• Knight Fellowships

Anthony Lewis

6th Annual John S. Knight Lecturer

Anthony Lewis is a native of New York City and a graduate of Harvard University. He went to The New York Times in the late 1940s and has spent nearly his entire career there.

The only other newspaper for which he worked was the Washington Daily News, where in 1955 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his articles on the federal government's loyalty security program. The citation from the Pulitzer Board said that Lewis's reporting was directly responsible for clearing a U.S. Navy Department employee against unjust charges of being a security risk. The employee, who had been fired by the Navy, got his job back as a result of the articles.

Lewis moved to the New York Times Washington bureau, where he won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963, for his coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court, and in particular of the court's legislative reapportionment decisions.

Lewis reported from Europe for eight years as the New York Times bureau chief in London. While in London he began writing a regular column, which appears twice a week on the Times' op-ed page. He frequently writes about international affairs, but he also deals with U.S. domestic issues, including politics, law, and a variety of social issues. In 1973, he returned to the U.S. and now is based in Boston.

Although he is not a lawyer, he is an authority on U.S. constitutional law, especially free speech and free press issues. For 15 years, he was a lecturer at Harvard Law School, and since 1983 he has been the James Madison visiting professor at Columbia University,

He is the author of three widely-read and influential books: "Gideon's Trumpet" (1964), "Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution" (1964), and "Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment" (1991).

In addition to delivering this address, Lewis was on the Stanford campus for two weeks, in residence at the Knight Fellowships program as the first Lee Hills Senior Fellow meeting with the Knight Fellows, talking with classes and other groups. Lee Hills, chairman of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, was instrumental in the Knight Foundation's decision to give the professional journalism fellowships program at Stanford the endowment grant that enabled it to become self-supporting.