William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times op-ed columnist, died today at age 79. He did more than any other American over the last generation to get people talking about words and phrases and the way that we use them. That makes it hard to find the perfect words to say about his passing. His life and his voluminous writings taught us that words have not only poetry -- and sometimes roots as intricate as a giant Sequoia tree could be jealous -- but also power, power that could be either righteous or destructive or both.
Safire is still remembered some 40 years later for the words that he put in the mouth of a previously inarticulate and later disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew, and for one phrase in particular:
"Nattering nabobs of negativism."
It's such a memorable and jarring expression that we can almost forget why it was so important -- as the opening salvo of a political war that continues to this day. In an era -- this would be the late 1960s and early 1970s -- when the reality-based world was looking rather bleak, with new revelations about government spying and the White House waging secret military campaigns in Southeast Asia, it would be the Nixon White House that invented the strategy of not changing the message but instead declaring war on the messenger, the American news media:
And William Safire would be the muse of that campaign. Here's how the famous phase is described in Rick Perlstein's remarkable recent book on that era, "Nixonland":
At the California Republican Convention in San Diego, Agnew mentioned how Democratic candidate John Tunney had started riding in police cars before cameras -- "Tunney-come-lately." (After Ted Kennedy told students at Boston University that violent protest was immoral and futile, Agnew labeled him "Teddy-come-lately.") Then Agnew loosed Safire's most triumphant linguistic confection: "In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H club -- the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."
Agnew knew the scribes would write about it, if only to mock him. That was good: Let the elites mock patriotism!
The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called "the silent majority" a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events -- journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority.
Today, the vast majority of Americans of all political stripes -- conservative, liberal, centrist -- don't believe the "nattering nabobs of negativism, a.k.a. the mainstream media, in record numbers. In the long run, a New Media is emerging that may ultimately prove to be better than what it is replacing, but in the meantime the cost to America in the journalism that was lost during the run-up to the Iraq war and Wall Street's hijacking of the U.S. economy is incalculable.
Now that's a mission accomplished --and an amazing tribute to the power of a few words some four decades ago to start convincing people to distrust the words they read and hear today.
Don't get me wrong -- there is much to celebrate in the life of William Safire. His love of language and discovering the arcane roots of our everyday words and phrases was quite contagious, and some weeks his "On Language" column was the most entertaining piece of real estate in the the sprawling metropolis of ink that is the Sunday New York Times. And his politics were sometimes infuriating but also sometimes uplifting -- despite his ties to "Nixonland," he was at heart a defender of civil liberties -- and he was never dull.
But nothing else that William Safire wrote would have the power or the impact of those four memorable words that he pounded out on a typewriter, 39 years ago.
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It does seem that way, but then it seems like too many famous people died this year, period. Maybe we have created too many famous people in America. But Safire is a genuine loss -- I will miss his "On Language" column.— will- Why is it that I keep hearing "other than that Mrs Lincoln wasn't it a wonderful play?". With his fingerprints on the knife in the back of civil society, much less civilization, there would not be enough "defending of civil liberties" to raise a pebble to the mountain of his hand in destroying them.— FreeDem
- An excellent summation of Safire, but you were too kind. Sure, I read a lot of his impressive commentary about language myself, and it was great work. But his insight and understanding in regard to language only makes his work for Nixon and Agnew that much more obscene. Really! No lie! And your characterization of the infamous "nattering nabobs of negativism" as the "opening salvo of a political war that continues to this day" was right on the money. The "war" was for the sake of press intimidation, and it has worked exceedingly well. Justice and decency today have become more difficult than ever to realize. Au revoir, Bill Safire.— Jim Weidman
- Hell is a little busier today.— Merican
- That war started in 1933 when the right-wing press, which included most of the newspapers at the time, began a merciless attack on President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The rich never stopped hating him, and he coined the perfect term for them---"economic royalists." Our understanding should be larger than merely our personal memories, Will.— Delaware Jim
"We have created too many famous people." That is part of the problem with "journalism" today -- everyone is trying to become a household name, and journalism for the sake of truth is an afterthought. Would it be an improvement if newspapers stopped printing author's names on the articles, or is it an important part of transparency that we know who did the researching and writing? .....Ants have no name....— Mr. Smith- How can you expect people to blindly believe the main stream media with all the recent episodes of complete fiction that have turned up in the New York Times and Washington Post. Some have even received awards that had to be taken back. And when you have an outright liar and degenerate like fat slob andrew sullivan writing about the genesis of Sarah Palin's pregnancy based on some rumour in an Alaskan blog known to be anti-Palin, what in the world can you expect? MEMO TO DEMS- keep it up!! -- RASMUSSEN POLL: Support for Health Care Plan Falls to New Low; 41% Favor 56% Oppose— WriteWinger
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Disdain and distrust of the press continues today. And for good reason. Cheerleading for Obama, not properly vetting him and the hard work put into trying to destroy all who oppose him is the basis of that distrust. Read your own paper.— georgel- Comment removed.
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- Yeah, Will. Batboy doesn't like you because he can't trust you to deal with both sides of a story honestly. That's why he switched to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck - because those sources are fair and balanced. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA— Talking point sleuth
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- "journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan" Are you serious? We remember the 80s, you know. Try reading "Bias" by Bernard Goldberg. But even if what you wrote were true, we should beleive that aside from this period of the 80s, journalists were unobjective pursuers of the truth? As always a liberal blaming soemone else for how they end of in life.— spags
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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