Polemics with a Satisfying Zap

By Thomas Griffith

Syndicated columnists have become the designated hitters on newspapers.

With chains now controlling 71% of daily circulation, the absentee owners prefer bland, trouble-free editorial pages. Only outside columnists are allowed to be noisy, querulous and opinionated. Even here, chain management usually dilutes the effect with a "spectrum" of opinion, in a look-no-hands neutrality between conservative, liberal and middle-of-the-road. Those among the columnists who are also in television develop a manner to go with the act--William F. Buckley Jr., arch and fastidious; James J. Kilpatrick, full of pretend bluster. When Kilpatrick takes the conservative side against Shana Alexander on CBS's 60 Minutes, their genial volleys are reminiscent of Robert Frost's definition of free verse--like playing tennis with the net down. Such show-biz parodies suggest a network's fear of the bite of real contention.

One of the few columnists who seems to be managing to escape the fixed-ideology trap is William Safire, even though he began with a political label glued to bis back. Safire is the New York Times columnist (now syndicated to 500 papers) who was hired to offset the Times's Liberal tilt in pundits. At the Times, his appointment was unpopular. Wasn't he the flack who in Moscow maneuvered the Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen debate" so that it took place in the model kitchen he was plugging? Wasn't he the nasty White House speechwriter who coined "nattering nabobs of negativism" for Spiro Agnew's attack on the press? His first columns insisted endlessly that Democrats were just as venal and hypocritical as his crowd. Remember his Nixonian attack in doggerel on John Dean, with the refrain, "He's a better man than you are, Gunga Dean"? His pieces were lively, if spiteful. They were sometimes relieved by his love of puns, which he has since learned to check. He continues with zest and doggedness but not always with fairness or pinpoint accuracy to go after Democratic wrongdoing. Bert Lance knows his sting, and so does House Speaker Tip O'Neill. Safire's coverage of Lance won him a Pulitzer.

Safire has learned to combine reporting with denouncing, and rarely writes thumb-suckers, which is what columnists call reflective pieces. A classic example appears in the Jan. 13 New Republic, written by Henry Fairlie. a transplanted Englishman who often combines good sense and fatuity. On the dubious premise that trends can be divided patly into decades, Fairlie proclaims that this is a Decade of No Survivors, meaning that no institution came out of the '60s intact. After gloomily surveying the current cultural barrenness, he speaks of the Decade with No Audience and concludes even more gloomily with the Decade of No Nation. For this contribution, Fairlie deserves the Deep Thumb a ward--of the decade, or at least of the year.

Safire is too light-footed to write like that. On his fifth anniversary as a columnist last April, he wrote that he avoids "evenhanded analyses, sage soul searchings or detached observations. I am in the business of writing informed polemics ... with a satisfying zap, so as to affect people in power and their policy in formation. In 1973 1 was hopelessly defensive; now I am happily aggressive."

He can still zap, as when he refers to Press Secretary Jody Powell's replying "with the same trustworthiness he displayed as an Air Force Academy cadet." counting on the reader to supply the memory. Safire says he does this only when a fellow fails to return his calls or makes "a deliberate effort to deceive." Safire's politics haven't changed: he says that when he and his liberal colleague on the Times Op-Ed page, Anthony Lewis, agree on anything, they both reconsider to see where they went wrong. The libertarian Lewis and the unforgiving Safire do have as common enemies Henry Kissinger, who in the Nixon days wanted Safire's phone tapped, and General Alexander Haig, who, Safire says, got it done.

As a kind of truculent watchdog on the right, Safire has the freshest voice coming out of Washington. (The best? There is no current best in Washington columning.) The grudging praise he once got from his colleagues has generally turned to ungrudged praise. Reviewing his fine new Safire's Political Dictionary, bipartisan in its pursuit of cant and memorable phrases. Robert Sherrill, White House correspondent of the leftward Nation, referred to Safire as "perhaps the best political columnist at work today." Safire's own sideline fascination with words--plain, sharp, evasive or handy--has led him to take on a new column on words, soon to start in the Sunday New York Times. The extra load shouldn't bother him; his productivity already exceeds presidential guidelines.

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