Safire Is What Closed on Sunday Night

In 1991, Eric Alterman wrote an article for GQ speculating on a likely replacement for William Safire on the New York Times' op-ed page. It was based partly on the assumption that Safire, who had been parked at the Times since 1973, would be announcing his retirement sooner rather than later. Like hell; Safire, who died over the weekend, hung in there until 2005. (When he finally did retire, the paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., announced that "The New York Times without Bill Safire is all but unimaginable.") If Safire had taken the hint and retired a dozen or so years earlier than he did, he would have denied mean bastards like myself from pointing out that he devoted the last several years of his career to banging the drum for every obvious, high-profile fraud that came rolling down the pike, spending the Clinton years confidently asserting that Whitewater was always just about to break wide open with disclosures of great crimes and cover-ups of said crimes that would result in long prison sentences for those involved and pushing the lies about Wen Ho Lee, then topping himself during the Iraq War period by making free-wheeling predictions about Saddam Hussein's vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons, insisting on an actual connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden and Saddam's involvement in 9/11, with frequent references to the famously nonexistent Prague meeting between Muhammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer, which Safire clung to like a sixty-year-old who has never lost his belief in Santa Claus.

Mind you, it's not that Safire declined; as the Times columnist who was most inclined to style himself as a "reporter"--Maureen Dowd, a former actual reporter, at least deserves credit for making no bones about treating her promotion to columnist as what it was, her official retirement from honest work--he had always had a thing for the Big Nothing story. According to legend, Safire was looked on with distrust and displeasure by his colleagues at the Times until he broke, flailed to death, and ultimately won a Pulitzer for the story that destroyed President Carter's budget director, Bert Lance, half a year into Carter's term. Lance, a blubbery-looking good ol' boy who must have seemed to sum up everything that Washington society found tacky and K-Mart quality about the Carter team, was accused of "questionable business practices" when he'd served as Chairman of the Board of Calhoun National Bank of Calhoun, Georgia, and I'll bet that a lot of people inside the Beltway were more appalled by the "Calhoun, Georgia" part than they were by the "questionable business practices" part. Lance lost his job and was subsequently cleared of all charges, but the headlines about that development were a lot smaller than the ones about the allegations made against him, and seven years later, when Walter Mondale first tried to name him chairman of the Democratic National Committee and then floated his name as a possible vice-presidential candidate, the press and pary regulars reacted as if Jack the Ripper had been hired as a special consultant to the National Organization for Woman.

The Lance affair helped establish the new post-Watergate ground rules for Washington scandal; within a couple of years, the same culture of journalism that had openly mocked the Washington Post and Woodstein for pursuing the Watergate story as Nixon had coasted to re-election assumed a new position that politicians were assumed guilty until proven innocent. The irony, of course, is that Safire had come to national prominence as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration, working for Spiro Agnew, the felonious vice-president who Hunter Thompson, in the most succinct insult of his career, once accurately described as having been "born wrong." Safire's reputation as an "unpredictable" columnist rather than a lockstep conservative largely came down to his solid support for civil liberties and his loathing of Henry Kissinger, and it's worth stressing that, in both cases, his convictions grew out of personal grudge: he had been subjected to electronic surveillance at the White House, at Kissinger's behest, and not stopped being pissed off about it. (He also wrote and wrote and wrote about what an utterly shitty president George Bush the Elder was, especially as the noodle-like world leader sought re-election in 1992. But in 1992, stopped clocks were united twice a day in their belief that George Bush the Elder was an utterly shitty president.)

As the Times' official Respectable Conservative Voice for more than three decades, Safire got to enjoy a lot of hollow flattery about how lively and peppery and well-written his columns were. (The sole benefit of this is that, when the Times declined to renew William Kristol's column because everyone in the world agreed that it wasn't any good, the obvious conclusion that this meant that Kristol's writing wasn't even as good as Safire's must have struck the younger man like a knife in the heart.) Safire's writing brightened up a little, and his congenial side was more entertaining, when he was dealing in ephemera, most notably in the language columns that showed him to be the cream of the American verbiage cops, if outshining Edwin Newman and John Simon is the sort of thing you want on your tombstone. But to an embarrassing degree, his reputation was based on his pretending to be Johnny Deadline, an actual reporter breaking stories on the op-ed page, and none of them held up, and he was never a big one for even acknowledging that his scoops were pure gas. (Oddly enough, he was better about admitting to having been too soft on such friends as Roy Cohn and Reagan CIA Director William Casey, who he defended for his role in the Iraq-Contra affair. Maybe Safire didn't mind being seen as a soft touch for his friends, though he never offered an explanation for why someone who was presented as both smart and basically a nice guy had so many scumbags for friends.) In fact, over the course of five presidential administrations, from Lance to the Iraq War neocons, he was the prototype for the bad Times reporter as national menace, a sucker for any flagrant bullshit that was fed to him that he, for some political or emotional reason, wanted to believe was true. He could get away with it for much longer than Judith Miller or Jeff Gerth could, because of his special place as a reporter on the op-ed page, which is to say, a reporter who wasn't expected to have his facts right. His "reporting" had horrible real-life consequences for many people, but since he was supposed to be an opinion columnist, people must have thought that holding him to any kind of serious standards of consistent accuracy would be cheating.