TFAS staff and board members mourn the loss of Lance Morrow, contributing columnist at The Wall Street Journal, former TIME Magazine essayist and Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
TFAS was proud to present Lance with the 2024 Thomas L. Phillips Career Achievement Award on November 12. His son, James, accepted the award on his behalf. The award was a fitting tribute to a distinguished career dedicated to public service, bringing him immense joy.
For some 40 years, Lance was a writer and essayist at TIME, where he won two National Magazine Awards and was a finalist for a third. Henry Grunwald created the essay page at TIME and put Lance on it right away in the 1970s. Lance wrote 150 cover stories for Time Magazine and was the primary writer on the influential Time Magazine Man of the Year essay.
A 1963 graduate of Harvard, he is the author of ten books, including two collections of his essays and a critically acclaimed memoir, The Chief. William F. Buckley Jr. described him as “one of the two or three best writers in America.”
Raised in Washington, D.C., the son of two magazine journalists, Morrow was a reporter for the Washington Star before joining the staff of TIME in 1965. He lived on a farm in upstate New York with his wife, the author Susan Brind Morrow and has two sons, James—a newspaper and television journalist in Sydney, Australia, and Justin, a writer in New York.
Upon presenting the Phillips Award to Lance, Paul Gigot, editorial page editor and vice president of The Wall Street Journal, said he looked to Lance as one of the great writers who formed his career. When reading Lance in TIME magazine in the 60s and 70s, he was particularly drawn to Lance’s essays.
“I came for the prose,” he said. “I came for the writing, but thinking, ‘man, could he turn out a sentence.’ You wanted to read him for the style as much as the substance.”
TFAS President Roger Ream said he considers it one of the great disappointments in life that he never met Lance.
“We talked on the phone and communicated by email,” he said. “I read many of his essays over the years and his most recent book, ‘The Noise of Typewriters.’ He even agreed just before he passed away to appear on my Liberty & Leadership Podcast. Alas, that is not to be. I take consolation in the fact that we were able to honor him before he died and deliver his award and a video of the event to him in his final days.”
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board remembers Lance’s knowledge of American politics and society as vast, “much of it based on his own experience and excellent memory.”
They wrote: “He contributed many pieces to our pages in recent years, each one written with his characteristic honesty and graceful style. America has lost one of its finest chroniclers.”
Read tributes to Lance in The Wall Street Journal here, The New York Times here and the Ethics and Public Policy Center here.
WATCH: Paul Gigot presents the 2024 Thomas L. Phillips Career Achievement Award to Lance Morrow; Son James Morrow accepts on his behalf.