RIP, Bill Safire

The NYT reports on the death of Bill Safire, a conservative and former columnists for the so-called “Newspaper of Record”:

William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Martin Tolchin, a friend of the family.

There may be many sides in a genteel debate, but in the Safire world of politics and journalism it was simpler: there was his own unambiguous wit and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the blubber of fools he called “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

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, which 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.

LOL. I wonder if the NYT will say anything similar to “laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay” when it comes to the death of their liberal columnists like, say, Bob Herbert?

Anyway, JWF calls Safire “one of the few bright lights from the New York Times in recent years.” I agree. I offer my condolences and prayers to Mr. Safire’s family.

Cross-posted to Right Wing News, where I am helping guestblog for John Hawkins on Sundays.

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