Morton Janklow remembers his lifelong friend, William Safire:
Bill brought a surprising contrarian perspective, grounded in conservatism in the true sense of that word. A civil rights advocate, a staunch defender of the right of privacy and human rights around the world, and an outspoken critic of governmental efforts to infringe upon those rights, Bill was, at the same time, cautious about political and social change and hawkish in his attitude about America’s role, including its military role, in the post-World War II era.
Here's JPod's summary:
He was a patriot, an American nationalist, a Zionist, a civil libertarian, and a classic Washington type of a sort that has now almost entirely passed from the scene.
I loved reading him on the nanny state, the First Amendment, the pretensions of left-liberalism, and his love of actual life in all its humdrum variety. I confess to finding his writing style sometimes unbearably cute, but there was great mischief in his provocations, and his back-and-forth with readers on language was, in some ways, a fore-runner of the blogosphere. He lacked pretension as a journalist when New York Times hauteur was at its peak.
But when the subject turned to Israel, the tone shifted dramatically.
It wasn't his Zionism or defense of successive Israeli governments, or his right-of-the-Likud stance that troubled me. It was the assumption of the most extreme views of Jewish and Israeli vulnerability as if they were inarguably the only positions a non-anti-Semite could take. Maybe that's why the New York Times obit made no mention at all of his life-long defense of Israel. Were they embarrassed by it? Or did it seem routine?
With this passionate exception, Charles Murray's tribute to Safire (and Buckley and Kristol) is on point, even as I think he overlooks Kristol's latter day cynicism and movementitis:
The comparisons with the voices of the Right today are unavoidable (The Left’s no better, but they’re not for me to worry about). There are many exceptions in print and some on radio and television. But who got on the cover of Time magazine the same week as Irving died? Glenn Beck, sticking his tongue out. He and others like him comprise far too much of the public face of the Right today—crudely sarcastic when they are not being angry, mean-spirited, and often embarrassingly ignorant. The antithesis of Friedman, Buckley, and Kristol.
I expect to be told that I’m too squeamish. We’re in a battle for America’s soul at a pivotal moment. But the very truth of that statement—we are indeed in a battle for America’s soul—makes it a good idea to stop and think about when the American Right was truly influential. It didn’t start after right-wing talk shows got big. It started in the 1960s, as Friedman, Buckley, and Kristol were hitting their stride. It flowered in the 1970s, then reached its apogee in the 1980s when their ideas were given political force by Ronald Reagan—another man of civility, good humor, and optimism. Don’t tell me that we have to put up with the Glenn Becks of the world to be successful.
The Dish 