Word: columnist
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...Mervin Field poll last week showed that Feinstein, who has already been advertising heavily on television, had shot ahead of Van de Camp, 42% to 38%, and Wilson as well, 46% to 43%, after trailing both by as much as 18 points in October. Concluded Los Angeles political columnist Joe Scott: "Before, it looked like an easy slam dunk for Van de Kamp in the primary, to be followed by a showdown between two gents in blue suits. Now it's been transformed into a close and volatile, totally unpredictable three-way race...
...there were three surefire Safirific clues embedded in the quotation: 1) this former Richard Nixon speechwriter remains a nattering nabob of negativism (he also crafted lines for Spiro Agnew) about Mikhail Gorbachev's intentions; 2) Safire's forcefulness of expression and clarity of opinion, for he is not a columnist who seeks safety in mainstream musings; and 3) the wordplay that is Safire's trademark -- in this case, revamping Winston Churchill's pledge not to dismember the British empire...
...product of Safire's childhood. The youngest of three sons of a successful New York City thread manufacturer, Safire was just four years old -- and his brothers were teenagers -- when his father died of lung cancer, leaving the family not poor, but pinched. (Their name was Safir, but the columnist added a final vowel in the 1950s to make spelling match pronunciation.) "Those were tough times," says Leonard Safir, who recalls that his brother Bill "was bounced around a lot as a boy." According to Janklow, Safire's mother taught her sons "all you have in this world is blood...
Through both McCrary and his own pluck, Safire in the 1950s kept popping up in improbable situations, especially for a latter-day Times columnist. Consider...
...advise industrialist Bernard Goldfine how to contain the scandal over his gift of a vicuna coat to Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's chief of staff. As McCrary tells it, Safire crawled across an outside window ledge on an upper floor of the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel to nab an assistant to columnist Drew Pearson and a congressional investigator bugging Goldfine's room...