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Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis is among the great American journalists of the past half century. His coverage of legal issues for The New York Times, where he was a columnist for 32 years, along with his best-selling books (including "Gideon's Trumpet"), have made him one of the most popular commentators on American law.
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Leddy, Chuck (January 8, 2008). "A balance between free speech and fear". The Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Massachusetts): p. 16. 

 

Anthony Lewis

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When I went to Spain, right after the Pulitzer I encountered Spanish journalists who are very different from American journalists. One way is that they are all very political. They want their writers to be very political. The first journalist that I met when I was there asked "Are you going to use your prize for political purposes?" I said, "Good Lord, no, I wouldn’t trade on it—I’m a professional liar. I tell stories. I make things up." They were appalled. They made it very clear to me that that was the wrong answer and that it was further evidence of what was wrong with American authors and Americans, in general, was that we were insular. Which we are. And that we were not bearing our responsibilities in the world. And that fame that is ours has been wasted on people like us because we won’t use it for good purposes. American writers are probably far more insular than we should be, nevertheless I am very much of the other persuasion. That people should not talk about what they don’t know.

 

Richard Russo

 

The doves are pleased that [Robert McNamara] finally concedes that "our blundering efforts to do good" turned into a "dangerous mistake," as Anthony Lewis put the matter long after corporate America had determined that the game was not worth the candle. As the doves had by then come to recognize, although we had pursued aims that were "noble" and "motivated by the loftiest intentions," they were nevertheless "illusory" and it ended up as a "failed crusade" (Stanley Karnow). McNamara has now "paid his debt," Theodore Draper writes in the New York Review, finally recognizing that "The Vietnam War peculiarly demanded a hardheaded assessment of what it was worth in the national interest of the United States," just as the invasion of Afghanistan "peculiarly demanded" such an assessment in the Kremlin. Draper is outraged by the "vitriolic and protracted campaign" against McNamara by the New York Times. "The case against McNamara largely hinges on the premise that he did not express his doubts" about "whether American troops should continue to die" early on, but the Times did not either (though Draper did, he proudly reminds us). Could there be another question?

 

Noam Chomsky

 

Deuce Bigalow is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes. … Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film's producers … should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child.
The movie created a spot of controversy... Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed [2004's] Best Picture nominees and wrote that they were "ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that ... bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic."
Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. ... Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers..." As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."

 

Roger Ebert

 

Terkel has built a career on the hunch that pretty much everyone might be worth trying to talk to: the rich and famous, certainly, and burglars and murderers and Ku Klux Klansmen — but most of all the teeming, unexamined mass of American life in between. Armed with a tape recorder, he has interviewed hundreds of people, producing a series of books that tell the story of the American century verbatim, and from the ground up: day-labourers, poor farmers and gangsters for Hard Times, his book about the Depression; everyone from steelworkers to hookers for Working, about the realities of employment in America; and his Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of the second world war, The Good War. They are the sound of a nation spontaneously unburdening itself to the first person who had thought to ask.

 

Studs Terkel

 

Lewis is a former New York Times columnist and an authority on the U.S. Constitution.

 

Anthony Lewis