COMM 337: William Safire, a master wordsmith, speechwriter, op-ed columnist

Last week in the comments section of this blog, we had a sidebar conversation about a famous political speech. It's worth an item of its own because it calls to mind one of the great 20th-century political wordsmiths.

William Safire, 1929-2009, was speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnist for The New York Times. The conversation in The Mackerel Wrapper got started when I noticed the author of our textbook in COMM 150 got the date wrong on a famous speech by Vice President Spiro Agnew, in which he accused people who disagreed with him of being "nattering nabobs of negativism." A student said the textbook also misquoted him, so I looked it up, and she was right. Anyway, it brought back memories.

William Safire was one of Agnew's chief speechwriters, and "nattering nabobs" was his turn of phrase. It helped make him famous.

The speech came during the 1970 congressional elections, when Agnew was campaigning for Republican candiates. Safire wasn't the only Agnew speechwriter with a flair for invective. Another was Patrick Buchanan, who went on to write for conservative websites and ran for the Republican presidential nomination. As speechwriters, they were properly anonymous at the time. But later on, much later on, the "nattering nabobs" speech turned out to be Safire's. The Sept. 21, 1970, issue of Time magazine quoted it at considerable length:

WE have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history. These men are hard up for hard times. They can only make hay when the sun does not shine. The objective of this campaign is to replace those who moan endlessly about what is wrong with their country with men and women of the wit and will to stand up and speak out for what is right in America. This campaign presents us with a clear choice between the troglodytic [cave-dwelling] leftists who dominate Congress now, and the moderate, centrist and conservative supporters of President Nixon.

Time's editors saw fit to explain "troglodytes" in brackets. At least two other words also deserve a word or two of explanation because they show what a master wordsmith Safire was.

According to the HarperCollins dictionary, "nattering" is "Chiefly Brit," and it means "to talk idly and at length; chatter or gossip." A "nabob" is a "rich, powerful, or important man" or a "European who made a fortune in the Orient, esp in India." Agnew wanted to paint his political enemies as un-American snobs, elitists who were way out of the mainstream, and Safire chose exactly the right words for him.

Even the targets of Agnew's attacks had to enjoy the wordsmithery. When he blasted college students and other critics of the Vietnam War as an "effete corps of impudent snobs," I remember seeing people wearing buttons on the University of Tennessee campus that said, "I am an effete, impudent snob."

After Agnew resigned from office in 1973 (as part of a plea bargain on charges of bribery and tax evasion), Safire was hired by The New York Times to write an op ed column. He also wrote about the English language, and sometimes it was hard to tell whether politics or language was his first love. In 2005 he wrote his last political column, but he kept writing "On Language" for The New York Times Magazine until his death.

Here's what Safire said in 2009 about a topic that's still in the news - "Zombie banks," which he defined suddinctly as "a bank with negative assets that survives thanks to government support."

“The Zombulator will continue to wreak havoc,” opined a worried Web site named the Motley Fool a couple of weeks ago, “as long as we pursue a Zombie Bank policy. ” A few months before, a group of anxious academics wrote in The Irish Times that “Irish banks must be recapitalized if Ireland is to avoid a Japan-style prolonged recession, retarded by zombie banks.” And Mark Gilbert, a Bloomberg News columnist who thinks that “the zombie banks are demanding to be let back into the financial mall so they can pillage the global markets anew,” headlined his somewhat alarmist view: “Fresh Flesh Runs Screaming as Zombie Banks Drool.”

Blanch not, horror fans; the etymology of zombie offers understanding. An 1819 history averred that Zombi is the name for an Angolan diety; in 1872, the early student of Americanisms Maximilian Schele de Vere defined the proper noun as “a phantom or a ghost, not infrequently heard in the Southern States in nurseries and among the servants” and speculated that “the word is a Creole corruption of the Spanish sombra.” A century later, as the word lost its capital and picked up a final e, The Times of London reported that “a zombie, as every schoolboy knows, is a person who has been killed and raised from the dead by sinister voodoo priests called bocors.” The spooky name was then taken up by bartenders to describe a stupefying rum highball ...

And so on ... you don't have to be a wordsmith to see how much he enjoyed the language.

When Safire died, fellow speechwriter-turned-columnist Peggy Noonan duly noted, and quoted, the "nattering nabobs" speech in a tribute in Time magazine. But she added it was in the column that "Safire became Safire." She said:

There he mastered and honed a natural pugnacity--a desire to "mix it up," as he put it. You really cared what he thought and weren't sure what he'd think because he could surprise you. And boy, did he wade in. When everyone was putting down Washington Mayor Marion Barry, he was alone in criticizing violations of Barry's privacy. He voted for Bill Clinton but pulled no punches toward him or Hillary. ...

Noonan started out as a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, and she felt an affinity for him. She continued:

He gave me some of the best professional advice I've ever received: Write what you see, because "what history needs more of is first-person testimony." "Never feel guilty about reading; it's what you do to do what you do." "Never join a pile-on, but it's O.K. to start one."

Notice that Noonan said readers like her "really cared what he thought and weren't sure what he'd think because he could surprise you." There's that word again. Surprise your readers, and they'll stay with you. Even in political writing. Maybe especially in political writing.

My free advice (for what it's worth) for readers: Our system of law and government is adversarial, and I think it's important to keep up with all sides of the issues. I say "all sides" because usually there are more than two. In the current Republican primary field, for example, there are at least five credible candidates whose ideas will influence the eventual party platform even if they don't win the nomination. That means we have to read a lot of stuff we don't agree with just to be informed citizens.

So ... after that windup, here comes the pitch ... if I read something I don't like, I try to be open-minded about it. Give it the benefit of the doubt. If it pins an abusive label on me, wear it proudly (like an "effete impudent snob" button). And if the people I agree with are the ones who are acting like jerks, I try not to let that bother me either. Whenever all the political invective leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I'll look at http://cuteoverload.com/ before I turn off my computer and go do something else. That always puts me in a better mood.