William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter-turned–New York Times political columnist, usually sparred with Beltway power players. But in 2001, the wily wordsmith set his sights on one of the Jewish community’s major machers.
In a March column that year, the Jewish Safire criticized the Anti-Defamation League (and the Ehud Barak government) for being part of the successful effort to win a pardon for fugitive businessman Marc Rich from President Bill Clinton. He called for Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director, to resign.
Foxman called Safire, and the conversation produced a memorable lead.
“You never made a mistake in your life?” an angry Foxman shouted over the phone. “What about when you worked for that anti-Semite Nixon?”
Safire insisted that Jewish organizations needed to “take a hard look at the ulterior motives of their money sources,” urging them to “set out written policies to resist manipulation by rich sleazebags.”
But Safire also called Foxman a “good man” and backed away from calling for the ADL director’s head, although he said the Nixon jibe was “unfair.”
He closed on a conciliatory note: “Abe dropped by my office a few minutes ago to take back that unfair telephone crack and answer questions about who sucked him into this mess, which takes some zip out of my conclusion. We wished each other a happy Passover.”
It was a brief detour into Jewish communal politics for a Pulitzer Prize–winning political columnist, yet very familiar.
Safire, who died of pancreatic cancer at 79 in a Maryland hospice Sept. 27, just before Yom Kippur, made an art of at once embracing and poking the Washington establishment.
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.
The friendship landed Safire a speechwriter’s job in Nixon’s White House in 1969. Somehow he helped cultivate the image of Nixon — who, along with being a former vice president, was a consummate GOP insider just elected to the most powerful position in the free world — as 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 a “hawk among doves,” as one account put it.
His twice-weekly column, which ran until 2005, made him a gadfly of Democrats and liberals. Safire won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for 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 exposés and later befriended Safire.)
Safire reserved his deepest affections for Israel; Israeli prime ministers often used his column’s valued real estate to convey messages to the Washington leadership.
Yet Safire also turned on Israel when he felt it erred. He blasted the Jewish state for using U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard as a spy, although he later described Pollard’s life sentence as “excessive.”
Over the years, Safire made clear his pain at discovering that not only Nixon but other friends from that administration — Vice President Spiro Agnew and speechwriter Pat Buchanan — were not above anti-Semitic outbursts or, in Buchanan’s case, using bigotry as a strategy.
Safire also is remembered as the “On Language” columnist appearing in the Times magazine from 1979 until earlier this year. He loved to plumb the meanings of what had become common usage, and seemed to take special pleasure in uncovering Jewish origins.
Safire, a New York native, was a U.S. Army veteran. He is survived by his wife, Helene; his son, Mark; his daughter, Annabel; and a granddaughter.