Punder on The Right

Carter's newest speechwriter

If Bert Lance ever needs another loan, he might consider asking William Safire. The Nixon-Agnew speechwriter-turned-columnist surely has the money, having made about $1 million from his bestselling Washington novel, Full Disclosure (TIME, July 4). He also has a personal admiration for Lance. "A likable man," says Safire, "and one of the very few in the Carter Administration to return my phone calls."

Lance is not likely to be queuing at Safire's window any time soon. Despite his fondness for the now defrocked Budget Director, Safire was one of Lance's most relentless journalistic tormentors. The columnist began writing about Lance's alleged financial improprieties in July, and a week before Lance bowed out Safire even conjured up an eloquent, 946-word television address in which the President announced that Bert and LaBelle were going home. Carter used his own.

Lancegate, as Safire has christened the controversy, does not mark the first time he has been out front of most of the Washington press corps. In four years as a New York Times columnist he has helped keep journalistic attention on such languishing scandals as Korean influence buying and John Kennedy's liaison with Judith Campbell Exner. In the Lance affair, Safire for a time had so many fresh allegations that Times editors in New York asked Washington staffers what he knows that they did not.

Safire less frequently bashes Republicans, but he has publicly disowned Spiro Agnew for his anti-Semitism and criticized Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger for encouraging rebellion among Iraq's Kurds and then refusing to aid them. A slick stylist with a sweet tooth for bon mots, Safire resisted obvious puns on the Kurds but drops groaners like "Zbig Government," and "Yamani or ya life."

Satire's casual contrariness has won him some reluctant admirers. "The most influential columnist in the country," says Esquire National Editor Richard Reeves. "I'm not enamored of his political viewpoint, which is sometimes to the right of Genghis Khan. But, hell, I read him because I have to. He's not predictable."

A native New Yorker, Safire dropped out of Syracuse University to become a researcher for Columnist Tex McCrary, joined McCrary's public relations firm, and later struck out on his own. As press agent for a "typical American house" at a Moscow exhibition in 1959, he lured Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev into their now famous "kitchen debate."

Safire joined the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign as a speechwriter, a job he retained when Nixon won. Nine months after the Watergate breakin, Safire left the White House and took a columnist's job at the New York Times. He had a previous offer from the Washington Post Co., but Publisher Arthur Sulzberger met him at a dinner in New York and made a higher bid--reportedly $50,000. That sizable salary, and his early columns defending Nixon against Watergate charges, did not endear Safire to many Times colleagues. But readers found him a lively contrast to the paper's other, mostly liberal and often solemn political columnists--Anthony Lewis, James Reston and Tom Wicker. Safire's column is sent to about 450 papers that subscribe to the New York Times News Service.

Safire still chats with Nixon on the phone, wears his Nixon tie clasp around the office, and corresponds with Convicts John Mitchell and John Ehrlichman. "Mitchell said he's working in the prison library cracking down on overdue books," reports Safire. "Ehrlichman and I have the same agent." He avoids ex-friend Henry Kissinger, who, Safire says, ordered his White House phone tapped in 1969.

The columnist occupies Wicker's old office at the paper's Washington bureau ("liberal ghosts in every corner"), but thinks up many of his columns at home, a 20-room, brick Colonial in Chevy Chase, Md. He lives there with his wife Helene, a former British model and pianist he met in New York in 1962, and their two children. Tall, relaxed and balding, Safire, 47, collects rare books and knows his way down a wine list. He batted out Full Disclosure in the mornings, without missing any of his twice-weekly columns. "This is my fifth book [first novel], and the first one I've made a nickel from," he says. "I'm flabbergasted by its well-deserved success." Success is busting out all over for Safire. For the first time since the Carter Administration took office, Safire reported last week, other White House officials besides Bert Lance have begun returning his phone calls.

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