New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis reads about the Pulitzer prizes while at the Boston bureau of The Associated Press in 1963. The two-time Pulitzer winner, whose New York Times column championed liberal causes for three decades, died Monday. (AP/File)
Anthony Lewis dies: Pioneering journalist gave legal writing a storyline
Anthony Lewis, a former New York Times columnist, died Monday, leaving behind a legacy of transforming American legal journalism.
His reporting on the US Supreme Court, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize in 1963, heralded a new approach to legal journalism: writing compelling stories that dug into the social impact of the court’s decisions.
“He brought context to the law,” Ronald K.L. Collins, a University of Washington scholar who produced a bibliography of Mr. Lewis’s work, told The New York Times. “He had an incredible talent in making the law not only intelligible but also in making it compelling.”
Fellow journalists shared their appreciation for Lewis on Monday, highlighting his legal expertise, his liberal values, and his passion for the role that journalists play in maintaining democracy.
Lewis began covering the US Supreme Court and Department of Justice for The New York Times in 1955 as a member of the Washington bureau. He came to the Times after working for the Washington Daily News, where he won his first Pulitzer Prize for a critical series on a Navy employee, Abraham Chasanow, who was unjustly fired for being a security risk. The New York Times Washington bureau chief, James Reston, sent Lewis to Harvard Law School in 1956 and 1957 on a Neiman Fellowship to study law with particular emphasis on the court, according to The New York Times.
Lewis then spent nine years reporting on the Supreme Court, which at the time was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
“You cannot talk about the legacy of the Warren court and not talk about Tony Lewis,” Mr. Collins told The New York Times. “He was just part and parcel of it. He was part of ushering in that constitutional revolution in civil rights and civil liberties from Brown v. Board of Education to Miranda v. Arizona.”
In the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg argued that Lewis should have been the court’s 10th justice.
“Tony Lewis knew more about the Constitution and the laws, their history and meaning, than the vast majority of Supreme Court Justices, let alone lawyers,” Mr. Hertzberg writes.
Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate, said she grew up reading Lewis’s New York Times columns, which ran from 1969 to 2001. In courses she teaches at Yale Law School, she assigns his book “Make No Law,” which chronicles the 1964 Supreme Court ruling on New York v. Sullivan that rewrote US libel law.
“I teach Lewis for legal substance as much as for context and style: His rendering of the Supreme Court’s momentous opinion is clearer than the opinion itself,” Ms. Bazelon writes. “He was a master elucidator: the writer who translated the Warren court for the public, and in that role, magnified its impact.”
She wonders what Lewis would have thought of the Supreme Court arguments on gay marriage, which are taking place Tuesday and Wednesday.
“If those of us who write about the cases manage to describe them clearly and sharply, we’ll owe Lewis for setting the standard,” Bazelon writes.
In The Nation, historian Rick Perlstein said Lewis was unflinching in his reporting of “uncomfortable truths” and his definition of patriotism was “holding leaders accountable for their sins.”
Mr. Perlstein found in his research of Lewis’s reporting during the 1960s and ‘70s that Lewis had a “consistent astringent vision and moral courage when it came to executive power and the national security state – a willingness to record the ugliest things the American state was up to, and to unflinchingly interpret them not as the exceptions of a nation that is fundamentally innocent but as part of a pattern of power-drunk arrogance.”
Boston Herald opinion editor Rachelle Cohen said she keeps a copy of Lewis’s last book, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment,” as a reminder of journalism’s rocky past and Lewis’s focus on the role of press freedom.
She highlights a favorite passage from the book’s introduction: “The meaning of the First Amendment has been, and will be, shaped by each American generation: by judges, political leaders, citizens. There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment.... But I am convinced that the fundamental American commitment to free speech, disturbing speech, is no longer in doubt.”
President Obama pauses during his speech at the Jerusalem Convention Center in Jerusalem, Israel, Thursday. The president’s speech last week in Israel revealed that his daughters are a key reason he holds Monday's Passover seder at the White House. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Why Obama, a Christian, hosts a Passover seder each year at White House
For the fifth time since he moved into the White House, President Obama will host a Passover seder Monday evening, a ritual that is celebrated by Jewish families throughout the world and that the president, a Protestant Christian, says speaks personally to him.
The gathering of about 20 people in the elegant family dining room on the first floor of the White House is expected to include first lady Michelle Obama as well as presidential daughters Malia and Sasha.
Mr. Obama is believed to be the first president to host seder dinners at the White House. America has not had a Jewish president.
During his speech to an audience of young people at the Jerusalem International Convention Center last Thursday, the president spoke at length about what the celebration of the Jews' escape from slavery in Egypt means to him. “It’s a story of centuries of slavery, and years of wandering in the desert; a story of perseverance amidst persecution, and faith in God and the Torah. It’s a story about finding freedom in your own land,” Obama said. “It’s a story that’s inspired communities across the globe, including me and my fellow Americans."
The president told his audience of young Israelis that the Passover story has a special resonance to him, as an African-American whose early years were not rooted in any one place. “To African Americans, the story of the Exodus was perhaps the central story, the most powerful image about emerging from the grip of bondage to reach for liberty and human dignity – a tale that was carried from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement into today,” he said. “For me, personally, growing up in far-flung parts of the world and without firm roots, the story spoke to a yearning within every human being for a home."
The seder tradition began in 2008 when candidate Obama unexpectedly joined a seder arranged by three young Jewish aides in the basement of a Sheraton hotel in Harrisburg, Pa., during some of the darkest days of his campaign. The organizers included Eric Lesser, who worked on trip logistics; campaign videographer Arun Chaudhary; and Herbie Ziskend, who did campaign advance work. All have since left the Obama team but are expected to attend Monday night’s dinner.
After the pledge that ends the traditional seder, “next year in Jerusalem,” candidate Obama raised his glass and declared, “Next year in the White House,”recounts the Jewish Daily Forward. At the time, he was still engaged in a ferocious primary battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Those who have attended the White House seders say they blend traditional and new aspects. On an untraditional note, the event includes the reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. More traditionally, Malia and Sasha in the past have taken on the traditional duties of Jewish children, asking four questions about the evening’s purpose and searching for a piece of matzoh that has been hidden at the White House.
The president’s speech last week in Israel revealed that his daughters are a key reason he holds the seders at the White House. “I did so because I wanted my daughters to experience the Haggadah, and the story at the center of Passover that makes this time of year so powerful," he said.
Like the Obamas and their daughters, not all attendees at the seder will be Jewish. For example, Jen Psaki’s first seder was the dinner in Harrisburg while she was serving as the Obama campaign’s traveling press secretary. She has since been pictured at White House seders. Ms. Psaki, now the State Department spokesman, learned the Exodus story at Catholic school.
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