This year, Yom Kippur falls on a Saturday, so Jews won’t have to miss work to observe the solemn day. But this is not always so. Tevi Troy tells the story of Richard Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire, who later distinguished himself as an incisive columnist:
During the 1968 campaign, Safire told Nixon that he would miss one of his speeches because of Yom Kippur. Nixon admired Safire’s adherence to tradition: “You go all the way, the cap, the shawl, and everything? Good for you!”
Troy has another Yom Kippur-related anecdote about Safire, who became famous for equipping then-Vice-President Spiro Agnew with such “memorable phrases” to describe the administration’s critics as “‘an effete corps of impudent snobs,’ ‘ideological eunuchs,’ ‘professional anarchists,’ and, most famously, ‘nattering nabobs of negativism.’”
In the fall of 1970, Safire was traveling with Agnew on the campaign trail and returned to Washington to attend [Yom Kippur] services at the Adas Israel congregation. He was less than thrilled to hear the rabbi’s sermon criticizing those who “let our country be divided and polarized by those who use the technique of alliteration.” As Safire wrote of the incident, “the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ was not a sin I had come to atone for.”
Read more on City Journal: https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-must-read-columnist