William Safire
William Safire, R.I.P.
William Safire, a speechwriter, author and famous New York Times columnist has just died of pancreatic cancer. The New York Times columnist of three decades had been a speech writer for President Richard Nixon and an influential conservative columnist, as well as the author of four novels.
William Safire won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns in the New York Times. Safire wrote the On Language column in the NYT Magazine from 1979 until earlier this month.
William Safire was a breakthrough figure, the first professional Republican ideologue of his time to become a mainstream fixture in journalism. Safire himself said that people would barely look him in the eye in his place of employ for years.
Over time, Safire revealed himself as a profoundly unorthodox columnist who combined hawkish views on foreign policy with a libertarian perspective on domestic matters, and a more uncompromising advocate for the state of Israel, its right to defend itself, and the importance of the Zionist experiment never walked this earth.
Safire famously said he wrote his column in 20 minutes, which is in part what gave his pieces their immediacy and force, as though his hand had untrammeled access to his thoughts and conveying them through touch-typing 750 words was all it took. He took far more care with the novels he wrote–among them the wonderful potboiler Full Disclosure, about a conspiracy to evade the requirements of the 25th Amendment, and the enormous bestseller Freedom, about Abraham Lincoln.
He was a college dropout and proud of it, a public relations go-getter who set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” in Moscow, and a White House wordsmith in the tumultuous era of war in Vietnam, Nixon’s visit to China and the gathering storm of the Watergate scandal that drove the president from office.
Then, from 1973 to 2005, Mr. Safire wrote his twice weekly “Essay” for the Op-Ed Page of The Times, a forceful conservative voice in the liberal chorus. Unlike most Washington columnists who offer judgments with Olympian detachment, Mr. Safire was a pugnacious contrarian who did much of his own reporting, called people liars in print and laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay.
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