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William Safire is dead. The longtime conservative contributor to The New York Times OpEd page, word wrangler, praetorian of puns, and Nixon speechwriter (along with Pat Buchanan and David Gergen) died Sunday of pancreatic cancer at age 79. His most famous phrase might be "nattering nabobs of negativism". He put that into the mouth of Nixon’s felonious Vice President, Spiro Agnew, to bemoan his beknighted (and correct) crtitics.
If David Brooks, Safire’s would be neocon successor at the Times, wears scruffy penny loafers, Bill Safire wore black Corfams with steel toes. He used them twice a week for three decades in his Times OpEd page Essay. Whether it was defending Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew from themselves, or defending good English and excoriating bad in his separate column, On Language, Safire never failed to put the boot in.
He could sometimes make you laugh, as he did when mimicking Strunk & White with his Rules for Writers, but you never forgot which side of the political aisle he preached from:
The columns [On Language]…made him an unofficial arbiter of usage and one of the most widely read writers on language. It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.
There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps.
If Mr. Safire was gifted with words, he was lucky in timing. He worked in the Nixon White House during the Watergate break-in, but left in 1973 to join the Times, missing the most heated parts of the Congressional investigation and Nixon’s resignation in disgrace.
[His] was one of the more remarkable transitions in the history of American communications – from barbed speechwriter for a reviled, soon-to-be-disgraced Republican president to columnist who adorned the editorial pages of the pre-eminent liberal newspaper in the land for more than 30 years. But William Safire was never easy to categorise.
His own political views he described as "libertarian conservative," and Safire gave weekly proof of them in his long tenure as a columnist for the New York Times. But whether inveighing against Democrats or Republicans, the former loyalist of Richard Nixon pulled no punches.
– The UK’s Independent
He was as persistence as he was pugnacious:
Critics initially dismissed him as an apologist for the disgraced Nixon coterie. But he won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and for 32 years tenaciously attacked and defended foreign and domestic policies, and the foibles, of seven administrations. Along the way, he incurred enmity and admiration, and made a lot of powerful people squirm.
The Times being the Times, it omits to mention that Mr. Safire’s Pulitzer was for a series attacking Bert Lance, an official working for President Carter, who was acquitted of the charges Mr. Safire went MoDo over. It also forgets to mention that of the powerful people squirming owing to Mr. Safire’s pen, most were Democrats.
Mr. Safire never stopped offering delicious bons mots for Republicans. His tongue-in-lap Rules for Writers, gives us a foretaste of the GOP’s diet for hypocrisy and for telling others not to do what they most enjoy. Here’s a sample:
* Remember to never split an infinitive.
* The passive voice should never be used.
* Do not put statements in the negative form.
* Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
* A writer must not shift your point of view.
* And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
* Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
* Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
* Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
* Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
I disagreed strongly with his politics, but appreciated his taste for words. He was champagne to Goopers and sulfuric acid in the mouths of Dems. David Brooks, he’s warm toast-in-milk of magnesia.
12 Comments
For some reason, the On Language column that sticks out in my mind, from the early 1980s, was one where Safire scolded a reporter for describing someone as having been “shot to death” rather than “shot and killed.” Safire seemed curiously indifferent to the human tragedy underlying the story, as opposed to the outrage of the usage.
Are you absolutely sure he’s really most sincerely dead? You and David should “do lunch” or something to work things out, get stuff off your chest, that sort of thing.
Yes, Safire was your garden variety, Wm F. Buckley, middle-brow, pedantic get, no doubt about it. Nowhere in the ‘hood of 8th grade dropout, H.L. Mencken.
Mr. Safire’s ruby slippers would most certainly not fit the much smaller feet of David Brooks.
Mr. Safire was an open partisan. Mr. Brooks pretends he’s partly partisan; he’s really an academic, a public intellectual promulgating his punditry purely for public betterment. He’s more like a builder of hyperspace bypasses, oblivious to the bodily harm he inflicts.
He’s also the guy who gleefully passed along bullshit from the PNAC-OSP axis, such as the whole “Atta in Prague” hooey that allegedly proved Saddam was behind 9/11 (that was the real pretext for invading Iraq — the WMD rants were just window dressing).
Funny how none of the Trad Medder obit Op-Edders even mentioned his willing pushing of Iraq-related Bushit, isn’t it?
Ha ha haaaaaaaaaa! Yeah, because Democrats are never hypocrites. Nope, not a one.
Give me a break.
Oh, no, that would be rude. There’s no rube in the Beltway Village like a rude journalist, unless it’s a Congresscritter uninterested in WaPoop scoop or lobbyists’ moolah.
Democrats like the Nelson twins and Blanche Walmart are full of it, too. They weren’t the objects of Mr. Safire’s ire. But authoritarian fundamentalists and Republicans have an oligopoly on accepting hypocrisy in their leaders, spiritual or political, just as they accept GOP economic and health policies as if they were prescriptions for making them better.
Safire was a person of small talents whose death leaves an infintesimal void.
Mr. Safire was enormously helpful to the Republican Party. The void he leaves is open partisanship, tangentially at least tied to facts and certainly tied to good writing.
I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead, so I’m simply not going to say anything at all.
He always reserved his worst writing for the On Language column. Guy with a tin ear and a clumsy style, telling other people how to write.
I won’t miss the arrogant prick.