Playboy Interview: William Safire

William Safire, 62, is something of a rarity in 1992: living proof that in an age when electronic journalism spreads like wildfire across the TV dial, the printed word can still stun 'em. As the Pulitzer Prize--winning political columnist for The New York Times and author of the Times Magazine's popular "On Language" feature, his columns are syndicated in more than 300 newspapers. And Safire--former speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and author of more than a dozen books on politics and language--knows how to use his clout. "Safire comes closer to influencing [American] policy than any other columnist," says media specialist Steven Hess of the Brookings Institute.

But there are also those who believe that Safire too often crosses the fuzzy line of journalistic manners, using his nationally syndicated bully pulpit to trumpet his conservative views. According to Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation, Safire takes amusing but ultimately mean-spirited potshots at people across the ideological aisle from him--"people who represent our best hope for idealistic politics, like Ralph Nader or Ramsey Clark. He is the cleverest columnist in the country," Navasky continues, "but I disagree with his conservatism. Safire presumes that you can solve political problems through military means."

Detractors also criticize Safire for his un shakable fidelity to old pals such as Nixon and Roy Cohn, for his unrelenting hawkishness on the Middle East and for his occasional blind spot to women's issues--specifically, his rants about lesbians in the women's movement and in arguments that abortion should be legal but "discouraged."

Yet critics and fans alike follow Safire religiously, and his readership spans the political spectrum. His twice-weekly Times "Essay" swings with sharp savvy, personal recollection and investigative reporting. And although Safire is a conservative, he often astonishes with his unpredictability: "Kick 'em when they're up" is his credo, and his kicking has staggered such Beltway grandees as John Sununu, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Alexander Haig, Charles Wick and Michael Deaver. In her autobiography, Nancy Reagan described Safire's journalism as "vicious and unbelievable"; yet it was that same kind of reporting that exposed the unconventional bookkeeping practices of President Jimmy Carter's budget director Bert Lance. The upshot: Lance resigned and Safire got the Pulitzer.

These days, Safire's wrath is aimed at President George Bush and Secretary of State Baker, both of whom he has accused of financing Saddam Hussein's military machine through a complex network of funds originally intended to aid American farmers. Having tracked the story for nearly three years, Safire predicts that once all the details of the scheme are exposed--including, he says, such crimes as the misuse of appropriated funds, misleading Congress and obstruction of justice--the outcome will be more damaging to Bush than the Iran-contra affair was to Ronald Reagan. The buzz within the newspaper community is that Safire may well snare his second Pulitzer with his Iraqgate revelations.

William Safire grew up in New York City in the Thirties, the youngest of three sons of a widowed mother, in a house where pictures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt decorated the walls. In 1949 the 19-year-old Safire took his first step into politics by dropping out of Syracuse University to work as a legman for Tex McCrary, a major force in New York Republican politics. (McCrary had a column in The New York Herald Tribune, a television show, a radio show and a public relations agency that handled the campaigns of the local GOP.)

With McCrary as mentor, Safire made an easy conversion to Republicanism, eventually finding himself smack in the middle of Dwight Eisenhower's 1952 campaign--the first-ever TV-driven presidential race. By the time he was 31, Safire knew enough about media and public relations to launch his own company, Safire Public Relations. His clients brought him into contact with some of the heavyweights of mid-century Republicanism: Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Jacob Javits and a Long Island businessman making an unsuccessful try for Congress, William Casey.

But of all the people Safire met during this period, it was Nixon who most impressed him. Safire was drawn to the very qualities in Nixon that others abhorred: his feistiness, his middle-class solidity, his willingness to play political hardball, his flexible conservatism. It is also not surprising that many of these personality traits have often been ascribed to Safire himself.

From 1960 on, Safire was a dedicated Nixon operative, and it was in part at Safire's urging that Nixon began his long march back from political oblivion in the mid-Sixties. When Nixon won the White House in 1968, Safire sold his business and headed to Washington, where he served as a special assistant and speechwriter for his friend, the President. At the White House, Safire shared a cubbyhole with Patrick Buchanan, from which he organized presidential press conferences, wrote public addresses and sometimes moonlighted on speeches for Vice President Spiro Agnew. It was Safire who gave the world Agnew's alliterative "nattering nabobs of negativism" harangue to reporters and antiwar professors in 1970.

In late 1972, just before the Watergate affair spun out of control, Safire began itching for a return to private life. According to one of his closest friends, literary agent Mort Janklow, "Bill has a sixth sense about these kinds of things, and his sniffer told him that it was time to leave." Coincidentally, at the time, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was searching for a conservative columnist for his op-ed page. Sulzberger found himself sitting next to Safire at a dinner party and offered him a twice-weekly feature. Safire accepted and, almost immediately, the press--then in the midst of a battle with the Nixon White House--registered its disapproval of the hire. At his desk at the Times Washington bureau, Safire was a pariah whose only lunch companion was reporter Martin Tolchin, a childhood friend from New York. "The hostility didn't turn around," remembers Tolchin, "until people here saw that he had independent ideas and terrific contacts--and that he could produce columns that actually made news. [But] it took years."

Today, almost two decades later, Safire remains at that desk. He is considered one of the Times' biggest attractions, drawing thousands of weekly readers with his Monday and Thursday essays and a mail haul of approximately 15,000 letters per year for his Sunday language column. Safire produces his columns in three-hour sessions in his Edwardian-decorated corner office. He returns in the evening to the 20-room mansion in Chevy Chase that he shares with his wife, jewelry designer Helene Safire. It is in this house that Safire writes his books. To date, Safire's oeuvre includes eight volumes on language, four nonfiction works, three anthologies (edited with the assistance of his brother, Leonard), a novel about Watergate ("Full Disclosure") and "Freedom," a novel about the Civil War.

This fall, Safire will have three books published simultaneously: "The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today's Politics" (Random House), a personal meditation on modern political life and Biblical philosophy; "Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History" (Norton) and "Good Advice for Writers" (Simon & Schuster), co-edited with his brother.

With the election season upon us, we asked New York political journalist Claudia Dreifus, whose previous "Playboy Interviews" have included Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Daniel Ortega, to question the man who calls himself "a professional pundit." Safire has had a long history of avoiding the "Playboy Interview," but Dreifus got her man. Here's her report:

At first, Safire said he would agree to speak with me for only six hours, but we ended up talking for two days running, over four separate sessions, for a total of almost sixteen hours. The scene of the interview was his office at the Times--his turf his territory--with phones ringing throughout.

"From my research, I had learned two odd things about Bill Safire: He is known as Washington's worst dresser, and he is considered the most charming man in the capital. Let me report that he dresses like your average college professor--which is to say, unremarkably--and that he is indeed charming (though not so charming as to convince me that things like Watergate were not assaults on constitutional processes).

"At times I sensed he was uncomfortable that I was not a conservative, not a Nixon fan, not a foreign-policy hawk. But he would continue talking unswayed--just as he does in his columns--convinced that, despite our ideological differences, the public square is still the most fascinating place on the planet.

"We began our conversation with a surprising fact that I had not uncovered in my research."

[A] Safire: You know, Playboy gave me my first fiction break.

[Q] Playboy: Really?

[A] Safire: Yeah. Back in the February 1958 issue. If you still have the yellowed clips, you'll find a short story. The title is Thank You, Anna, and it's about a bachelor and his housekeeper. It was my first crack at fiction. Playboy bought it--and I didn't do another fiction piece for twenty years. [Laughs] I remember how excited I was to get published, and how pleased I was that Playboy did it. But my sister-in-law was faced with a terrible problem about it.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Safire: She bought the issue, but it was one with Jayne Mansfield in it. The problem was showing the story to my nephews, who were then very young. The story was printed on the backside of a naked picture of Jayne Mansfield, so there was this great dilemma that was solved by actually taping the pages together and showing them to these six-and seven-year-old kids. The world has changed. Now they look at the pictures and hide the text.

[Q] Playboy: You call yourself a professional pundit. Give us a working definition of pundit.

[A] Safire: Pundit is Hindi for learned man. That has nothing to do, however, with its present sense: A pundit is a writer with his thumb planted firmly in his mouth, who can stare at the wall, come up with a question that nobody else is asking and then get some bigwig on the phone who is able to answer it.

[Q] Playboy: How did you develop your passion for politics?

[A] Safire: That began for me in 1952 when the man I was working for, Tex McCrary, decided he'd try to get General Dwight Eisenhower drafted and elected as President of the United States. Until that point in my life--I was twenty-two then--I'd been moderately apolitical. My big dream was writing. I'd been writing since I was very young. I wrote long and funny letters to my brother in the Army when I was ten or eleven, and wrote little essays or short stories for the school papers at the Bronx High School of Science and at Syracuse University. But in 1952 I was working for McCrary, who had his own newspaper column in the old Herald Tribune and also had a radio show and a television show with his wife, Jinx Falkenburg. He was a super editor and a tough, demanding taskmaster.

[A] So there I was, a young, young man who was producing his radio show. McCrary came to my desk one day and said, "How would you like to volunteer to head the Madison Square Garden rally to bring Dwight Eisenhower home to run for President of the United States?" And I said, "Gee, Tex, I'm already working twelve, fourteen hours a day." And McCrary answered in a way that was typical of him: "Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat."

[A] Anyway, I worked on the rally. And being a central part of those events made me think, Gee, this is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact on your time.

[Q] Playboy: So at twenty-two, you helped the Republican Party capture the White House for the first time in twenty years.

[A] Safire: In a small way, but working on that campaign introduced me to the play of power, which is the best play in the world. It is bloodless war. It creates friendships that last a lifetime. It creates enmities that can last a lifetime, though they don't have to. It sharpens the appetite for combat and combines a sense of passion with a sense of mercy. You can be kind and cool and high-spirited and funny in politics. You can see through the falsity of what is being sold because you're sometimes given entrée to the back rooms where it's being created. I like the political life. I like the idea of having been able to go from journalism to politics and back to journalism again. Now, not everybody agrees with that. I've had a debate with [Washington Post columnist] David Broder, who thinks there's too much street-crossing.

[Q] Playboy: A lot of people have done it.

[A] Safire: Yeah, it's probably now done more often than not. I think that's a good trend, because you really do get an idea of what motivates politicians when you've been one yourself. And the great trick to punditry is to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and to try to figure out from their points of view what they're getting at. That's why I do these mind-reading columns every now and then--"Inside Gorbachev's Head" or "Inside Bush's Mind." It's a fictional device, but you can slip all kinds of facts and conclusions into them. And you're not kidding the readers--they know you're just pretending to read minds. But through that device you say, "This is what it's really like in the Rashomon of the political world."

[Q] Playboy: As a Pulitzer Prize--winning columnist with more than three hundred weekly outlets, your words are read in the White House and within the halls of Congress. Do you like that power?

[A] Safire: I enjoy the job I have, which is the best job in the world. And sure, there's power in being a pundit--and responsibility, too. You have to be very careful not to hurt somebody inadvertently or to pop somebody who is not powerful. My motto is "Kick 'em when they're up," and I always try to. If I call the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice, for example, it's good to know that he worries a little--that there's a frisson of fear at the other end of the line.

[Q] Playboy: Before punditry, you were best known as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon. How did you meet Nixon?

[A] Safire: We met in 1959 in Moscow. I was a public relations man by that time, with my own agency, and I was working for All-State Properties, a company that had built this typical American split-level house for a trade-show exhibit. Richard Nixon, who was then Vice President, was this trade show's official host, and he was taking Nikita Khrushchev around the fairground. Now, naturally, as a press agent, I was eager to get the dignitaries over to my client's exhibit--the media always follow the big shots. But Nixon and Khrushchev were touring the Pepsi exhibit and there was a chain-link fence between it and us.

[A] So I got a Jeep and attached it to the fence, pulled down the fence and then yelled to the Nixon entourage, "This way to the typical American house!" And everyone veered off the planned path and walked right into the house. Nixon had just come from his defeat at the hands of Khrushchev in the TV studio debate, and when Khrushchev came into this typical American house, he muttered about its being some kind of Taj Mahal or palace and not at all typical of the way ordinary Americans live. Nixon stopped in the kitchen and started explaining that this was, indeed, the sort of house a typical American could buy. With that, the two leaders began what historians now call the Kitchen Debate. I took a picture of it with a borrowed camera and the photo went out around the world. As I recall, I made a big point of framing the photograph so that it included Nixon, Khrushchev and the washing machine.

[Q] Playboy: What was your impression of Richard Nixon at that moment?

[A] Safire: That he was terrific! I mean, he really stood up to Khrushchev. And coming from the television debate defeat earlier in the day, he made a real comeback in confronting Khrushchev. You could see it even then: Nixon was very good at comebacks. If you floored him, he would get up and come back.

[A] Later that day, I went to Spasso House, the U.S. Ambassador's residence, and got in line to meet Nixon. The Vice President recognized me, grinned and said, "We really put your kitchen on the map." I said to myself, "I'd like to work for this guy for President." So I worked for him in 1960 and I signed up again in 1966.

[Q] Playboy: By 1966 Nixon had lost one presidential race and a subsequent gubernatorial race. Most people had written him off.

[A] Safire: Well, I saw him as the Republican Party's best chance for winning the White House in 1968, after the debacle of the 1964 Goldwater campaign. I had worked in 1964 for Rockefeller against Goldwater. I'd carried a banner in the convention that said Stay in the Mainstream. And I listened to Goldwater say that famous line--"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"--and looked quickly over to Nixon in his box. The place was going wild, people were screaming and applauding. But Nixon was sitting on his hands. He didn't applaud. He knew the speech was a mistake, an undue provocation that would cost votes. Nixon's reaction impressed me. And so, in 1965, after Nixon moved to New York to work as a lawyer, I volunteered to write speeches for him.

[Q] Playboy: What did you see in Richard Nixon that no one else saw?

[A] Safire: I saw him as a way for the Republican Party to make a big comeback. The whole party. This was right after the Lyndon Johnson landslide over Goldwater. Republicans were flat on their backs all over the country. And who could speak for the party? I thought that Nixon had a far better chance to be President than Rockefeller. So I went for Nixon.

[Q] Playboy: What do you make of Nixon's current reemergence in the media?

[A] Safire:[Smiles] Can't keep a good man down. I think that quality of not quitting is a great quality, and Nixon has it, in spades. And this second great comeback, I think, is inspiring to people who have been kicked in the teeth and thrown aside.

[Q] Playboy: But Nixon wasn't exactly kicked in the teeth. So far as Watergate is concerned, he's not history's victim.

[A] Safire: There was wrongdoing. Nixon made some very terrible blunders. And he paid for them. He paid on a grand scale--the only President to resign. But in the course of the next twenty years, two decades, he's come back. He hasn't had any public relations campaign or any phony buildup, either. He's come back by virtue of his thinking and writing. Just this past spring, at a Nixon gathering here in Washington, he made a thirty-minute stand-up speech--without notes--on what President Bush's policy toward the former Soviet Union should be. I think he gave Bush some room to operate and blunted the idea that we mustn't do any spending on foreign aid. He took that strong, fairly unpopular position and made it popular. Bush could then fall in behind and follow that.

[Q] Playboy: So you're saying that Nixon pushed George Bush into doing the right thing?

[A] Safire: Which I think Bush wanted to do, but he felt he would have to pay too big a political price. What Nixon said was, I'll take a little of the heat and there won't be a big political price. As a matter of fact, there will be a greater political price if you don't do it, because people will say, "Who lost Russia?"

[Q] Playboy: Victor Navasky, who edits The Nation, has said that despite your record as a journalist, you remain a professional publicist and that your "biggest account is the Nixon rehabilitation project."

[A] Safire: Well, the word publicist originally meant a public man who dealt with public issues. It has been warped into its current press-agent sense. I'll accept "publicist" in its original sense. And it's wonderful how people can read motivations into my thinking. I don't have any secret agendas. Do I admire the comeback of Richard Nixon? You bet I do. Do I think that he was tagged as the only ogre among American Presidents when it came to the suppression of dissent? You bet I do. I think that suppression took place under Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson.

[Q] Playboy: What did Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson do that was comparable to Watergate?

[A] Safire: Wiretapping. The first taping system began under Roosevelt. This was the first step down that slippery slope of eavesdropping that was supposedly for national-security reasons but was actually for political reasons. And we saw it continue. We now know it continued heavily in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations because the tapes exist in the libraries.

[Q] Playboy: But back to Nixon. The articles of impeachment that were considered by the House Judiciary Committee were not just for wiretapping but for systematic violations of constitutional authority: the burglary at the Watergate, the cover-up, the lying to Congress, the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, the secret bombing of Cambodia.

[A] Safire: I don't think the count for the so-called illegal bombing of Cambodia would have gone anywhere. I think we bombed the Ho Chi Minh trail for good and sufficient reasons. The Cambodian government knew full well what we were doing and cooperated with us.

[Q] Playboy: Still, it was considered by some to be an impeachable offense.

[A] Safire: Well, you know, we kept it secret for the simple reason that it protected the government of Cambodia from having to protest against it. But it was part of the war. Now, you can disagree with it or you can say the war was wrong, but to impeach a President because of it--I don't think that would have flown. The break-in of Ellsberg's doctor's office was a criminal act. It was wrong. That was an impeachable offense. But I think it grew out of what John Mitchell later called "the White House horrors," which was the wiretapping of reporters and White House aides, me among them.

[A] But all of this was not unprecedented. Indeed, John Doar, the impeachment counsel of the House [and assistant attorney general under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson], turned out to be the man who came up with the plan for spying on dissidents. There were all these ironic revelations later. I think the facts speak very loudly that the Kennedy Justice Department bugged and tapped Martin Luther King, that the Johnson Administration carried out a plan for the containment and repression of dissent and that the charges I have run over the years have turned out to understate rather than overstate the practice.

[Q] Playboy: Although the tapping of Martin Luther King was certainly reprehensible, it was at least done through legal mechanisms--through orders that were agreed to by Robert Kennedy at the insistence of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. But President Nixon's men were spying on journalists and political enemies with secret crews operating out of the White House. The feeling at the time was that Nixon was crossing the line.

[A] Safire: You're forgetting that the FBI and the Justice Department work for the President. Look at the Martin Luther King incident, for example. Robert Kennedy knew full well about--and indeed signed the authorization for--the wiretap. Kennedy's apologists now say that was done only for Martin Luther King's own good. That FBI activity directly encouraged other law enforcement agencies to bug Dr. King's bedroom. The transcripts were passed around with some glee by the FBI and others here in Washington to smear Dr. King. Now, frankly, I don't think anything Nixon or Nixon's operatives did in the early Seventies can compare with the King effort.

[A] I just want to make two points here. One, "everybody did it" is no excuse. But there's also no excuse for denying that everybody did it. And, two, I've denounced the intrusion into personal privacy in the Nixon years. I've denounced it preceding it, and I've denounced it subsequent to it. Even today, I think the intrusions into personal privacy through the use of polygraphs is an offense against civil liberty. I just don't think you can say it was invented by Nixon, or treat it as if it were some kind of an island, a peninsula.

[Q] Playboy: Well, the difference----

[A] Safire: That's all I have to say about it.

[Q] Playboy: Your own phone was tapped by Nixon's men.

[A] Safire: Yes, I heard in April 1973 that I'd been tapped back in 1969. I really saw red! I'll tell you the truth: I'd been a Nixon man since 1959, before any of those creeps entered the scene. I'd proved my loyalty. And the irony of my getting tapped was Nixon saying to me, "Hey, on this welfare reform speech, please leak it all over town before I make it so we can try to get some interest in it." So I spoke to Henry Brandon of the London Times and he said, "What's new this week?" And I said, "There's going to be a terrific speech on welfare reform and you have to listen to it; he's going to say this and such."

[Q] Playboy: That's a breach of security.

[A] Safire: And the President told me to do it! It turned out that they were tapping Henry Brandon. So the wiretappers and the FBI went to Al Haig and, I believe, Henry [Kissinger] and said, "There's a man in the White House talking to one of our taps and we'd like to put a tap on him, too." And I think Haig said yes. I know John Mitchell signed the order.

[Q] Playboy: Was Attorney General Mitchell an old pal of yours?

[A] Safire: No. I met him during the campaign of 1968. He didn't trust me at the time because I was an associate of "known journalists." But it turned out that some leaking he suspected me of doing actually came from somebody else who owned up to it. So after that, Mitchell seemed to trust me. I was given the franchise to talk to journalists.

[A] In 1973, one of my Times colleagues informed me, "You were one of those who were wiretapped." Curiously, that event took a lot of the heat off me at the Times. I'd been hired out of the White House as a conservative voice, and a lot of people on the paper figured, "Aha, here's a Nixon plant, probably up to his hips in corruption from Watergate. And we're stuck with him."

[A] In my first few months at the Times, which was also the time when Watergate was beginning to go wide, there were people who were unhappy with the fact that I was writing on the paper--and, even worse, that I was defending Nixon. I was saying Watergate was no big deal, that everybody did it, that Nixon would never be impeached and all those good things. So I would really have won an unpopularity contest at the Times. But suddenly I was given a reprieve by being on the tap list. Being tapped was even better than being on the enemies list, a position that was highly sought after.

[Q] Playboy: Your brother Leonard said that the Nixon men didn't trust you enough to allow you to be a crook.

[A] Safire: "I am not a crook." [Laughs] I didn't even write that line. Nor were any of the Nixon men crooks. Curiously enough, in all the denunciations of the abuses of power in the Nixon White House, nobody ever talked about crookedness or financial----

[Q] Playboy: For their own pockets.

[A] Safire: Yeah, nobody stole anything.

[Q] Playboy: But what they were really talking about was stealing the Constitution.

[A] Safire: They were talking about abusing power.

[Q] Playboy: To your brother's point: You were not trusted enough to be a participant in the White House horrors. Why was that?

[A] Safire: I'll give you a serious answer. It was a combination of luck and mental set. My mental set, they all knew, was New York--literary writers, reporters, journalists, all those people who are "not our kind." So while I had the franchise to go to a Georgetown party and deal with the intellectual set, I was not wholly trusted. As a matter of fact, back in 1966, when Nixon introduced me to the other guys who were just beginning his presidential campaign, he said, "This is Safire, been with us since 1960, but watch what you say, he's a writer." Sort of half in jest, knowing that I was going to write down everything and use it some day in a history.

[A] I remember the day I left the White House to work for The New York Times. It was at the end of March 1973. I cleaned out my desk and put the last things in my briefcase and, walking out of the Executive Office Building, I passed the President's office. The Secret Service men were standing outside, so I knew the President was inside that office. And I stopped for a moment and thought to myself, Should I go in and say goodbye? But then I figured I'd written my letter of resignation and I'd written his nice letter to me saying thanks--"you did a wonderful job"--which I assume he signed.

[Q] Playboy: You wrote it yourself?

[A] Safire: Either Pat [Buchanan] or I did. We turned it out in our shop for each other. But at any rate, that formality had been taken care of, and there was always an awkwardness in saying goodbye with Nixon. So I said the hell with it, passed by the door and continued on out. I learned later that, at that moment, the President was in the office with John Dean having the conversation about the cancer on the presidency.

[Q] Playboy: What might have happened if you'd knocked on the door, opened it and walked in?

[A] Safire: The President's secretary would have said, "Safire's here to say goodbye." I would have gone in. We would have shaken hands and then the great likelihood is that Nixon would have said, "Sit down, listen to this. See if you have any ideas." Then, I would have been in it!

[Q] Playboy: Really? You don't think you might have said, "Fire Mitchell! Fire Bob Haldeman! What they're doing is illegal and dangerous to the country"?

[A] Safire: Ah, but you see, you're drawn into a thing like that. You're sitting there talking about it and you're saying, "What you ought to do is this or that." You don't say, "You should stonewall, you should perjure yourself." You don't say anything like that. You say, "Maybe you shouldn't say anything for a while," or "Maybe we should have a press conference." In so doing, you involve yourself in what is later called a venal cover-up. Now, maybe I would have stood up like some kind of straight arrow and said, "I can see this entire thing unfolding and it's wrong and immoral and I oppose it, and, Mr. President, you've got to throw this guy out of your office." But I doubt I would have said that.

[Q] Playboy: You're claiming that Watergate was some inexorable slide that people got on and couldn't get off?

[A] Safire: Yes, there was an inexorability to it. Nixon could have stopped it. It would have required some early disloyalty to individuals on Nixon's part, but that was not his way.

[Q] Playboy: Which individuals?

[A] Safire: John Mitchell, then Haldeman and Erlichman. Yeah, chucking them off the sled, which he should have done right off the bat. He should have done it when the Watergate was broken into.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction to the flurry of Watergate twentieth-anniversary retrospectives in June?

[A] Safire: I tried to let them go by without joining in. If I were a Nixon hater, I'd beat the drums, too. But as you know, I'm not. Still, I can see people remembering the good old days and trying to urge people not to forget how they won over the forces of the Nixon men.

[Q] Playboy: During those years at the White House, you double-dutied by writing speeches for Vice President Spiro Agnew, who won headlines with speeches attacking the press and the media. Now that you're a leading member of the press, how do you feel about having written those speeches?

[A] Safire: Pat Buchanan wrote the famous Des Moines speech in which Spiro Agnew denounced the media. I never liked that speech. I wrote one of the other famous Agnew speeches, the "nattering nabobs of negativism" speech. Interestingly, I was recently preparing an anthology of political speeches, Lend Me Your Ears, and had a chance to look it over again. I still rather like it. It was a speech that attacked pessimism.

[A] The way the phrase developed was that I was looking for something to update Adlai Stevenson's "prophets of gloom and doom" speech. Stevenson had used rhyme as a device to make that a memorable phrase. So I used alliteration. I was looking around for a noun, and "sultan" wouldn't do it, and "solon" wouldn't do it. But "nabob" did. And then I had to look for a word that modified the noun that started with an N. And I guess what made that expression work was the odd word "nattering," which is a combination of chattering and nagging.

[A] That speech was fine--it got the press's attention--but now, of course, when you think of Agnew, you think two things: one, the attack on the media and, two, the nolo contendere plea.

[Q] Playboy: The second marking the end of his career.

[A] Safire: Right, when he turned out to be less than our idea of a good Vice President or a decent public servant. But who knew at the time? At the time, he struck us as an excellent vehicle for doing what a Vice President should do, which is to carry the partisan message. Nixon did it as Ike's Vice President and he expected his Vice President to do it.

[Q] Playboy: As Dan Quayle does now.

[A] Safire: Yet Bush didn't do it for Reagan--but that was acceptable.

[Q] Playboy: When Quayle launched his attack on Murphy Brown last spring, you must have been reminded of a previous Vice President.

[A] Safire: Yes. [Laughs] I recall well the Agnew blasts at the counterculture. Interestingly, in the famous Des Moines speech, Agnew made a lot of points that many media critics have been making ever since. The problem there was that it came from a top elected official, when it might better have come from the media. However, I've never thought the media were such tender flowers that they could not withstand blasts from politicians.

[A] Anyway, I enjoyed Quayle's shot at Murphy Brown because I agreed with him that the promotion of that sitcom episode [in which Brown has a baby] exalted single parenthood.

[Q] Playboy: But isn't Quayle just searching for a scapegoat to blame for more serious social problems?

[A] Safire: That's just a knee-jerk-liberal reaction.

[Q] Playboy: It isn't knee-jerk. Single motherhood hardly caused the Los Angeles riots, for example. And so to answer our question with a countercharge is not to answer it.

[A] Safire: I'll leave it at that.

[Q] Playboy: You've been down on George Bush in a most un-Republican way. For most of the spring and summer, your columns accused the Bush Administration of arming Saddam Hussein and causing circumstances that made the Gulf war necessary. Aren't you burning your bridges to this White House?

[A] Safire: What bridges? I've been getting hate mail from this White House for years. You never have to worry about whether or not you have good contacts with any administration. They have to deal with a columnist for The New York Times or the Washington Post or any major newspaper. They can't hang up and not get back to you.

[Q] Playboy: Nonetheless, you seem genuinely sick of Bush.

[A] Safire: Sick of Bush? Well, I'm not a professional outragee--I have no rage to rage. I recognize that every President is going to do some things I don't like. So I come down and criticize.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction to the Democratic Convention?

[A] Safire: I felt it was a surrender to conservative economics and the end of the liberal dream of income redistribution.

[Q] Playboy: If that's true--and given your disappointment with Bush--might you vote Democratic in November?

[A] Safire: For the first time in a long time, I'm not absolutely certain I'll vote Republican. I want to see how the campaign goes right to the very end, and then I'll vote for [the candidate with] the better philosophy and stronger character. I have a lot of problems with Bush, but I also have a lot of problems with the old Carter hands around Bill Clinton. So I want to see how they hold up in the crucible of a campaign. Both of them are comeback kids.

[Q] Playboy: You've used your columns to report on the campaign as well as to advise. In the spring you even wrote columns that offered Clinton free and unsolicited advice on how he should present himself.

[A] Safire: I've offered a little advice. That's the great thing about this business: It's the free-advice business. And I ladle it out in great dollops. I did one column telling Clinton how to improve his stump speech. I did another on the Hillary problem, suggesting that she stop defining herself by what she is not. She was saying, "I'm not standing by my man" and "I'm not baking cookies" and all that. And I said, "That only alienates people. Start defining yourself by what you are--which is yourself." It seems she took my advice. Actually, I'm impressed with Clinton's mind and his ability to take a punch--though I'd like to know more about him. He seems to be Mr. Program. Whatever you ask him, he's got a twelve-point plan for it.

[Q] Playboy: In all your years as a giver of advice, has anyone ever said, "Safire, keep it to yourself"?

[A] Safire:[Laughs] Never! Never once. But people always say, "How's that again?" or "What did you mean by that?"

[Q] Playboy: What advice might you have given Mario Cuomo?

[A] Safire: I would have advised him to run--and urged him. I was looking forward to his running and, indeed, expected him to run.

[Q] Playboy: Really? One of this country's leading conservative columnists urging Mario Cuomo to run for President?

[A] Safire: Sure. A Cuomo candidacy would have been exciting. He's articulate, he thinks and he loves the cut and thrust. He's also good to write about.

[Q] Playboy: Is George Bush defeatable in this coming election?

[A] Safire: Of course he is. Absolutely, Bush is beatable. Will he be beaten? I don't think so. I think he'll pull it out.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Safire: The forces of trust are stronger than the forces of change.

[Q] Playboy: Even when the nation's trust in the President, according to the nightly news, at least, is eroding daily?

[A] Safire: I can't envision this whole campaign going by without certain foreign-policy matters coming to the fore that will underline the need for the kind of experience President Bush has.

[Q] Playboy: You predicted ahead of time that Ross Perot would withdraw from the presidential race. How did you know?

[A] Safire: It was a lucky thing I was on Larry King Live the week before he pulled out. I had a chance to go on the record predicting that he might not last the whole campaign, even though I didn't have it in my column. The reason I thought there was a chance he'd pull out was that I always figured him to be a volatile character. He had a history of doing impulsive things and being totally undependable. I felt he was a liar and a bully and I said so. I think he misled and betrayed a great many trusting and dismayed people. And his pullout means that Clinton will have a better chance.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about the "character issue." Your new book, The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today's Politics, is as much a rumination about modern-day politics as it is about the Bible. In it you say that the character issue in political elections is just "an excuse for gossip-mongering."

[A] Safire: Yeah. I think "the character issue" is a high-sounding phrase for "Did he or didn't he sleep around?"--which will one day be extended to "Did she or didn't she sleep around?" People don't like to call it something as direct as "the sex issue," so they call it "the character issue." They also remove themselves from reality by saying, "We're not interested in whether or not he fell from grace once or twice, we're interested in whether he lies about it."

[A] I do think that as more women start running for office, or get elected, they, too, will be closely examined for their sexual activities. And that's why I say to a great many women who feel that the character issue is very important: "If it's so important, how will you feel when it starts being applied to women?" I hope they'll stop thinking that way and realize it's a two-edged sword.

[Q] Playboy: How do you rate the way Clinton has handled the sex issue so far?

[A] Safire: Pretty well. Originally, he had an unassailable position that was consistent and direct--that his marriage had had some rocky times, that they had not gotten a divorce, that they worked it out and were now determined to look ahead. This hinted that they had had difficulty on the subject of marital fidelity and worked it out. Then when it came up later, specifically with Gennifer Flowers, Clinton began getting too specific. You can't start getting specific. I think when he saw that she did not have anything on tape that was incriminating, or compromising--I shouldn't say incriminating--he was able to say that there was nothing to her charges.

[Q] Playboy: President Bush has been subjected to the same kind of media scrutiny on the sex issue as Clinton. Last summer, Spy magazine ran a cover story on Bush's personal life. Did you see it?

[A] Safire: I'm not interested.

[Q] Playboy:Spy's investigation focused on Bush's long-alleged romantic involvement with former aide, Jennifer Fitzgerald. Will that story affect the President's reelection campaign?

[A] Safire: I don't think it will amount to a hill of beans.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Safire: You're asking me my judgment.

[Q] Playboy: What about the more recent reports that a former U.S. ambassador, now dead, had corroborated the alleged romance?

[A] Safire: I still don't think it will amount to a hill of beans. It's a secondhand source. Furthermore, the so-called source is a dead man, so he's no source at all. So I really don't think it's going anywhere. Of course, you're talking to a man who thought Watergate was a one-day story.

[Q] Playboy: In general, does an incumbent President have a kind of immunity on this sort of thing?

[A] Safire: I think everybody has the presumption of innocence. Even politicians. They have the presumption of innocence in their private lives unless there is clear evidence brought forth to the contrary. And who has come forward and said, "I accuse George Bush"?

[Q] Playboy: Maybe Bush just picks more discreet women than Democratic politicians pick.

[A] Safire: Politicians are entitled to a degree of privacy on sex. The public has no right to demand a seal of moral purity stamped on the forehead of every candidate. When a charge is made, as in Clinton's case, the candidate has to deal with it, as he did. When no charge is made, as in Bush's case--and the only evidence comes from a mere suspicion expressed by a source now dead--then the way to handle it is to condemn the question. I predicted back in the spring that some macho reporter would ask the tasteless did-you-ever question of the President. And I suggested that the President should reply: "Leap in the lake" or "Go to hell." That's essentially what Bush did when the NBC guy asked about adultery. Now other candidates in years to come can answer it with, "I'm with George Bush--I won't take sleazy questions that demean the political process."

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to the President's record, most of your disaffection with Bush revolves around or centers on his foreign policy.

[A] Safire: I'm one of those people who think he's been an excellent domestic-policy President and a terrible foreign-policy one. As a conservative, I like his laissez-faire economic policies, though I wish that he had done more to curb spending.

[Q] Playboy: How big a scandal is what you call Iraqgate--the series of events that begins with a half-billion dollars of U.S. grain credits issued to Iraq?

[A] Safire: Big. I've been on this since 1989. Nobody paid any attention to it. I think it's considerably more important, more damaging than Iran-contra was to Reagan, because it involves three sets of crimes. It does not exclusively involve a mere policy blunder. The first set of crimes was misuse of appropriated funds--using export-promotion money designed to help American farmers as foreign-aid money to help Saddam Hussein. The second set of crimes was the systematic misleading of Congress by the departments of State and Agriculture and Commerce. The third set of crimes was the obstruction of justice after the FBI discovered how Iraq was abusing Banco Lavoro in Atlanta to use grain credits to buy weapons. Taken together, this shows a criminal conspiracy within the government, and I think it will be important in the campaign. And if Bush is reelected, it will be central to his second term. I think there will be a special prosecutor who will find plenty of wrongdoing.

[Q] Playboy: Not unlike the way in which Watergate unraveled Nixon's presidency after his reelection.

[A] Safire: Because it's about U.S. tax dollars financing Saddam's nuclear program. Saddam was developing a nuclear capacity and rockets with money we financed by giving him grain credits. He used grain credits from the United States to barter for the technology enabling him to build an atom bomb. I've been writing about that in an ongoing way in my column for quite a while. The United States gave Iraq a loan guarantee through Banco Lavoro's branch in Atlanta to buy American grain, which was bartered for weaponry and technology with eastern Europe. In other words, we guaranteed Saddam loans to buy American grain, which was loaded onto ships and sent to eastern Europe--the grain probably never went to Iraq--where it was traded for technology and weaponry. Iraq later defaulted on the loan, and the United States taxpayer paid out at least a half-billion dollars to arm Iraq. It wasn't getting grain from us, but it was getting the means to barter weapons--at a time when Saddam was strapped for cash. So some of this went into his atom bomb.

[Q] Playboy: How did you know about all of this?

[A] Safire: I originally got the information [about Iraq's nuclear potential] from Kurdish-related sources. I've been a friend of the Kurds for fifteen or twenty years. I came into information that led me to believe that Saddam Hussein was a lot closer to nuclear-bomb development than most people thought. But when good newspaper reporters went to the CIA and asked, "What do you have on development of nuclear potential of Iraq?" they were told, "Not for five to ten years could [Saddam] do it."

So I went out on a limb and said, "It ain't five to ten years, everybody--it's two years. It's right around the corner." And now, with what the inspection teams in Baghdad found last winter--that he was only months from having a bomb--it turns out that even I was not alarmed enough.

[Q] Playboy: Was the Gulf war avoidable?

[A] Safire: Yes, it was. Definitely. It was avoidable, and it was not avoided. The military buildup of Saddam Hussein should have been spotted. There were plenty of signs. His willingness to use poison gas against the Kurds and, essentially, to practice genocide should not have been winked at by the United States government. So we clearly gave the signal to Saddam Hussein that we were on his side--that we still wanted to cooperate actively with him. And when the Voice of America dared to suggest that freedom would prevail in such countries as China and Iraq, that's when Saddam called in our Ambassador and complained. A hot wire went back to James Baker, and Baker proceeded to crack down on the Voice of America. All of this is a pattern of appeasement that encourages dictators to do daring things. No wonder Saddam was surprised when the United States reacted so fiercely after he invaded Kuwait. We'd given him every reason to think that we would not [react that way].

[A] After the invasion in 1990, I was one of those war-hawk pundits actively supporting President Bush's position. I said he was right to move quickly to counter the Kuwait invasion by Saddam and I was one of his most ardent supporters in the war. However, now I've found out more and more about the degree to which he was culpable in helping Saddam build up his nuclear and conventional forces.

[Q] Playboy: This is a big change for you.

[A] Safire: Basically, I've gone through three phases in my thinking of how Bush handled Iraq. In the first phase, I was critical of the United States' aiding Saddam before the war. In the second phase, I was a hundred percent pro-Bush on going to war against Saddam in order to turn him back from Kuwait and drive him out of power. The third phase began with the premature end of the war, where some nutty geopolitics drove the President to fail to complete his job [and dispose of Saddam Hussein]. The Saudis were saying to [National Security Advisor] Brent Scowcroft and to our State Department that we should drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. "But," they said, "do not destabilize Iraq."

[Q] Playboy: Was it feared that if Iraq was destabilized, the balance of power in the Gulf would tilt toward Iran?

[A] Safire: Right, and then Iran and fundamentalism would take over the area. So they suggested we fine-tune ourselves to the point of just pushing Saddam back--but not over. Well, it turns out that our generals there were misinformed about the trapping of the Republican Guard. There was such a rush toward ending the war that the Republican Guard, the elite troops of Saddam Hussein, were able to slip out. And our general there, Norman Schwarzkopf, admitted that at the end of the war he was snookered by the Iraqis on allowing them to keep and use their helicopters. Ultimately, when the Shiite and Kurd uprising that we called for took place, Saddam had the helicopters to defeat them.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that General Schwarzkopf was completely fooled?

[A] Safire: I'm saying he was given the wrong intelligence from the generals in the field, which he then transmitted back to the White House--back to the Joint Chiefs--saying that it was OK with him to end the war because he had control of the situation. Well, there are two mistakes here: Mistake A was in allowing the Republican Guard to escape. And Mistake B, which has been admitted, was to permit the use of Saddam's helicopters. Schwarzkopf was misguided and passed along that misguidance. Nobody else ever criticized him for it. I did, but he is so wrapped in an aura of military glory that he's not rapped. See, I'm playing w-r-a-p-p-e-d with r-a-p-p-e-d.

[Q] Playboy: Right.

[A] Safire: OK, so there's Schwarzkopf, the great victor who allowed the enemy to escape and permitted the air power of the enemy, through helicopters, to be used against the uprising that President Bush encouraged. So, pushed by the Saudis and misguided by our own military brass, we betrayed the uprising.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps Bush simply wanted Saddam to be diverted by an uprising during the ground war. Once that was over, then the Kurds and the Shiites were disposable.

[A] Safire: We were eager to see Saddam Hussein overthrown. The President made that absolutely clear. And, indeed, toward the end, that's what he was saying--he expected the end of Saddam. So this great fundamental mistake was made to allow the repression of the revolt. A few of us screamed about it. I'm thinking of Jim Hoagland in The Washington Post and some other columnists. That's when a top White House aide--whom I know to be [former White House chief of staff] John Sununu--told Newsweek, "A hundred Safire columns are not going to make us change our mind." They didn't want to permit the disintegration of Iraq. Ironically, the Saudis are now changing their minds about that.

[Q] Playboy: This interview will be on the newsstands in October. Based on what you know, could there be an October surprise in the coming election?

[A] Safire: Could well be. The likelihood of it actually happening in October is, I think, less than in September, because you don't want to do anything that could be overtly criticized as last minute. But I could see a strike at Qaddafi, or some corrective of Saddam Hussein with respect to the Kurds, or some assertion of UN authority against Serbian aggression that would not cost too many American lives. That could happen. That would immediately be denounced as politically inspired, but it may be necessary.

[Q] Playboy: Well, if it's not politically motivated, why wait until the election?

[A] Safire: Well, for example, if Saddam Hussein, who is making menacing noises and then backing off, doesn't back off, he has to be backed off. You have to wait for a provocation. If Saddam continues his economic warfare against the Kurds--if he continues to starve them or starts lobbing in shells--at that point we would have to take dramatic action.

[Q] Playboy: After the invasion of Kuwait you called for strong military action. Meanwhile, your former White House colleague Patrick Buchanan publicly stated that, in essence, the only people who wanted war were the Israeli lobby and----

[A] Safire: "The Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."

[Q] Playboy: Many people thought that Buchanan was talking specifically about you.

[A] Safire: Well, he was talking about those of us who were strongly supporting the President's action against the invasion of Kuwait and, indeed, calling for a war on Saddam Hussein. But there was Pat referring to the amen corner. Now, I know what an amen corner is--I wrote a political dictionary some years ago. It is an Americanism based on a religious phrase: The amen corner in a church is where a group would automatically yell "Amen" whenever a preacher made a point. In politics, it became a phrase meaning a claque, a servile group----

[Q] Playboy: It's also a code phrase for coreligionist--in this case, a non-Christian coreligionist.

[A] Safire: No, I didn't see that. I saw it as meaning "automatic support of Israel." I resented that because it imputed a dual loyalty, and I don't like charges of dual loyalty. I think it's quite proper to support or criticize the United States government on what you think is good or bad about the United States government. I think it's also entirely called for to support or criticize an ally. I don't like my motives being impugned by someone's saying that I am giving my opinions not because I'm a good American but because I'm a Jew. Now, Buchanan denies [implying] that. But that's the way I read it, and the way a great many others in what he called the amen corner felt. I held my fire on that one for a while. I wanted to see what Bill Buckley was going to do. There was the guru of the conservatives--who is not Jewish, who knew and felt an affection for Buchanan and who Buchanan greatly respected--and his call on it was that, yes, indeed, that sort of thing amounted to anti-Semitism. After Bill Buckley wrote that, I did my column about it, more in sorrow than in anger. Frankly, I invited Pat to back away from the brink of anti-Semitism, nativism and isolationism. I was hopeful that he might pull back a little bit. But evidently he felt that pulling back would be wimpish, so he didn't.

[Q] Playboy: During his presidential campaign, Buchanan frequently used code words that seemed to have an anti-Semitic slant to them. Did you find his tone offensive?

[A] Safire: Well, before that, when he [wrote about] typical people who would have to fight the Gulf war, he used names that covered every ethnic group except Jews. I think that was read properly as anti-Semitic.

[Q] Playboy: Let us ask you bluntly: Do you think Pat Buchanan is anti-Semitic?

[A] Safire:[Answers slowly] Yes.

[Q] Playboy: And?

[A] Safire: I hope he straightens himself out on that. He now sees the reaction he's generated, and he must know it's not good for the country, the Republican Party, for conservatism or for him. He's been more sensitive recently, and that's encouraging.

[Q] Playboy: OK, let's move on to Israel. You've devoted a large number of your columns to criticism of the Bush--Baker policy toward Israel. What's your problem with it?

[A] Safire: I think the Bush Administration, from the start, believed that the answer to a lasting peace in the Middle East would be the withdrawal of Israel from the disputed territories and the establishment there of some form of Palestinian state.

[Q] Playboy: There are a lot of people in Israel who think that, too.

[A] Safire: A minority.

[Q] Playboy: Not such a small minority.

[A] Safire: I didn't say a small minority, I said a minority--as expressed in elections. I am among those who believe that this is a misguided notion. I think that at the end of the day, what will come about is a division of the West Bank into cantons or enclaves. Israel will retain territory that makes the area defensible and removes the possibility of its use as a staging area for an attack on Israel. At the same time, Israel will provide self-government--autonomy--for the Palestinian Arabs in the area. And in all likelihood, they will be federated with the other Palestinian state in the area, which is Jordan. So what you will have is a Jewish state with Israeli Arabs living within it, and a Palestinian--Jordanian state with a series of cantons around populated and fertile areas in what has become known as the West Bank. Now, is this a neat, tidy solution? Of course not. It's creatively sloppy, but I think it's realistic. But if you're going to get into who was on the West Bank first, you'll never get any solution. You can go back to biblical times and all you'll find there are arguments. You have to say, "How do we get out of the situation we are in now and how do we live together?"

[Q] Playboy: If the Israelis are entitled to a national homeland--a national sense of identity--why aren't the Palestinians?

[A] Safire: I consider myself pro-Palestinian.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Safire: In that I'd like to see them have a state. I think the state they should have is Jordan, which is mainly Palestinian. The majority of people there are Palestinian Arabs, and I think it should be conjoined to enclaves or areas within the West Bank that are predominately Arab. I can see a federation there with a state of their own and a flag of their own. I see them as a nation that can be a beacon to other Arab nations that are living under monarchies and tyrannies.

[Q] Playboy: King Hussein might not agree. In fact, he doesn't.

[A] Safire: Right. I think he's an obstacle to peace. His desire to remain king is an obstacle to the development of a true Transjordan. By Transjordan, I mean a state that crosses the Jordan River--not having the West Bank or Judaea and Sumaria as a separate state but having areas within them affiliated with a Palestinian state.

[Q] Playboy: When you say that King Hussein is an obstacle--and indeed he would be to a plan such as this--are you suggesting we get rid of him?

[A] Safire: I always resist questions that begin, "Are you saying?" My natural inclination is to reply, "I'm saying what I'm saying, not what you're saying." But it's a useful technique in a lot of interviews. I've used it myself. Some people fall for it.

[Q] Playboy: You're not an easy interview.

[A] Safire: Thank you.

[Q] Playboy: One of the qualities that you're known for is your loyalty to old friends. Roy Cohn was a close friend, right?

[A] Safire: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: And you were there for him when he was disbarred.

[A] Safire: Disbarred by the New York bar, yeah.

[Q] Playboy: You testified for him.

[A] Safire: You bet. I felt it was the classic example of a late hit. He was dying of AIDS--you could see he was dying. I mean, you visited him and there was a dying man. The old liberal McCarthy haters who could never bring down Roy Cohn when he was a scrappy, successfully litigating, intimidating, bullying lawyer in New York City saw this as a great chance to get him before he died.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't they do it earlier?

[A] Safire: I think they were afraid to. They had plenty of time. But the New York Bar crowd that hated him was led by a man named Charles Hynes, who is now the district attorney in Brooklyn. They felt this was their chance to get him. One of Roy's law partners asked me to testify as a character witness. I accepted with alacrity and told this bunch of men at the New York City Bar Association that they were a pack of ghouls and that they ought to be ashamed of themselves. And I did use the word ghouls. I remember when one of the people on the bar association--bar tribunal--when one of the smaller Torquemadas said, "Mr. Cohn has referred to us as a bunch of yo-yos." I then had to explain to him the etymology of yo-yo.

[Q] Playboy: Good thing you're a language expert.

[A] Safire: It always helps. Now, on Cohn, let me just say this: I met Roy when we were both about twenty. He was then working for the U.S. Attorney in the southern district of New York. He was the only person from the establishment who was getting convictions against narcotics racketeers. So I wrote a piece about him for my bosses, Tex and Jinx, at The New York Herald Tribune. And I think that was the first publicity he got. Then he went to work in Washington, where he and Bobby Kennedy were on a [special congressional] committee [chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy]. I lost track of him. [Grins] I disagreed with McCarthy and Cohn and the way they operated, but years later, I didn't think it was fair to use McCarthy tactics on Cohn. Two wrongs don't make a right.

[Q] Playboy: You have said that the last time you saw Roy Cohn, he wanted to pass along some information on public figures he knew would outlive him.

[A] Safire: Right.

[Q] Playboy: Did he?

[A] Safire: Yeah, he was worried about somebody becoming President and he thought I ought to know a lot about him.

[Q] Playboy: Who was that?

[A] Safire: I don't want to say. He gave me all this stuff, none of which I've ever used.

[Q] Playboy: Republican or Democrat?

[A] Safire: Male or female?

[Q] Playboy: New York State?

[A] Safire: Or New Mexico.

[Q] Playboy: Nobody in New Mexico was running for President.

[A] Safire: I'm not going to narrow it down at all. If I wanted to tell you, I'd tell you. I wouldn't be cute. I used to have a button that I wore in the Seventies that said Agnew and Eagleton, Nobody's Perfect.

[Q] Playboy: What's the point?

[A] Safire: I'm referring to Roy Cohn. Perfect he wasn't.

[Q] Playboy: Clearly.

[A] Safire: But perfectly loyal he was.

[Q] Playboy: Another close friend of yours was William Casey, the former CIA chief. When Iran-contra broke in 1986, it seemed that every misdeed or crime was thrown at Casey's feet. But the day after the congressional hearings began, Casey died of a brain tumor.

[A] Safire: Well, first of all, Jesse James was blamed for every train robbery and bank robbery in the West. He could not have done them all. So apply that to William Casey. Bill was a buccaneer, a covert-action enthusiast, a man absolutely dedicated to the turning back of communism around the world. And because he had this all-out, undercover-warfare training in World War Two, he applied that total-war idea to a limited-war situation in Central America and thereby got us all into some trouble.

[A] Do I think he directed Oliver North? You bet I do. I was in his office one day asking him about something and he said, "Wait a minute, I've got a guy who can do anything." He picked up the phone, called Ollie North and asked him to do something. And just knowing Casey, that told me he had a guy working in the White House who would do anything he told him to do. So I believe North when he says that Casey knew pretty much everything that North was being directed to do.

[Q] Playboy: Still, does it make sense to blame Casey for everything--after he's dead?

[A] Safire: Well, it was convenient. Once a man dies, he's the only one who takes the rap--he doesn't care. If you're looking for truth: Did he tell the President some of these things? I'm certain he did. But not all. I think he had the intelligence and discretion to protect the President by not telling him everything. But at the same time, he would indicate to the President that he had some things going on that the President was probably better off not knowing.

[Q] Playboy: So you're saying that the director of the CIA exercised more foreign-policy authority than the President?

[A] Safire: I'm saying that he felt he was thinking in tandem with the President. It's the old story of protecting the top man from having to have guilty knowledge.

[Q] Playboy: But, again, it implies that the director of the CIA exercised independent power to conduct a separate foreign policy.

[A] Safire: I think he assumed power that he felt the President would have approved. Frankly, I think the President would have approved it. Who knows? We can't tell how much Bill Casey mumbled to Ronald Reagan about what he was doing. And who knows how much Ronald Reagan heard with his earpiece off or on? So there was possibly some fuzziness of communication. But I think Ronald Reagan knew that Bill Casey was running the kind of CIA that Ronald Reagan wanted him to run.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe Bob Woodward's account of his deathbed interviews with Casey in his book Veil?

[A] Safire: No.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Safire: I believe Sofia and Bernadette Casey, who maintained a vigil in that room. It does not seem to me to be at all in character for Bill Casey to recant dramatically on his deathbed. I have a lot of respect for Woodward as a reporter. I think he did a good job opening up Casey and the CIA in that particular book. There's a lot of new information in there. But I don't think Bill Casey mouthed those words that Woodward quoted at the end of that book.

[Q] Playboy: That's a very strong charge about someone you say is a good reporter. Ostensibly you're saying he may have made it up.

[A] Safire: Mm-hmm.

[Q] Playboy: That's not reporting then.

[A] Safire: That's what I think. I also think that there was not a Deep Throat. I don't think Deep Throat existed.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Safire: One, he or she would have come forward by now. Two, it's impossible to keep such a secret for twenty years. And three, there didn't have to be a Deep Throat.

[Q] Playboy: Some people have suggested that Deep Throat is a composite of several people.

[A] Safire: I suppose that's possible, but I've just never gone for the game of pointing at various members of the White House and saying, "He was part of Deep Throat." I think that was a dramatic device to put some zip in All the President's Men. My own judgment has always been that Deep Throat was a fictional concoction [created to supply] a source for good guesswork. After twenty years, that nonsource has been carefully protected.

[Q] Playboy: Another power figure with whom you've had a more ambivalent relationship is Henry Kissinger. For most of the mid-Seventies, Kissinger was the target of choice in your columns, as James Baker is now. Why?

[A] Safire: Henry and I had a falling out. The first time was when I heard about the wiretap. I complained bitterly about that. He denied it, I didn't believe him, so we had this falling out.

[A] Then, in the course of the next year or so, I saw that détente was getting us nowhere. So I began to become more critical of Henry Kissinger's foreign policy--he had become the Secretary of State and then stayed on with President Ford. He interpreted any criticism I made about his foreign policy to be rooted only in my anger at the wiretap. Well, the truth is somewhere in between.

[Q] Playboy: Is it true you named your police dog after Kissinger?

[A] Safire: Oh, that was an embarrassing moment. In the Seventies, I got a German shepherd; they're very smart dogs. So, as a lark, I named him Henry--mainly because I wanted to say, "Come here, Henry" or "Goddamn it, Henry, get out of here." You can do that with a puppy. Then the dog grew up with great dignity and intelligence, but his name was still Henry. Well, over the years, Henry Kissinger and I buried the hatchet. There is a statute of limitations on just about everything and, frankly, I think it's a good idea not to carry grudges for more than eight or ten years.

[A] Anyway, one night Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, came over to the house for dinner. And sure enough, my dog, Henry, walks into the room wagging his tail. Kissinger said, "What a fine animal--what's his name?" And I harrumphed and said what could be interpreted as "Henry" but could also be interpreted as any other word beginning with an H. Kissinger professed to miss it and patted the dog on the head, and I felt better about the whole thing.

[Q] Playboy: You're hell on your enemies, William Safire.

[A] Safire: Well, that's the great thing about being an op-ed columnist: You can smite hip and thigh. [Pauses] Now, I wonder where that comes from? "Smite hip and thigh." It's obviously biblical, but why "hip and thigh"?

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps it's the Old Testament answer to kneecapping?

[A] Safire: Hmmm. "Hip and thigh." That's half the leg. So why don't they say, "Smite half the leg"? I'll have to look that up some day. See, now that's where a language column comes from. You say something, then you stop and say, "Now why did I just say that?" And then you go to a concordance of the Bible, or if you can't find it there, you try the Oxford English Dictionary, and if you can't get it there, then you go to the Library of Congress and maybe they can help you. And then you have a column.

[Q] Playboy: Exactly how did your "On Language" column start?

[A] Safire: Abe Rosenthal [then the managing editor of The New York Times] was looking for a column to appear in the front of the Times Sunday Magazine that would not have to be too timely--that is, it could be written two or three weeks before publication. One day he had a meeting with the editors and said, "Eureka, we'll have a language column and we'll have Safire do it!" He then explained that "eureka" was Greek for "I found it." Anyway, I had done some articles on language for the magazine. I'd written The New Language of Politics--which became Safire's Political Dictionary--in the mid-Sixties. So I agreed to do it. We figured it would last for about a year's run. Well, I did not see the potential in the audience--there's a big audience for language. I mean, everybody is an expert. That's because native speakers have a sense of ownership about their tongue and, most of the time, a native speaker is right. So I started doing this column and getting this terrific mail pull. I get maybe three hundred letters a week. That's, what, fifteen thousand letters a year? A lot of mail.

[Q] Playboy: What's in the letters?

[A] Safire: The biggest and most persistent group is the "gotcha gang." They're the people who find enormous glee in correcting experts. Let me give you an example. I received a letter this morning from a man claiming I turned Isaiah inside out again. I quoted Isaiah as the source of "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die"--no, it should be: "Eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die." Anyway, this man, Michael Sanders, points out that it wasn't Isaiah who said that, it was Isaiah quoting those who would not hear him saying that. So I had the book of the Bible right, but I made an incorrect attribution for my etymology. Sanders was correct. I really do enjoy the communication.

[Q] Playboy: Someone once asked you if you'd ever consider running for the presidency. You answered, "Why step down?"

[A] Safire: I was being facetious. But it's true--I have the greatest job in the world. There's a lot of power to it.

[Q] Playboy: Then let's wrap this up with the broadest of questions: If you do have the greatest job in the world, what is the meaning of your life?

[A] Safire: I think I was put here to object, to cry, to prod, to challenge, to educate myself and to teach as much as I can. And to discombobulate--not just for the sake of discombobulation, but to push my own envelope. [Long pause] Maybe I can do a little good.

[A] I think I've been given a fantastic opportunity and a great forum to open up some minds and to go against some grains and to share the pleasures of contrarianism.

[Q] Playboy: You're a bit of a curmudgeon?

[A] Safire:[Laughs] I'm getting old enough to be a good curmudgeon. I always thought of a curmudgeon as a likable, irascible old man. And I am well on my way to irascibility.

[Q] Playboy: So you're looking forward to curmudgeondom, even if you're not yet there?

[A] Safire: Yes. No doubt about it.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think you'll be like when you're old?

[A] Safire: Gosh, I hope not lovable.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Safire: I would just like to keep nattering and nabobbing along. But never negatively, of course.

"Sick of Bush? Well, I'm not a professional outragee. Every President is going to do some things I don't like."