Columnist Knows Power of Persona : George Will: Wit, Charm Help Push Conservatism

As the columnist recalls it now, the discovery came the morning George Frederick Will became a character in the columns of George F. Will.

“One day, the Washington Post sent someone out to do one of their pop sociology pieces out of Reston, Va.--fear and trembling on $30,000 a year,” Will explained it recently.

“I thought it was splendidly silly stuff. So I wrote a column about what the Post would find if they came to the Will house, the utter lack of glamour.

“The phone rang off the hook. No one had heard of me then. This was ’73.”

In the 13 years since, the phone has kept ringing, and Will has gone on to become the pre-eminent American political commentator. His commentaries, which appear in 450 newspapers, in Newsweek and on ABC television, are even credited with helping to make conservatism intellectually respectable.

“The fact that Will articulated (conservative positions) as well as he did . . . created a certain legitimacy for them,” said Paul Weyrich, president of the conservative Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress.

As Brookings Institution media specialist Stephen Hess points out, Will arrived as “the country was moving to the right and there were openings for far-right thinkers.” But his celebrity owes much to the birth in that column 13 years ago of a charming persona: a witty fellow who hates saxophones and half-time shows, wears bow ties and cares about manners and thinks political theory took a wrong turn with Thomas Jefferson.

“Will has class appeal,” said Democrat Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly. “He makes people intelligent and sophisticated when they read him.”

Will emerged from academia, training at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and at Oxford, where he began his conservative turn. He received a Ph.D from Princeton and taught briefly at Michigan State University and the University of Toronto.

Then, in 1970, Will came to Washington as a speech writer for Gordon Allott, a one-term Republican senator from Colorado. In 1973, on Allott’s defeat, he joined William Buckley’s conservative National Review as a writer.

In January, 1974, Will began writing a column for the Post full time. Within a year, he was syndicated in 100 newspapers.

Column for Newsweek

Within two, he began a twice monthly column for Newsweek.

Within three, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Today, in addition to the newspapers, Newsweek and television, Will makes the lecture circuit roughly once a week, commanding $15,000 a shot. In total, he now probably earns between $1.3 million and $1.8 million a year.

One reason for Will’s quick success, simply, was quality of intellect. He wrote, as Atlantic editor James Fallows described it, with “a sweet-tempered tone” and a graceful phrasing that made reading him pleasurable. Equally crucial, he understood the power of a public persona.

“One of the things People magazine understands,” Will said, is that “people want to know what Walter Cronkite has for breakfast. Hey, I eat shredded wheat, too.”

Knowing what George ate for breakfast made Will’s political ideas easier to digest as well, even for liberals, and was one reason he became, in the words of Burton Yale Pines, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, “every liberal’s conservative.”

He is a fellow so disdainful of the excesses of “commerce,” as he politely calls capitalism, that he buys his suits over the phone; whose column on modern sculpture was entitled, simply, “Junk”; who once scrawled: “Egalitarianism is envy masquerading as philosophy.”

Grim Face, Bow Tie

Yet, perhaps above all, the Will persona is erudite, a grim-faced, bow-tied doctor of philosophy with a Bartlett’s memory for quotations.

Will thinks people read him because they know his message “wasn’t thought up that morning.”

“I mean I had nine years of higher education . . . and I used it well . . . . And, when I go to hear old (Soviet leader Mikhail S.) Gorbachev in Moscow, I’ve read more Marx than he has.”

But, to some, this erudition seems contrived. Ronald Steel, whose biography of columnist Walter Lippmann won wide acclaim, said he considers Will “a quotation monger with a huge Rolodex,” who “leans on the crutches of others” to create a sense of learning.

And Fallows of the liberal Atlantic magazine called Will’s reliance on quotations “a serious problem,” which in Will’s most recent book, “Statecraft as Soulcraft,” “enables him to evade his fundamental responsibilities of exposition and analysis.”

Will denies relying on any reference books or files for his erudition. “There’s no Rolodex” of quotations on the desk. “Generally, what I quote, if I quote at all, is what I’m reading at the moment.”

So is the character in the George Will columns real?

“It’s partial,” Will said. “I wouldn’t say it’s not real.”

However, some readers are suspicious.

One colleague privately described Will as being to political philosophy what Carl Sagan is to astronomy, an intellectual whose skill is in popularizing rather than advancing the field.

Exploiting a Niche

“I don’t see him as an aristocratic Tory lost in a materialistic world,” Steel said. “I see him as an energetic fellow cleverly looking for a niche and exploiting it.”

Manufactured or not, Will’s strong persona was one thing that attracted ABC television executives to him in the first place.

He protects the network from right-wing charges of liberalism, said journalist Hodding Carter, an occasional commentator on the network. Will’s presence also answers perennial criticisms that ABC is the glitzy, lowbrow news network.

Will’s television contract, which insiders estimate exceeds $500,000, makes him the only ideological commentator to appear regularly on network news. His counterparts, NBC’s John Chancellor and CBS’ Bill Moyers, are journalists whose philosophies are not so clearly discernible.

Paradoxically, Will’s political philosophies--far from mainstream conservative--have been called “ill-suited” to America by the conservative journal Commentary.

Will supports welfare, big government and higher taxes, in contrast with most conservatives. Also, he believes, as he explained in his book “Statecraft as Soulcraft,” that America’s celebration of individual freedom has brought moral decline. As a result, “all of the nation’s life is marked by excess, and by disdain for . . . self-denial.”

Will cautions against “exaggerating the intellectual chasm” between himself and other conservatives, noting, for instance, his hard-line anti-Soviet attitude and various other typically conservative positions.

But he does admit that he has more faith in the rule of wise elites than in the democratic rule of law.

Conservative analyst Kevin Phillips has even suggested that Will’s “partly updated version of 19th-Century English Toryism . . . helps make it (his politics) culturally acceptable but not particularly relevant to 20th-Century America.”

Perhaps the most controversial part of Will’s public persona, however, is that of disinterested distance.

“I’m not one of the boys,” Will said. “As Dr. Johnson said, I’m not clubbable.”

Yet Will has his friends, and they do influence him. “How he views the great international issues are very much shaped by his close relationship with Richard Perle,” said one friend of Will who spoke anonymously. Perle, the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, is one of the most quietly influential and ardently anti-Soviet officials in Washington.

And it seemed incongruous to Will’s public image when rumors surfaced that he had considered running for the Senate from Maryland. Will dismisses the rumors, blaming them on press reports taken out of context. However, friends said privately that Will had seriously considered a campaign but rejected it because of the risk of losing the election in that Democratic state and, in the process, his lucrative niche as a columnist.

Will’s image as disinterested observer was also strained in 1983 by disclosures that he had not only coached candidate Ronald Reagan to debate Jimmy Carter in 1980 but also knew that Reagan’s people had a stolen copy of Carter’s briefing book.

Then Will critiqued the debate for ABC’s “Nightline,” acclaiming Reagan’s “thoroughbred performance.”

Will today stops short of conceding any ethical breach. He says he would decline another invitation to help coach a candidate because he is now a regular on ABC, not a guest commentator matched with a liberal counterpart. Nonetheless, “I simply reject the idea that I misled anyone. It wasn’t a state secret who I was for.” He makes light also of his much-publicized friendship with the President, who has been a dinner guest at the Will home in Chevy Chase, Md.

“I’m not like Paul Laxalt (GOP senator from Nevada) to him, or (former White House Deputy Chief of Staff) Mike Deaver,” Will said. “When Ronald Reagan comes to my house, I say, ‘Hi, here are my guests,’ and then my wife takes him, sits down at the table with him. I mean it’s not a close personal relationship.”

Despite this characterization, friends say Will does enjoy knowing the powerful. And there is evidence that Will’s columns have changed somewhat as a result.

In the introduction to his first compilation of columns, for instance, Will wrote accurately that he did not concern himself much with trying to influence legislation, policy or back-room politics at the White House.

“My subject is not what is secret but what is latent, the kernel of principle and other significance that exists, recognized or not, inside events, actions, policies and manners.”

Specific Effects

However, with Will’s rising status and influence, some have noticed columns sketched with more specific effect in mind.

“His columns leading up to the Geneva summit were very clearly written right at Reagan,” Weyrich said.

Will similarly stirred the Washington pot recently by describing Vice President George Bush’s attacks on Democratic candidates as “dishonest” pre-campaign “pandering” and charging that Bush was emitting “the unpleasant sound” of a “panting . . . lap dog.”

“I intended it as a warning shot across the bow,” Will said.

“And I think I did him a huge favor, if only because no Bush speech writer is ever going to have his hands over the keyboard again without thinking: ‘I might detonate that maniac out in Chevy Chase again.’ ”

A few weeks later, Will wrote a valentine to Bush rival Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.). “His spirit, at least, is presidential,” Will said, and his strategy, despite the early polls showing him trailing, is “convincing.”

What might Will do without friends in the White House? The columnist is not worried. He has enjoyed the role of opposition voice before and disdains the suggestion that he has come to enjoy the lure of special influence on the President.

He similarly disdains the suggestion that his success is due to a carefully created public persona.

“Gatsby? You’re your own work of art?” Will said, referring to the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel “The Great Gatsby” about a young man who creates an image for himself that ultimately proves fatal.

Is there a bit of Gatsby in the public persona of George Will?

“No. Not Gatsby. I don’t think so,” Will answered.

But his reference is understandable. Gatsby, it turns out, is one of Will’s favorite novels, and he has a first edition of it in his study.

The Will persona is that of an erudite doctor of philosophy with a vast memory for quotations.