William Safire, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and former speechwriter to President Richard Nixon, passed away on Sunday at the age of seventy-nine. Safire first met Nixon in 1959, at the then–vice president’s famous “kitchen debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, it was Safire, then a publicist, who set up the debate, a fascinating story he chronicled in his book Before the Fall.

After he left the Nixon White House he joined the New York Times op-ed page. In his more than thirty years as a columnist he served as “a forceful conservative voice in the liberal chorus,” as the Times noted in its remembrance. For much of that time he was the only conservative voice in the Times chorus.

Yet Safire was much more than a political columnist. He also wrote extensively on language—on usage, etymology, neologisms, and more. In that capacity he became one of the most high-profile, and passionate, defenders of the English language.

In 2006 Safire was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Requiescat in pace.

The following profile of Mr. Safire was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (ISI Books, 2006).

A Pulitzer prize–winning (1978) commentator on politics from a moderately conservative-libertarian perspective, and an acute analyst of the uses of power in politics, author and journalist William Safire is a widely recognized authority on the uses of the American language. Safire was born in New York City, studied at Syracuse University, and received an honorary degree from the same institution. He began his career as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune syndicate, worked as a radio-TV producer for WNBC, and headed his own public relations firm (1960–68). As special assistant to President Richard M. Nixon (1969–73), Safire wrote presidential speeches and from 1973 to 2005 made his thrice-weekly New York Times column into a significant event in political discourse. Safire’s commentary on the Washington scene was considered by many the last word on the uses of power in government.

Safire’s novel Freedom (1987), a fictional account of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, provides in narrative form a classic account of the decision-making process in the federal system. Others of Safire’s thirty or so books include Before the Fall (1975), Safire’s Political Dictionary (1978), On Language (1980), Freedom (1987), Language Maven Strikes Again (1990), and The First Dissident (1992), a political reading of the book of Job. This work drew appreciative attention from the world of biblical scholarship.

• Safire, William. The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time: Wit and Wisdom from the Popular “On Language” Column in the “New York Times Magazine.” New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
• ———. Scandalmonger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.