Dowd on being a Jewess wannabee, Safire on being a newsman, period.

Maureen Dowd writes today about how she finally insinuated herself into a William Safire break-the-fast by accounting for her many sins of the Jewish flesh:

He would have appreciated the fact that his obits ran on Yom Kippur. He had a famous dinner every year at his home in Chevy Chase, Md., to break the fast that gathered many of the city’s most influential players.

Curious, I pestered him for years for an invite. He patiently explained it was just for Jews or people who were, or had been, married to Jews.

After years of pleading, including many protestations that I had had Jewish boyfriends and that I would one day find a Jewish husband, he broke down and let me come.

She also correctly uses, under Safire’s posthumous tutelage, "mishegoss," (although I suspect her original use of "meshugas" likely originated with someone acquainted with modern Hebrew — that bastradized rendition is common in Israel).

Anyone, it’s a nice memory, and one well-remembered.

I’ve seen a lot in the left blogosphere — mostly in the comments to otherwise affectionate posts — about Safire’s role in touting the Iraq war. He attached himself to a bogus Iraq-Mohammed Atta connection way past its due date and never recanted, as far as I know.

This is cited as evidence that he was not as independent of Republican Party strictures as memorialists would have it.

Poppycock. Reporters, unfortunately — and especially as we grow older — maintain a morbid attachment at times to stories that look glossy and keen at first glance, but which soon fade. Safire’s affection for the tall Atta tale does not make him a shill.

He was as independent as they come. I met him only once — at Israel embassy spokesman Mark Regev’s going away event in 2005 — but I already knew this about him.

This was because I worked in a major DC newsroom on Sept. 11 2001, when the planes attacked. Rudy Giuliani, New York’s mayor, famously made his way to Ground Zero almost as soon as it happened. President Bush famously made his way to Nebraska, to a secure location.

This, of course, was eminently sensible, but it didn’t stop the less sensible from wondering where the president was in our time of need, etc. etc.

But instead of pointing out the utility of protecting the president in a time of peril, his aides — and this kind of shenanigan unfortunately was emblematic of the second Bush administration’s dogged insecurity — made up a story about an imminent threat to Air Force One.

Now, as I said, I was working in a major newsroom. We ran the story, as did many others — and I happen to know that lead reporters and editors were quite certain it was not true. But, for a couple of days it was out there: The terrorists said they were going to get Air Force One next. (I wondered at the time — even before I heard that it wasn’t true — why would you head straight for Air Force One if it was a target? It didn’t make sense.)

I imagine we weren’t alone in knowing the truth about the Air Force One myth — it must have been common knowledge in Washington. (It was far from my call, I wasn’t even close to the story and was in any case a drone.) Sept. 11 had upended journalistic traditions like nothing I’d ever seen; there was a real culture of protecting the public from information, which in my opinion (then and now) is just nuts.

It took Safire to boot this myth into the wastebasket where it belonged.

He wrote a column on Sept. 13 that, very politely, pointed out that if indeed there was a credible threat, the attacks were much more serious than they appeared:

The most worrisome aspect of these revelations has to do with the credibility of the ”Air Force One is next” message. It is described clearly as a threat, not a friendly warning — but if so, why would the terrorists send the message? More to the point, how did they get the code-word information and transponder know-how that established their mala fides?

That knowledge of code words and presidential whereabouts and possession of secret procedures indicates that the terrorists may have a mole in the White House — that, or informants in the Secret Service, F.B.I., F.A.A. or C.I.A. If so, the first thing our war on terror needs is an Angleton-type counterspy.

The Air Force One bubbiemeiser cracked on impact. Karl Rove was soon making the kind of "heh heh heh, all a misunderstanding" calls at which he seems to excel.

So: a fabulous institutional memory; a willingness to follow a story wherever it leads, however scary its prospect; a willingness to piss off your best sources, and friends, in the name of the public’s right to know.

I didn’t like everything Safire wrote (and I’ll bet he didn’t want anyone to like everything he wrote), but he was a newsman when we most needed newsmen.