Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

It is still a gamble to launch a new columnist on the nation's editorial pages. That is true even when the new man, A.M. Rosenthal, has just stepped down from editing the New York Times. Forget the power he once wielded; his words must now compete from scratch with other columnists' across the country.

Transferring success as an editor to the quirkier demands of columning is not automatic, and Rosenthal's first columns, going out to the 300 U.S. newspapers that subscribe to the New York Times News Service, have a way to go. But ^ Rosenthal, starting out on a new career at 64, is characteristically sure that he can successfully write about foreign affairs, love "or whatever else is in my head, and I hope it's not too lonely up there."

In this he reflects an attitude increasingly common in newspaper columning, an ambition to personalize the news rather than to report and reflect on it. This requires a strong ego, the kind Rosenthal developed with his power as an editor. Ego seems to have come almost from birth to two columnists conspicuous for it, William F. Buckley and George F. Will. Buckley is the beneficiary of an oil-rich upbringing and a thorough grounding in Roman Catholic thought. Will's father was a college professor, and George was presumably encouraged to air his youthful opinions at the dinner table. After all, a columnist is expected to be wise on short notice, and is tempted to make judgments that are quick and flat, or they will leave no mark. Anyone who writes a column twice a week is unlikely to be rendered wordless by what he does not know.

The columning field is overcrowded these days and no longer as prestigious as when heads of state waited to see what Walter Lippmann had to say. Lippmann, who died in 1974, was far from infallible, but he had a grave, ruminating authority that no one now writing has. But then, in journalism as in everything else, such authority today is suspect. Op-ed-page editors feel that many a Washington oracle spreads himself too thin boning up on too many subjects, and frequently prefer to commission articles from specialists who know one field well.

In the age of television, newspaper columnists seem diminished stars among the power groupies in Washington. Will regards himself primarily as a writer, but it is his TV appearances that put him in the big money. Moreover, a columnist is expected to be pigeonholed politically. The Gannett chain advises its 92 daily papers to pick columnists whose views range a broad spectrum -- from Mary McGrory's spirited liberalism, say, to James J. Kilpatrick's avuncular conservatism. But positioning isn't always enough: even in the age of Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz have not built significant reputations.

The most remarkable success in recent years has been a Times columnist, William Safire, who began with two strikes against him as both a former press agent and a partisan Nixon speechwriter. He is bright, brittle, brassy and unpredictable. Professing to be a Reagan conservative, he often deploys his inside knowledge and sharpest invective to devastating effect against the Administration. Abe Rosenthal thinks Safire's is the "greatest column in the business," though he does not aspire to "be the plump Safire." His own politics are more complicated; Rosenthal has stopped admiring liberals "who are too willing to accept nonliberality in other societies." Perhaps, he suggests with a laugh, "I have become a bleeding-heart conservative."

There is another Times model Rosenthal might consider. During the years that Russell Baker paid his dues as a Washington reporter, he was always more of an outsider than an insider. As a columnist, he has now widened his range to take on the entire culture, particularly its daffier aspects. But to call him a humorist does not contain him. He has the rare gift of writing seriously or playfully, with the reader never in doubt about which mood he is in. When the story of our times is finally written, historians may find it best defined not by conventional Washington experts but by Baker's down-home wisdom.