It is our misfortune that Anthony Lewis stopped writing his column for The New York Times in 2001. For more than thirty years, that column was the first place to look for commentary about public affairs that was informed by a deep knowledge of and commitment to constitutional rights, expressed clearly, gracefully, and forcefully. Lewis’s retirement deprived us of his voice just at the moment when Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, John Ashcroft, Viet Dinh, Alberto Gonzales, John Roberts, and all the other president’s men began rewriting the rules on wiretapping, prolonged detention without trial, habeas corpus, torture, military commissions, secret evidence, and, above all, the claimed authority of President Bush, as commander in chief, to exercise sole and unlimited power on matters involving national security. Though the post-9/11 assault on civil liberty is only touched upon glancingly in Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, Lewis’s short book is nevertheless a reminder of what we have been missing.

In the United States, as Lewis’s tales of the First Amendment confirm, the power vested in the courts to interpret the Constitution helped us to resist tyranny. And the area where we have fared best is this book’s subject: the First Amendment right to speak and publish. In that crucial respect, the present era differs markedly from previous periods when rights were under attack. From the time of the Sedition Act of 1798, to the period during and right after World War I when there were thousands of state and federal prosecutions for speech, to the post-World War II red scare, and again during the Nixon years when political surveillance reached a high point, the hallmark of repression was the effort to curb dissent. Not so today. The protections forged in the court cases discussed by Lewis in...

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