WILLIAM SAFIRE: Prolific Purveyor Of Punditry

Writing a provocative newspaper column is an invitation to be egregiously wrong in public -- at least some of the time. Take the man who is America's best practitioner of the art of columny: succinctly melding fact and opinion in an unforgiving 770-word format. Even though in a parade of predictions in late 1988 he called the fall of the Berlin Wall, this Pulitzer-prizewinning pundit also flatly asserted last March that the Soviet Union would never brook Eastern Europe's attempts at independence. "Depend on Mr. Gorbachev to crack down as Mr. Stalin would have, fraternally rolling in the tanks and shooting the dissenters," he wrote. "The present Kremlin leader was not chosen to preside over the dissolution of the Soviet empire."

Faithful readers may have immediately recognized the telltale style of William Safire, whose twice-weekly political commentary has adorned the New York Times op-ed page since 1973 and appears in more than 300 other papers. For cognoscenti, there were three surefire Safirific clues embedded in the quotation: 1) this former Richard Nixon speechwriter remains a nattering nabob of negativism (he also crafted lines for Spiro Agnew) about Mikhail Gorbachev's intentions; 2) Safire's forcefulness of expression and clarity of opinion, for he is not a columnist who seeks safety in mainstream musings; and 3) the wordplay that is Safire's trademark -- in this case, revamping Winston Churchill's pledge not to dismember the British empire.

Unlike the Olympian detachment that is the traditional pose of Washington columnists, Safire projects a rumpled persona far closer to Walter Matthau's than Walter Lippmann's. His clothes are L.L. Bean, not Savile Row. Safire retains the unbuttoned style, the street-smart diction and the wry-not enthusiasms of a man who happily spent his formative years as a successful public relations flack in New York City. Where other conservative columnists like George Will and William F. Buckley can be precious and predictable, Safire prides himself on his reporting and contrarian thinking. "A column should not be a chore, not a chin puller, not a dreary thing," Safire says, trying to summarize his approach. "You don't have to be solemn to be serious." Then with a sense of satisfaction at the epigrammatic elegance of that last sentence, he adds, "I think that's original."

Safire has reason to be pleased with his gift of glib: his Sunday "On Language" column in the Times magazine has made him the nation's amateur arbiter of usage, or as he puts it, "pop grammarian." He wears the crown lightly, for it is not accidental that one of his six language books is titled I Stand Corrected. As comfortable with punnery as with punditry, Safire is rarely the punctilious schoolmaster in private conversation. True, when a visitor used propinquity to describe two men working in the same law firm, Safire interjected, "Don't you mean proximity?" He insisted on a quick trip to Webster's New World Dictionary on a stand in his lush Times office, furnished with the look of a turn-of-the-century men's club. The verdict: the two words are interchangeable. But there was nothing craven about this language maven. Instead, he said with verve, "Now both of us know something we didn't know a moment ago."