Offense, Defense and Cheap Shots

By Thomas Griffith

Washington columnists are not like pro football players--a new team does not come trotting on the field whenever it is time to shift from offense to defense. Our mud-splattered veterans stay in the game.

With the change of Administrations, some attackers in the press are now practicing the unfamiliar arts of defense. It's not easy for someone like Conservative George F. Will, the most literate of Washington columnists. Thoughtful, astringently witty and rather young for a seasoned oracle (39), Will once called Carter perhaps the most dangerous President since James Buchanan. On their first postvictory visit to Washington, the Reagans went to dinner at the Wills' in Chevy Chase. This inspired Garry Trudeau to a cutting Doonesbury cartoon. In a column last week Will good-humoredly noted: "Fearful rumors are afoot that I may abandon the columnist's basic stance of thorough disapproval of all conduct but his own." The dinner "was a small matter, but large enough to fill to overflowing the minds of some people . . . Will this columnist be as critical of Reagan's Administration as he was of Carter's? . . . I certainly hope not."

George Will then proceeded to ignore Walter Lippmann's valedictory advice to the press ("Put not your trust in princes"). Will questions the cynicism that "the only way for a journalist to look at a politician is down"; instead, "to have intelligent sympathy for them, it helps to know a few as friends." This is an attitude admired in the social precincts of political Washington but unfashionable elsewhere.

William Safire is playing it differently. Having emerged from Nixon's White House bunker to become Washington's most effective journalistic scourge of the Carter Administration, Safire now envies his liberal colleagues, Mary McGrory and Anthony Lewis: "They're lucky guys, with a new lease on life. To be on the attack is to be more readable." Though Safire describes himself as "a right-winger," never underestimate his fondness for creating a stir. In one column he savaged Reagan's new Attorney General, William French Smith, for attending a 65th birthday party for Frank Sinatra. It was bad enough, Safire wrote, for Reagan to turn to Sinatra for fund-raising help and to put him in charge of Inaugural entertainment, but for an Attorney General to involve himself with "a man obviously proud to be close to notorious hoodlums is the first deliberate affront to propriety of the Reagan Administration."

That rattled the ice cubes among Reaganites celebrating their victory. When Safire introduced himself to Smith at a party, Smith upbraided him: "What a cheap shot!" But then, Safire reported triumphantly, "to a partygoer who was recently elected President of the United States, I mentioned in sadness that I had felt it necessary to zap his lawyer in print. 'Yeah, I know,' Mr. Reagan responded. 'We've heard those things about Frank for years, and we just hope none of them are true.' That was all--no huffiness, no bristling, no protestations of violated virginity."

Safire insists that conservatism is not a "troglodytic monolith" and that "fortunately there will be enough internal fighting" to satisfy a scrapper of his style. Just how brutish such fighting can get can be seen in a column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak that deserves to be studied in journalism schools. Never ruminative like Will, they are columnists who air their opinions in the guise of reporting. The story they were reporting was simple enough: Reagan's new Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, wanted as his deputy Frank Carlucci, who had worked in Government with him before. Right-wingers fought the appointment, but lost. Now hear Evans and Novak tell it:

"Unease within the defense community over Caspar Weinberger has blossomed into panic," their column began. Weinberger "has booted out 'Reaganaut' military advisers, trashed their recommendations and at least opened the door for soft-liners." Carlucci's appointment is "the visible tip of concealed events . . . The most charitable explanation is that this is no conspiracy but the product of Weinberger's nearly total ignorance on defense questions . . . But assuming Weinberger finally learns the names and issues involved, he has lost valuable time in revising defense spending . . . That may well prevent any Reagan hurry-up plans for accelerated spending in the current fiscal year."

Whew! A Defense Secretary soft on defense. Furthermore, Evans and Novak wrote, one William Howard Taft III "incredibly . . . has wound up on the list for the department's No. 3 post," though he has been known to confer with a Government official "whose views generally coincide with Senator George McGovern's."

Right-wing infighters put out stuff like this, but why do Evans and Novak (whose column appears in 275 newspapers) send it out as their own? The language ("blossomed into panic") is as clumsy as the innuendoes are nasty. Cheap shot more suitably describes this kind of journalism.

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