By Tim Redmond
William Safire was wrong about Vietnam. He was wrong about Watergate. He was right about poor Bert Lance, but wrong about Jimmy Carter. He was very, very wrong about Saddam Hussein, 9/11 and the Iraq War. He was, as the Telegraph of London says, “tall, dishevelled, slouching and dour.”
But Lord, what a good writer.
His conservative columns sparkled with style and wit — and often, with intelligence (that factor so utterly missing from the right wing of American politics today). I read him regularly, not just his language columns (which got more dreary as he aged), but his political commentary, which was sharp up until the day he retired from the New York Times op-ed page.
And while he was often horrendously wrong and politically awful, he was pretty consistent. After complaining repeatedly about the climate of secrecy in the Bush Sr. administration, he made it very clear in 1992 that a president who refused to accept sunshine in the White House was unacceptable and that “this lifelong Republican” was going to vote for Bill Clinton.
(He later chided Barbara Streisand for refusing to take his phone calls. “She told me if I voted for Bill Clinton, she’d [grant an interview.} I did; she didn’t.”) And, of course, he famously turned on the Clintons, referring to Hillary as a “congenital liar.”
And unlike a lot of conservatives of his era, he was willing to change with the times. By the late 1990s, he had become pro-choice on abortion, and once commented on a rally to save Roe v. Wade: “Nothing warms the heart of an old conservative as much as seeing thousands of protestors stare decisively at the Supreme Court and demonstrate in support of the status quo.”
Back in 2003, he opened the door to conservatives accepting same-sex marriage (“I’m a ‘libcon.’ To that small slice of the political spectrum called libertarian conservative, personal freedom is central,” and if he were still writing today, I’m pretty sure he’d be out front on that issue (and on allowing gays in the military).
So I’ll miss the crusty old right-winger. He did a lot of damage, and when he first started writing his column in 1973, as a former Nixon speechwriter, he was an apologist for an administration that was pretty much indefensible. But he was thoughtful and somewhat open-minded and sharp and funny and creative. There are no conservative writers who come even close today.