Remembering William Safire

William Safire (1929–2009) was as much of an influence on me, growing up, as anyone I didn’t know, rivalled only by Carl Sagan. Sagan spurred my fascination with science and space, but didn’t move my politics, whereas Safire was a factor in my political views, writing style and career path. He was one of three conservative formative influences on me, along with William F. Buckley, Jr., and Norman Podhoretz, but in retrospect Safire figured most among these, even though I never met him (unlike Buckley, briefly) or wrote for any publication he was known for (unlike both Buckley and Podhoretz).

A piece at The Bulwark, “Reading Trump’s Mind,” by William Kristol, brought Safire to mind. He was, Kristol notes, “the master of this genre,” of first-person essays imagining the thoughts of public figures. “A great leader, a new Saladin, is known for the enemies he makes. I now have the enemies I need,” Safire wrote at the beginning of a 1997 piece, “Reading Saddam’s Mind.” Kristol’s Trump is less articulate: “Screw them all. Revenge and retribution are gonna be sweet. I’m gonna do it.” I don’t dismiss that as a plausible sample of Trump’s thinking, but Safire would’ve come up with something more interesting. (In fairness to Kristol, emulating Safire’s style in reading Trump’s mind is a difficult challenge. I asked ChatGPT to do it, receiving worthless output.)

Safire, a Republican, former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, New York Times columnist and self-described “libertarian conservative,” stood out in the partisan fights of his time for his willingness to take on his own party. He called Bill Barr the “Cover-Up General” for the latter’s role during his first round as Attorney General in deflecting probes into the administration of President George H.W. Bush. It’s a term that’s grown more fitting for Barr since. Safire was known for championing underdogs and neglected causes, such as that of the Kurdish people; Trump’s pull-out of U.S. forces that had been working with Kurds in Syria opposed to ISIS and the Assad regime would’ve gotten negative attention from Safire.

Loyalty to friends was a Safire keynote, sometimes perhaps to a fault as with his long-time friendship with Roy Cohn. I wonder what Safire would’ve made of this passage from Kristol’s Trump: “You know, I had a weird dream last night. Roy Cohn was in it. He was always one of my favorites. And I was thinking, he began with McCarthy, he advised Nixon, but I’m gonna to outdo them all. Roy would be proud of me. When I get elected, I got to think of a way to honor him. He was ahead of his time.” This may give Trump too much credit in suggesting he feels loyalty to the man who reportedly said, “Donald pisses ice water.”

One Safire trope was to advise readers “who to root for” in various wars or tensions around the world, or in political clashes at home. (As a language columnist, he was dismissive of letters complaining it should be “whom,” not “who.”) In a 1979 column, Safire weighed in on several foreign conflicts: In Tanzania versus Uganda, he wrote, root for Tanzania; “Idi Amin is a butcher, of use only to crossword puzzle writers seeking two short names.” On Vietnam versus Cambodia, he opted for Vietnam, given the Khmer Rouge’s brutality; but sided with China in emerging or prospective fights with Vietnam or the Soviet Union. On Iran, he rooted for Khomeini’s forces over Communists, an understandable choice that’s less compelling 45 years later.

Five years ago, I wrote a piece about Safire’s book on Nixon, Before the Fall, and about Nixon’s relevance in the Trump era. Comparing Nixon favorably to Trump, as I still would, I now think I was too lenient on Nixon, whose devious style of politics posed genuine dangers to democracy that I’m inclined to take more seriously in view of later abuses committed or attempted by Trump. Moreover, I’ve less in common now with Safire’s world-view, as expressed over the decades in his writings, than I did circa 1980 when reading his column helped get me interested in politics. Still, as with Carl Sagan, I don’t have to agree with William Safire across-the-board to recognize he had a major—and positive—influence on me. No right-wing writer of today fills his shoes, and if any did, the right would be a better and more-honest portion of the political scene.

—Follow Kenneth Silber on Threads: @kennethsilber