William Safire

Journalist and presidential speechwriter

• Born: December 17, 1929
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 27, 2009
• Place of death: Rockville, Maryland

Safire began as a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and spent more than three decades as an influential political editorialist and language columnist at The New York Times.

Early Life

William Safire (SAF-ir) was born in were chosen on December 17, 1929, to Oliver and Ida Panish Safir. Safire later added an “e” to his last name to guarantee that others would give it correct pronunciation. Although Safire was not overtly religious throughout his life, his Jewish heritage did play a strong role in shaping his political views, and he did observe holidays such as Yom Kippur with regularity.

Safire graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, an academically elite institution, in 1947. Although he began attending Syracuse University, Safire left college in 1949, at the end of his sophomore year, for financial reasons. That year, he entered the world of professional writing by becoming a researcher and writer for Tex McCrary, a New York Herald Tribune columnist and media personality.

Inducted into the Army in 1952, Safire put his reporting experience to work for a variety of military newspapers. When he left the Army in 1954, he returned to New York City to produce McCrary’s television show for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Because of Safire’s work, McCrary named Safire vice president of McCrary’s public relations firm.

When Safire visited Moscow in 1959, he changed his future direction by setting up a debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in the model kitchen of one of McCrary’s clients. Pleased with the resulting publicity, Nixon hired Safire to work on his bid for the presidency in 1960. After the election Safire created his own public relations firm but never left his active involvement in politics. During this period, Safire also began a family, marrying Helene Belmar Julius, an accomplished pianist and model, in 1962. The couple had two children, Mark and Annabel.

In 1968, Safire was ready to return to the world of presidential politics. He volunteered to act as an unpaid speechwriter for the Nixon campaign. When Nixon took office in 1969, Safire sold his agency and became a special assistant to the president, working as a speechwriter for both Nixon and, beginning in 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew. Safire worked on speeches related to foreign policy, the war in Vietnam, and the economy. Later in his life, Safire would state that his work as a White House speechwriter was marred by the overt anti-Semitic remarks of many members of the Nixon administration.

Life’s Work

Although Safire was already an accomplished speechwriter, he began the writing career for which he is most famous in 1973, when he was hired by publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger as a political columnist on the opinion and editorial page of The New York Times. Safire’s politics, which he frequently described as both conservative and libertarian, and his association with the Nixon White House, which was beginning to become dominated by the Watergate scandal, made Sulzberger’s decision to give Safire a twice-per-week column controversial.

While decidedly conservative in its politics, Safire’s column demonstrated a willingness to criticize the Nixon administration’s handling of Watergate and to criticize Republican figures when Safire believed they had gone too far in their actions. For example, Safire staunchly defended the administration of George W. Bush when it decided to invade Iraq, but Safire criticized the administration’s advocacy for the Patriot Act following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, on libertarian grounds. Safire’s columns also strongly defended Israel, a country for which he continued to express deep affection. Although he developed a close bond with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, for example, Safire did not ignore what he considered to be mistakes made by Israeli leaders.

The expertise and depth of research employed by Safire when writing his columns drew praise from media watchers. His nonfiction works, including his column collections, included a political dictionary and, notably, Before the Fall (1975), his account of the Nixon administration before Watergate. His work on the Bert Lance banking scandal in Georgia early in the administration of President Jimmy Carter resulted in Safire’s winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 (Lance was later acquitted). Safire’s rising fame led to a weekly column in The New York Times Magazine in 1979 for commentary on language. In contrast to his political column, Safire’s language pieces were often lighthearted in tone and yet conveyed the writer’s serious concern as a guardian of proper usage. The column proved to be so successful that Safire eventually published more than a dozen collections of his essays, including No Uncertain Terms (2003). Even after he retired as an op-ed writer in 2005, Safire continued to write his language column until 2009. After his retirement as a political commentator, Safire continued to support causes in which he believed, including becoming chair of the Dana Foundation, an organization dedicated to research on brain disorders. In 2006, Safire was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. Safire was stricken with pancreatic cancer and died on September 27, 2009, at a hospice in Rockville, Maryland, at the age of seventy-nine.

Significance

Safire’s career as a speechwriter largely shaped the public presentation of Nixon’s presidential agenda, including the rebirth of Nixon as a viable politician within the Republican Party. As the writer of one of the country’s most widely read political opinion columns, published in one of the country’s most influential newspapers, Safire was instrumental in the rebirth of the conservative movement during the Nixon years, paving the way for the rise of such conservative politicians as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Safire’s consistent support of Israel also shaped the public’s perception of the leadership of that state and provided a wide-reaching forum for advancing the political views of that leadership.

Bibliography

Henry, William A., III. “Rarely Safe, Very Rarely Sorry.” Time 121 (March, 1983): 70-71. A good discussion of Safire’s political views as a columnist, with particular reference to his “balance” and place in the conservative movement.

Safire, William. Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House. 1975. Reprint. Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction, 2005. Safire’s account of the early Nixon White House. Although not strictly speaking a memoir, the book does include many of Safire’s personal experiences as a speechwriter.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. No Uncertain Terms. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. The best collection of Safire’s work for The New York Times Magazine, giving excellent examples of the quality and tone of Safire’s weekly column.

Shapiro, Walter. “Prolific Purveyor of Punditry: As Comfortable with Wordplay as with Politics, William Safire Is the Country’s Best Practitioner of the Art of Columny.” Time 135, no. 7 (February, 1990): 62-65. An excellent summary of Safire’s life to the time of the article, with some specific information about his background and work as a columnist.