The Loner

New York Daily News Columnist Ted Lewis, 67, seldom leaves his office. The bare cubicle where he works is all but devoid of mementos from the 30 years he has spent covering the nation's capital. Though he is Washington bureau chief for the newspaper with the largest circulation (2,000,000) in the U.S., he is not on a first-name basis with a single politician.

Lewis is a loner by choice. He is simply too suspicious of official Washington to give its operators any more time than he has to. Yet out of his self-imposed isolation he fashions his private blend of astute observations, consistently readable commentary, and an abiding cynicism about politics and politicians. Almost scornfully he avoids the ponderous punditry that so many of his colleagues indulge in. If his four-times-a-week column "Capitol Stuff" reflects any ideology at all, it is one of "anti-baloney." When he deigns to talk to a politician, his most familiar expression is "Are you kidding me?"

Down on Consensus. Lewis writes in the breezy, somewhat belligerent style for which his paper is famed. But while the conservative News gets mad mainly at liberals, Lewis gets mad at anyone he thinks deserves it. He has been a persistent critic of the Great Society, and is not welcome at the White House even if he wants to go there. "Any consensus operation," he has written of Johnson's tactics, "if continued too long, develops a squashy, cabbage-like quality in smell, and an uninspiring vegetable taste." But he was equally tough on Everett Dirksen after the defeat of the civil rights bill in the last Congress. De bunking Dirksen's claim to have killed the measure because he put "principle ahead of party," Lewis scoffed that Dirksen could not have delivered enough Republican votes to save the bill anyway. "It was the biggest bunch of hogwash ever emitted by the Senator's honey-sprayed tonsils." And after hearing the suggestion last week that Gregory Peck run for public office as a Democrat, Lewis speculated that maybe Bonanza's Dan Blocker would do better. After all, "he is from Texas too." Or perhaps George Hamilton, "provided he gets his draft-board problems straightened out."

The News's editors send Lewis their editorials in advance, but he feels no compulsion to follow their precepts. Last week, for instance, when a News editorial commemorated the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor by accusing Franklin Roosevelt of deliberately provoking the attack, Lewis wrote that no one person could possibly be held to blame for the disaster. And while the rest of the nation's press devoted column after column to the familiar details of the debacle, Lewis offered a fresh and authoritative footnote to history. He picked up a 1965 letter written by Admiral Chester Nimitz and published for the first time in the current issue of the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. "As bad as our losses were at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941," wrote Nimitz, "it was God's divine will" that the fleet was not at sea to do battle with a superior Japanese task force. Some of the ships sunk in the protected waters of the harbor were salvageable; lost at sea, they would have been lost for good--along with all their men.

When News editorials accused Communists of fomenting ghetto riots, Lewis defended U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who emphatically denied that Communists were to blame. Angry at FBI members for spreading rumors that Katzenbach was naive, Lewis expostulated: "If the departmental critics wanted to cut him down to size, they should have had the decency to speak out, not furtively leak information which they lacked the guts to defend openly in making their case."

Shifting Beats. Brought up in a strict New England home, Lewis took a series of jobs with newspapers and the U.P. before joining the News in 1944 and earning a reputation for speedy writing and unflappability. He started his column in 1958, became Washington bureau chief in 1961. Ever since, he has cultivated a habit of almost total uncommunicativeness. A reporter has to work in the bureau a year before Lewis will say much more than "Good morning" to him. Lewis insists on shifting around his reporters' beats every year so that no one will get too close to his sources.

As for himself, Lewis deals with almost all sources at arm's length. More and more these days, he depends on his political instincts rather than tedious legwork. "As soon as you talk to people, you get confused," he says. But not talking to enough people sometimes leaves Lewis confused too. In 1961, for example, he wrote that Castro would flee Cuba because of its crumbling economy. In November he went far out on a limb and prophesied that President Johnson would not sign the campaign-financing bill for the curious reason that it would put a Bobby Kennedy-led third party at a disadvantage.

A supporter of both Robert Taft and Adlai Stevenson for President, Lewis values personal character above political ability. Unlike other columnists, he does not dwell interminably on President Johnson's celebrated idiosyncracies. When several Congressmen demanded an investigation of Supreme Court Justice William Douglas because of his fourth marriage, Lewis retorted in boisterous News style: "Justice Douglas loves nature, liberal causes and pretty women; in what order is his personal business. And as long as these inbred interests are within the law, they are none of the damnfool business of Congress."

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