At Home On the Left

Anthony Lewis '48 marks the events in his career by the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy.

"Robert Kennedy meant a very great deal to me, and I continue to believe that the country has been changed more by his death than by any other event. His brother too, but it made an immense difference that he was killed. We would have gotten out of that war at once instead of four more terrible years."

Their deaths and the Vietnam war are topics Lewis has agonized over throughout his career as a journalist--the Kennedys commemorated in his biweekly New York Times column, and his disapproval of the war sounded repeatedly in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The dark suit, the pinstriped shirt, the wrinkled forehead and the long, straggly locks disguise an animated man, a man constantly editing his sentences, correcting every exaggeration. He displays casual modesty, underplaying the various events in his life and the power he wields as one of America's most respected liberal journalists. He would rather talk about the issues that concern our nation and the themes he has addressed for ten years as a columnist.

The liberal's duty for the next four years, Lewis asserts, is to preserve and strengthen the progressive philosophy, especially in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties. He contends that overt racism is growing throughout the nation, citing the increasingly visible Ku Klux Klan as one example of this trend. Lewis attributes recent expressions of racism to hard economic times: "We feel powerless in the world, people are not as content, and it is easier to be generous when things are going well."

But he adds that neither he nor the liberal movement has produced clear alternatives to these economic problems. Ronald Reagan led a conservative landslide last November because "people no longer had a clear sense of what the liberal position on social and economic policy was," Lewis says.

Despite his fear that programs such as school busing may soon be strangled by conservative hands, the columnist believes that liberals must cooperate to maintain the basic tenets of equal opportunity. Regardless of the resurrection of the Old Right or the birth of the New Right, Lewis plans to beat the same liberal drum these next four years.

* * *

Lewis' rise from Crimson editor to liberal spokesman is an example of what he calls the purely accidental nature of journalistic success. Almost defensive in his explanation, he says, "If you're looking for some life pattern that will lead every Crimson editor to become a columnist for The New York Times, you will fail; you will strike out."

In fact, Lewis had two stints at the Times. During his first tour of duty, he did not fare so well. Immediately after graduation from Harvard, he went to work for Lester Markel, the "tyrannical and brilliant" editor of the newspaper's "Review of the Week" section, book reviews, and Sunday magazine. Lewis eagerly began writing summaries of each week's major events, but he soon discovered he was not well-suited for the job: "I came from The Harvard Crimson to a job where I really should have known something about the world and the way people live."

Lewis soon left the Times, after Markel told him he was not getting anywhere at the paper. Essentially, The New York Times fired Lewis in 1952.

But the education of Anthony Lewis had hardly begun. After working for Adlai Stevenson's campaign in 1952, he met an old-time Scripps Howard newspaperman, Lee Miller, who found Lewis a job with the now-defunct tabloid, the Washington Daily News.

Since the News was an afternoon paper, Lewis would come in by 6:30 or 7 a.m. and write that day's police, suicide and murder stories. He learned about "life with a capital K," as he jokes. Lewis also began writing about the theme most closely associated with his column today--the prevention of social injustice.

At the News, Lewis did a series on a man named Abraham Chasanow, for which he later won a Pulitzer Prize. Chasanow had been an employee of the Navy Department, who, after working there for 20 years, was fired because of alleged Communist associations. Lewis claims now, as he did at the time, that Chasanow was "about as much of a communist as Ronald Reagan was." The seeds of Lewis' liberalism were already sewn.

Lewis continued to write Chasanow-like stories for the News and then for The New York Times, which hired him in 1955. Washington bureau chief James Reston had contacted Lewis and asked him to cover the Supreme Court for the Times. For seven years Lewis was the Times' man in the halls of American justice, and he collected another Pulitzer for his efforts.

He covered the Warren Court while it handed down many of its most revolutionary rulings. Lewis recalls sending then-Solicitor General Archibald Cox '34 a note during the famed Reynolds v. Sims case, in which the one man-one vote laws were upheld, saying, "How does it feel being at the second constitutional convention?"

Lewis also wrote the award-winning Gideon's Trumpet during this period, a book telling the story of one man's attempt to guarantee himself counsel at public expense in a serious criminal case.

Between his time at the News and his second stint at the Times, Lewis won a Nieman fellowship and spent a year at Harvard Law School, preparing for his new assignment. He speaks with great fondness about this year, and continues his relationship with the Law School by teaching a course there every year entitled "The Constitution and the Press."

After seven years of covering the court, Lewis was ready to move on. "Journalists have short attention spans," he remarks casually, in discussing his reassignment to London, where he spent eight years as Times bureau chief. It was during his time in England that he first began writing columns. James Reston, who by the late 60s had given up his position as Washington bureau chief and was also writing a column, asked his old tutee to fill in for him during a vacation period. Lewis, who now thanks Reston for sparking his career, hesitantly agreed. "How do I write a column?" he queried his friend Russell Baker.

Overcoming his initial timidity, Lewis quickly became known for taking positions on controversial issues, first addressing the Vietnam question. Though the war seemed remote to him in London, he began to feel more strongly about it as he discussed it in his columns. "I know this sounds corny, and I've said it before, and I'm sort of weary of it, but I genuinely believe I found out what I believed about a number of things by having to face the responsibility of saying what I believed about them, especially Vietnam," he says.

Lewis' columns disappeared from the Op-Ed page, however, when Reston returned, and it was not until 1970 that the biggest accident of his career brought him back for good.

Reston called Lewis in London to tell him that newly appointed Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal wanted Lewis to be his deputy. A surprised Lewis flew to new York to meet with Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger to work out the details of this flattering offer. But Sulzberger greeted Lewis with a rather embarrassing change of plans. Rosenthal now wanted Seymour Topping, another veteran Times correspondent, to be his deputy. Lewis remembers smiling and saying that no harm had been done. He had not, after all, solicited the job offer. Instead of wasting the airfare, however, Sulzberger asked Lewis if he would write a regular column. And thus, "Abroad at Home" began to appear twice a week.

* * *

Nobody tells Lewis what to write about. His columns run totally unedited. He telephones in his copy at 5 or 6 p.m. the night before to the make-up man, who reads the piece and checks for transcription mistakes.

He enjoys an unusual opportunity to reflect on issues without answering to a boss. Times Editorial Page Editor Max Frankel, admiting his bias as a longtime friend and colleague of Lewis', praises the columnist's "genuine passion on issues combined with a very cool and precise writing style."

Though always serious in discussing his craft, Lewis is quick to point out that his words often have little impact on the outside world. "There is a temptation to be deluded into thinking you are going to influence something," he says, adding that "Every once in a while you can feel some incremental influence but it rarely happens in a dramatic way. He writes "resigned to the fact that a column is not going to change the world."

Lewis feels no frustration in being an observer instead of an actor, though he admits a good reporter frequently senses that he knows more about an issue than those actually involved. "The absurd fantasy for someone covering the Supreme Court," he says, grinning, "is that you would be sitting there in the courtroom, listening to the argument, and suddenly the lawyer faints and the Chief Justice says to the reporter, 'Would you like to continue?"

Anthony Lewis could probably take over, were he ever asked. His rather casual undergraduate years at Harvard did not prompt him to go on to law school, but he seems a natural for public interest law. The late nights handsetting Crimson headlines and the 4 a.m. discussions at the Hay-Bickford cafeteria on Mass. Ave paved the way for a different profession--a career which twice a week has a column landing on the front porches of American homes, an unmuffled voice of liberalism in an increasingly conservative age.