Prolific Purveyor Of Punditry

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Writing a provocative newspaper column is an invitation to be egregiously wrong in public -- at least some of the time. Take the man who is America's best practitioner of the art of columny: succinctly melding fact and opinion in an unforgiving 770-word format. Even though in a parade of predictions in late 1988 he called the fall of the Berlin Wall, this Pulitzer-prizewinning pundit also flatly asserted last March that the Soviet Union would never brook Eastern Europe's attempts at independence. "Depend on Mr. Gorbachev to crack down as Mr. Stalin would have, fraternally rolling in the tanks and shooting the dissenters," he wrote. "The present Kremlin leader was not chosen to preside over the dissolution of the Soviet empire."

Faithful readers may have immediately recognized the telltale style of William Safire, whose twice-weekly political commentary has adorned the New York Times op-ed page since 1973 and appears in more than 300 other papers. For cognoscenti, there were three surefire Safirific clues embedded in the quotation: 1) this former Richard Nixon speechwriter remains a nattering nabob of negativism (he also crafted lines for Spiro Agnew) about Mikhail Gorbachev's intentions; 2) Safire's forcefulness of expression and clarity of opinion, for he is not a columnist who seeks safety in mainstream musings; and 3) the wordplay that is Safire's trademark -- in this case, revamping Winston Churchill's pledge not to dismember the British empire.

Unlike the Olympian detachment that is the traditional pose of Washington columnists, Safire projects a rumpled persona far closer to Walter Matthau's than Walter Lippmann's. His clothes are L.L. Bean, not Savile Row. Safire retains the unbuttoned style, the street-smart diction and the wry-not enthusiasms of a man who happily spent his formative years as a successful public relations flack in New York City. Where other conservative columnists like George Will and William F. Buckley can be precious and predictable, Safire prides himself on his reporting and contrarian thinking. "A column should not be a chore, not a chin puller, not a dreary thing," Safire says, trying to summarize his approach. "You don't have to be solemn to be serious." Then with a sense of satisfaction at the epigrammatic elegance of that last sentence, he adds, "I think that's original."

Safire has reason to be pleased with his gift of glib: his Sunday "On Language" column in the Times magazine has made him the nation's amateur arbiter of usage, or as he puts it, "pop grammarian." He wears the crown lightly, for it is not accidental that one of his six language books is titled I Stand Corrected. As comfortable with punnery as with punditry, Safire is rarely the punctilious schoolmaster in private conversation. True, when a visitor used propinquity to describe two men working in the same law firm, Safire interjected, "Don't you mean proximity?" He insisted on a quick trip to Webster's New World Dictionary on a stand in his lush Times office, furnished with the look of a turn-of-the-century men's club. The verdict: the two words are interchangeable. But there was nothing craven about this language maven. Instead, he said with verve, "Now both of us know something we didn't know a moment ago."

Safire turned 60 in December, and he makes no secret of his ambition: 20 more years opining on deadline. "I have the greatest job in the world," he declares. "I'm free to write, to select my subject and say anything I want about the subject. That's freedom. Freedom's a big thing for me." The tribal bonds between Safire and the Times are intense. It is odd to recall the epithets that greeted his ill-timed arrival in the midst of Watergate; Safire's critics could not decide what was worse -- that he was a Nixon apologist, a right-winger or a non-journalist. "What impressed me was how quickly he became a Times person," says A.M. Rosenthal, the paper's former executive editor. In fact, when Rosenthal began writing his own pugnacious Times column, Safire cracked, "Overnight, you've made me a centrist."

Safire and his stylish, British-born wife Helene, a jewelry designer, live in an expansive Georgian home in suburban Chevy Chase, Md., purchased in 1969. The rare-book-lined elegance (Safire is an avid collector) is marred only by a series of small white gates to keep the couple's two Bernese mountain dogs, Heidi and James, at bay. No longer at home are their two children: Mark, 25, a computer-software specialist, and Annabel, 24, a painter. Gracious hosts, the Safires are known for their break-the-fast party after Yom Kippur. Amid the memorabilia that fill the house, there is one bit of revisionism: Agnew's autograph is no longer on the photograph of Helene's 1969 citizenship ceremony. But the artifact that best symbolizes the weight of Safire's words is a framed clipping of a 1988 column heavily annotated with the commentary of George Bush.

With a philosophy that he dubs "kick them when they're up," Safire has made enemies. The West German government was enraged by his early 1989 columns that helped reveal that nation's complicity in the construction of a Libyan poison-gas factory, which Safire dubbed "Auschwitz in the sand." Nancy Reagan in her autobiography, My Turn, denounces various Safire columns as "heartless and dumb" and "vicious and unbelievable."

But other Safire foils remain oddly charmed by their tormentor. Bert Lance has become a friend, even though Safire won his 1978 Pulitzer for exposing the freewheeling banking practices that led to the resignation of Jimmy Carter's budget director. Charles Wick, the Reagan-era head of the U.S.I.A. and a frequent Safire target, gushes, "There's no way you can dislike the guy. I admire him so much." Perhaps no journalistic jousting caused the anguish of the Iran-contra rift with the late CIA director William Casey, whose 1966 congressional campaign Safire managed. Critical columns led to angry phone calls and a shouting match at a party -- all of which Safire recounted in the Times. But Sophia Casey, the CIA director's widow, recalls that her husband to the end "still had a soft spot for Bill Safire."

One theme reappears unbidden in almost all conversations about Safire: his unusual capacity for nurturing intense friendships. "If I were in a desperate situation where I had only one phone call, it would be to Bill," says David Mahoney, the former chairman of Norton Simon. Similarly, Safire's literary agent Mort Janklow calls him a "great friend," someone he would trust to race to Bangkok in an emergency. Such sentiments sound saccharine, but Safire's friends tend to remember gifts he gave them 30 years ago. For Barbara Walters, who worked with him in p.r. in the late 1950s, it was a black, shorty nightgown -- presented not as a romantic gesture but to twit her for being too prim. "Bill was saying, in effect, 'Loosen up,' " she recalls. Safire was introduced to Helene in 1962 by motion-picture executive Edward Bleier. After a whirlwind wedding, Safire presented Bleier with a silver matchbox engraved, "To Ed, the perfect matchmaker from one of his matches."

Such intense loyalties are probably a product of Safire's childhood. The youngest of three sons of a successful New York City thread manufacturer, Safire was just four years old -- and his brothers were teenagers -- when his father died of lung cancer, leaving the family not poor, but pinched. (Their name was Safir, but the columnist added a final vowel in the 1950s to make spelling match pronunciation.) "Those were tough times," says Leonard Safir, who recalls that his brother Bill "was bounced around a lot as a boy." According to Janklow, Safire's mother taught her sons "all you have in this world is blood and friendship."

Safire entered Syracuse University on scholarship, but two years later a summer job turned him into a 19-year-old dropout. Through his brother Leonard, Safire was hired as legman for journalistic impresario Tex McCrary, then writing a personality column for the New York Herald Tribune, acting as host on a radio show and dabbling in G.O.P. politics. Safire soon decided that he "could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels." Safire spent most of the 1950s working for the dynamic, yet erratic McCrary, goading him into public relations, which Safire saw as "the most adventuresome business there was." As his brother Leonard puts it, "When Bill was at the impressionable age when fathers normally help sons, he ran into McCrary." And of Safire, McCrary says, "I wish he had been my son."

Through both McCrary and his own pluck, Safire in the 1950s kept popping up in improbable situations, especially for a latter-day Times columnist. Consider:

1952. At 22, Safire, as McCrary's majordomo, organized the "Draft Ike" rally at Madison Square Garden that helped persuade Dwight Eisenhower to run for President.

1958. McCrary, with Safire in tow, rushed to Washington to advise industrialist Bernard Goldfine how to contain the scandal over his gift of a vicuna coat to Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's chief of staff. As McCrary tells it, Safire crawled across an outside window ledge on an upper floor of the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel to nab an assistant to columnist Drew Pearson and a congressional investigator bugging Goldfine's room.

1959. Safire impulsively set up the "kitchen debate" between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon at the American Exhibition in Moscow. Safire's goal was not to boost Nixon but to plug the developer of the "all-American home" in which the famed face-off took place.

Ever the loyalist, Safire has never recanted his membership in the Nixon alumni association. The two men talk at length about once a year, largely about pro football and foreign policy. Safire reveled in an October column contrasting Nixon's unpaid and unofficial mission to China to Ronald Reagan's $2 million jetcapade to Japan. The former speechwriter is not oblivious to the vices of Watergate; he just refuses to allow them to drown what he sees as Nixon's virtues. Before she died, Safire's mother asked him, "How could you work in the Watergate White House and not be tainted?" By way of answer, Safire wrote his entertaining 1977 political novel, Full Disclosure, which can be read as a parable on the conflict between high-minded intentions and moral blindness in the White House. But these days, Safire jokes, "Some guy broke into Watergate. I wrote Nixon's wage-and-price-controls speech. Where is the greatest sin?"

What Safire carried away from four years in the White House is the self- confidence to intuit how men behave along the corridors of power. Safire may exaggerate the degree to which all administrations cleave to the Nixon norm, but the ability to project his imagination into the White House animates both his columns and his fiction. In 1987 Safire published his second novel, Freedom, a 1,152-page, sprawling and ungainly but nonetheless fascinating reconstruction of the early years of the Lincoln Administration.

"You can put yourself back in the room," Safire passionately insists, referring to both the Lincoln and Bush White Houses. "Say, I'm ((National Security Adviser)) Brent Scowcroft; I've just been told that there is a coup in Panama. And what happens? I place myself there as Scowcroft, and I'd call the Situation Room, I'd call the Joint Chiefs. Or say, I'm Abraham Lincoln, and a crisis arises. What happened in the room? I can take the diaries of ((Lincoln's Treasury Secretary)) Salmon P. Chase or ((Secretary of War)) Edwin Stanton; I can lay it all out, and I can come up with what it was like to be in the White House. It hasn't changed that much in 100 years. The politics are the same."

These days, with his Lincoln labors behind him, Safire is writing his column with brio at an age when most columnists give way to pretentious punditry. Last week Safire returned for the first time in 13 months to a format that has become a personal trademark: a mind-reading column that provocatively depicts Kremlin politics through Gorbachev's inner thoughts. This Gorbachev, still a wily foe of the West, miraculously shares Safire's gift for language, describing his political philosophy as "improvisationism" and his goal as creating in Europe "a Balance of Impotence until Russia can rebuild." That is the joy of Safire's sonnets -- they are too much fun for even dovish dissenters to resist.