Bill Safire: Happy Warrior of the Op-Ed Page

On Page 317 of my dog-eared copy of "Safire's New Political Dictionary" (1993), there is an entry for "Happy Warrior," the sobriquet that Franklin Roosevelt used in his 1924 Democratic nomination speech for Al Smith. As the Political Dictionary explains, "Smith – 'the Brown Derby' – became the party's choice four years later, and FDR's label for cheerful combativeness stuck."

Dictionary-maker, language maven, loyal Richard Nixon speechwriter and Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times columnist Bill Safire died Sunday at age 79. From a Zelig-like early career (helping public-relations impresario Tex McCrary organize a massive 1952 "Draft Ike" rally in Madison Square Garden; orchestrating the 1959 "kitchen debate" between Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev at an American exhibition in Moscow) to his 32 years opining on a dime twice weekly for the Times, Safire brought to his work and his life a joyful zest for combat (his credo as a Washington columnist: "Kick them when they're up") and a puckish punster's penchant for wordplay and alliteration ("nattering nabobs of negativism" was his coinage for Spiro Agnew). As much a New Yorker as Al Smith despite his four decades in Washington, Safire was indeed the Happy Warrior of the Op-Ed Page.


At a time when newspaper columns, with a few laudable exceptions, have become either predictable partisan screeds or snark-hunting expeditions, it is difficult to convey how consistently good Safire was at filling his allotted 770-word space. Safire was not omniscient nor unerringly right (although his political views tilted in that direction, except on free-speech issues): His hawkish views caused him to distrust Mikhail Gorbachev until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and his pursuit of Hillary Clinton over Whitewater turned him into a cross between Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. What made Safire exceptional as a columnist was that he offered his readers brio rather than bromides and that for him being interesting trumped being ideological. When I profiled Safire for Time magazine nearly 20 years ago, he told me, "A column should not be a chore, not a chin-puller, not a dreary thing. You don't have to be solemn to be serious."

In recent years, I saw Safire regularly every 18 months or so during the irregular dinner meetings of the Justin Welliver Society, the bipartisan alumni association of former presidential speechwriters. (I was there as a minor adverb-carrier from the Jimmy Carter White House). Safire was in his element – gracious, humorous and solicitous – as he presided over these dinners, reveling in the history embodied by former Harry Truman speechwriter and West Virginia congressman Ken Hechler as well as by Ted Sorensen and the late Arthur Schlesinger from the Kennedy administration and reliving old ghostwriters' tales about speech drafts that went awry and presidential prose banged out during harrowing all-nighters.

It is almost time for another meeting – and I cannot imagine such an evening without Safire. It is as hard to envision as never again reading Safire's "On Language" column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. In a world where so many Washington insiders and pundits boast reputations based on smoke and mirrors (the definition is on Page 720 of the "Political Dictionary"), Bill Safire was the real thing.