''The New York Times''. He left in 1952 to work for the [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic National Committee]] on Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign. He returned to journalism at ''[[The Washington Daily News]]'', an afternoon tabloid. He wrote a series of articles on the case of [[Abraham Chasanow]], a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy, who had been dismissed from his job on the basis of allegations by anonymous informers that he associated with anti-American subversives. The series won Lewis a [[Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting]] in 1955.<ref>{{cite web|title=1955 Winners|url=http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1955|publisher=Pulitzer Prizes|access-date=March 27, 2013}}</ref>

Lewis returned to ''The New York Times'' that year as its Washington bureau chief. He was assigned to cover the [[United States Department of Justice|Justice Department]] and the [[Supreme Court of the United States|Supreme Court]]. In 1956–57 he was a [[Nieman Fellowship|Nieman Fellow]] at [[Harvard Law School]].<ref name=nytobit/> He won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963, again in the category National Reporting, for his coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court.<ref name = pul63>{{cite web|title=1963 Winners|url=http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1963|publisher=Pulitzer Prizes|access-date=March 27, 2013}}</ref> The citation singled out his coverage of the court's reasoning in ''[[Baker v. Carr]]'', a Supreme Court decision which held that federal courts could exercise authority over legislative redistricting on the part of the states, and the decision's impact on specific states.<ref name=nytobit/>

In his 1969 history of ''The New York Times'', [[Gay Talese]] described Lewis in his Washington years as "cool, lean, well-scrubbed looking, intense and brilliant".<ref name=nytobit/> Lewis became a member of Senator [[Robert F. Kennedy]]'s social circle, too conspicuously so in the opinion of [[Max Frankel]], another of the paper's editors.<ref name=nytobit/>

During a four-month newspaper strike (November 1962 to February 1963), Lewis wrote ''[[Gideon's Trumpet]]'', the story of [[Clarence Earl Gideon]], the plaintiff in ''[[Gideon v. Wainwright]]'', the 1963 case in which the Supreme Court held that states were required to provide counsel for indigent defendants charged with serious crimes. At Lewis' death it had not been out of print since it was first published.<ref name=nytobit/> It won the 1965 [[Edgar Award]] for Best Fact Crime and in 1980 was adapted as a movie for television and presented by [[Hallmark Hall of Fame]]. Lewis played a small role in the film.{{Citation needed|date=June 2024}}

Lewis published a second book in 1964, ''Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution'', about the civil rights movement. In 1991, Mr. Lewis published ''Make No Law'', an account of ''[[The New York Times v. Sullivan]]'', the 1964 Supreme Court decision that revolutionized American libel law. In ''Sullivan'', the court held that public officials suing critics of their official conduct needed to prove that the contested statement(s) were made with "actual malice", that is, with knowledge that it was false or with "reckless disregard" of whether it was true or not.<ref name=nytobit/>

The ''Times'' moved Lewis to London in 1964, where he was bureau chief with responsibility for broad coverage of politics, culture and, in the words of one editor, "ballet, music, [[Glyndebourne Festival Opera|Glyndebourne]], la-di-da London society, diplomacy, the British character, you name it".<ref name=nytobit/> He moved to New York in 1969 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 retiring in 2001. Though wide-ranging in his interests, he often focused on legal questions, advocacy of compromise between Israel and the Palestinians, and criticism of the war in Vietnam and the apartheid regime in South Africa. On December 15, 2001, his final column warned that civil liberties were at risk in the U.S. reaction to the [[September 11 attacks]].<ref name=nytobit/><ref name=lavoie/>

Reflecting on his years as a columnist, he said he had learned two lessons:<ref name=lavoie/>
{{blockquote|One is that certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and (then-Attorney General) John Ashcroft. And secondly that for this country at least, given the kind of obstreperous, populous, diverse country we are, law is the absolute essential. And when governments short-cut the law, it's extremely dangerous.}}

When told [[Henry Kissinger]] had once described him as "always wrong", Lewis replied: "Probably because I wrote in a very uncomplimentary way about him. I didn’t like him. He did things that were very damaging to human beings."<ref>{{cite news|last=Solomon|first=Deborah|title=Speech Rules|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/magazine/23wwlnQ4-t.html|access-date=March 27, 2013|newspaper=The New York Times|date=December 23, 2007}}</ref>

==Other activities==
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Lewis taught a course in First Amendment and the Supreme Court at [[Columbia University]]'s Graduate School of Journalism for 23 years.<ref name=crimsonobit/> He held the school's James Madison chair in First Amendment Issues from 1982. He lectured at [[Harvard University|Harvard]] from 1974 to 1989 and was a visiting lecturer at several other colleges and universities, including the universities of [[University of Arizona|Arizona]], [[University of California|California]], [[University of Illinois|Illinois]], and [[University of Oregon|Oregon]].<ref name=lavoie/>

In 1983, Lewis received the [[Elijah P. Lovejoy|Elijah Parish Lovejoy]] Award as well as an honorary [[Doctor of Laws]] degree from [[Colby College]]. On January 8, 2001, he received the [[Presidential Citizens Medal]] from President [[Bill Clinton]]. On October 21, 2008, the [[National Coalition Against Censorship]] honored him for his work in the area of First Amendment rights and free expression.

He served for decades as a member of the ''Harvard Crimson'''s graduate board and as one of its trustees. He was a key player in the fundraising and reconstruction of the paper's Plympton Street building.<ref name=crimsonobit/>

Lewis was elected to the [[American Philosophical Society]] in 2005.<ref>{{Cite web|title=APS Member History|url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Anthony+Lewis&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced|access-date=2021-06-08|website=search.amphilsoc.org}}</ref>

He served on the board of directors of the [[Committee to Protect Journalists]] (CPJ) and its policy committee. CPJ awarded him its Burton Benjamin Award for lifetime achievement in 2009.<ref>{{cite web|last=Massing|first=Michael|title=Tony Lewis gave CPJ authority, devotion over decades|date=25 March 2013|url=http://www.cpj.org/blog/2013/03/tony-lewis-gave-cpj-authority-devotion-over-decade.php |publisher=Committee to Protect Journalists|access-date=28 March 2013}}</ref>

He was chosen Class Day speaker at Harvard in 1997.<ref name=crimsonobit/>

He was a member of the [[Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute]]'s International Council.

==Views on the press==
Lewis read the First Amendment as a restriction on the ability of the federal government to regulate speech, but opposed attempts to broaden its meaning to create special protection for journalists. He approved when a federal court in 2005 jailed [[Judith Miller]], a ''New York Times'' reporter, for refusing to name her confidential sources as a special prosecutor demanded she do. [[Max Frankel]], another ''Times'' editor said: "In his later years he turned a little bit against the press, which he loved. But he disagreed with those of us who felt that we couldn't just trust the courts to defend our freedom".<ref>{{cite news|last=Malone|first=Scott|title=NY Times legal trailblazer Anthony Lewis dead at 85|url=https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-people-anthonylewis-idUSL2N0CH1J820130325?|access-date=March 28, 2013|newspaper=Reuters|date=March 25, 2013}}</ref>

Lewis also opposed journalists' advocacy of a federal "shield law" to allow journalists to refuse to reveal their sources. He cited the case of [[Wen Ho Lee]], whose privacy was, in Lewis' view, violated by newspapers who published leaked information and then refused to identify the sources of those leaks, preferring to agree to a financial settlement. He noted that the newspapers said they were acting to "protect our journalists from further sanctions", thus privileging their own needs over the damage caused the victim of the false information they printed.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Lewis|first=Anthony|title=Are Journalists Privileged?|journal=Cardozo Law Review|date=March 2008|pages=1356–7|url=http://www.cardozolawreview.com/Joomla1.5/content/29-4/29.4_lewis_frankel_kovner.pdf|access-date=2013-03-28|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304030156/http://www.cardozolawreview.com/Joomla1.5/content/29-4/29.4_lewis_frankel_kovner.pdf|archive-date=2016-03-04|url-status=dead}}</ref>

==Personal life==
On July 8, 1951, Lewis married Linda J. Rannells,<ref>{{cite news|title=Linda J. Rannells Wed at Columbia|url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1951/07/09/89801598.pdf|access-date=March 27, 2013|newspaper=The New York Times|date=July 9, 1951}}</ref> "a tall, blithe student of modern dance" according to [[Gay Talese]].<ref name=nytobit/> They had three children and divorced in 1982.

Lewis relocated from New York to Cambridge while he was a ''New York Times'' columnist. There, in 1984, he married [[Margaret H. Marshall]],<ref name=marshall/> an attorney in private practice who later became  General Counsel at [[Harvard University]] and [[Chief Justice]] of the [[Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts]].

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

Lewis died on March 25, 2013, from [[renal failure|renal]] and [[heart failure]], two days shy of his 86th birthday.<ref name=nytobit/> He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a few years earlier.<ref name=lavoie/>

==Awards==
* 1955:  Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting<ref>{{cite web|title=1955 Winners|url=http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/1955|publisher=Pulitzer Prizes|access-date=March 27, 2013}}</ref>
* 1963: Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting<ref name = pul63/>
* 1983: [[Elijah P. Lovejoy|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

== Selected writings ==
;Author
* ''[[Gideon's Trumpet]]'' ([[Random House]], 1964) (Reprint {{ISBN|0-679-72312-9}})
* ''Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution'' (Random House, 1964) ({{ISBN|0-394-44412-4}})
* ''Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment'' (Random House, 1991) ({{ISBN|0-394-58774-X}})
*''The Supreme Court and How It Works: The Story of the Gideon Case'' (Random House Children's Books, 1966) ({{ISBN|0-394-91861-4}})
*''[[Freedom for the Thought That We Hate|Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment]]'' ([[Basic Books]], 2010) ({{ISBN|0465039170}})

;Co-author
*Pierce O'Donnell and Anthony Lewis, ''In Time of War: Hitler's Terrorist Attack on America'' (New Press, 2005) ({{ISBN|1-56584-958-2}})
*[[Frank Snepp]] and Anthony Lewis, ''Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Free Speech'' ([[University Press of Kansas]], 2001) ({{ISBN|0-7006-1091-X}})

;Editor
*''Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times'' (Holt, 2001) ({{ISBN|0-8050-6849-X}})

;Preface/introduction
*''Glory and Terror: The Growing Nuclear Danger'' by [[Steven Weinberg]]; preface by Anthony Lewis (New York Review Books, 2004) ({{ISBN|1-59017-130-6}})
*''The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent'' edited by [[Tom Segev]] and Roane Carey, with an introduction by Anthony Lewis (New Press, 2004) ({{ISBN|1-56584-914-0}})
*''[[The Torture Papers (book)|The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib]]'' edited by [[Karen J. Greenberg]] and [[Joshua L. Dratel]], with an introduction by Anthony Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 2005) ({{ISBN|0-521-85324-9}})
*''The Myth of the Imperial Judiciary: Why the Right Is Wrong About the Courts'' by  Mark Kozlowski, foreword by Anthony Lewis ([[New York University Press]], 2003) ({{ISBN|0-8147-4775-2}})

;Miscellaneous articles
*[https://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/05/04_403.html One Liberty at a Time] (''Mother Jones'', May/June 2004)
*[http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Background.view&backgroundid=24 the Framers, the 1st Amendment and watchdog reporting]
*[http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Background.view&backgroundid=41 "Heroic" News media?]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20050402075100/http://www.susqu.edu/lawandsociety/LewisCommentary.htm The Justices Take on the President]

==References==
{{Reflist|2}}
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20120801215612/http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/new/html/Mon_Jan_8_141714_2001.html The White House – ''President Clinton Awards the Presidential Citizens Medals – Monday, January 8, 2001'']

==External links==
{{Wikiquote}}
{{external links|date=July 2018}}
*{{C-SPAN|4282}}

;Bibliographies
* [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/149 New York Review of Books, index of articles by Lewis]
* [https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20080822051534/http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/about.aspx?id=17378 Anthony Lewis: bibliography]

;Profiles
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20050331072644/http://www.fairness.com/resources/by-relation?relation_id=7764 Fairness.com profile]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20050303211415/http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/faculty/lewis.asp Columbia faculty profile]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20051023031745/http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=about.viewContributors&bioid=21 Nieman Watchdog profile]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20031016203035/http://knight.stanford.edu/lectures/knight/1994/lewis_bio.html John S Knight fellowship at Stanford]

;Interviews
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060719000031/http://www.facinghistory.org/Campus/reslib.nsf/webclips/36C2ED8E3AED279885256F970051C2A3?Opendocument Lewis discusses how  ''New York Times v. Sullivan'' enhanced national press coverage of the civil rights movement]
*[https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20080822051529/http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=17375 Anthony Lewis discusses press issues with Ron Collins at Harvard University]; [https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20080725074402/http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=17872 transcript]

{{PulitzerPrize National Reporting}}

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Lewis, Anthony}}
[[Category:1927 births]]
[[Category:2013 deaths]]
[[Category:American legal writers]]
[[Category:Jewish American journalists]]
[[Category:Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting winners]]
[[Category:Edgar Award winners]]
[[Category:Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award recipients]]
[[Category:Columbia University faculty]]
[[Category:The Harvard Crimson people]]
[[Category:University of Arizona faculty]]
[[Category:Horace Mann School alumni]]
[[Category:The New York Times columnists]]
[[Category:Presidential Citizens Medal recipients]]
[[Category:Writers from Cambridge, Massachusetts]]
[[Category:20th-century American non-fiction writers]]
[[Category:21st-century American non-fiction writers]]
[[Category:Harvard College alumni]]
[[Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society]]
[[Category:21st-century American Jews]]