Maoz On Safire (I)
Jason Maoz in his Monitor column of Sept. 26 expressed so well why William Safire meant so much to those of us who used to value The New York Times as the best newspaper around. It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since Safire’s voice and pen were taken from us.
Helene Geiger
(Via E-Mail)
Maoz On Safire (II)
The New York Times began its decline while William Safire was still a regular columnist (no fault of his, of course), but for most of his time at the paper it offered, despite its incorrigibly liberal editorial stance, the most comprehensive and for the most part balanced coverage available to intelligent consumers of news.
While Safire was the token conservative columnist in a sea of lefties and liberals, he was hardly alone among his colleagues, reporters as well as columnists, in terms of the professionalism and sense of gravitas he brought to his work.
The Times has declined so steeply and emphatically over the past twenty years or so that it’s hard to convey to younger people just how respected and vital an institution it was at one time.
Jonathan Lazar
(Via E-Mail)
Maoz On Safire (III)
Jason Maoz mentioned that prior to coming to the Times as a columnist, Bill Safire was a speechwriter for President Nixon. Indeed Safire’s way with words immeasurably strengthened Nixon’s public speeches, but Safire’s most memorable contribution in those years was a phrase he came up with for Vice President Spiro Agnew during the 1970 midterm elections.
Agnew relished his role as the administration’s attack dog, and in 1970 he was on the warpath against what he perceived as an increasingly negative and defeatist posture among the nation’s elite opinion-makers.
For a speech in San Diego in September of that year, Safire offered Agnew a choice of catchy alliterations to choose from, and Agnew decided to go with all of them:
“In the United States today,” Agnew told his audience, “we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. The have formed their own 4-H Club – the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’ ”
“Nattering nabobs of negativism” struck a chord across the political spectrum and was widely quoted and used in various contexts by politicians and journalists for years afterward.
Michael Riley
(Via E-Mail)
Artistic Depravity
Re “Large Demonstration Blasts Met Opera for ‘Death of Klinghoffer,’ ” (news story, Sept. 26):
The American Jewish community is not unaware of or indifferent to the shifting cultural winds threatening it. The demonstration in New York against the Metropolitan Opera’s showcasing of the atrociously pro-terrorist Klinghoffer opera is just the most recent example of individual Jews coming together to make themselves heard.
We are living in a terrible era of moral depravity when intellectuals can justify terrorism as being necessary to assuage grievances. Mr. Klinghoffer was a helpless invalid in a wheelchair on a vacation cruise with his wife when he was shot and thrown overboard by Palestinian terrorists. He was not Israeli and the ship was an Italian liner – in other words, nothing about him or the boat he was on had anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was a Jew, though, and that apparently was a capital offense to the terrorists.
The death of Klinghoffer was a wanton act of murder, pure and simple. The so-called creative or artistic community is depraved if it accepts any rationalization and/or justification for such an act.
Toby Willig
Jerusalem
Full Military Confrontation
Re “Analysts: Israel Faces Vexing Challenge in Confronting Hamas, Hizbullah, and ISIS,”(front page news story, Sept. 26):