LEWIS, (Joseph) Anthony

(b. 27 March 1927 in New York City), two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, United States Supreme Court and Department of Justice correspondent for the New York Times Washington bureau in the early 1960s, and chief of the London bureau in the latter part of the 1960s.

The son of Kassel Lewis, a textile executive, and Silvia Surut, Lewis was editor of a student publication at New York's Horace Mann High School. In 1944 he entered Harvard, majoring in English, and was managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, the daily school newspaper. He served three months in the U.S. Navy during World War II but was discharged because of eye problems. He graduated with an A.B. from Harvard in 1948. In 1952 he worked as a researcher for the Democratic governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson. On 8 July 1951 he married Linda Joan Rannells, whom he later divorced. The couple had three children.

In 1952 Lewis joined the Washington Daily News staff and in 1955 won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his articles on employee security in the government. Communism among civil service employees was an important issue in that era. Just after the Pulitzer Prize was announced, Lewis was recruited by James Reston, then Washington bureau chief, to join the staff of the New York Times. Lewis's beat became the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. In the 1960s the focus of both agencies was the civil rights movement, as the Supreme Court led the way in securing rights for the black minority.

In 1964 Lewis edited a compilation of articles by New York Times journalists, Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution, A First Hand Account of the Struggle for Civil Rights from 1954–1964. Lewis painted a picture ofthe South in turmoil—President Dwight Eisenhower using troops to admit students to high school in Little Rock, Arkansas; fire bombings of churches in Alabama; and the murder of a black student admitted to the University of Mississippi. In the book's view, matters on an economic and social level were getting worse even as the Supreme Court was fleshing out improved legal rights. Moreover, there was no need for the North to be smug—Lewis inserted an article depicting the suburbs of Chicago in turmoil over the influx of blacks. There was also an article by the poet LeRoi Jones (later called Amiri Baraka), then unknown, attacking the depiction of American blacks as happy with their lot. The only positive institution emerging from the pages was the United States Supreme Court—with the voice of the civil rights leader the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in the background.

In 1962 the Supreme Court announced its decision in Baker v. Carr, in which it ruled that legislative districts in the popular branches of state legislatures must be of essentially equal size in population. The ruling was later expanded to virtually all U.S. legislative bodies except the U.S. Senate. Lewis released a Pulitzer Prize–winning article on the decision titled "Historic Change in Supreme Court" that "opened the doors of the federal courts to legal attacks on the apportionment of seats in state legislatures." Lewis saw the decision as part of a "revolution in constitutional doctrine in recent years" involving "criminal proceedings" and "racial segregation." The Supreme Court's focus was no longer on economic issues. "The conclusion is that the Supreme Court has tended in recent years to act as the instrument of national moral values that have not been able to find other governmental expression." Lewis concluded with respect to the Court: "Its great success has been as a moral goad to the political process—when it has urged politicians to do what they have avoided doing but knew in their hearts they should … the Court is taking up the role of conscience to the country."

Lewis's most enduring popular work was Gideon's Trumpet (1964). Clarence Earl Gideon, a down-on-his-luck defendant in a routine Florida burglary trial, quietly requested defense counsel but was turned down because the state of Florida at that time did not provide an attorney to a defendant unless the case involved the death penalty. Gideon was found guilty, mostly on the basis of questionable eyewitness testimony, and was sentenced to a Florida penitentiary. He sought review by the United States Supreme Court, urging that he had been entitled to counsel.

Much of Lewis's book details the long odds that Gideon's plea to the Supreme Court would ever get a full hearing. By what Lewis described as a near miracle, the Court heard his case and assigned Arthur Goldberg, later a justice himself, as Gideon's attorney. Lewis accounted in detail Goldberg's briefing and argument of his case as well as the preparations of the lawyer assigned by Florida to defend the matter. After argument and internal battling in the Court, Gideon prevailed, as the Supreme Court announced that all defendants in the United States facing deprivation of liberty would be entitled to an assigned counsel to defend them if they desired an attorney and were unable to afford one. As Lewis wrote, like the Gideon of the Old Testament, he blew his trumpet and the walls fell down. He also followed up the story: Gideon was retried with competent counsel and found not guilty. Lewis then conducted an extensive study of the efforts of states to provide counsel for defendants in non-capital cases. While such lawyers are underpaid and overworked, once again the 1960s ethos of placing social problems in the hands of the legal community is in evidence.

In 1964 Lewis became the New York Times London bureau chief and within three months was writing the obituary for Sir Winston Churchill, the former statesman and prime minister. His bureau covered Harold Wilson's short career as prime minister, the slow decline of the British Empire, and Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales. In the meantime Lewis continued to pursue American legal topics; among other works, he wrote an introduction to the Times publication of the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1972 Lewis left the London bureau and was posted to Boston. He married Margaret H. Marshall on 23 September 1984.

In 1991 Lewis returned to the Times v. Sullivan case that he had covered in the 1960s. That case provided that only recklessly false statements about public figures would be subject to libel suits. Lewis documented the changes in how lawyers, the courts, and the media reacted to libel complaints in a book entitled Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (1992).

Lewis's works include a large number of opinion/editorial pieces and dispatches to the New York Times and Washington Daily News. His books include Gideon's Trumpet (1964) and Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution (1964). For biographical information on Lewis see Current Biography (1955) and the New York Times (3 May 1955).

John David Healy