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.

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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.