William Safire, Nixon speechwriter, dies at 79

William Safire, who died Sunday of pancreatic cancer at age 79, was for 32 years a standard bearer of what he called"libertarian conservatism" in the otherwise mainly predictably liberal Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. A former public-relations executive who claimed to have staged the famous 1959"kitchen debate" in Moscow between Richard Nixon, then vice-president, and Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev on the merits of capitalism and communism, Safire went on to work in the White House as a speechwriter, before starting a career as a wordsmith at the Times. And a wordsmith he was: in addition to his columns, Safire also penned (a verb I suspect he would have hated) the"On Language" page in the New York Times Magazine, continuing to write it until shortly before he died. For those of us who love to know where a word or phrase comes from, how its meaning and usage has changed, what verbal construction is now permissible (and what is not),"On Language" was a consistent delight. Safire was always keen to stress the libertarian part of his political belief, which led him into interesting waters. He was a longtime adversary of Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of Singapore and a man much admired by un-adjectivally qualified conservatives, for what he saw as Lee's illiberal tendencies toward the press and opponents. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1999, Safire had a long interview with Lee, posted online. It's still worth reading as an example of two first-class minds going at it hammer and tongs. He was critical, too, of some of the laws and policies adopted in the wake of 9/11, believing that they too easily sacrificed civil liberty at the altar of national security, and its supposed imperatives. But that libertarian thing was, when all is said and done, just an adjective; Safire was a true conservative, and a partisan one too, biffing in print, and not always fairly, political opponents from Bert Lance to Hillary Clinton. He was a cheerleader for some of the more outlandish justifications for the Iraq War, such as a supposed link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, though commentators such as David Corn, then the Nation's Washington editor, delighted in pointing out that the New York Times' own reporting, in its news pages, had the habit of undercutting the claims that Safire was advancing as fact in his columns....