Anthony Lewis and the First Amendment.

AuthorLiptak, Adam
PositionThe Art, Craft, and Future of Legal Journalism: A Tribute to Anthony Lewis

It is a great privilege to be with you today to celebrate the life and work of Anthony Lewis who created modern legal journalism. I thought I would try to do three things today to help us think about Tony's legacy. One is to sketch out what made Tony such a giant. A second is to reflect for a minute on the state of the modern Supreme Court press corps, which he essentially founded. And a third is to consider a topic Tony returned to again and again in his articles, columns and books: the role of the press in a democracy and under the rule of law. Tony believed passionately in the First Amendment but was skeptical about a special role for the institutional press in the constitutional structure, and this set him apart from most journalists and all press lawyers. I'd like to make the case that his clear-eyed and iconoclastic views in this area were a triumph of intellectual honesty over self-interest.

I.

Tony arrived at The Times's Washington bureau in 1955, at the age of 28. (1) He had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate and then had an undistinguished four-year run as an editor at The Times in New York. (2) He left that job to work on Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential campaign and then joined The Washington Daily News, a lively afternoon tabloid. (3) He promptly won a Pulitzer Prize there, for a series of articles on Abraham Chasanow, a Navy employee unjustly accused of being a security risk. (4) The Navy eventually cleared and reinstated Mr. Chasanow, who credited Tony's reporting for his vindication. (5)

The Pulitzer prompted The Times to have another look at its former employee. Scotty Reston, the Washington Bureau Chief, hired him to cover the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. (6) Then, in a turning point for The Times and for legal journalism, the paper sent Tony off to Harvard Law School on a Nieman Fellowship in 1956 and 1957 to study law for a year. (7) The idea that a little legal training might help in covering the Supreme Court was a novelty at the time. It is no longer.

When Tony returned to Washington and the Court, his coverage so impressed Justice Felix Frankfurter--a man not easy to impress--that he called Reston. (8) "I can't believe what that young man achieved," Justice Frankfurter said, as Reston recalled in his memoir, Deadline. (9) "There aren't two justices of the Court who have such a grasp of these cases." (10)

Tony's Supreme Court reporting transformed the genre, and it earned him a second Pulitzer, in 1963. (11) You can divide press coverage of the Supreme Court coverage into two eras: before Tony Lewis, and after. The old articles on the Court's decisions were pedestrian recitations by journalists without legal training that did little more than recite who had won and who had lost, perhaps adding how the justices had voted. These reports rarely examined the Court's reasoning or explored the doctrinal context and practical consequences of particular rulings.

Tony's work changed that. His articles were tutorials about currents in legal thinking, written with ease and sweep and an ability to render complex matters accessible.

The 1963 Pulitzer citation singled out Mr. Lewis's coverage of Baker v. Carr, (12) in which the Supreme Court opened legislative districting to oversight by the federal courts. (13) Tony did more than cover the decision; an article on legislative apportionment that he had written for The Harvard Law Review (14) was cited in the decision at Footnote 27. (15)

Tony cut a striking figure in Washington. He was, Gay Talese wrote in The Kingdom and the Power, his 1969 history of The Times, "cool, lean, well-scrubbed-looking, intense and brilliant." (16)

"Only those who knew him well," Talese added, "or with whom he was sufficiently impressed and thus responsive, sensed the interesting man beneath --the connoisseur of opera, the serious man married to a tall, blithe student of modern dance, the superb mimic of W. C. Fields, the charming dinner guest." (17)

He moved easily among the powerful and was close--some said too close--to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Though he left an indelible mark, Tony only covered the Supreme Court as a reporter for eight years. (18) He went on, in 1965, to become The Times's London Bureau Chief, and he never lost his connections to and affection for London. (19)

He was briefly a candidate for a high editing position in New York, but that was scuttled by intrigue and miscommunications. As a consolation prize, he was given a column that would grace the op-ed page and dazzle readers for more than three decades. (20) It was called "Abroad at Home" or "At Home Abroad," depending on where he was writing from. (21)

Tony wrote four books. (22) One of them, Gideon's Trumpet, told the story of Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 decision...

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