Bill Safire

The former Nixon speechwriter died at 79 this week. I knew him slightly. Bill was in love with language. He was the guy who gave Spiro Agnew the phrase “Nattering Nabobs of Negativism.” A one dinner my wife and I had with him he gave a long discussion of the origin of the “I have a dream” speech given by Martin Luther King. Just as his phrase was derivative of something originally uttered by Teddy Roosevelt. Bill went through both the history of speeches like Dr. King’s not to denigrate his speech, but to show that the work was a grand part of American rhetorical tradition.
After he left politics he became a Pulitzer winning columnist and wrote a couple of novels and a couple of books on use of the language that are fun and useful. Bill wrote a biography of the Nixon Administration called , Before the Fall which is still the most readable and fair-minded coverage of Nixon.