Cub Columnist

With Administration critics like James Reston, Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis in residence, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times is hardly regarded as congenial reading in the White House. Beginning in April, however, at least two editions a week will seem friendlier. That is when Nixon Speechwriter William Safire leaves the President's house to become a Times columnist. Safire, 43, was a successful public relations man before joining the Government four years ago. "People know I'm a Nixon man," he says. "I always have been. I guess that makes me a centrist, or just to the right of center." In a relatively humorless Administration, Safire stands out as a wit and phrasemaker. He wrote The New Language of Politics, a droll political lexicon, and is credited with coining the Agnewism "nattering nabobs of negativism."

James Brady, who broke the story in his New York magazine gossip column, reported that Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger had been pressured by relatives to acquire some Republican counterweight. As Brady told it, Sulzberger's cousin, Editorial Page Editor John B. Oakes, was angry over the top-level interference (Oakes denied it). The principals would not comment on the report that Safire would be making $55,000 a year--a lot of honey for a cub columnist. Quips Safire: "I'm going from one organization to another, and both are equally leaky."

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