Anthony Lewis

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." At his death, 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."

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. He and his family were Jewish. 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.

Career in journalism Following his college graduation, Lewis worked for The New York Times. He left in 1952 to work for the 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.

Lewis returned to The New York Times that year as its Washington bureau chief. He was assigned to cover the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. In 1956–57 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard Law School. 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.

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.

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.

He was chosen Class Day speaker at Harvard in 1997.

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.

Personal life On July 8, 1951, Lewis married Linda J. Rannells, "a tall, blithe student of modern dance" according to Gay Talese. 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

Selected writings Author Gideon's Trumpet (Random House, 1964) (Reprint ) Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution (Random House, 1964) Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (Random House, 1991) The Supreme Court and How It Works: The Story of the Gideon Case (Random House Children's Books, 1966) Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment (Basic Books, 2010)

Co-author Pierce O'Donnell and Anthony Lewis, In Time of War: Hitler's Terrorist Attack on America (New Press, 2005) 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)

Editor Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times (Holt, 2001)

Preface/introduction Glory and Terror: The Growing Nuclear Danger by Steven Weinberg; preface by Anthony Lewis (New York Review Books, 2004) The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent edited by Tom Segev and Roane Carey, with an introduction by Anthony Lewis (New Press, 2004) 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) 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)

Miscellaneous articles One Liberty at a Time (Mother Jones, May/June 2004) the Framers, the 1st Amendment and watchdog reporting "Heroic" News media? The Justices Take on the President