Anthony Lewis

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Anthony Lewis (born March 27, 1927, New York City) is a prominent liberal intellectual, writing for The New York Times op-ed page and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He was previously a columnist for the Times (1969–2001). Before that he was London bureau chief (1965–1972), Washington, D.C. bureau (1955–64), and deskman (1948–1952) all for the Times. From 1952-55 he worked for the Democratic National Committee and the Washington Daily News.

Biography

His first Pulitzer Prize was in 1955, during the period of McCarthyism, for reporting on the U.S. government's loyalty program; he reported specifically on the dismissal of Abraham Chasanow, a US Navy employee who was not informed of the nature of the accusations against him, nor of his accusers. Lewis's articles led to the employee's reinstatement. This story was fictionalized in the movie Three Brave Men starring Ernest Borgnine and Ray Milland. He won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for his coverage of the United States Supreme Court. He has frequently written on the Court and matters of constitutional law.

Lewis has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism since the mid-'70s, and has held the school's James Madison chair in First Amendment Issues since 1982. He lectured at Harvard from 1974 to 1989 and has been a visiting lecturer at several other colleges and universities, including the Universities of Arizona, California, Illinois, and Oregon.

Anthony Lewis was born in New York City; he attended the Horace Mann School in New York (where one of his classmates was Roy Cohn) and Harvard College, where he earned a A.B. in 1948. While at Harvard, he was an editor of the Harvard Crimson.^[1] He is on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

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 was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Clinton. On October 21, 2008, Lewis was honored by the National Coalition Against Censorship for his work in the area of First Amendment rights and free expression.

Noam Chomsky has said that Anthony Lewis is at "the far left of the spectrum" that is available in the mainstream media, and thus is useful in discovering the tacit assumptions that underlie all mainstream discussion. Henry Kissinger reportedly once said that Anthony Lewis is "always wrong", which Lewis attributed to his own open dislike of Kissinger.^[2]

He is Jewish and married to retired Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, who was formerly the General Counsel and Vice-President(citation needed, inconsistent with other articles) at Harvard University. He has three children from his first marriage, Eliza, David, and Mia, and seven grandchildren: Zoe, Miranda, Lily, Thea, Evie, Beatrice and Jack.

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

Quotations

"What future possibility could be more terrible than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now?" -March 17, 1975

Reagan used “sectarian religiosity to sell a political program”…the “evil empire” speech was “primitive”…“a mirror image of crude Soviet rhetoric”… “What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology?” -March 10, 1983

Books

Sole or primary author

• Gideon's Trumpet (Random House, 1964) - the story behind Gideon v. Wainwright (Reprint ISBN 0-679-72312-9)
  • 1965 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book
  • made into a film of the same name for the Hallmark Hall of Fame
• 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) The story behind New York Times v. Sullivan (ISBN 0-394-58774-X) (PB ed by Vintage)
• 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: A Biography of the First Amendment (Basic Books, January 2008) (ISBN 0465039170)

Editor

• Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times (Holt, 2001) (ISBN 0-8050-6849-X)

Co-author or contributor

• In Time of War: Hitler's Terrorist Attack on America by Pierce O'Donnell and Anthony Lewis. (New Press, 2005) (ISBN 1-56584-958-2)
• 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 by Tom Segev (Editor), Roane Carey (Editor), Jonathan Shainin (Introduction), and Anthony Lewis (Introduction) (New Press, 2004) (ISBN 1-56584-914-0)
• The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib by Karen J. Greenberg (Editor), Joshua L. Dratel (Editor), and Anthony Lewis (Introduction) (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)
• Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Free Speech by Frank Snepp and Anthony Lewis (University Press of Kansas, 2001) (ISBN 0-7006-1091-X) The story of CIA v. Snepp

Online articles by Lewis

• 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

Sources

• The White House - President Clinton Awards the Presidential Citizens Medals - Monday, January 8, 2001

References

External links

• New York Review of Books
• Reporting Civil Rights
• Fairness.com profile
• Columbia faculty profile
• Nieman Watchdog profile
• John S Knight fellowship at Stanford
• Lewis discusses why the Supreme Court’s overturning of the decision in The New York Times v. Sullivan case—the focus of his 1992 Make No Law—was a blow to those in the south who wished to overlook the first amendment and silence the national press’ coverage of the Civil Rights Movement
• NYT bio
• Middle East Warp: The Pathology of Anthony Lewis 1992 article by Andrea Levin highly critical of Lewis
• links to various online articles mentioning Lewis
• Front list--books by Lewis
• Anthony Lewis discusses press issues with Ron Collins at Harvard University A transcript of that interview can be found here.
• Anthony Lewis: bibliography of articles, columns, scholarly works and books on the First Amendment
• Booknotes interview with Lewis on Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment, October 20, 1991.