Against all the odds of inertia and ignorance and fear of state power, Clarence Earl Gideon insisted that he had a right to a lawyer and kept on insi… - Anthony Lewis

Without the foundation of law, this vast country could never have survived as one, could never have absorbed streams of immigrants from myriad cultures. With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.

Five more times in the succeeding pages of his penciled petition Gideon spoke of the right to counsel. To try a poor man for a felony without giving him a lawyer, he said, was to deprive him of the due process of law.

Pulitzer Prizes are the preeminent mark of achievement in American journalism. As the prizes for reporting on Vietnam in defiance of official wishes show, they also point to the press's view of its role in society. That view has changed substantially over the more than eighty years of the Pulitzer Prizes' existence. Exposing official corruption on a local level had always been part of what journalists see as their function. But today, more than ever before, they are ready to write critically about the policies of the federal government, even in the once sacrosanct areas of foreign and national security affairs.