The Life of a Writer
by Judy Bachrach
SEPTEMBER 28, 2009 TAGS:
It makes perfect sense that William Safire, the gallant conservative columnist for the New York Times, died on Yom Kippur eve. I’m not going to say that’s the way Safire would have wanted it: These days 79 is a little young to go. He was not a fiercely religious man, and I’ll bet anything he would have sacrificed the charming symmetry of dying on the eve of a major Jewish holiday for just one more year -- or better still many more years -- of excellent living.
But even so, the strangeness of his passing of pancreatic cancer on a day he once loved and famously celebrated is undeniable. Safire would be the first to write about the coincidence and marvel at it.
Every year on the night following Yom Kippur, when observant Jews all over the world are allowed to break the fast, Safire and his beautiful British-born wife, Helene, a former model and jewelry designer, threw an enormous dinner party at his vast suburban Washington, D.C., house. Guests were greeted by his Bernese Mountain dogs, then ushered out into the garden, and plied with wine and tzimmes.
Everybody who was anybody was invited: ambassadors, journalists (those especially), politicians, liberals and troglodytes. The ideology of those who came didn’t matter a damn to the host. Nor did their pedigree.
The whole point of the festive evening, as Steve Roberts, the (Jewish) husband of NPR’s (Catholic) Cokie Roberts, once explained, was for the invited to be able to exclaim, “Gee, I didn’t know So-and-So was one-quarter Jewish!” Herman Wouk, the author of The Caine Mutiny, showed up at these parties, as did the law professor Jonathan Turley, the right-wing journalist John Podhoretz, and Yitzhak Rabin, who was at the time Israel’s ambassador to Washington.
They came not only because Safire was a charming man of considerable talent, unpredictability and intelligence, but also because he was an eloquent and durable writer. Against all odds, he was hired in 1973 by the New York Times as the newspaper’s conservative voice on the Op-Ed page – and plenty of critics during that era considered the decision a dismal sellout from which the paper would never recover. They figured (correctly, as it happened) that the hiring of Safire was designed to appease the furies of the Nixon administration, which was in those days particularly antagonistic toward the print media.
Safire had been a speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon. Even more astounding, he’d also worked as a speechwriter for Nixon’s dullard vice president, Spiro Agnew, yet another White House criminal of the era, who would eventually be shamed and then forced to resign. In fact, the celebrated phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism,” directed at the critical press and uttered by Agnew (who probably hadn’t the faintest idea what a nabob actually was), that was Safire’s work. He wrote it. He loved alliteration.
And yet, in the long run, none of these inferior associations tainted the columnist. Or at least, not for long. Certainly they didn’t haunt him. Somehow or other, Safire rose above all the men he’d once known and worked for. In 1978, just five years after the Times hired him, he won the Pulitzer Prize. It was an astonishing recovery.
Safire was born William Safir (he eventually tacked on the “e” in a classic move, to make sure, as he said, that everyone pronounced the name correctly) in the Bronx. After dropping out of Syracuse University when he ran out of money, he worked first for the New York Herald Tribute, then as a WNBC journalist in Europe and the Middle East. But although writing was his passion, it was by no means his only one. In 1952, he arranged an Eisenhower rally at Madison Square Garden. Seven years later, he turned up in Moscow, beside then-Vice President Richard Nixon, who had his hands full steering Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev around the American Trade Fair in Moscow.
By 1960 Safire was working for Nixon on his presidential campaign. When those efforts fell flat and Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy, Safire launched a public relations firm (his first clients: New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who also ran, in vain, for president in 1964, and John Lindsay, who became mayor of New York City in 1965).
In addition to his ultra-political twice-weekly “Essay” columns for the New York Times, of which 3,000 now exist, Safire also wrote a Sunday column, “On Language, for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. It was a far more popular, and less polarizing, offering, which reflected his first two loves: writing well and writing for fun.
On the whole, it’s his political writing that stands out – and for good reason. It’s important to remember that Safire wasn’t simply a right-winger. He would have been lousy on Fox News. He was, as he liked to say, “a libertarian conservative” – meaning he was a fearless and unrepentant trasher of trash.
The Reagan administration’s unseemly intimacy with Frank Sinatra, who flaunted his Mafia ties; President George H.W. Bush, whom Safire unapologetically called “Chicken Kiev,” because the columnist considered Bush soft on the Soviets; and Hillary Clinton, who, in 1996, he called “a congenital liar” who “profited corruptly” when she got “a 10,000 percent profit” on a commodities trade: These were Safire’s more memorable targets, and he never really backed down. Not even when Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, declared he wanted to punch Safire in the nose for what he’d written about Hillary. (Safire, vastly amused, would later offer that what he really meant to say was that Hillary was “a congenial lawyer.”)
And there was also another side to Safire that nobody writes about. He was an ardent civil libertarian and also a big booster of women writers. He wrote fan letters, and he wrote critical letters, very much to the point. “Don’t be so scared. Be bolder and more assertive,” he wrote when I first started writing a column. “After all, it’s your column, it has your name.”
There aren’t a lot of political columnists around anxious to further the careers and reputations of those with whom they are ideologically at odds. I always thought those letters he sent were especially fine of Bill Safire. I always will.
But even so, the strangeness of his passing of pancreatic cancer on a day he once loved and famously celebrated is undeniable. Safire would be the first to write about the coincidence and marvel at it.Every year on the night following Yom Kippur, when observant Jews all over the world are allowed to break the fast, Safire and his beautiful British-born wife, Helene, a former model and jewelry designer, threw an enormous dinner party at his vast suburban Washington, D.C., house. Guests were greeted by his Bernese Mountain dogs, then ushered out into the garden, and plied with wine and tzimmes.
Everybody who was anybody was invited: ambassadors, journalists (those especially), politicians, liberals and troglodytes. The ideology of those who came didn’t matter a damn to the host. Nor did their pedigree.
The whole point of the festive evening, as Steve Roberts, the (Jewish) husband of NPR’s (Catholic) Cokie Roberts, once explained, was for the invited to be able to exclaim, “Gee, I didn’t know So-and-So was one-quarter Jewish!” Herman Wouk, the author of The Caine Mutiny, showed up at these parties, as did the law professor Jonathan Turley, the right-wing journalist John Podhoretz, and Yitzhak Rabin, who was at the time Israel’s ambassador to Washington.
They came not only because Safire was a charming man of considerable talent, unpredictability and intelligence, but also because he was an eloquent and durable writer. Against all odds, he was hired in 1973 by the New York Times as the newspaper’s conservative voice on the Op-Ed page – and plenty of critics during that era considered the decision a dismal sellout from which the paper would never recover. They figured (correctly, as it happened) that the hiring of Safire was designed to appease the furies of the Nixon administration, which was in those days particularly antagonistic toward the print media.
Safire had been a speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon. Even more astounding, he’d also worked as a speechwriter for Nixon’s dullard vice president, Spiro Agnew, yet another White House criminal of the era, who would eventually be shamed and then forced to resign. In fact, the celebrated phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism,” directed at the critical press and uttered by Agnew (who probably hadn’t the faintest idea what a nabob actually was), that was Safire’s work. He wrote it. He loved alliteration.
And yet, in the long run, none of these inferior associations tainted the columnist. Or at least, not for long. Certainly they didn’t haunt him. Somehow or other, Safire rose above all the men he’d once known and worked for. In 1978, just five years after the Times hired him, he won the Pulitzer Prize. It was an astonishing recovery.
Safire was born William Safir (he eventually tacked on the “e” in a classic move, to make sure, as he said, that everyone pronounced the name correctly) in the Bronx. After dropping out of Syracuse University when he ran out of money, he worked first for the New York Herald Tribute, then as a WNBC journalist in Europe and the Middle East. But although writing was his passion, it was by no means his only one. In 1952, he arranged an Eisenhower rally at Madison Square Garden. Seven years later, he turned up in Moscow, beside then-Vice President Richard Nixon, who had his hands full steering Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev around the American Trade Fair in Moscow.
By 1960 Safire was working for Nixon on his presidential campaign. When those efforts fell flat and Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy, Safire launched a public relations firm (his first clients: New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who also ran, in vain, for president in 1964, and John Lindsay, who became mayor of New York City in 1965).In addition to his ultra-political twice-weekly “Essay” columns for the New York Times, of which 3,000 now exist, Safire also wrote a Sunday column, “On Language, for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. It was a far more popular, and less polarizing, offering, which reflected his first two loves: writing well and writing for fun.
On the whole, it’s his political writing that stands out – and for good reason. It’s important to remember that Safire wasn’t simply a right-winger. He would have been lousy on Fox News. He was, as he liked to say, “a libertarian conservative” – meaning he was a fearless and unrepentant trasher of trash.
The Reagan administration’s unseemly intimacy with Frank Sinatra, who flaunted his Mafia ties; President George H.W. Bush, whom Safire unapologetically called “Chicken Kiev,” because the columnist considered Bush soft on the Soviets; and Hillary Clinton, who, in 1996, he called “a congenital liar” who “profited corruptly” when she got “a 10,000 percent profit” on a commodities trade: These were Safire’s more memorable targets, and he never really backed down. Not even when Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, declared he wanted to punch Safire in the nose for what he’d written about Hillary. (Safire, vastly amused, would later offer that what he really meant to say was that Hillary was “a congenial lawyer.”)
And there was also another side to Safire that nobody writes about. He was an ardent civil libertarian and also a big booster of women writers. He wrote fan letters, and he wrote critical letters, very much to the point. “Don’t be so scared. Be bolder and more assertive,” he wrote when I first started writing a column. “After all, it’s your column, it has your name.”
There aren’t a lot of political columnists around anxious to further the careers and reputations of those with whom they are ideologically at odds. I always thought those letters he sent were especially fine of Bill Safire. I always will.
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