Anthony Lewis
Last Monday, Anthony Lewis, the great
New York Times reporter and columnist, passed away at the age of 85. For those of us of a certain age, it marked the remembrance of an era—an era when our media elite were truly elite. A time when the thoughts and writings of public intellectuals were insightful, persuasive, important.
For the younger amongst us, you may not understand what Anthony Lewis meant to so many of us. The obituary in the New York Times does Lewis justice, but, for me at least, fails to capture the significance of his work in his time.
When I was a young man, reading Anthony Lewis changed me. It made me think about things in an entirely different way. Reading Anthony Lewis made me aware of the humanity behind the issues.
On the other side, more on Anthony Lewis.
There is a certain irony that Lewis passed away 10 years after the commencement of the Iraq Debacle. A review of Lewis' record makes it clear that he did not need to provide many mea culpas, and certainly nothing of the magnitude of those delivered these past weeks (and the one that should have been delivered by Thomas Friedman, who now pollutes the pages that Lewis once graced).
As a journalist, Lewis is best known for revolutionizing the coverage of the Supreme Court. In his remembrance of Lewis, current New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak wrote:
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.
“There’s a kind of lucidity and directness to his prose,” said Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The Times. “You learned an awful lot of law just from reading Tony Lewis’s accounts of opinions.” [Emphasis supplied.]
What higher praise could a journalist receive? But Anthony Lewis was not, first and foremost to me, a reporter—he was the moral voice of the op-ed page of the
Times.
For many people, Lewis is best remembered for his book Gideon's Trumpet, about the seminal Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright. Myself, I think of Henry Fonda.
No, for me, Anthony Lewis became important during the Age of Reagan, as the strong, unwavering voice fighting for those in need, those without power and those with principles. It was Anthony Lewis who first introduced me to the real Ed Meese, in his many columns on one of the most radical characters ever to work in the federal government. Consider this from a 1985 column:
[T]he Attorney General this past summer deliver[ed] to the annual meeting of the American Bar Association. It was a remarkable text, the most radical document to come from a legal officer of the United States in generations.
Mr. Meese attacked the idea that state governments should be restrained by the guarantees of freedom in the Bill of Rights - the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. Those are the familiar protections for freedom of speech and press, the rules against unreasonable searches and seizures, the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments and so on.
[... O]ver the last 60 years the Supreme Court has held that the essential protections of freedom in the first 10 amendments are embraced in the ''due process of law'' guaranteed by the 14th. That amendment, adopted after the Civil War, limits what the states may do.
Thus as long ago as 1925 the Supreme Court held that freedom of speech was protected from repressive state action. In 1931 it applied the free press clause of the First Amendment to keep Minnesota from shutting down a newspaper. In 1963 it said the states were bound by the Sixth Amendment's right-to-counsel guarantee and must provide lawyers for poor defendants.
The Court divided in the past about whether and how to apply particular guarantees to the states, but the general question has long since been settled. No Supreme Court justice in memory has argued that the Constitution should be read to limit only Federal Government intrusions on religious liberty, free speech and other basic rights.
Mr. Meese, in his Bar Association text, sought to roll legal history back 60 years. He condemned as a violation of states' rights the settled view that the 14th Amendment ''incorporated'' and applied to the states essentials of the Bill of Rights.
''Nowhere else,'' Mr. Meese said, ''has the principle of federalism been dealt so politically violent and constitutionally suspect a blow as by the theory of incorporation.''
It was Anthony Lewis who first brought me to fully understand the radical conservative project, the beginnings of what we have come to know as the Constitution in Exile.
And so it was with any number of issues at that time. In the words of Joe Lelyveld, "[y]ou learned an awful lot [...] just from reading Tony Lewis’s accounts [...]." I know I did.
And it was not just about conservatives and the law. Lewis was relentless in his critique of the Clinton Administration's extremely cruel and unjustified immigration policies. Indeed, Lewis' focus on the issue was so singular that in 2002, the Nieman Center asked Lewis to write an explanation for his immigration "obsession." He wrote:
During a five-year period I wrote several dozen columns about the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act and its consequences. Nieman Reports asked me to try to explain why, as a columnist, I did this—and to say whether, in my judgment, what I reported and wrote had any effect.
[...] Why did I write about the 1996 Immigration Act and its consequences? Because I believe in American justice, and I thought the 1996 law and its applications violated that ideal. It was that simple. [Emphasis supplied.]
Anthony Lewis made me believe in it too. He was a giant.