William Safire's Farewell Column

He retires today from his "right-wing scandalmongering" on the NYTimes OpEd. Why? To try something new -- full-time chairmanship of the Dana Institute for Brain Reasearch ("Fewer lone-wolf assertions; more collegial dealing. I hear that's tough.")

He'll keep the language column. I'll miss him. Through his numerous political contacts -- unmatched among columnists -- he brought factual reporting into his columns, something which David Brooks, for example, never does, preferring to refer to his own books to understand what's going on in the world. I'm sure Brooks' approach can be useful, but getting Israel's policies explained by Sharon has its advantages too.

I was hoping he would announce at last that he was Woodward and Bernstein's Deep Throat. Why him? While the Nixon administration was imploding, Nixon's heavily partisan, long-time speech writer was offered a job at the Washington Post by Katherine Graham. It was after Graham died that Safire revealed in a column she also stepped forward to recommend him highly for the NY Times job, which he took. That he was a frequent guest at her well-attended parties possibly brought them close enough that she would want to scoop up the bright young commentator onto her masthead; but how that translates into getting him a job at her newspaper's major competitor is not so transparent --- unless she had some reason to respect him so greatly, that she saw his having such a position transcended the business concerns of her newspaper. And, it would make sense that, if Safire was a major source pushing Watergate forward, he'd like a little distance from the reporters who took him up on it. Finally, while Safire admires the cause of the right, he's also highly intellectually honest -- meaning, as soon as he would find out members of the administration were using illegal and anti-democratic means to hold onto power, he'd roll over on them.