(zt)NYTimes: On Safire by Maureen Dowd

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opinion/30dowd.html

During the Clinton impeachment circus, I walked by William Safire’s lair.

He had an imposing office in “murderers’ row,” as he dubbed the hall where we worked, full of English antiques, Oriental rugs and a couple of old ties he kept for those rare moments when he needed one.

He was sitting in an armchair reading that bodice-ripping best seller, The Starr Report.

“There’s a word here I don’t know,” said The Times’s wordsmith. “What is a thong?”

I flushed and stammered that it was a scanty panty with a string for the back. His hazel eyes glinted with curiosity.

Trying to elucidate, I blurted: “Maybe you’re thinking of thong sandals, where thong is an adjective. With Monica, it’s used as a noun.”

He smiled. “It’s like a G-string,” he said. “That brings back memories of some clubs I went to as a young man in Union City, N.J.”

Bill Safire was anything but a nattering nabob of negativity. He had none of the vile and vitriol of today’s howling pack of conservative pundits: Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and Malkin.

Even though we disagreed on the Iraq war, he chastised me only once about it, for writing that Cheney & Co. had shoehorned all their “meshugas” about Saddam’s W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links into Colin Powell’s U.N. speech. “Mishegoss,” he wrote in his language column, would have been a better spelling of the word.

One of my proudest moments was when I proved to him that “jade” could be a noun referring to a woman, citing Edith Wharton’s “The Gods Arrive.”

He walked with a Walter Matthau shamble, and he always dressed down in tweeds, earth tones and Hush Puppies. But there was a natural elegance about the guy.

Married to the gorgeous English rose Helene, he was a man who loved women; his novels, even the one about the founding fathers, were full of zesty sex scenes.

He told me the story of how when Barbara Walters worked for him at the famous New York P.R. company of Tex McCrary, back in the “Mad Men” era, he wanted to loosen up Barbara, who was very serious. So one Christmas he gave her a sheer black shorty nightgown with matching panties.

“Today I would have had to take him to Human Resources,” she recalled dryly. “But then, I loved it.”

When he learned that my mom shared his love of weird head meats, he would buy tongue sandwiches from Loeb’s Deli to send home to her.

He had a rough time with his transition from the Nixon White House to The Times. He told me that many of the liberal reporters stiffed him for the first couple of years until he dove into a pool to save a drowning child at an office party.

When I became his “colleague in columny,” as he called me, we shared a bathroom, and I teased him for being the one who kept hair spray there.

He always had interesting advice.

“Put a phone in your office that doesn’t go through the switchboard,” he told me.

If White House officials wouldn’t call you back, leave them a single-word message about what you wanted to talk about: “Malfeasance.”

I saw him having lunch once in the ’80s with Bert Lance, the former Carter official. I asked him afterward why he was hanging out with the Georgian he had eviscerated; his columns on Lance’s irregular banking practices had won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 and lost Lance his job. “Only hit people when they’re up,” he told me.

The only time I ever saw a shred of doubt was after the famous dust-up when he wrote that Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, was “a congenital liar.”

A congenital pot-stirrer, he acted delighted with Bill Clinton’s subsequent threat to punch him in the nose. But, as a famous expert on etymology, he must have known he had used the wrong word. Congenital usually connotes a condition existing at birth. Was that really what he intended?

Shortly after that happened I went into his office to talk to him. He wasn’t there, but I noticed a piece of paper on a table on which he’d written two words: “chronic” and “habitual.” A rare case of Safire second thoughts.

He would have appreciated the fact that his obits ran on Yom Kippur. He had a famous dinner every year at his home in Chevy Chase, Md., to break the fast that gathered many of the city’s most influential players.

Curious, I pestered him for years for an invite. He patiently explained it was just for Jews or people who were, or had been, married to Jews.

After years of pleading, including many protestations that I had had Jewish boyfriends and that I would one day find a Jewish husband, he broke down and let me come.

He was a mensch. And that’s no mishegoss.