The Spy's Obituary Page

William Safire: Nixon flack, Agnew buddy

By U. Netanya Tokef
Obituary Editor

On Monday, September 28, it was sealed: who would live and who would die. William Safire, consummate insider to the very end, got the advance word: he died on Sunday.

Safire had apparently forgotten what he'd been told the previous week: that all of our deeds, all of our words, are recorded and form the basis of the judgment of the Eternal One.

Wonder what deeds and words were written in that book? Let's turn the Waybac to 1969 – the blink of an eye to the Source of All Blessings, but apparently before the dawn of recorded history to the self-satisfied gasbags who eulogized the dead flack as if he were a benign amalgam of Samuel Johnson, Walter Lippmann, and Ted Sorenson.  

No sale.  

They say you can judge a man by the company he flacks for, and it doesn't get much worse than these two criminals.

Those of us whose memory cells are less plaque-addled than, say, Maureen Dowd's, remember things differently, which is to say, as they were.  Nixon had been narrowly elected President, by lying about a non-existent peace plan to end the Vietnam War and feasting on the self-immolation of clueless Cold Warrior Hubert Humphrey, who had failed to extract the Democratic Party from the twin demons of endless war and Mayor Daley.

Like the Restoration Bourbons, Nixon returned to Washington having learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Always adept at prying apart the tectonic plates of the American polity, he realized that his election was due to the perception that the Republican Party, historically the bastion of civil rights, could benefit by chucking all that Abe Lincoln crap overboard and becoming the Party of angry white resentment, a role it has played to perfection ever since.

Of course, if you want to sell a product like pandering to white racism, it helps to have a smooth flack from New York, if you know what we mean, to put it across. Enter Bill Safire, who came to Washington with Nixon and something called Spiro Agnew.

Unable to provide either peace or prosperity, the Nixon Administration used bilious falsehoods to pry apart the Democratic coalition. Think of Bill Safire as the guy who brought the crowbar.

In later years, he modestly claimed credit for Spiro's alliterative "nattering nabobs of negativism," and passed it off as self-criticism of pompous intellectuals.  What he actually wrote had rather more bite:

“For too long the South has been punching the bag [sic] for those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals . . . We have among us a glib, activist element . . . nattering nabobs of negativism . . . snobs for most of them disdain to mingle with the masses who work for a living [unlike Man of the People Safire, who loved tractor pulls – Ed.] . . . Americans cannot afford to . . . let their license destroy liberty. We can, however, afford to separate them from our society – with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples in a barrel.”

Deconstructing this drivel (as any redneck was able to do) will reveal what's really going on here.  First, he's trying to justify continued white racism and support for segregation (in the schools that they had been ordered to desegregate 15 years previously), even when (as in Boston, the Montgomery of the North) the mobs turned violent.

Then he responds to the concerns of those seeking to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection not by addressing their arguments but by demonizing their propounders. Truth be told, he didn't invent the great Republican tradition of answering one's political adversaries with smears of unsurpassable vileness, but he sure seemed to get a kick out of it.

Finally, he – through his sock puppet, Spiro Agnew – tells the racist mob that the fitting reaction is somehow to drive these "nattering nabobs" out of "our society," presumably in much the same way Safire's ancestors were driven out of the Pale of Settlement by the Czar.

It should therefore be no surprise that our happy wordsmith was found three years later drafting speeches for Nixon in support of Nixon's plan to strip the courts of jurisdiction to enforce the Constitution. In 1971, thanks to the hard work of Safire and others like him, this was known as "Law and Order."

Speaking of which, he also wrote speeches for Nixon, still in his pre-felon days, justifying the illegal wiretapping of CBS News reporter Dan Schorr, who had incurred the displeasure of Prickly Dick by daring to report stories Nixon wanted kept hidden.

Nixon's assault on the Constitution at home was accompanied an even more violent campaign to prolong and expand the Vietnam War until such time as the Karzai [Surely, Thieu? – Ed.] government could be propped long enough for U.S. troops to leave Vietnam "with honor."

And who spun the words purporting to justify the ill-conceived invasion of Cambodia (which paved the way for the Pol Pot regime to march in four years later)? Safire claimed later that he expressed his concerns about the endless Indochinese War to war criminal Henry Kissinger. Gosh, that should make those dead Cambodians feel a lot better!

Safire, of course, had no intention of going down with the sinking Nixon-Agnew Administration. At the first sighting of the Watergate iceberg, he jumped ship, helping Punch Sulzberger regain Republican cred after daring to publish the Pentagon Papers. It worked out great for Safire; somehow, for the Times, not so much.

Safire could have called a memoir of his Nixon-Agnew years "Present at the Destruction:" the destruction of the broad-based inclusive center-right coalition so ably glued together by Dwight Eisenhower. Not to mention the destruction of any tradition of civil Republican discourse. Ever since, Republicans have been causing the rubble to bounce with wild attacks on the patriotism of those who disagreed with their increasingly extreme views: soft on Communism, terrorist coddlers, Nazi Fascist Stalinist Kenyans, or whatever.

Now American political crudity and stupidity goes back to the founding of our Republic. But the contribution of Safire and others like him – Billy Kristol, Condoleezza Rice, and Paul Wolfowitz come to mind – was to put the imprimatur of apparently reasonable intellectuals on this slime. After all, if Safire, if Rice, if Billy were working for Nixon and W. and Cheney, then that meant that all the efforts to drive critics of Republican war- and hatemongers out of political society weren't so bad, or at least weren't meant to be taken seriously by those in the know, or, as Agnew read off the prompter, "the nattering nabobs."

The Spy's bottom line on Bill Safire: you couldn't trust the bastard. But down the corridors of infamy, Dick Nixon can be heard to protest. Nixon once told Haldeman that the problem with Jews was "you couldn't trust the bastards." He made three exceptions: fixer Len Garment, Henry "the Mad Bomber" Kissinger, and – wait for it – William Safire.