Safire's "Headline of the Year"

Headline of the Year

Writers of headlines — their words cabin’d, cribb’d and confined in capturing the gist of an article — on rare occasion break through with an inspiring turn of phrase. My nomination for Headline of the Year appeared early this month above a full-page commentary infused with original reporting by the Pulitzer-winning Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal.

Her subject was a largely downplayed instance of the current campaign to undermine the First Amendment by Justice Department prosecutors and their F.B.I. satraps of entrapment. Having failed for years to find the “mole” inside the F.B.I. who sold out to the Russians, the agent sought to salvage his reputation by running a “sting” operation. The F.B.I. found a Pentagon analyst who had foolishly taken home papers and — by threatening him with prosecution — induced the analyst to type a supposedly classified document about policy toward Iran and fax a “leak” of it to two staff members he knew in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. F.B.I. agents then wired him for sound and further drew the unsuspecting targets — whose jobs were to stay in touch with analysts and known journalists — into the trap.

The Pentagon analyst pleaded guilty to keeping classified documents at home, for which big shots draw a fine. He is trying to reduce his 12-year sentence by testifying in June, as Rabinowitz reported, in “the first ever attempt by government prosecutors to convict private citizens under the 1919 Espionage Act.” That F.B.I. bell tolls for thee and me.

Here is the headline in the Journal that Rob Pollock, who grasped the universal civil-libertarian point of her article, put across the top of the page: “First They Came for the Jews.”

Those words are from an approximation of what Martin Niemoeller, the German pastor who outspokenly opposed the Nazis and suffered through concentration camps, said to a seminary audience in Georgia in 1959: “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”