Whatever you do, don’t hire another Bob Herbert.

Column writing took a hit this week with the retirement of long time New York Times columnist William Safire. His conservative musings filled the op-ed pages of the Times for 33 years, serving as much more than the elementary political pontification that fills opinion pages today.

Reading a Safire column was a different experience. It wasn’t a twice-a-week outlet for him to push a political agenda. Sure, he had his opinions, but he had a rare way about him. His corner of the page was the go-to place for perfect phrasing and eloquent wording twice a week on anything and everything from getting the take of a Washington lawmaker to channeling his old boss, former President Richard Nixon, for the view from heaven.

Maureen Dowd has comedy, Thomas L. Friedman world affairs, Herbert racial issues, Paul Krugman economics — Safire was the only of the Times columnists on whom connoisseurs of news could rely for a wide repertoire of opinion writing.

It goes much further. Safire defined the very craft he was a part of. Despite coming off as the self-appointed “Messiah of Column Writing,” Safire helped create rules that all columnists, this one included, try to follow with every word we pen. No prepositions to end a sentence, always use the correct idiom and to never use a long word when a diminutive one will do are lessons etched in my mind whenever I sit behind a computer to pen my latest musings.

TV-pundits-turned-columnists Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly need to pick up just a dab of Safire’s elegance and intelligence. He did more than just spout the party line; instead, he gave the conservative movement the intellectual kick-in-the-pants that it often needs — most recently represented by the libertarian-conservative Safire’s criticism of the USA Patriot Act’s assault on civil liberties. We need more of this in columns today from both ends of the political spectrum.

Anyone who has ever written a column is guilty of cheating the reader. What gives the columnist the upper hand? What makes our opinion the be-all and end-all?

We need less barroom banter and more reporting from columnists. Safire went to where the news was going down; he didn’t sit in the comfort of his office and watch from afar. His advanced age was not a deterrent, either. You always could expect a dateline to be attached to whatever he wrote. Safire didn’t pay his dues sitting in a newsroom; he was a part of the news.

Safire’s refreshing ability to take his White House experience and channel it into an analysis that was not chock full of the cheerleader-like nostalgia that many fellow former White House helpers (think Peggy Noonan) bring to the table.

An admitted “iconoclast,” Safire achieved this level of admiration without owning a college diploma. He dropped out of Syracuse University but went on to form a public relations firm that helped make possible a meeting between Nixon and former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev possible, advised and wrote speeches in the Nixon administration and broke through to be the star of an op-ed page dominated by liberals.

In the end, William Safire’s column was just smarter than us. He knew language, politics, rhetoric and the world better than any of us. We will never see another like him ever again.

But to use Safire’s own words: “Never assume the obvious is true.”

Assistant Forum editor and former Daily political columnist Troy Appel is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected]<.>