What's Wrong with Washington Columnists

Once the world of Washington pundits included a few giants, ranging from the Olympian sage, Walter Lippmann, and James Reston, the best informed of Washington reporters, to the feared scandalmonger, Drew Pearson--and that was it. Now so many syndicated Washington columnists exist that it is hard to keep track of them, keep up with them, or tell one from another.

Only the indefatigable Joseph Kraft, though he lacks Lippmann's magisterial authority, sometimes approaches the master's command of foreign and domestic topics. In fact, in an overreported town like Washington, the best reporting generally comes from those who are specialists in defense, diplomacy or Congress, rather than those who focus on the big picture. Jack Anderson, who minds Drew Pearson's store, still deals successfully in the tattletales of disgruntled bureaucrats. But he no longer has an exclusive franchise, ever since the archtattler of them all, Deep Throat, told his tales elsewhere. Among the newcomers, the best is George F. Will, who thinks cleanly and writes with irony. Others stand out for special qualities and interests, though these assets become debits when they get Johnny One Note about them, as Tom Wicker does with his angry Southern passion for civil liberties and prison reform, or Anthony Lewis with his affinity for the law and the opinions of the Harvard law faculty. Dave S. Broder ranks as the best political reporter in town. Peter Lisagor is admired for his wry sanity. Mary McGrory, a hard-working reporter, is experienced but not cynical, which may be why her dislikes are sometimes more firmly based than her enthusiasms.

Beyond these and a few others, Washington columning is a dull plain --unadventuresome and predictable. Often the predictability is intended and marketed as such, the print equivalents of those televised pillow fights between Galbraith and Buckley. Mostly the designated labels fit, but two do not.

One is William Safire's. Feeling the need to offset the liberalism of Wicker and Lewis, the New York Times in 1973 hired, not a conservative but a Nixonian, and the difference is considerable. A p.r. man before he became a Nixon speechwriter, Safire has had a hard time abandoning a cute, punning style and glib judgments. He is most interesting when most irritating, being as unfair in his opinions as the worst of liberal polemicists. Safire labors constantly to prove that all other politicians and their aides, from Kennedy to Carter, are as bad as Nixon. His forays into foreign affairs usually end with a poison pen stuck in the back of his old colleague, Henry Kissinger, whom

Safire blames for his phone being tapped.

In a different way, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak elude the columning category they seem naturally to fit into--that of reporters rather than commentators. Reporters too, of course, have their obligations (a college thesis could be written about how Woodward and Bernstein, or Theodore H. White, reveal their most useful sources by the praise they bestow upon them in passing). Despite good Washington connections, Evans/Novak usually give a one-legged performance, lacking balance. They early developed an animus toward Jimmy Carter and reported so many hidden obstacles in his way that if Carter had had to overcome them all, his nomination would have been even more impressive than it was. The Democratic Convention that others described as Carter-dominated, they found controlled by "left-of-center labor leaders," with Carter "the junior partner." To Evans/Novak, the choice of Mondale "could prove a costly miscalculation" (coulds and mights pepper this kind of writing). The kernels of fact that Evans/Novak begin with are often blown up like puffed wheat and made to serve and to obscure a dubious case.

Still, Evans/Novak are among the Washington columnists who matter. And the others? Too many turn up on editorial pages because they are innocuous and come cheap--as low as $5 per week. Some, easily classified by their automatic responses to any event, get printed so that a lazy editor can call his opinion page balanced, even when it is not. The token liberal or conservative columnist is a familiar trick. It is also out of date. No longer, as in Gilbert and Sullivan's day, is "every boy and every gal" born "either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative." Few Democrats any longer want to describe themselves as liberal, and even Reagan has schweikered the simon purity of his conservatism. Fuzzy designations like independent and moderate and populist are more fashionably worn by politicians now. A change is long overdue on the nation's editorial pages. Editors ought to go for the quality of a columnist's reporting and judgments, not for the musty label he wears.

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