The Greatness of George F. Will

When George Will was being packed off to graduate school, his father, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, asked him what, or who, he wanted to be in life: Ted Sorensen, Isaiah Berlin, or Murray Kempton? All three men were closely identified with a public trade. Sorensen, as President Kennedy’s speechwriter, was the ultimate political operative and staffer. Berlin was one of the century’s leading political philosophers. Kempton was the most revered newspaper columnist of his time, writing copiously about everything from politics to poetry in an elevated style unlike that of any other newspaperman.

Will studied at Oxford and got a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton, on the assumption that he would pursue the calling of Berlin. It didn’t take. He moved to Washington to be an aide, Sorensen-like, to a conservative Republican senator. After two years, he had had enough of the hill-rat race. That left Kempton and the scribbling life. “I phoned Bill Buckley at National Review,” he recalled the other day. “I said, ‘You need a Washington editor.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I do, and you’re it.’ ” A few months later, in January 1973, the editorial page editor of the Washington Postoffered him a three-times-a-week column, to be syndicated nationally. At the age of 32, Will had arrived at the summit of political punditry.

And here he is still, an astonishing 44 years later, in the second-floor office of a townhouse he owns in Georgetown. He’s 76 but looks 55; for that matter, when he was 36 he looked 55. Owing to his trademarked dour appearance and sometimes crotchety manner on TV, it is always a surprise to note that the primary impression George Will makes in person is one of perpetual sunniness. Maybe happiness is a better word—happiness understood in its old sense of aptness. He has the good cheer and supreme self-confidence of a man perfectly situated in life, doing precisely what he was made to do. The man and the vocation are essentially identical. He is a columnist born to write columns, a miniaturist who writes exquisite mini-essays of 750 words and not a word longer.

“I’d do it for free,” he says, “but they pay me anyway. It’s a failure of the price system.”

George Will is part of the furniture of Washington life and as close to a national celebrity as punditry will allow. He has been famous for so long—he’s figured in episodes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons (“The George Will?” says an awed friend of Lisa’s) and has been the subject of a sketch on Saturday Night Live and made a character in Doonesbury, back when both were sort of funny—it’s sometimes easy to forget he’s here. But you don’t forget for long.