William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times died at a hospice in Rockville, Maryland, on Sunday. He was 79. The cause was pancreatic cancer, a friend of the family said.

From 1973 to 2005, Safire wrote his 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, Safire was a pugnacious contrarian who did much of his own reporting, called people liars in print and laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay.

From 1979 until earlier this month, he wrote On Language, a New York Times Magazine column that explored written and oral trends. The columns made him an unofficial arbiter of usage. It also tapped into the lighter side of Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.

He was hardly the image of a button-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on. His last Op-Ed was Never Retire.

William Safir was born on December 17, 1929, in New York City. He entered politics in 1952 by organising an Eisenhower-for-President rally at Madison Square Garden. In 1959, he was in Moscow to promote an American products exhibition and managed to steer Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev into the “kitchen debate” on capitalism versus communism.

... contd.