My old teacher Anthony Lewis died this week, and a melancholy descended on me, along with a sense of gratitude for my luck in experiencing his intelligence and insight directly.
I first experienced him personally in Columbia Journalism School in 1988. He taught the required 1st Amendment law course with Vincent Blasi, a noted attorney on the subject. Every Friday, I think it was, we would trudge over to the Law school and get to sit in one of the amphitheater shaped classrooms while Lewis and Blasi taught us through the Socratic method. Based on assigned readings of cases, the two would take us through a series of questions that would lead us to the heart of the case’s importance and central issues. It was my first experience with the Socratic method, and I loved it. I was an avid participant, despite not having always read the cases thoroughly. At the end of the year, I mailed Lewis a letter expressing my appreciation.
After that, I of course continued to read his columns in the Times. We may have had some direct contact, but the first time I remember was 12 years later, in 1999-2000, when I was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Part of the Loeb experience is a weekly dinner at the fellowship’s small house, to which the fellows are encouraged to invite prominent people. At my encouragement, we invited Anthony Lewis to dinner one week. He was nice enough to accept. I admit I don’t recall too many of his remarks that evening, and all in all he may have been a bit off of his game, being faced with mostly designers and urban planners, and not journalists or lawyers. But I do remember my pleasure in seeing him, and his ever graciousness, which I had noted before. He had commented on the wine, noting its niceness. At the suggestion of Marcia, the one lawyer in the bunch of fellows that year, we gave him one of the remaining bottles to take home, and sent him on his way, back to his home not far away in our own Cambridge, where no doubt his Massachusetts Supreme Court justice wife Mary Marshall awaited him.