Called “the world’s greatest correspondent” by New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal, Flora Lewis covered the defining moments of the twentieth century and became a bureau chief for the Times. Lewis graduated from UCLA at eighteen and earned an MS from Columbia University’s School of Journalism in 1942. She spent three years reporting for the Associated Press in New York and Washington until in 1945 they assigned her to London, where she met and married Sydney Gruson, a New York Times reporter. Because the Times had a rule that only one spouse could work for the paper, Lewis worked for the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, and other papers throughout their marriage, finding work in whatever city her husband was assigned—Warsaw, Paris, Jerusalem, Mexico City—until their divorce in 1972. She then became head of the Times’ Paris bureau and first female op–ed columnist. During her career, she covered the 1948 and 1967 wars in Israel, travelled to Vietnam four times during the war there, and witnessed first–hand the rise of Communism in 1946, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the birth of the European Union in 1993. She wrote four books on international politics.