William Safire

William Lewis Safire (/ˈsæfaɪər/; né Safir; December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009) was an American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He was a long-time syndicated political columnist for The New York Times and wrote the "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine about popular etymology, new or unusual usages, and other language-related topics.

Safire was born William Lewis Safir in New York City, the son of Ida (née Panish) and Oliver Craus Safir. His family was Jewish and of Romanian origin on his father's side. Safire later added an "e" to his surname to better convey its pronunciation, while his brothers Leonard Safir and Matthew P. Safir continued to use the original spelling.

Safire graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized public high school in New York City. He attended S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University but dropped out after two years. He delivered the commencement address at Syracuse in 1978 and 1990, and later became a trustee of the university.

After dropping out of Syracuse, Safire worked for noted public relations specialist and journalist Tex McCrary throughout the 1950s, first as a gofer and later a public relations associate. He worked as a publicist for a homebuilder who exhibited a model home at an American trade fair at Sokolniki Park in Moscow in 1959—the one in which Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev had their Kitchen Debate. A much circulated black-and-white photograph of the event was taken by Safire. Safire joined Nixon's campaign for the 1960 presidential race, and again in 1968. After Nixon's 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and for vice president Spiro Agnew; he is known for having penned Agnew's famous alliterative term, "nattering nabobs of negativism".

William Safire named the famous city of Lauderhill, Florida after convincing Herbert Sadkin. The development that eventually came to be known as Lauderhill was originally to be named "Sunnydale", but William Safire, a friend of the developer, Herbert Sadkin, convinced him to change his mind. Safire felt that "Sunnydale" sounded like a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Sadkin said there were no hills in the new town, to which Safire replied, "There are probably no dales in Lauderdale, either!" From that discussion, the name "Lauderhill" was coined.[5] The development eventually grew to become Lauderhill, the city.[6]

Safire drafted a never-delivered speech titled "In Event of Moon Disaster", for President Nixon to deliver on television in the event the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the Moon. According to the plans, Mission Control would "close down communications" with the LEM and a clergyman would have commended their souls to "the deepest of the deep" in a public ritual likened to burial at sea. Presidential telephone calls to the astronauts' wives were also planned. The speech originated in a memo from Safire to Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, whence the name "Safire Memo", suggesting a protocol the administration might follow in reaction to such a disaster. The last line of the draft speech was an allusion to Rupert Brooke's First World War poem "The Soldier". In a 2013 piece for Foreign Policy magazine, Joshua Keating included the speech as one of six entries in a list of "The Greatest Doomsday Speeches Never Made".

Safire joined The New York Times as a political columnist in 1973. Soon after joining the Times, Safire learned that he had been the target of "national security" wiretaps authorized by Nixon, and, after observing that he had worked only on domestic matters, wrote with what he characterized as "restrained fury" that he had not worked for Nixon through a difficult decade "to have him—or some lizard-lidded paranoid acting without his approval—eavesdropping on my conversations".

In 1978, Safire won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary on Bert Lance's alleged budgetary irregularities; in 1981, Lance was acquitted by a jury on all nine charges. Safire's column on October 27, 1980, entitled "The Ayatollah Votes", was quoted in a campaign ad for Ronald Reagan in that year's presidential election. Safire also frequently appeared on the NBC's Meet the Press. Upon announcing the retirement of Safire's political column in 2005, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, said: