William Safire wrote speeches for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Well, everybody has to have a job, I guess. But just because you have one, it doesn’t mean you should earn as reward column-space on the op-ed page of the New York Times. For 32 years.
Yet that’s what Safire received, for five years of crafting such snide and slashing culture-busting phrases as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” For both Agnew, who was routinely receiving cash bribes across his desk in the Vice President’s office, and Nixon, the most ethically depraved man to serve in the White House within the lifetime of any person currently present on the planet.
Safire passed today, at age 79, of pancreatic cancer. And that is sad, as it is sad when any creature shuffles off this mortal coil. But sad too is the story of how Safire came to occupy his post at the Times, where, for more than three decades, he was one of but a half-dozen people permitted to speak from the op-ed pulpit of the premier political newspaper in this country. Sad as well is that once Safire was let in, he was soon followed into the nation’s newspapers and TV studios by legions of other hard-right political partisans, who today dominate the national political discourse.
Hunter S. Thompson is often slotted as a besotted maniac who just made shit up. Well, he was that, but he also had a fine eye for the real workings of American journalism, and when he held forth on that subject, it was best to believe.
In his 1974 Rolling Stone piece “The Scum Also Rises,” which recounts the final days of Richard Nixon, Thompson had this to say:
The masthead of the New York Times‘ Washington Bureau is a reliable weathervane for professional observers of the changing political climate. Control of the bureau is usually in the hands of somebody the magnates in New York believe is more or less on the same wavelength as the men in control of the government. Arthur Krock, for instance, got along fine with Eisenhower, but he couldn’t handle the Kennedys and was replaced by [James] Reston, a JFK partisan in 1960 and a “Roosevelt coalition” neopopulist who also got along well with Lyndon Johnson. But when Johnson quit in 1968 and the future looked very uncertain, Reston was promoted to a management job in New York and was succeeded by [Tom] Wicker at about the same time Robert Kennedy was deciding to make his move for the presidency; but when Bobby was killed and McCarthy collapsed, the Times hedged its bet on Humphrey by deposing Wicker and replacing him with Max Frankel, a smooth and effective diplomat/journalist who could presumably get along with either Hubert or Nixon . . . But not even Frankel could handle Four More Years, apparently, and the Nixon/Agnew landslide in 1972 forced the admittedly anti-Nixon Times into a stance of agonizing reappraisal. Frankel moved up to New York, and since the most obvious candidates for his job were relatively liberal young turks like Bob Semple, Anthony Lewis or Johnny Apple, who were clearly out of step with the mandate of vengeance that Nixon claimed by virtue of his shattering victory over McGovern, the Times management in New York made a fateful policy decision that would soon come back to haunt them:
On the theory that the best offense, at that point, was a good defense, they pulled in their editorial horns for the duration and sent an elderly, conservative mediocrity named Clifton Daniel down from the executive backwaters of New York to keep the aggressive Washington Bureau under control. At almost the same time, they hired one of Nixon’s top speechwriters, Bill Safire, and gave him a prominent ranking columnist’s spot on the Times editorial pages. Both of these moves were thinly veiled concessions to the prospect of a revenge-hungry Nixon/Agnew juggernaut that had already telegraphed its intention to devote as much of its second (and final) term energies to their “enemies” in the “national media” as they had already successfully devoted in the first term to scuttling the U.S. Supreme Court.
It was clearly a management decision, safely rooted in the Times concept of itself as “a newspaper of record,” not advocacy—and when you’re in the business of recording history, you don’t declare war on the people who’re making it. “If you want to get along, go along.” That is an ancient political axiom often attributed to Boss Tweed, the legendary “pol” and brute fixer who many journalists in Washington insist still sits on the editorial board of the New York Times.
Safire was awarded his Times slot as a sop to Nixon and his people. As it was Safire who first, while writing for Nixon and Agnew, aggressively propounded the nonsense that ours is a “liberal media” slyly suppressing conservative voices, so too was Safire the first conservative voice deliberately invited into that media specifically to spew such crankery. Nice work, if you can get it.
Today, of course, more than 30 years on, the cranks outnumber the sane people. The Safire-like sops have wholly seized control, and transformed our media into a rightbent asylum. And though we are still told—hourly, by every available winger—that ours is a “liberal media,” anyone flash-frozen in, say, 1968, and unthawed before today’s tabloid TV shows, would regard such an assertion as evidence s/he had awakened to a world of the mad.
Pat Buchanan, another former Nixon speechwriter, and once described by Thompson as “the other fork of Nixon’s tongue,” is these days so omnipresent that it sometimes seems there must be an actual law requiring that Buchanan be present in some magazine, TV show, or radio program at all times. Even as, in his dotage, Buchanan is now all about such mind-numbing outrageousness as attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of Adolf Hitler.
Diane Sawyer, elevated this month to the anchor chair at ABC News, once worked in the office of Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, churning out lies for the masses on behalf of The Chief. So loyal was she that she even followed Nixon into exile in San Clemente, once he was successfully driven from office by “the liberal media.”
These are among the things that it is well that Thompson did not live to see.
My old philosophy professor Ivan Svitak used to say that he had “lived under three tyrants: Hitler, Stalin, and Nixon.”
Out here in the West, Stalin doesn’t get much traction these days, but we sure can’t seem to shake Nixon and Hitler. Over there from Rome an ex-Hitler Youther is rumbling around the world as pope, while here in the US, during 20 of the past 28 years, the spawn of a Nazi financier has served as either President or Vice President.
William Safire, naturally, did his part, there from the pages of the Times, to help that spawn succeed. As an example, he repeatedly and exuberantly flogged lies about WMDs and Iraqi spies in order to force Americans who were not him to go over to Iraq, for what he predicted would be a “quick war." And during the non-George interregnum, Safire from the Times promoted “Whitewater” fictions, while meanwhile gleefully plunging knives into Hillary Clinton, who he once denounced as “a congenital liar.”
I guess he would know. Having once willingly worked for, and having secured his place at the Times through his association with, the premier congenital liar of our time.
Rest up, Bill. Go easy.
(This piece, illustrated, also available in red.)