TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021290/0212520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.8 KB | 254 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 62

Prolific Purveyor Of Punditry


As comfortable with wordplay as with politics, WILLIAM SAFIRE
is the country's best practitioner of the art of columny

By WALTER SHAPIRO


    Writing a provocative newspaper column is an invitation to
be egregiously wrong in public -- at least some of the time.
Take the man who is America's best practitioner of the art of
columny: succinctly melding fact and opinion in an unforgiving
770-word format. Even though in a parade of predictions in late
1988 he called the fall of the Berlin Wall, this
Pulitzer-prizewinning pundit also flatly asserted last March
that the Soviet Union would never brook Eastern Europe's
attempts at independence. "Depend on Mr. Gorbachev to crack
down as Mr. Stalin would have, fraternally rolling in the tanks
and shooting the dissenters," he wrote. "The present Kremlin
leader was not chosen to preside over the dissolution of the
Soviet empire."

    Faithful readers may have immediately recognized the
telltale style of William Safire, whose twice-weekly political
commentary has adorned the New York Times op-ed page since 1973
and appears in more than 300 other papers. For cognoscenti,
there were three surefire Safirific clues embedded in the
quotation: 1) this former Richard Nixon speechwriter remains
a nattering nabob of negativism (he also crafted lines for
Spiro Agnew) about Mikhail Gorbachev's intentions; 2) Safire's
forcefulness of expression and clarity of opinion, for he is
not a columnist who seeks safety in mainstream musings; and 3)
the wordplay that is Safire's trademark -- in this case,
revamping Winston Churchill's pledge not to dismember the
British empire.

    Unlike the Olympian detachment that is the traditional pose
of Washington columnists, Safire projects a rumpled persona far
closer to Walter Matthau's than Walter Lippmann's. His clothes
are L.L. Bean, not Savile Row. Safire retains the unbuttoned
style, the street-smart diction and the wry-not enthusiasms of
a man who happily spent his formative years as a successful
public relations flack in New York City. Where other
conservative columnists like George Will and William F. Buckley
can be precious and predictable, Safire prides himself on his
reporting and contrarian thinking. "A column should not be a
chore, not a chin puller, not a dreary thing," Safire says,
trying to summarize his approach. "You don't have to be solemn
to be serious." Then with a sense of satisfaction at the
epigrammatic elegance of that last sentence, he adds, "I think
that's original."

    Safire has reason to be pleased with his gift of glib: his
Sunday "On Language" column in the Times magazine has made him
the nation's amateur arbiter of usage, or as he puts it, "pop
grammarian." He wears the crown lightly, for it is not
accidental that one of his six language books is titled I Stand
Corrected. As comfortable with punnery as with punditry, Safire
is rarely the punctilious schoolmaster in private conversation.
True, when a visitor used propinquity to describe two men
working in the same law firm, Safire interjected, "Don't you
mean proximity?" He insisted on a quick trip to Webster's New
World Dictionary on a stand in his lush Times office, furnished
with the look of a turn-of-the-century men's club. The
verdict: the two words are interchangeable. But there was
nothing craven about this language maven. Instead, he said with
verve, "Now both of us know something we didn't know a moment
ago."

    Safire turned 60 in December, and he makes no secret of his
ambition: 20 more years opining on deadline. "I have the
greatest job in the world," he declares. "I'm free to write,
to select my subject and say anything I want about the subject.
That's freedom. Freedom's a big thing for me." The tribal bonds
between Safire and the Times are intense. It is odd to recall
the epithets that greeted his ill-timed arrival in the midst
of Watergate; Safire's critics could not decide what was worse
-- that he was a Nixon apologist, a right-winger or a
non-journalist. "What impressed me was how quickly he became a
Times person," says A.M. Rosenthal, the paper's former
executive editor. In fact, when Rosenthal began writing his own
pugnacious Times column, Safire cracked, "Overnight, you've
made me a centrist."

    Safire and his stylish, British-born wife Helene, a jewelry
designer, live in an expansive Georgian home in suburban Chevy
Chase, Md., purchased in 1969. The rare-book-lined elegance
(Safire is an avid  collector) is marred only by a series of
small white gates to keep the couple's two Bernese mountain
dogs, Heidi and James, at bay. No longer at home are their two
children: Mark, 25, a computer-software specialist, and
Annabel, 24, a painter. Gracious hosts, the Safires are known
for their break-the-fast party after Yom Kippur. Amid the
memorabilia that fill the house, there is one bit of
revisionism: Agnew's autograph is no longer on the photograph
of Helene's 1969 citizenship ceremony. But the artifact that
best symbolizes the weight of Safire's words is a framed
clipping of a 1988 column heavily annotated with the commentary
of George Bush.

    With a philosophy that he dubs "kick them when they're up,"
Safire has made enemies. The West German government was enraged
by his early 1989 columns that helped reveal that nation's
complicity in the construction of a Libyan poison-gas factory,
which Safire dubbed "Auschwitz in the sand." Nancy Reagan in
her autobiography, My Turn, denounces various Safire columns
as "heartless and dumb" and "vicious and unbelievable."

    But other Safire foils remain oddly charmed by their
tormentor. Bert Lance has become a friend, even though Safire
won his 1978 Pulitzer for exposing the freewheeling banking
practices that led to the resignation of Jimmy Carter's budget
director. Charles Wick, the Reagan-era head of the U.S.I.A. and
a frequent Safire target, gushes, "There's no way you can
dislike the guy. I admire him so much." Perhaps no journalistic
jousting caused the anguish of the Iran-contra rift with the
late CIA director William Casey, whose 1966 congressional
campaign Safire managed. Critical columns led to angry phone
calls and a shouting match at a party -- all of which Safire
recounted in the Times. But Sophia Casey, the CIA director's
widow, recalls that her husband to the end "still had a soft
spot for Bill Safire."

    One theme reappears unbidden in almost all conversations
about Safire: his unusual capacity for nurturing intense
friendships. "If I were in a desperate situation where I had
only one phone call, it would be to Bill," says David Mahoney,
the former chairman of Norton Simon. Similarly, Safire's
literary agent Mort Janklow calls him a "great friend," someone
he would trust to race to Bangkok in an emergency. Such
sentiments sound saccharine, but Safire's friends tend to
remember gifts he gave them 30 years ago. For Barbara Walters,
who worked with him in p.r. in the late 1950s, it was a black,
shorty nightgown -- presented not as a romantic gesture but to
twit her for being too prim. "Bill was saying, in effect,
`Loosen up,'" she recalls.  Safire was introduced to Helene in
1962 by motion-picture executive Edward Bleier. After a
whirlwind wedding, Safire presented Bleier with a silver
matchbox engraved, "To Ed, the perfect matchmaker from one of
his matches."

    Such intense loyalties are probably a product of Safire's
childhood. The youngest of three sons of a successful New York
City thread manufacturer, Safire was just four years old -- and
his brothers were teenagers -- when his father died of lung
cancer, leaving the family not poor, but pinched. (Their name
was Safir, but the columnist added a final vowel in the 1950s
to make spelling match pronunciation.) "Those were tough
times," says Leonard Safir, who recalls that his brother Bill
"was bounced around a lot as a boy." According to Janklow,
Safire's mother taught her sons "all you have in this world is
blood and friendship."

    Safire entered Syracuse University on scholarship, but two
years later a summer job turned him into a 19-year-old dropout.
Through his brother Leonard, Safire was hired as legman for
journalistic impresario Tex McCrary, then writing a personality
column for the New York Herald Tribune, acting as host on a
radio show and dabbling in G.O.P. politics. Safire soon decided
that he "could get a better education interviewing John
Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels."
Safire spent most of the 1950s working for the dynamic, yet
erratic McCrary, goading him into public relations, which
Safire saw as "the most adventuresome business there was." As
his brother Leonard puts it, "When Bill was at the
impressionable age when fathers normally help sons, he ran into
McCrary." And of Safire, McCrary says, "I wish he had been my
son."

    Through both McCrary and his own pluck, Safire in the 1950s
kept popping up in improbable situations, especially for a
latter-day Times columnist. Consider:

    1952. At 22, Safire, as McCrary's majordomo, organized the
"Draft Ike" rally at Madison Square Garden that helped persuade
Dwight Eisenhower to run for President.

    1958. McCrary, with Safire in tow, rushed to Washington to
advise industrialist Bernard Goldfine how to contain the
scandal over his gift of a vicuna coat to Sherman Adams,
Eisenhower's chief of staff. As McCrary tells it, Safire
crawled across an outside window ledge on an upper floor of the
Sheraton-Carlton Hotel to nab an assistant to columnist Drew
Pearson and a congressional investigator bugging Goldfine's
room.

    1959. Safire impulsively set up the "kitchen debate" between
Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon at the American Exhibition
in Moscow. Safire's goal was not to boost Nixon but to plug the
developer of the "all-American home" in which the famed
face-off took place.

    Ever the loyalist, Safire has never recanted his membership
in the Nixon alumni association. The two men talk at length
about once a year, largely about pro football and foreign
policy. Safire reveled in an October column contrasting Nixon's
unpaid and unofficial mission to China to Ronald Reagan's $2
million jetcapade to Japan. The former speechwriter is not
oblivious to the vices of Watergate; he just refuses to allow
them to drown what he sees as Nixon's virtues. Before she died,
Safire's mother asked him, "How could you work in the Watergate
White House and not be tainted?" By way of answer, Safire
wrote his entertaining 1977 political novel, Full Disclosure,
which can be read as a parable on the conflict between
high-minded intentions and moral blindness in the White House.
But these days, Safire jokes, "Some guy broke into Watergate.
I wrote Nixon's wage-and-price-controls speech. Where is the
greatest sin?"

    What Safire carried away from four years in the White House
is the self-confidence to intuit how men behave along the
corridors of power. Safire may exaggerate the degree to which
all administrations cleave to the Nixon norm, but the ability
to project his imagination into the White House animates both
his columns and his fiction. In 1987 Safire published his
second novel, Freedom, a 1,152-page, sprawling and ungainly but
nonetheless fascinating reconstruction of the early years of
the Lincoln Administration.

    "You can put yourself back in the room," Safire passionately
insists, referring to both the Lincoln and Bush White Houses.
"Say, I'm [National Security Adviser] Brent Scowcroft; I've
just been told that there is a coup in Panama. And what
happens? I place myself there as Scowcroft, and I'd call the
Situation Room, I'd call the Joint Chiefs. Or say, I'm Abraham
Lincoln, and a crisis arises. What happened in the room? I can
take the diaries of [Lincoln's Treasury Secretary] Salmon P.
Chase or [Secretary of War] Edwin Stanton; I can lay it all
out, and I can come up with what it was like to be in the White
House. It hasn't changed that much in 100 years. The politics
are the same."

    These days, with his Lincoln labors behind him, Safire is
writing his column with brio at an age when most columnists
give way to pretentious punditry. Last week Safire returned for
the first time in 13 months to a format that has become a
personal trademark: a mind-reading column that provocatively
depicts Kremlin politics through Gorbachev's inner thoughts.
This Gorbachev, still a wily foe of the West, miraculously
shares Safire's gift for language, describing his political
philosophy as "improvisationism" and his goal as creating in
Europe "a Balance of Impotence until Russia can rebuild." That
is the joy of Safire's sonnets -- they are too much fun for
even dovish dissenters to resist.