Chuck Lewis, former AP and Hearst bureau chief, dies at 80

Chuck Lewis, a prominent figure in Washington journalism for more than three decades and a longtime National Press Club member, died March 20 in Arlington, Virginia. He was 80.

Lewis died of complications from multiple myeloma and oral cancer..

He served as bureau chief for the Associated Press and then Hearst Newspapers running two of the largest Washington news operations in the last golden era of print journalism.

But Lewis always enjoyed shoe-leather reporting, whether he was whipping out his reporter’s notebook to cover the annual National Spelling Bee or winning national awards for his tough investigative reporting on friendly fire casualties in the 1991 Iraq War.

“Chuck was a true gentleman with an endless sense of humor,” said 1986 Club President Mary Kay Quinlan, retired associate dean of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications. “He led by example, which is the best kind of leadership. He will be missed.”

Lewis’ friends and former colleagues described him as a quintessential old-school journalist, a hard-nosed reporter, a fun-loving friend, a demanding but compassionate boss, and a loving husband. “He’s still the beautiful man I fell in love with,” his wife, Vivian Chen, wrote in an email announcing his death.

1978 NPC president Frank Aukofer, a longtime Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Washington bureau chief, hailed him as “a great newsman.” 1982 NPC president Vivian Vahlberg, a member of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, praised him as “a great guy.”

In addition to the National Press Club, he was a member of Washington’s Metropolitan Club and the Gridiron Club, and a supporter of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

As president of the Gridiron Club in 2013, he roasted then-President Barack Obama for his dearth of interviews with newspaper reporters. But Lewis’ most memorable Gridiron moment came when he dressed as a giant stalk of broccoli to lampoon then-President George H.W. Bush’s distaste for the green cruciferous vegetable.

“A charming smile of a man, successful and prosperous – and a fan of the National Press Club,” 1997 Club President Richard Sammon said. “His full life and career are as large as a setting sun allows.”

Said Sammon: “Chuck would often deliver a joke to me at the side of the bar. Then he’d ask what I thought about it – his joke – and to discuss if it could be made better or shorter. True editor.”

Lewis had his first taste of Washington journalism during a D.C. fellowship to study the impeachment process amid the Watergate scandal that led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Bitten by the Washington bug, he left his job as an assistant city editor at the Chicago Sun-Times for the AP's Washington bureau, where he was hired as a desk editor and later promoted to supervisor. After stints as an assistant bureau chief in Los Angeles and bureau chief in Hartford, Connecticut, Lewis returned to Washington as AP bureau chief in 1985.

He became a prominent player in efforts to gain the release of kidnapped AP Beirut Bureau Chief Terry Anderson, traveling to the Middle East with Anderson’s sister Peggy.

Lewis’ work behind the scenes with Reagan administration National Security Council staffer Oliver North became a flashpoint in 1986 when AP investigative reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger accused him of toning down the wire service’s coverage of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which North was a key figure. Lewis denied any unethical activity, and AP President Louis D. Boccardi stood by him. 

Lewis remained friends with Anderson after his release and later hired one of Anderson’s Ohio State University journalism students, Katie Perkowski, as an intern in Hearst's Washington bureau.

Charles Joseph Lewis was born on July 10, 1940, in Bozeman, Montana. His family moved to Peoria, Illinois, where young Chuck fell in love with newspapering. His first of many management roles was sports editor of his high school newspaper.

He seemed headed for a career in the law after graduating from Loyola University in Chicago in 1962 and Columbia Law School in 1965. But his heart was in journalism, and he preferred writing about history as it unfolded rather than the staid life of the law.

He joined Chicago’s City News Bureau and quickly got a taste of the civil strife tearing apart America over the Vietnam War and civil rights. He was roughed up by Chicago police officers in 1968 while covering an antiwar protest outside a donut shop, just a few months before Chicago police earned worldwide infamy by assaulting protesters during the Democratic National Convention.

After leaving the AP in 1989, Lewis became Washington bureau chief of Hearst Newspapers, where he hired a team of aggressive investigative journalists.

Lewis and Hearst colleague Stewart M. Powell won the White House Correspondents' Association's Edgar A. Poe Award and a National Headliner Award for revealing that a greater percentage of American soldiers were killed and wounded by friendly fire during the Persian Gulf War than in any other major U.S. conflict in the 20th century.

After 20 years as bureau chief, Lewis became a senior editor in the Hearst bureau in 2009 and occasionally wrote stories for the chain’s Connecticut newspapers. Until his retirement in 2013, he religiously took part in the monthly White House pool rotation, taking great enjoyment in sharing his knowledge with younger journalists.

“Chuck was a dedicated, accomplished, universally respected journalist,” recalled David McCumber, Hearst’s final Washington bureau chief. “He trained me as a White House pooler and generously taught me a great deal about the way D.C. works. Always stood up for his colleagues.”

Lewis is survived by Dr. Vivian Chen, senior director of the U.S. Forest Service’s office of emergency medical services, who he married in 2007. Other survivors include three children from his first marriage, Peter Lewis of Madison, Wisconsin; Patrick Lewis of Hollywood, California; and Barbara Lewis of Falls Church, Virginia; a stepdaughter, Rebecca Kretschman of Brooklyn; a brother; two sisters; and four grandsons.