Safire irks liberals, surprises conservatives and pleases himself
Consternation and even outrage from his new colleagues greeted William Safire when he joined the New York Times as a columnist in 1973. Safire was triply suspect: he had come directly from White House speechwriting for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, for whom he had coined press-baiting phrases like "nattering nabobs of negativism"; he was an aggressively conservative Republican at the generally liberal Times; and he was a writer scarcely versed in journalism who for nearly two decades had been pursuing careers in television production and...
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