Early in Lewis' career as a legal journalist, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter told an editor of The New York Times: "I can't believe what this young man achieved.

He wrote a series of articles on the case of Abraham Chasanow, a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy, who had been dismissed from his job on the basis of allegations by anonymous informers that he associated with anti-American subversives.

[1] In his 1969 history of The New York Times, Gay Talese described Lewis in his Washington years as "cool, lean, well-scrubbed looking, intense and brilliant".

[1] Lewis became a member of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's social circle, too conspicuously so in the opinion of Max Frankel, another of the paper's editors.

[citation needed] Lewis published a second book in 1964, Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution, about the civil rights movement.

Though wide-ranging in his interests, he often focused on legal questions, advocacy of compromise between Israel and the Palestinians, and criticism of the war in Vietnam and the apartheid regime in South Africa.

[1][4] Reflecting on his years as a columnist, he said he had learned two lessons:[4] One is that certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and (then-Attorney General) John Ashcroft.

And when governments short-cut the law, it's extremely dangerous.When told Henry Kissinger had once described him as "always wrong", Lewis replied: "Probably because I wrote in a very uncomplimentary way about him.

[4] In 1983, Lewis received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.

Lewis read the First Amendment as a restriction on the ability of the federal government to regulate speech, but opposed attempts to broaden its meaning to create special protection for journalists.

He approved when a federal court in 2005 jailed Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter, for refusing to name her confidential sources as a special prosecutor demanded she do.

He noted that the newspapers said they were acting to "protect our journalists from further sanctions", thus privileging their own needs over the damage caused the victim of the false information they printed.

There, in 1984, he married Margaret H. Marshall,[3] an attorney in private practice who later became General Counsel at Harvard University and Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.