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.