A Shifty Defense

By Edward Magnuson

BEFORE THE FALL by WILLIAM SAFIRE 704 pages. Doubleday. $12.50.

Nixon: You think of Truman--a fighter. Eisenhower--a good man. Kennedy--charisma. Johnson--work. Me --what?

Safire: Competence. Sorry about that.

This exchange between President Nixon and William Safire, one of his top three speechwriters, late in 1970 reveals much about both men. Nixon, self-consciously complaining that his personal strengths were not being sold to the public by his staff, had his image problem confirmed by the unawed Safire, whose humor often took the edge off his frequently rejected advice to the President. As related in this bulky but useful account of the preWatergate Nixon Administration, the episode also conveys Safire's slickly polished prose style. "He smiled ruefully," Safire writes of Nixon, "having made his point and not liking the point he had made."

Safire claims to write "neither in defense nor denunciation," but what he has produced is the cleverest, if still unconvincing, defense of Nixon yet. He devotes too much space to a glorification of Nixon's meager domestic program, which he sees as a near revolutionary "New Federalism" in government. In foreign affairs, he uncritically accepts Nixon's Viet Nam policies while--more reasonably--extolling the Nixon initiatives in Peking and Moscow.

In fact, the book is unrelentingly harsh on the ex-President only when to be otherwise would completely ruin Safire's own credibility. He assails Nixon's loathing of the press, his taping and wiretapping, his lying about Watergate. Yet even about these seemingly inexcusable Nixon transgressions Safire tries to plant redeeming doubts. Formerly a public relations man and now an erratic columnist for the New York Times, Safire seems to share his former boss's conspiratorial view of the press. According to Safire, it was "hatred of the press that slowly, steadily, and then suddenly pulled Nixon down." But Safire does not make clear whether he thinks Nixon's enmity for the press caused him to tap newsmen's phones, unleash leak-plugging plumbers, etc., or whether reporters simply reacted to the hatred by overplaying the Nixon scandal. Either explanation, of course, is simplistic.

Safire concedes that "Nixon failed, not while daring greatly, but while lying meanly." Then he proceeds to place greater responsibility on H.R. Haldeman than on the President for the "epic arrogance" of a White House taping system that ultimately exposed the lies. Haldeman's lofty aim, contends Safire, was "to provide history with its raw material so as to ultimately serve the cause of truth, and prevent the denigration of a peacemaker." Incredibly, Safire insists that the "dark side" of Nixon shown on the tapes was not the real Nixon.

Unkind Cut. "Underneath the imitation-oak-grained formica veneer is solid oak, beneath that phony image of character is character," writes Safire. But what is the nature of that character? He never succeeds in defining it. Perhaps there never was anything cohesive in Nixon's character. Perhaps Safire is simply too compassionate to label it. Such ambiguity of approach may partly explain why Safire's original publisher, William Morrow & Co., rejected his manuscript as unsatisfactory (the author lost his suit to recover all of a promised $250,000 advance, settling for $83,000). Still, Safire offers lively anecdotes about the Administration. He is good at recounting exactly how policy was shaped and presidential speeches honed. (Nixon shrewdly asked his three writers, Liberal Ray Price, Conservative Patrick Buchanan and Centrist Safire, to make first drafts along the lines that they would find personally congenial, then often had them rewrite each other for balance.)

Safire's unkindest cuts are saved for Henry Kissinger. He charges that Kissinger first had his own telephone bugged and afterward lied about it. Safire also flatly asserts that Kissinger deviously recorded telephone conversations with newsmen--sometimes belittling his long-suffering foreign affairs adversary, Secretary of State William Rogers--then deliberately altered the transcripts and sent them to Haldeman to portray the resulting stories as wrong.

There are some commendable small corrections and additions here. Safire reveals that Nixon impulsively wrote a wholly unpublicized and touching note to the son of Senator Tom Eagleton, praising the father's "poise and just plain guts" when McGovern dropped him as a vice-presidential candidate. Despite the book's length, Safire's sprightly style keeps the story moving. The man who fed Spiro Agnew such alliterations as "nattering nabobs of negativism" strains to avoid cliches, and the struggle is often entertaining.

To his relief, Safire was never enough of an insider to be admitted to Nixon's Watergate conversations. But he was the official notetaker at countless other meetings, scribbling away, cleaning up everyone's syntax, deleting ahs and ahums, making everyone sound decisive. He did not know, of course, that Nixon's recorders were silently and efficiently capturing everything that he was leaving out. sbEdward Magnuson

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