Posted by: Stephen Saban contact

Recently Dead

William Safire, the political speechwriter, pundit, and brilliant wordsmith, whose decades-long "On Language" column in the New York Times concerned the origins of words and phrases and their proper usage, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer in a Rockville, Maryland, hospice. He was 79. The New York native and former ad executive became the speechwriter for Richard Nixon in 1968, and coined the phrases "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "hysterical hypochondriacs of history" for Vice President Spiro Agnew to use in describing the American media. Safire won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978. (VOA)



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