People Remembered: William Safire

New York Times Magazine columnist William Safire, whose writing rules included never split an infinitive, avoid mixingmetaphors, proof read carefully andavoid clichés, died of pancreatic cancer September 27.

William Safire was proud that he dropped out of college in 1949 after his second year at Syracuse University. He then took a job with Tex McCray, a columnist for The New York Herald Tribune.

In 1951, Safire was a correspondent in Europe and the Middle East for the New York City station WNBC-TV. During part of his U.S. Army service, 1952 to 1954, he was a reporter for the Armed Forces Radio Network in Europe during which he interviewed Ingrid Bergman and Lucky Luciano within a few hours of each other in Naples. As a public relations man, Safire organized the 1959 Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” in Moscow on capitalism vs. communism. After working in the Nixon White House as a speech writer, Safire joined The New York Times in 1973 as an op-ed writer. His columns were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers.

He won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for commentary with columns that accused Bert Lance, President Carter’s budget director, of shady financial deals. Lance resigned but was acquitted. From 1979 until this September, Safire wrote the column “On Language” for The New York Times Magazine. His writing rules included never split an infinitive, avoid mixing metaphors, proof read carefully to see if you can leave words out, avoid clichés and don’t overuse exclamation marks. He wrote four novels.

Born in New York City in 1929, Safire, 79, died of pancreatic cancer September 27 in a Rockville, Maryland hospice.