William Safire

Archive [July 2000]

I was honored to speak with the brilliant New York Times columnist and novelist, one of the great writers of the age.

Rush: Let me thank you for carving out a little time for this. How’s your book, Scandalmonger, doing?

Safire: I think they’ve got about 55,000 copies in print. It’s perking right along, thanks to you. It had peaked, and was sort of declining in sales until you got hold of it. And then, by God, you can tell the Limbaugh impact.

Rush: I’ll tell you what is amazing — the amount of work you obviously put into this book. I’ve written a couple of books myself, but none nearly as laborious as that. It’s just stunning conceptually to even think that you wanted to tackle this. You told me it took you three years to put that together?

Safire: But it’s a labor of love. When you start digging into the fascinating personalities and scandals that were flying around with our Founding Fathers, one thing leads to another. And if you can find some common thread, then suddenly you’ve got more than a nonfiction book. You’ve got a novel.

Rush: Exactly. I went into it with a couple of, let’s say, prejudices, that I think the book bears out as truths. One, that basic American history education in America is woefully incomplete. And second, that the American people have a very short perspective on American history. Generally their view of it begins with the day they were born. They think that things that are bad in their lifetimes have never been worse; they think that things that are good have never been better.

If you look at our politics in history, for example, your book illustrates just how vicious politicians were to each other, how vicious the press was to politicians. Yet we live in this era in which “we must not be partisan.” Bipartisanship reigns supreme. But your book illustrates something I think contemporary life also shows, that the American people love combat. They love winners. So how did we get to this point where we think we’ve got to be bipartisan, that there shouldn’t be any bickering, that we should all just get along. How did we get here?

Safire: Compared to writers like James Thompson Calendar — who is the first great scandalmonger — compared to him, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Safire are a couple of powder puffs. We’re gentle and easygoing and mild-mannered. This guy really went for the throat. He was reviled by historians for the last two centuries because he cast aspersions on our Founding Fathers, who too many historians and teachers of history felt — mistakenly, I think — needed cosmetics, a coverup. I don’t think they need that at all.

What Calendar did, and what we now do in going back over it, is take a look at these patriots and see them as real people — with their human foibles, their partisanship, and their fierce belief in their own principles — and watch them clash. There’s nothing wrong with that clash. A great lesson could be learned, just as you were making that point about partisanship, how important partisanship can be. Back then, you had George Washington keeping the country together and united, and not having the spirit of faction. This was very necessary in the first decade after our revolution, when we just got started.

Rush: What would be the year 2000 word for “faction”?

Safire: Partisanship, party. But the idea there was that the country had just formed. And frankly, we underrate Washington. He was a magnificent leader, and shrewd, too. He brought Alexander Hamilton, a sort of son, really, a believer in a strong central government, a powerful federalist, and his antithesis, the guy who disagreed with him, Thomas Jefferson, into Washington’s cabinet. Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury, and Jefferson was Secretary of State. They didn’t like each other. They disagreed with each other profoundly about the way the new country should go. Yet they worked under George Washington.

What we’ve discovered in digging into this is that quietly, Jefferson was trying to undermine Hamilton — and, indeed, Washington — in opposing the idea of a strong central government. Jefferson believed in the states’ rights, and the necessity of not allowing a monarchy to reform itself.

Rush: When you talk about Hamilton and federalism, is there anything comparable to that in American politics today? Would you say that Hamilton would be synonymous with prominent liberals today, or is that a stretch?

 

 

Safire: It is a stretch. But a strange thing has been going on. The Supreme Court today, on the basis of fairly narrow votes, has been directing power away from the federal government and out to the states, and giving more power back to the local governments. This is Jeffersonian; this is what Jefferson wanted. And yet Jefferson is revered now by Democrats and liberals, while Hamilton, who believed in a strong central government, is sort of pushed to the side.

Rush: Well, I still marvel, and I hope this book ends up in even more hands than it has, because it’s so educational on so many levels, and in particular establishing that the Founding Fathers were not united and of one mind and purpose. I think a lot of people have a misconception about that.

Safire: I talked yesterday to a lady in her 80s who was reading this book, via tape, who said, “Very interesting. But, gosh! There was a lot of sex involved! I didn’t expect this from a conservative writer like you.” I had to explain to her that right-wingers have an interest in this, too. And quite frankly, the idea of showing our patriots, our Founding Fathers, as men — not with feet of clay, but men with genuine hearts and weaknesses and desires and fires — is pretty good tor the country.

Rush: One of the things I came away with in reading the book was that back then, if a leader, one of the Founding Fathers, behaved in his personal life as Bill Clinton did, it was a matter of honor to not mention it. It was considered something that was not to be discussed, nor was it to be used in judging someone’s character. Today, the same thing is said by Clinton supporters. Yet his critics cite the Federalist Papers as an example of character in the Executive being the most important qualification.

Safire: Two hundred ten years ago, Hamilton was accused of speculating, or passing money back and forth, when he was Secretary of the Treasury. He was a patriot, he realized that the reputation of the American treasury was foremost. So he came forward: “Yes, it’s true. I did pass money to this guv, but it had nothing to do with speculation, nothing to do with the probity of the Treasury Department. I was sleeping with his wife, and he was blackmailing me.” Everybody gasped. But from Hamilton’s point of view, it was more important to protect the Treasury Department’s reputation than it was to protect his own.

Rush: You inscribed the book to me: “To Rush. This is when reporters were tough on politicians.” I concluded from this that you long for those days, when reporters were truly adversarial. Your colleagues in the Washington press corps, in my opinion, are not adversarial in the traditional American sense, at least with this Administration. Is that correct?

Safire: We have our ups and downs. Generally speaking, liberal presidents are beloved more by a liberal press corps. Frankly, most of my colleagues in the press corps lean left, and conservatives in office get a somewhat harder time. But even with that said, a lot of good, solid liberal reporters, liberal thinking reporters have given Bill Clinton a pretty tough time, just as they gave Jimmy Carter a tough time. So the adversarial nature of the press lives on.

Rush: Okay. I’d like to talk to you about Los Alamos and the latest discovery of the missing hard drives. What’s your take on all this?

Safire: The New York Times, particularly James Risen, has been way ahead on this story, and is embarrassing the pants off a lot of scientists at Los Alamos. It’s pretty distressing — whether it’s scientists at Los Alamos, or the disappearance of computers with highly secret nuclear stuff from the State Department. It shows a kind of a lack of urgency in security. We could really pay for that down the road. I asked Madeleine Albright about that, and other reporters have asked about that, and she’s belatedly slamming the barn door. But this sort of thing should have been watched five, six, seven years ago.

Rush: It’s got to be somewhat troubling. Many in the public are aghast that this kind of missing information, stolen information, whichever it turns out to be, could continue, it seems, month after month in this Administration. After all, these are our nuclear secrets — though they obviously aren’t secret any more.

Safire: We have an intelligence gathering operation trying to steal secrets from others. And others, particularly the Chinese, have an effective one working on us. We know that’s going on. So we have to be alert. What bugs me is the lack of outrage that was shown when we began to show the connections of the Riadi family of Indonesia with the Clinton Administration. That was awful.

Rush: Outrage on the part of the people?

Safire: Lack of outrage on the part of people when we started laying this out. There was huge fundraising going on overseas, illegal, and coming in for Clinton, Gore, in ‘92 and ‘96. Especially ‘96. When we got a lot of the facts out, there was a general big shrug. The outrage wasn’t there. That’s what’s dismaying, because unless we get that outrage back, we’re not going to be able to stop this kind of thing.

Rush: There’s been that lack of outrage about almost every set of shenanigans that this Administration’s been involved in. Frankly, it’s been one of most frustrating things of the last eight years. No matter what the news, no matter how disheartening or ballistic it may be, people just don’t seem to care. Everybody’s tried to explain it: “Well, it’s the economy. We’re doing so well, we’re so fat, dumb, and happy, people don’t want to confront the news that things may be bad.”

 

 

Safire: Yes. That’s depressing, let’s face it. Would this happen if there was a recession? I think perhaps there’d be fewer people saying, “Don’t rock the boat.”

Rush: You’ve been writing extensively lately about the erosion of privacy that we’re all facing. I can read between the lines in your pieces — and sometimes I don’t have to read between the lines. You’re exhibiting similar frustration on that front.

Safire: I’m getting a little bit better traction on that than I did on the others. A lot of people feel personally offended when they realize that they didn’t know that when they were on the Internet, they signed away their rights to privacy — with “cookies,” these methods of tracking what you watch and where you go on the Internet. Most people don’t want to be surveyed. They don’t want their Social Security numbers stolen. They don’t want their identities stolen. In some cases stalkers were able to buy from states pictures and information from drivers’ licenses, stalk their prey and, in a couple of cases, kill women by tracking them down through their Social Security numbers. Now, finally, as we’re beginning to blow the whistle on this, Congress is beginning to act. What I’ve been trying to do is get commitments from both Bush and Gore to force companies that are targeting people for their marketing to ask people for their consent before they get any information.

Rush: It’s good to know you feel optimistic about it, because it has a larger application, too. The lack of privacy, or the erosion of it, has some relationship to the loss of freedom. There are a lot of people in the country who are genuinely concerned about a steady erosion of freedom, vis-à-vis the tax code, vis-à-vis other legislation. It goes back to the expanding role of the federal government in people’s lives, with liberals’ desire to be more and more to people, and have people turn over more decision-making processes to the government — let them handle their health care for them, their pensions, their Social Security. The argument about Social Security demonstrates it, I think, pretty well. This notion that Americans should be allowed to take two percent and invest it is just appalling to some. To others of us, it’s a godsend, because it puts people more in control of their affairs. So when you write about this loss of privacy, I also read into it the idea that people are similarly conscious of a loss of freedom. Are you as concerned about that as much as I might be?

Safire: I would put the word “personal” in front of “freedom.” You’re talking about your personal freedom, your right to turn around, your right not to be spied on, and your right not to have snoops looking at your financial records, your medical records, your academic records when you were in kindergarten. That’s your business; it’s nobody else’s business.

Now here’s the trick. It’s a linguistic trick. A lot of companies that want information about you say, “We offer you ‘choice.’” What they’re really saying is, “The burden of finding out what we are finding out is on the consumer.” So watch out for that word “choice.” That’s the industry’s snooping word. What individuals should demand is “consent.” If you give your consent, that means that the companies have to come to you and ask for that consent.

Remember back when the Book-of-the-Month started? They had this great gimmick, that unless you said, “No,” you’d get the book. In the same way, on the Internet right now, people are saying, “Unless you say, ‘No’, we can follow you and track your decisions and see what books you buy and films you’ve ordered and everything.” That’s wrong. What you should demand is that they come to you for your written, or clicked-on, consent.

As this debate develops, listen for those words: “choice, and “consent.” If it’s “choice,” forget it. It’s no good. If it’s “consent,” that’s what we’re for.

Rush: Let me jump to another subject. Did I hear you correctly on “Meet the Press” a few weeks ago — did you say that you were one of those who believes that “Clinton fatigue” might be supplanted by “Clinton nostalgia” in the waning days of his presidency?

Safire: Americans are forgiving, let’s face it. A lot of people are accustomed to Bill Clinton. And the very notion of somebody else being President after eight years, well, too many of us are inclined to let bygones be bygones.

Rush: Was there a Reagan nostalgia?

Safire: Now there is. But right afterwards, no. Nor was there an Eisenhower nostalgia right afterwards.

Rush: So why would there be a Clinton nostalgia? You voted for him —

Safire: — the first time; not the second time —

Rush: — the first time. I remember your column in which you wrote that you had been double-crossed.

Safire: Right.

Rush: Your level of dismay at the lack of outrage over the various things you’ve talked about today seems to be consistent with just wishing this guy would go away. But he’s at the top of the mountain. That’s the reason why there is no outrage.

Safire: I have no nostalgia for him. I’ll be delighted to see him back in Arkansas, or California, or writing his book, or being the first man to be a senator’s spouse from New York if that’s what you get. But I imagine a lot of Democrats will say, “Gee, he was sure a good politician.” They’ll forget that it was Clinton’s policies that led to the revolution that enabled the Republicans to win the Congress for first time in 40 years.

Rush: If they lose the White House, they will be in a position that is totally unaccustomed to them in decades. That’s why I expect this to be one of the dirtiest campaigns there’s ever been.

Safire: It’s certainly the most expensive.

 

 

Rush: Let’s say Bush wins this, with coattails. House: Republican. Senate: stays Republican. What a legacy Bill Clinton will leave.

Safire: Certainly one of the legacies he’ll leave is a bad policy on missile defense. He’s been dragging his feet on that, and even as we speak, I think, weakens American defense. He’s saying, “We’re trying to put minor amendments into the ABM Treaty.” But we need major amendments in order to protect American cities from rogue nation missiles.

His legacy, I think, will be exactly what the opening line of his obituary, many years from now, will be: “The first elected President of the United States to be impeached.”

Rush: And he brought us, with his wife, a Republican Congress in ‘94.

Safire: We’ll give him credit for that, yes.

Rush: Then if he ends up delivering a Republican government through and through, that will be an incredible legacy as well.

Safire: I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion, Rush, because a lot of Americans kind of like the idea of gridlock. You’ll see a lot of ticket splitting — people voting for Gore and then voting for the Republican representative.

Rush: I know you expect Gore to shine in the debates.

Safire: He’s good at debates. He clobbered Ross Perot, remember?

Rush: He called me “a distinguished American” in that debate.

Safire: Well, listen, he has an ability to exaggerate.

Rush: Yes, he has an ability to say things he doesn’t mean!

Safire: But remember when he was debating Jack Kemp, we all said it was going to be “the quarterback versus the goal post.” But the goal post won. He was pretty good. I think George Bush has to really go before what we call “murder boards,” a bunch of friendly staffers equipped with the toughest questions and follow-up questions, to get him ready for a debate.

Rush: What is Gore’s biggest problem?

Safire: It could be the residue of the Clinton-Gore era. In other words, do we want a third Clinton term? A lot of people have had it. It could also be that people have become so accustomed to prosperity that they don’t credit the Democrats any more. Even so, I don’t really believe in polls at this stage of the game. We’re well aware that polls, as George Bush the Elder showed, can be wildly out of whack six months before an election.

Rush: You once referred to Mrs. Clinton as a “congenital liar.” I look at Al Gore as somebody who’s much the same. He makes things up out of thin air, things that can be refuted instantly, and yet seems to not be embarrassed. This business about inventing the Internet, claiming that “Love Story” was about him, and so on, these things say to me that there are serious problems inside his head, not just cosmetic, but serious problems.

Safire: I think he’s completely overboard on the environment. I worry about his changing the complexion of the Supreme Court. There’s no doubt that his appointments would be quite different from George Bush’s.

Rush: But how about his search for himself? He’s on his ninth or tenth trek now.

Safire: Well, you’re talking to somebody who sold the world on “the New Nixon” from time to time, so that doesn’t kill me. Politicians tack, to present their images differently. That’s life. Politics ain’t beanbag.

Rush: Yes. But there was an authentic Nixon people could embrace if they chose to. Is there an authentic Gore that they’re proud of?

Safire: That’s the problem with being a Vice President. You have to go along with everything your President says. But now he has to step out. If he disagrees with the President, he takes a lot of heat — as he did with Elian Gonzalez. A lot of Democrats jumped all over him on that one, and said, “You’re selling out to the Cubans in Florida.” Or, more important, the Cubans in New Jersey. But he disagreed with the President, and more power to him on it. Frankly, I was with him on that.

Rush: Bill, in 1993, I had an opportunity to go to Israel. I spent four days there, and it was worth at least a year in college. I was taken over by Malcolm Hoenlein. I met Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu. I got a private tour of the Golan Heights, talked to the Mossad. They really allowed me access to virtually anything and anybody I wanted to see. It was extremely substantive. Eighteen-hour days.  And my whole time there, I never understood — and really don’t, even though I’ve asked countless people, they’ve tried to explain it to me this Israeli position in this Middle East process of being willing to continually give up land in exchange for what appears to be a mythical peace.

I don’t see what’s changed. Their enemies have sworn to exterminate Jews and Israel and have not changed. They say they have, but it doesn’t appear they have. Yet there’s pressure from the United States and a lot of outside sources for Israel to continue to cave and give away more and more of itself — though it doesn’t have that much to give away. Without the West Bank, it’s nine miles wide. Now we’ve got the death of Assad, and I’m trying to figure how to factor that in with what little I know about it.

Safire: First of all, let me tell you where I’m coming from. I’m consistent. I’m a right-wing hawk in America, and I’m a right-wing hawk for the right-wingers in Israel. I don’t have any hangups on where I stand on that. On the other hand, there’s Israel. It’s a democracy. And if it wants to vote in a tough-minded negotiator, it does. If it wants to take big risks for peace, it voted for Labor. It put together a coalition. Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who’s a good man and a good soldier, says it’s a different kind of a threat that we face. It’s not tanks any more; it’s missiles, and we’ve got to get peace with our neighbors.

 

 

I happen to think he’s wrong. I think he’s giving away much too much. But I don’t live there. People who live there make their votes. I think they’ve indicated in a lot of the public opinion polls and in the Knesset that they’re not quite comfortable with giving up the Golan and the Jordan Valley, getting only promises in return. So I have enough faith in the Israeli people that they’ll have a referendum, both on the West Bank and on the Golan Heights, and they’ll be careful.

Now, was Assad’s death good for peace or bad for peace? He was a man who was not going to make peace. He had his great opportunity only three months ago in Geneva, when Bill Clinton, acting really on behalf of the Israelis, said, “Here’s the deal. You can have the whole Golan Heights back.” And instead of saying, “Yes, I’ll take it. Let’s go,” the way Sadat did a generation ago from Egypt, he said, “No, I want that little strip along the Galilee as well,” which would give him water rights and things like that. Because he wanted that last one percent, he blew the deal.

I think it means that a year will pass before they can get back to a position of coming down to a closed deal. Whether Assad’s son can remain in power is a question. The Israelis can’t really make a deal with a problematic regime; they have to deal with a country that’s stable and solid. So I think the danger of giving back the Golan has receded.

Rush: Good.

Safire: At least tor the time being.

Rush: I hope you’re right, having seen it, having been there. It was, I have to tell you, a profound and moving experience. A soldier was giving us a tour and somebody in our group asked him why he was so devoted to what he did. He said, “Turn around and look at that.” He pointed and said, “See, that’s Lebanon.” Then he said, “Look over there.” He said, “That’s Syria.” “Look over there. That’s Jordan.” Then he said, “See, that’s my house. And only a few miles away from three different groups of people who wish me dead.”

It’s something the people of the United States cannot relate to. There’s nobody that close to us, that we can see, who wants to wipe us out. Once you’re there, you can see how strategic the Golan is. It made no sense to me that anybody would ever give it up, having won it with blood in the first place.

Safire: We can’t be more Catholic than the Pope, and we can’t be more hawkish than the Israelis. They’ve got to call that shot themselves.

Rush: No, I understand. I asked Rabin, and I asked a number of people, “Why, all of a sudden, do you appear to trust those who’ve sworn to exterminate you?” I chalked it up to age, that they had just fought too many battles too long, and they didn’t want their kids to grow up that way, and were basically going to give it a chance. And they said, “No, you’re wrong about that. We actually believe that it’s the right time, and we’ve got a legitimate chance.”

Let me ask you about Hillary and Rick Lazio. She cannot move, no matter what she does, no matter who her opponent is, beyond 45 to 46 percent in the polls. If she doesn’t, if we’re into July and August and the polls show her not moving, can she stay in this race and afford to lose, Bill? If she loses this race to Rick Lazio, what is her future? I don’t see much of one.

Safire: She can head a think tank.

Rush: Yes, but politically, she can’t be President. She’s not going to win another race. If she runs in the liberal mecca of New York and is rejected, what is her political future?

Safire: She can move to Illinois and run from Chicago. And if she doesn’t run for senator, she could run for the House. She’s voting enough.

There’s a joke that they tell: the Clintons drive into a gas station. The attendant comes up, starts washing the windows, and says, “Hiya,Hillary.” She replies, “Hiya, Joe.” The President asks, “How do you know him?” She says, “I used to date him before I met you.” “Hah!” he says. “Can you imagine if you had married him, you’d be washing windows today.” And she replies, “If I had married him, he’d be President of the United States.” She’s a redoubtable lady.

But I think Rick Lazio is always underestimated. He ran tor Congress and beat Tom Downey, even though Downey was a real powerhouse. He upset Downey. He’s Mr. Nice Guy, and he’s a moderate Republican, which is what you have to be in New York State, and take sort of centrist views of a lot of things. He’ll do very well upstate, where Rudy Giuliani was not going to do well. If he can penetrate the city, at least cut losses in the city, he just might upset Hillary Clinton.

Rush: If you had to say, this early, which way that’s going to go, could you?

Safire: Of course not. Anybody who does is just guessing. And pundits who suck their thumbs and stare at the wall, as I sometimes do, ought to admit that they’re just guessing. In this case, it’s still a tossup. But it also means that the campaign will count. We’ll see how good a campaigner both of them are. And the best man will win.

Rush: A great quote to end this! Thank you, Bill, very much for your time. I appreciate your making it. And thanks again for the book and the inscription.

Safire: Rush, I’m glad you’re out there.

Rush: Well, I get inspiration from people like you. Always have.

Safire: Don’t let anybody grind you down. Keep your good humor about things. Most people don’t realize that right-wingers have a sense of humor. Enjoy the give-and-take of politics.

Rush: I’ll do that. Thank you very much.

Safire: Keep the faith.