Anthony Lewis (1927-2013)

Anthony Lewis in 1963, after winning his second Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, this one focused on his coverage of the Supreme Court

"I was probably made to be a lawyer. It just didn’t turn out that way."

-- Anthony Lewis, quoted by WaPo obituarist Emily Lang

"There's a kind of lucidity and directness to his prose. You learned an awful lot of law just from reading Tony Lewis’s accounts of opinions."

-- former NYT executive editor Joseph Lelyveld,
quoted by Adam Liptak in his Times obit

by Ken

This is another one that hurts. Not because longtime New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis didn't live a rich and rewarding life (though the standard obituaries are obliged to identify him as 85, since he died two days short of turning 86, we'll think of him as 86, since after all he died a mere two days short of his birthday), but because he carved out a journalistic niche that made him awfully hard to replace, all the more so as newspapers, even the NYT, feel obliged to be apologetic about maintaining opinion writers who are unabashedly and unapologetically liberal -- certainly not without "balancing" their voices with gibberish-mongers from the Right.

To say that Lewis was "unabashedly and unapologetically liberal" doesn't mean that he had a reflexive or in any way un-fully-reasoned viewpoint, even though that's the way your average right-winger would read it, because that really does seem to be the only way right-wing "thinkers" think, at the jerk of a reflexive knee, which after all is right close to where most of their thinking is done. No, all I mean is that Lewis had thought through the issues and arrived at deeply held convictions that any sensible person would recognize as "correct."

And what was special about Lewis's liberalism is that it was expressed most frequently in terms of the law -- he really believed that the law could be challenged into deliver justice. Here are some nice paragraphs from Emily Lang's Washington Post obit:

By the time he retired in 2001, Mr. Lewis was widely recognized as the dean of liberal American columnists and had written a book that is regarded as the seminal account of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright.

As a Times columnist for 32 years, he wrote his most noted work on First Amendment rights and the American justice system. In a crowded field of columnists, many of whom were at times enticed to bloviate, Mr. Lewis distinguished himself with the consistent lucidity of his writing and his reportorial approach to the job. . . .

Taken together, [his two Pulitzer Prizes] reflect the two most salient themes of Mr. Lewis's career: a self-professed affinity for the underdog and seemingly infallible command of the law, despite his limited formal training in the field. "I was probably made to be a lawyer," he once said. "It just didn't turn out that way."

The WaPo obit, by the way, is titled "Anthony Lewis, indefatigable champion of civil liberties and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, dies at 85." My initial reaction was to pooh-pooh the Pulitzers and focus on the "indefatigable champion of civil liberties" part. But reading the obit, I was reminded that the Pulitzers were won, not for columnistic thumb-sucking (where Pulitzers have notoriously much to do with where you are and who you've pleased) but reporting, before he became a columnist. The first one, in fact, came before he was brought to the Times.

He received his first Pulitzer for national reporting in 1955, at age 28, while working for the now-defunct Washington Daily News. The award recognized his series of articles that cleared a Navy Department employee who was fired for alleged security risks during the Red Scare stoked by then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.).

Meanwhile, in the Times obit, Adam Liptak writes in part:

Anthony Lewis in 1970

Mr. Lewis brought passionate engagement to his two great themes: justice and the role of the press in a democracy. His column, called "At Home Abroad" or "Abroad at Home" depending on where he was writing from, appeared on the Op-Ed page of The Times for more than 30 years, until 2001. His voice was liberal, learned, conversational and direct.

As a reporter, Mr. Lewis brought an entirely new approach to coverage of the Supreme Court, for which he won his second Pulitzer, in 1963.

"He brought context to the law," said Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the University of Washington who compiled a bibliography of Mr. Lewis's work. "He had an incredible talent in making the law not only intelligible but also in making it compelling."

Before Mr. Lewis started covering the Supreme Court, press reports on its decisions were apt to be pedestrian recitations by journalists without legal training, rarely examining the court's reasoning or grappling with the context and consequences of particular rulings. Mr. Lewis's thorough knowledge of the court's work changed that. His articles were virtual tutorials about currents in legal thinking, written with ease and sweep and an ability to render complex matters accessible.

IT'S BEEN A TOUGH TIME ON WHAT I MIGHT CALL
THE "LEGAL JUSTICE" JOURNALISTIC BEAT

It was just on February 14, at 81, of Ronald Dworkin (left), who contributed so much dazzling comment to the New York Review of Books, describe in his Guardian obit as "widely respected as the most original and powerful philosopher of law in the English-speaking world."

I've missed Anthony Lewis's columns since his retirement in 2001 (though he soldiered on as a valued NYRB contibutor), and reading Ronald Dworkin's final NYRB piece, "Religion Without God" (an excerpt from the first chapter of his forthcoming book with that title), arguing that it's possible to hold moral viewpoints with the passionate conviction of religious belief without believing in an accepted deity, has been depressing. Fortunately, NYRB has no shortage of other able legal commentators, and for ongoing coverage of law and justice issues I'm infinitely grateful to Jeffrey Toobin for the diligent work he does both in The New Yorker and on newyorker.com.

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