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Safire on Wiretapping

I was watching Meet the Press this morning and William Safire, the longtime New York Times columnist who was a Nixon speechwriter was on. I've rarely agreed with anything Mr. Safire had to say, but he said something that I had to agree with. Even as I agreed with what he had to say, my cynical side had something else to say.

When the topic of the Bush wiretapping came up, staunch Republican Safire had this to say:

I have a thing about wiretapping.

I was writing a speech on welfare reform [for President Nixon], and the president looks at it and says, "OK, I'll go with it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we'll get something in the paper." And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or something, and I said, "Hey, you want a leak? I'll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform." And he took it down and wrote a little story about it. But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so they hear a White House speechwriter say, "Hey, you want a leak?" And so they tapped my phone, and for six months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn't like that. And when it finally broke--it did me a lot of good at the time, frankly, because then I was on the right side--but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home--you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my--everything.

So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what's happening now is that the--as a result of that scandal back in the '70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now, this court's a rubber-stamp court, let's face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses.

But the very fact that the FBI has to do a little paperwork beforehand slows them down and makes them think for a minute. It doesn't slow them down as much as the president [Bush] has made out to believe, because there's a wrinkle in it saying that if it's a real emergency and you have to get this information, then you can get it and get the approval within 72 hours afterwards. So there's always this struggle in a war between liberty and security. Doris [Kearns-Goodwin], you go into that in your book, and Lincoln did, indeed, suspend habeas corpus, but there it is in the Constitution, "It shall not be suspended except in invasion or a rebellion," so he had the right to. He didn't have the right, I think, to close the Brooklyn Eagle or see the arrest of the leading dissident, Vanlandingham, and he made some mistakes.

But just as FDR later made a mistake with the eight saboteurs and hanged them all, and just as we made a terrible mistake with the Japanese-Americans in World War II and have apologized for that. During wartime, we have this excess of security and afterwards we apologize. And that's why I offended a lot of my conservative and hard-line friends right after September 11th when they started putting these captured combatants in jail, and said the president can't seize dictatorial power. And a lot of my friends looked at me like I was going batty. But now we see this argument over excessive security, and I'm with the critics on that.

So, Mr. Safire sees the light on wiretapping and proclaims that there is "thing about personal privacy." I've always figuratively pulled my hair out when people shrug their shoulders in the face of a loss of privacy saying that they have "nothing to hide." Whatever.

The fact is, we all have things to hide. Not necessarily criminal "things," but how many people have things that they don't want to disclosed to the public? If you are taking an anti-depressant, do you want that disclosed? Or, if you are having marital problems and you (or your spouse) are unfaithful, do you want that disclosed? If you are using Viagra, or have genital Herpes, do you want that disclosed? When one's privacy has been violated, one understands how damaging that is. The human condition is one of weakness. The right of privacy allows citizens to maintain one's dignity and save oneself from embarrassment.

Mr. Safire's own experience has taught him first hand how the government's intrusion into the privacy of its citizens without probable cause to believe that criminal activity is taking place is a violation of one of the most sacred rights -- the right to keep personal secrets. Once the government starts to monitor the communication of all of its citizens it is a short step to the control of thought and the suppression of dissent. Mr. Safire understands that, because he and his family have been violated. I can't help but think that, because he's at odds with his fellow conservatives, if he hadn't been personally subjected to wiretapping, he too would be an advocate of Bush's [illegal] wiretapping.

To paraphrase the Gospels, blessed are those who have not been violated, but still understand the importance of civil liberties.