William Safire:WILLIAM SAFIRE, who has died aged 79 of pancreatic cancer, went from being the public relations man who set up Richard Nixon's "kitchen debate" with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, to the first columnist on the New York Times(NYT) chosen for his conservative view, and then a much-loved grouch and language purist.
As a speechwriter, he put into vice-president Spiro Agnew’s mouth his memorable denunciation of liberals as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and called Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar”, a slur she deftly turned by saying she resented the insult, not to herself but to her mother.
Although he dropped out of college without a degree, Safire became a respected defender of good English.
He mocked fashionable jargon such as “behind the curve”, pointing out that any pilot knew that if he were behind the power curve he was heading for a crash, and published his witty “rules for writing”, each an example of the solecism it purported to ban, for example: “Remember to never split an infinitive.”
Although his hiring by the NYT in 1968 was correctly interpreted as a sign that the once-liberal newspaper felt it needed to make a gesture to the new conservative ascendancy, Safire occasionally scored against his own team.
He was, however, an unblinking supporter of the state of Israel in all that it did and, in particular, a reliable defender of Ariel Sharon. He was also a defender of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
He was sure that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq and insisted, even after the CIA and almost everyone else disagreed, that Mohamed Atta, leader and supposed planner of the 9/11 attacks, had met representatives of Saddam Hussein in Prague.
In short, he parlayed a public relations man’s partisanship and a conservative’s instincts into a career as an admired pundit, and expanded a speechwriter’s verbal facility into a pulpit from which he pontificated with wit and erudition about the corruption of language in American politics and journalism.
He was born William Safir in New York City and went to the elite Bronx high school of science, then dropped out of Syracuse University. He added an “e” to his name to correspond with what should be its pronunciation.
In the US army from 1952, he served in Europe as a journalist for military newspapers. In Naples, he once interviewed both the mafioso Lucky Luciano and the film star Ingrid Bergman on the same day.
He was working in public relations for a firm that was trying to sell American-style kitchens to the Russians when he engineered the famous 1959 meeting in Moscow, in which Nixon, then vice-president to Dwight Eisenhower, tried to persuade Khrushchev of the superiority of the American way of life.
Nixon did not forget, and when he ran for president in 1968 added Safire to a team of speechwriters that already included Ray Price on the left and Pat Buchanan on the right. Safire later admitted he was embarrassed by the antisemitism freely expressed in the Nixon circle.
After Nixon was elected president in 1968, Safire was invited to join the NYT by its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. Some NYT journalists were upset that the paper had hired a man who had worked for Nixon, who was rightly regarded as an enemy of the press in general and the liberal press in particular.
One of Safire’s former colleagues in the Nixon White House, however, said that his columns for the NYT were “a great beacon to us in the years of darkness”. Safire’s critics were mollified when they learned that he, like Nixon’s “enemies”, had his phone tapped by his suspicious boss.
Safire soon fitted in at the NYT in an increasingly conservative climate there. In 1978 he won a Pulitzer prize for revealing the financial shenanigans of president Jimmy Carter’s friend Bert Lance.
The following year he was given a regular column in the NYT magazine – which ran until his death – to air his thoughts on the use and misuse of language. He analysed the origins, the faults and the absurdities of countless voguish phrases, from “modelling” to “blogosphere” in a witty style that included a pinch of self-mockery.
Safire affected a scruffy, relaxed manner in a newspaper where correct dress and behaviour were generally expected.
He could be nasty in print, but in person he was an affectionate man who, for example, became a personal friend of Lance, whose political career he had destroyed.
His wife, the model and pianist Helen Belmar Julius, his son Mark and daughter Annabel survive him.
William Safire: born December 17th, 1929; died September 28th, 2009