The Passing of Two Giants

As writers, William Safire and Irving Kristol followed very different paths.

Kristol was an elegant essayist, whose depth of thought shaped a generation. Safire was a dogged reporter, whose scoops drove the news agenda. Kristol read and meditated. Safire worked a network of sources and informants. Kristol was a man of learning; Safire, a man of secrets.

And yet in another way, the two men shared more than ever divided them. They were Jews whose lives had been formed in the days before Jews had found full acceptance in America. And they were politically conservative Jews in an era when American Jewry and American conservatism regarded each other with mistrust verging on paranoia.

For both men, the touchstone issue was the security and survival of Israel. Somebody once asked Kristol: Is Israel reason enough to associate with born-again evangelicals who preach that all non-Christians are damned? He gave his characteristic shrug: “It’s their heaven—but it’s our Israel.”

When an American president pressured Menachem Begin, William Safire compared the defiant but diminutive Israeli prime minister to the lofty Charles de Gaulle, who likewise stood down American presidents from Franklin Roosevelt onward.

With the passing of these two men, we lose two more giants from that generation of American Jews who directly experienced the vulnerability of the Jewish people and the Israeli state. You have to be over 50 to have much memory even of the Yom Kippur war, almost 60 to remember 1967, almost 80 to have learned of the Holocaust in real time.

Prosperity in America and the growing military strength of Israel have effaced the recollection of these frightening traumas. Jews of Kristol’s and Safire’s generation were haunted by tragedy; subsequent generations have slipped into unexamined assumptions of perfect security.

William Safire entered politics as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon. Kristol had voted for Hubert Humphrey but warmed to Nixon later. Nixon was a president not much liked by American Jews. He muttered anti-Semitic remarks when he had hit the whisky bottle too hard. Yet when Israel exhausted its munitions in the first crisis of the Yom Kippur war, it was Nixon who authorized the resupply airlift that turned the tide of war.

The younger generation of Jews has just overwhelmingly voted for a candidate for president who has shown less sympathy and concern for Israel than any since Jimmy Carter—and astonishingly many of those American Jews who write about international affairs seem to share a conviction that the problems of the Middle East will be solved if only Israel is slapped often enough and hard enough.

The current cliché is that Israel “must be saved from itself”—blithely disregarding that it is not “itself” that is rocketing the towns of southern Israel, organizing cultural and economic boycotts, or developing nuclear warheads to be aimed at Tel Aviv.

What a loss to be deprived now of these two men who championed both America and Israel with such clear-eyed love and knowledge. I miss the New York Times columns Safire would have written, crackling with blind quotes from intelligence sources, about Obama’s hemming and hawing on Iran and his brazen attempts to evade his own campaign promises on Afghanistan. I miss Irving Kristol’s acute analysis of American Jewry’s declining concern for Israel’s safety.

I miss the dedicated institution-building of the two men. William Safire gathered his fellow former presidential speechwriters—previously a rather and arguably deservedly uncelebrated bunch–into a boozy reunion, the Judson Welliver Society, named for the man who wrote for President Warren G. Harding. Irving Kristol followed a lifelong rule: “Got a problem? Start a magazine.” The first magazine he founded and edited, Encounter, became the international voice of the liberal anticommunism that set the intellectual tone of the 1950s; the next, Public Interest, developed and championed the neoconservatism that inspired the public policy of the 1980s and 1990s.

I miss Irving Kristol’s supremely discreet advising of presidents and William Safire’s gleefully indiscreet muckraking of things presidents would rather have kept hidden—including, by the way, the U.S. program of assistance to Saddam Hussein in the later part of the Gulf War. I miss Irving Kristol’s ironic realism and William Safire’s burning indignation against injustices large and small. I miss Irving Kristol’s benign refusal to ever hold a grudge and William Safire’s mordant refusal to forget that Henry Kissinger had ordered the bugging of Safire’s phone.

I miss the lost accents of Brooklyn and the grumbling anti-authoritarianism of men who had worn Uncle Sam’s uniforms in the big SNAFU wars of the mid-20th century. I miss Irving Kristol’s cigarettes and William Safire’s game insistence, against all the evidence, that Loeb’s on Washington’s McPherson Square served a perfectly adequate deli sandwich.

I miss the hell they would have given today’s bollixed Republican Party—and the hope they would have inspired that a better future lay within reach. I miss above all their fingertip-to-fingertip connection to that departed generation that had crossed the Atlantic, spoke Yiddish and found their Zion in America while remembering that the real Zion still had to be redeemed.

David Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and is the editor of the political website NewMajority.com.