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.
For other people named Anthony Lewis, see Anthony Lewis (disambiguation).
Anthony Lewis
March 27, 1927
March 25, 2013 (aged 85)
American
Journalist
Linda J. Rannells (1951–1982; divorced; 3 children)
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."[1] 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."[2]
Early life[edit]
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.[3][4] He and his family were Jewish.[5][6] 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.[7]
Other activities[edit]
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.[2] He held the school's James Madison chair in First Amendment Issues from 1982. He lectured at Harvard from 1974 to 1989 and was a visiting lecturer at several other colleges and universities, including the universities of Arizona, California, Illinois, and Oregon.[4]
In 1983, Lewis received the 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.[2]
Lewis was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2005.[12]
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.[13]
He was chosen Class Day speaker at Harvard in 1997.[2]
He was a member of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute's International Council.
Views on the press[edit]
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".[14]
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.[15]
Personal life[edit]
On July 8, 1951, Lewis married Linda J. Rannells,[16] "a tall, blithe student of modern dance" according to Gay Talese.[1] 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,[3] 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 and heart failure, two days shy of his 86th birthday.[1] He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a few years earlier.[4]