William Safire died he was 79. Safire was credited, along with William F. Buckley Jr with restoring substance and respectability to the American Right. He was, in addition, one of those loquacious Americans of a certain vintage who, if rarely laugh-out-loud funny, were venerated for their wit. 
( Hewas born on December 17, 1929. He died of pancreatic cancer on September 27, 2009, aged 79)
He could be abrasive, even abusive, as when he notoriously labelled Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady, a “congenital liar”. He could get things hopelessly wrong, as when he wrote, beneath the headline “Found: A Smoking Gun”, that a “clear link” had been established between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. He was also an unwavering Zionist, with a particular regard for the belligerent former general and Likud party leader Ariel Sharon. He brooked no criticism of Israel and regarded the protection of the Jewish state as almost a constitutional requirement of the United States.
Yet, in repose, when writing his long-running column “On Language”, his mind was as playful as a grand piano. He was meticulous in his choice of words, determined always to strike the right note, keen that his learning should be on display alongside an obvious bonhomie. Many readers of The New York Times who would instinctively have shied away from his political opinions believed him to be the ultimate fount of wisdom when it came to style and usage.
It would never have occurred to Safire — not even in jest — to become a stand-up comedian. There was a polished quality to his humour that harked back to the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s, when tweedy men and women with feathers in their hats exchanged well-practised aphorisms in midtown Manhattan while enjoying a three-Martini lunch.
If The New Yorker magazine had ever lurched to the right, he would have been one of its brightest stars. As it was, having served as a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, he worked for many years as a political pundit and linguistic commentator on the otherwise liberal New York Times, where his gung-ho conservatism — notable for its support for both the Vietnam War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq — was balanced by his unwavering support for civil liberties, including his spirited opposition to the Patriot Act of 2001.
William Lewis Safir (he added the “e” to his surname to make it appear more American) was born, the eldest of three brothers, into a Jewish family in New York City in 1929. His father, Oliver, was a threads manufacturer to the garment trade who died when Safire was 4. Brought up by his mother, Ida, in Los Angeles and New York, the future “maven” attended the Bronx High School of Sciences, from which he won a place at Syracuse University, dropping out at the end of his second year to work as a copyboy for Tex McCrary, a columnist with the New York Herald Tribune.
It was McCrary — later credited with the invention of the talk show — who introduced Safire to the Republican Party, then recovering from the shock defeat of Thomas E. Dewey in the eventful 1948 campaign in which President Harry S. Truman won his second term.
Safire came to believe that only Republicans could maintain order in the world and provide succour to the nascent Israeli state, and was persuaded by his boss that the best man to succeed Truman in the White House was the former Commander-in-Chief Dwight D. Eisenhower.
By 1951, aged 22, the erstwhile trainee was a foreign correspondent for the NBC, working in Europe and the Middle East, but drafted into the army 12 months later and assigned to the Armed Forces Network. Upon his discharge from the military, he entered public relations and in 1959 represented a US domestic appliances company at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. It was here that he persuaded the visiting Vice-President, Richard M. Nixon, and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to engage in a revealing political discussion on the merits of communism v capitalism that became known as the “kitchen debate”.
For Safire, it was a life-changing event. Within a year, Nixon had taken on the young PR man to boost his forthcoming bid for the presidency. The campaign, against the unstoppable John F. Kennedy, was a disaster, but no blame attached to Safire, who, while honing his craft, maintained links with Nixon all the way through his wilderness years until his victory, at the second attempt, in 1968.
The first Nixon Administration was dominated by the Vietnam War, which Safire, as an in-house speechwriter, defended as a national and ideological crusade. In one speech, written for the Vice-President, Spiro T. Agnew, he described opponents of the war as “nattering nabobs of negativism”, a largely meaningless phrase that caught the media’s attention. Pleased with the result, he then coined the equally alliterative “hysterical hypochondriacs”.
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