The Press: Advice Taken

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Just out of Harvard ('48), where he was managing editor of the daily Crimson, New York-born Anthony Lewis landed a writing job on the Sunday New York Times. Tony Lewis did not do very well. One day more than two years ago, Sunday Editor Lester Markel called him in, suggested that he go out and get some reporting experience. Tony Lewis went home and told his wife, "I've been fired," then started looking for a reporting job.

He tried the Times's Washington bureau. But Pundit Arthur Krock, who then headed the 24-man bureau, also advised him to go somewhere else and get some reporting experience. The Scripps-Howard tabloid Washington Daily News had the job; it hired Lewis and he quickly made a mark as a byline reporter. In 1953, when he began looking into the records of Government employees who had been fired as security risks, he came across the unpublicized case of Abraham Chasanow, suspended by the Navy Department (TIME, May 10, 1954). Reporter Lewis wrote a five-part series on Chasanow's troubles, stirred up so much interest that the Navy reviewed the case, cleared Chasanow. The series won Tony Lewis the $500 annual American Newspaper Guild Heywood Broun Award for enterprising reporting. One of the honorable-mention winners for the same prize: Veteran (20 years) Reporter James B. ("Scotty") Reston, now chief of the Times's Washington bureau.

Reston asked Lewis to drop in to talk about working for the paper. Last week, as he sat in the New York office of the Times discussing the final details of a job, over the wire-service Teletypes came an impressive but needless recommendation.

Lewis' Chasanow series had just won the Pulitzer Prize for the best "national reporting" of the year.* After he winds up his affairs on the News, Reporter Tony Lewis, 28, one of the youngest newsmen ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, plans to become a Washington correspondent for the New York Times.