William Safire: Knocking Them 'When They're Up'

 August 31, 1987

By ELEANOR RANDOLPH, The Washington Post

WASHINGTON
— William Safire, his voice uncommonly soft for a newspaper columnist,
is talking about his former boss, President Richard Nixon. Except that
not once, but twice, he calls him President Lincoln.

It's not
hard to understand. Safire has spent his spare time the last nine years
writing a novel about Lincoln. "Freedom," as the epic is called, is
1,125 pages that deal with Honest Abe during his not altogether honest
first 20 months in the White House.

Still, listening to Safire
in his New York Times office here, one senses that these slips of the
tongue are not the result of some momentary confusion.

History
has defined Lincoln as a wise President with a few understandable
flaws. For Safire, there has always been a question why the President
he wrote speeches for from 1969-73 is being judged as flawed, with a
little accidental wisdom.

At Lincoln's point in time, the
President's men did more than bug reporters' telephones. Lincoln
arrested a war correspondent who, back from the front, gave a report to
the President and then planned to write about how distraught and
unhappy he had found the man in the Oval Office.

Break-in at the
headquarters of the political opposition? About 100 years before
Nixon's men were invading the Watergate, Lincoln suspended habeas
corpus– that hallowed protection against unlawful imprisonment.
Thousands were locked up at one time or another for various degrees of
suspected disloyalty to Lincoln's policies.

"I think that's
criticiz-able," says Safire, an expert on language who would probably
pounce on anybody else for using such a word. "Rarely does anybody
criticize the President–President Lincoln–for his excesses, for
cracking down on dissent and cracking down on the press."

But if
Safire is criticizing him, he also decided somewhere in the long
process of writing this book that Lincoln's unseemly means were more
admirable than Nixon's in Watergate or even Ronald Reagan's in the
Iran- contra scandal. And Lincoln had a purpose aimed at a more
understandable end–the preservation of the Union.

"If he were running today, I'd vote for him," Safire says. "I think he had his priorities straight."

Straight
priorities mean having a core of beliefs that are worth all the
harassment and trouble that come with leadership. It is true for
Presidents, and it has to be true for critics like William Lewis
Safire. A registered Republican who defines himself as a Libertarian
conservative, Safire at 57 has become the most thoughtful conservative
essayist in the country.

His twice-a-week columns are often at
the top of required reading for the politically attuned. Even people
who hate his conclusions still love his column. His Sunday column on
language generates more than 15,000 letters per year.

His
speeches bring him $18,000 apiece. His recent books (this is the ninth)
have hit the jackpot. And most of the people who had nothing but
criticism when he was hired in 1973 as the token conservative on the
Times Op-Ed page have decided that maybe it wasn't such a bad idea
after all.

What has mostly surprised and delighted the
non-believers has been Safire's tendency to take on the powerful,
whether they be political foes or personal friends. His targets have
included former Carter Administration budget director Bert Lance,
Reagan friend Michael Deaver and the most powerful of all, Nancy Reagan.

The
late CIA director William Casey was a longtime ally from the days when
Safire worked for Nixon in 1960 and helped on Casey's unsuccessful
congressional campaign in New York in 1966. And yet Safire had so
angered Casey late last year that the two were barely speaking. When
Casey got word that Safire was asking some tough questions about the
Iran arms scandal, he called Safire three times at home. On a Sunday.

Safire
recalls "pulling my punches" somewhat on Casey in his column the next
day. Still, he wrote: "It struck more than one of his former friends
that power and secrecy had corrupted Big Bill."

It was one of
the few cases when his political friends felt that Safire came closest
to breaking his primary rule for the column: "I believe in knocking
somebody when they're up."

For those who are his friends,
Safire's loyalty is legend. They sometimes cite his support of the late
Roy Cohn, whom he befriended after he wrote a story about Cohn in 1949.

Cohn
had been making enemies, and creating controversy, since the days of
his association with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. What angered Safire was that
Cohn was disbarred in New York shortly before he died of complications
from AIDS.

In his columns he labeled the proceedings a "late
hit" and a "ghoulish pursuit." His outrage brought a torrent of angry
letters from people who believed Safire had distorted the facts to
support a man unworthy of such a defense.

"He never denied their
friendship," says ABC's Barbara Walters, a friend of Safire since she
worked for him at Tex McCrary's broadcasting and public relations
operations in the 1950s. "A lot of people were friendly with Roy and
used Roy who never admitted they knew him."

Says Safire: "I
thought he abused civil liberties (on McCarthy's committee) and I told
him so at the time. . . . But over the years, when he needed me I was
there; when I needed him he was there."

Asked to explain this
arrangement, Safire said: "I would go to a big gathering of his in New
York or something and I would get up and say, 'I'm here because I like
unpopular causes.' And that would get a laugh and a lot of people who
were uncomfortable about it being publicized felt better."

'Sound Judgment'

As
for Cohn's way of reciprocating, "whenever I wanted to run something
past him he would have really sound judgment, like in politics, what
about this guy, what about that guy?"

"I think the great riches
in a man's life are his friends, and you stick by them and they stick
by you," Safire says. "And nobody's perfect. Everybody has the sharp
edges knocked off in the course of life."

Friends and family
members say that Safire's own edges took their first knock at age 4
when his father, a successful thread manufacturer, died of cancer.

Safire's
mother picked up her three boys–Bill, Leonard and the oldest,
Marshall–and moved to California. Her husband had set up a fund before
he died, and there was a monthly check.

"It wasn't poverty
exactly, but it was close to it," Leonard says. "She would sit on the
edge of the chair and wait for the check. If it didn't come, we were
dead."

In the next few years, the family would move back and
forth between New York City and California. Safire, bright and likable,
went to Bronx High School of Science, one of New York's most elite, and
started at Syracuse University in 1947 on a scholarship. There he ran a
radio show, following in the footsteps of brother Leonard, who was also
showing an early interest in journalism.

In the summer of 1949,
Safire went to work for McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg. As a result,
William Safire is not a college graduate; he did not go back to
Syracuse until he gave the commencement address after he won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1978.

Instead, Safire took his lessons in
politics, public relations and journalism from McCrary, who today says
Safire "learned to write for people who follow with their finger and
read with their lips moving. He remembered that the adjective is the
mortal enemy of the noun. He always writes lean and mean."

After
two years in the Army, he returned to Tex and Jinx, ultimately becoming
a vice president for McCrary's firm. It was during this period that he
changed his name from Safir to Safire, because, as he puts it, "I got
tired of people calling saying 'safer,' 'saffer' or 'zephyr.' "

More
important for Safire's future was the way he engineered a little extra
publicity for one of his clients, a home-building firm that had a
display at the American National Exhibition in Moscow.

There,
Safire maneuvered Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita S.
Khrushchev into the all-American house for their famous "Kitchen
debate." What developed was the beginning of an important friendship
for both Nixon and Safire.

In 1961, after helping Nixon in his
unsuccessful campaign against John Kennedy, Safire started his own P.R.
firm, where his clients ranged from Ex-Lax to such political candidates
as Casey, Sen. Jacob Javits (D-N.Y.) and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Safire's
life took its real swing upward when he went to the New York Times at
age 44. He left the Nixon White House, having created such memorable
phrases as "nattering nabobs of negativism"–a criticism of the media
delivered by Spiro Agnew.

An Ear for Sour Notes

What
has happened to Safire since, in some ways argues against the old code
that only a lifetime journalist can be a good journalist. The years in
public relations and the White House seem to have given him an ear for
sour notes on both sides–among those in power in government and those
in power in the press.

So, readers seem to sense that he has
mostly worked things out for himself. After investigating the story, he
sits down and listens to orders–not from bosses or friends or
political allies–but from somewhere deep inside.

There are echoes of Lincoln there, at least of Safire's Lincoln.