Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Wlliam Safire, New York Times columnist, dies at 79

By Ron Kampeas · September 27, 2009

WASHINGTON (JTA) — William Safire, the conservative speechwriter
turned columnist who made an art of at once embracing and poking the
Washington establishment, died at 79.

Safire died in a hospice in Maryland on Sunday, just before Yom
Kippur, his former employer, the New York Times, reported. He had
pancreatic cancer.

Safire was an adman visiting Moscow in 1959 when he made friends with
then-Vice President Richard Nixon by arranging a capitalism
vs. communism "kitchen debate" between Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev,
the Soviet premier.

That friendship landed Safire a speechwriter’s job in Nixon’s White
House in 1969. He helped cultivate the image of Nixon — the former
vice president and consummate GOP insider just elected to the most
powerful position in the free world — as somehow an outsider to
Washington’s establishment. He coined the phrase "nattering nabobs of
negativism" to describe the administration’s critics.

>From the White House, he leapt in 1973 to the op-ed page of the New
York Times, another bastion of the establishment, to become, according
to one account, a "hawk among doves."

His twice-weekly column, running until 2005, made him a gadfly of
Democrats and liberals; he worked the column like a beat reporter and
won the 1978 Pulitzer for columns raising questions about the
propriety of the financial dealings of Bert Lance, President Jimmy
Carter’s budget director. (Lance was acquitted of charges arising out
of the exposes, and later befriended Safire.)

Safire, later in his career, seemed sometimes unaware how much a part
of the Washington establishment he had become; one mid-1990s colum was
a reproach of the Clinton administration for removing his fellow
columnist, Maureen Dowd, from the White House-sanctioned party
circuit.

Safire reserved his deepest affections for Israel; Israeli prime
ministers often used his column’s valued real estate to convey
messages to the Washington p. He was especially close to Ariel
Sharon. In a Jan. 3 2005 column he asked Sharon, who was buffeted by
criticism from the right for setting the stage for the evacuation of
settlers from the Gaza Strip: "And do you expect to be prime minister
one year from today?" He recorded Sharon’s reply as: "Why only one
year?"

Exactly a year and a day later, Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke
and was replaced as prime minister by Ehud Olmert.

Safiire turned on Israel when he felt it erred; he blasted Israel for
running U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard as a spy, although he later
described Pollard’s life sentence as "excessive." In 2000, when the
United States stood opposed to the Jewish state’s arms sales to China,
Safire invoked the prophetic injunction about forgetting Jerusalem in
his warning to Israel not to endanger its most valuable alliance:
"Reconsider, Israel; let not your democratic hand lose its cunning."

In 2001, he took aim at the Ehud Barak government and the
Anti-Defamation League for being part of the successful effort to win
a pardon for fugitive tax evader Marc Rich from President Bill
Clinton. He called for Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director, to
retire. Foxman called him up and the conversation produced a memorable
lede:

”You never made a mistake in your life?” an angry Abraham Foxman,
national director of the Anti-Defamation League, shouted over the
phone. ”What about when you worked for that anti-Semite Nixon?”

Safire took back his call for Foxman’s head, although he said Foxman’s
jibe was "unfair."

Over the years, Safire made clear in his column his pain at
discovering that not only Nixon but other cherished friends from that
administration — Vice President Spiro Agnew and speechwriter Pat
Buchanan — were not above frequent anti-Semitic outbursts or even, in
Buchanan’s case, adopting the bigotry as a strategy.

After Buchanan, preparing for a presidential run in 1999 on the Reform
ticket, accused the "Israeli lobby" of not putting American first,
Safire wrote this of a man he friend:

"Was this calculated to whip up resentment at Jews’ political
participation, even at the cost of stimulating anti-Semitism? Of
course; he knows exactly what he’s doing. To pose as fair, he also
imputes policy disloyalty to Americans with ties to Cuba, Greece,
Armenia and a dozen other places, and is careful to say ‘Israeli
lobby’ rather than ‘Jewish lobby.’ But you know what he means."

Safire is equaly remembered as the "On Language" columnist, appearing
in the New York Times Magazine from 1979 until earlier this year. He
loved to plumb the meanings of what had become common usage —
especially common political usage — and seemed to take special
pleasure in uncovering Jewish origins. In 2007 he asked readers to
research the origins of "Go figure." Some uncovered evidence that it
was an American original, others said its derivation was Spanish, and
others insisted it stemmed from the Yiddish, "gay vays," or "Go now."

Safire’s assessment:

"My call: Go figure is a clip of standard English ‘Go and figure it
out for yourself,’ given a Yiddish overlay by go know and an
expressive shrug and weary rolling of the eyes long identified with an
ethnic group."

Safire is survived by his wife, Helene, his son, Mark, and his
daughter, Annabel, and a granddaughter.