RIP NYT's Anthony Lewis

[AdamSmith]

Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis, who has died aged 85, was a New York Times columnist and author who twice won a Pulitzer Prize, the highest award in American journalism.

Anthony Lewis Photo: NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE

6:29PM GMT 26 Mar 2013

Throughout his long career, the issue that preoccupied Lewis was constitutional law, and its impact on human rights and freedom of the press.

In his book Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (1991), he addressed what one judge called “probably the most important free press case since the dawn of the Republic”. Lewis took the title from the words of the First Amendment to the US Constitution: “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

The Sullivan case concerned a libel action against The New York Times over its publication of an advertisement by a group called the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South. The advertisement was critical of police and other officials in Montgomery, Alabama, who responded by suing the Times for $3 million. After four years of litigation the Times’s lawyers managed to get the case brought before the Supreme Court for review. The Court threw it out, in effect establishing a doctrine that the press, under the First Amendment, had substantial protection against officials too thin-skinned to take the criticism that accompanies life in the public eye.

Although a lifelong liberal, Lewis did not believe that the press should have privileged status under the law when it came to the protection of sources; neither was he happy about unwarranted intrusion into privacy.

Joseph Anthony Lewis was born in New York City on March 27 1927 and attended the private Horace Mann school before going on to Harvard, where he was a contemporary of Robert Kennedy. After four years with The New York Times he moved to the Washington Daily News, where in 1955 he won his first Pulitzer, for a series of articles on injustices suffered by some civil servants during the Eisenhower administration. The principal subject of the series was a US Navy employee who was sacked as a potential security risk after being denounced by unnamed informants. As a result of Lewis’s articles the man was reinstated. The case formed the basis for a film, Three Brave Men (1956), starring Ray Milland and Ernest Borgnine.

In 1955 Lewis moved to the Washington staff of The New York Times, specialising in stories about the Justice Department and the Supreme Court, work which won him his second Pulitzer in 1963.

In 1964 he published Gideon’s Trumpet, an analysis of the workings of the Supreme Court which drew on the case of Clarence Earl Gideon, a drifter and habitual criminal convicted of theft in Florida in 1961 and sentenced to five years’ jail. Gideon was unable to afford a lawyer, and Florida provided free legal aid only in capital cases. In a letter to the Supreme Court he claimed that the US Constitution guaranteed him the right to legal representation.

It was a case of great significance, determining whether the constitutional guarantee that the defendant in a federal case should have counsel extended to a defendant in a criminal case brought by an individual state. In the event, Gideon was granted legal representation for a retrial in Florida, and was acquitted. According to Justice Goldberg of the Supreme Court, Lewis’s book about the case “will take its place in the annals of distinguished literature about the law”.

Lewis’s other books included Portrait of a Decade, about race relations in the United States; and Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment (2008).

From 1965 to 1972 Lewis was chief of The New York Times bureau in London, and often appeared on radio and television making trenchant comments on British affairs. He wrote his column for more than 30 years, retiring at the end of 2001 with a warning to America not to surrender its civil liberties in the wake of 9/11.

Lewis lectured at Harvard Law School, was a visiting teacher at the Universities of California, Illinois and Oregon, and a Visiting Professor at Columbia. His interests included opera and musicals .

Anthony Lewis’s marriage to Linda Rannells was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, Margaret Marshall, former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and by a son and daughter of his first marriage.

Anthony Lewis, born March 27 1927, died March 25 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9955529/Anthony-Lewis.html

[RA1]

I appreciate this post and the information it contains. I still have some regard for the Pulitizer (although my regard for the Nobel Peace Prize has plummeted) and the description of the subject matter contained in his books has piqued my interest in reading them.

Best regards,

RA1