On William Safire's Retirement and Death
September 29th, 2009by Glynn Wilson
I am still scratching my head as I re-read the New York Times feature obituary on William Safire, wondering how in the world the nation’s newspaper of record could get things so wrong in the end.
The power vacuum created at the Times when Howell Raines resigned really has left the former U.S. newspaper of record with a talent void — in spite of the TV commercials to the contrary.
I mean look at this lede. Do you see anything wrong?
William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79. The cause was pancreatic cancer…
NY Times Columnist William Safire Dies at 79
Do you know what a malaprop is? According to Wikipedia, which of course is banned in links from the NYTimes online, a malaprop is the substitution of an incorrect word for a word with a similar sound, in which the resulting phrase makes no sense but often creates a comic effect.
What Safire wrote was a dictionary for terms used in politics not otherwise found in a regular dictionary, terms such as “trial balloon” and the like. I’ve had a copy since the early 1980s, when I first studied political science and journalism at the University of Alabama and became a fan of Safire’s columns in the paper and the Sunday magazine.
Maybe in the end the Times‘ new management got mad at Safire for something, or maybe they just hired the wrong guy to write his obit. It doesn’t do him justice.
I would have left the part about writing speeches for Nixon out of the lede myself and focused on his accomplishments as a wordsmith. He was, after all, one of our most prolific lexicographers.
They say Safire was a conservative, and of course he got his chance because he wrote speeches for Nixon. But in fact, Safire was not so much a political conservative as he was a civil libertarian. In other words, he believed in civil rights, you know, quaint things like the Fourth Amendment, which is supposed to prevent government spying on our phone calls, e-mails and Facebook accounts.
I am sad to say I may have had a little something to do with Safire’s decision to retire when he did.
Safire was a great columnist and one of the most significant wordsmiths of the 20th century. But when it came to covering government, his sources were about as flawed as Judith Miller’s, who depended on Karl Rove and Curve Ball to tell us about the threat from Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
In a column right after September 11, 2001, just a couple of weeks after Howell Raines left the editorial page to take over as executive editor, Safire wrote that President George W. Bush had wanted to immediately fly back to Washington, D.C. on 9/11 (after finishing his reading of My Pet Goat).
I sent Safire an e-mail telling him he was wrong. I can’t tell you how I know this since it would jeopardize national security and reveal confidential sources with a similar status to Valerie Plame-Wilson. But the fact is, Bush asked the Secret Service, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove what to do. He didn’t insist on anything.
He was flown to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana where he held a press conference assuring the nation he was on the case, and then to NORAD in Colorado, until it was determined it was safe for the president to return to the nation’s capital.
Safire never publicly corrected that column, but after I got to work for the Times myself from 2002-2005, I had other communications with Safire. Just a couple of weeks before he retired, he wrote a column basically advising southerners to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, a line right out of Ronald Reagan’s political playbook. I upbraided him in an e-mail message that must have made him reel. I still have our e-mail exchange saved in an old archive, but I think it would be unfair upon his death to reveal the entire contents. Let’s just say he was wrong again, one of the few times in his career, and perhaps he was feeling his age.
In any event, no journalist or writer should be judged entirely on the basis of one or two mistakes over a lifetime. He was still one of the best columnists the nation, and the New York Times, ever had. There are not many columnists of that stature left in the publishing world. No matter what his political affiliation, Safire’s wit and wisdom will be missed…
Tags: On William Safire's Retirement and Death, The New York Times
September 29th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
I think you have misinterpreted the lede in the Times obituary of Safire, then compounded that by quoting from the Wikipedia.
First of all, the premier English language dictionary and reference source on the language, always cited by Safire himself as the first source of all sources, is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Its definition of malaprop, which it properly refers to as “malapropism,” varies in important respects from that in the Wikipedia. I can’t quote it here without violating the license, but I can send you a link from within the OED which is valid for a short period for you to use. I wish the Wikipedia had as expert a group of word sleuths as Safire’s Lexicographical Irregulars.
Second, the Times’s obit writer uses the upper case “Malaprop’s,” which obviously refers to Mrs. Malaprop, the comic character from the 1775 English play by Richard Sheridan, “The Rivals.” The writer does not say that Safire wrote a dictionary of malapropisms, rather that Safire’s articles, mostly those from the “On Language” column in the “NY Times Magazine,” constitute a treasury of language boners that would do Mrs. Malaprop proud. I have read those columns for years, and I wish I had thought to characterize them in such a tongue-in-cheek way. I’m sure Safire would have approved, and there is one way to explore that: submit the question to the Magazine’s editor and let whoever takes over the column be the judge.
As for obituary writing in the NY Times and, I assume, other newspapers, for people of Safire’s stature, the writing of the obituary begins long, the paper hopes, before the subject’s death, and the file is built over time. I suspect his was begun when he was a Nixon speech writer.
The lede, to me, seems pitch-perfect.
September 29th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
I understand the history but still disagree with the usage as well as the entire tone of the piece.
Maybe he was trying to capture Safire’s wit. But that would be sort of like trying to copy the style of Hunter S. Thompson. Not many, actually no one, could pull it off, so it would be best not to try.
I also understand canned obits, having done them myself and assigned them to students for years.
And as I point out, he was not as politically conservative as they try to paint him. That’s that bad definition of objective journalism raising it’s ugly head again. Unfortunately in our culture, it turns up everywhere we look…
September 29th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
As always, one’s predispositions tend to influence artistic criticism.
I suspect you are still a believer, a believer in The New York Times, that is. You still believe it exists, the ideal of it.
I have personally seen that ideal tumble and fail, sometimes not even meeting the minimal expectation standard. It has been measured and tested — and found wanting…
September 29th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I wrote only about the lede, not the whole piece. “Malaprop’s treasury” seems quite good usage to me. I thought the obit made clear that he was a libertarian, but maybe I either read, heard, or saw that elsewhere. I don’t believe in Platonic ideals.
September 29th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
It’s as if the NYT has been turned over to the movie critics. Did you happen to catch the view of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism?” As snotty as it gets…