william safire, columnist & nixon speechwriter, dies at 79

from ap: William Safire, the conservative columnist and word warrior who feared no politician or corner of the English language, died Sunday. He was 79. The Pulitzer Prize winner died at a hospice in Rockville, Md. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, family friend Martin Tolchin said.

Safire spent more than 30 years writing on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. In his "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine and more than a dozen books, Safire traced the origins of words and everyday phrases such as "straw man," "under the bus" and "the proof is in the pudding." ...

Safire penned more than 3,000 columns, aggressively defending civil liberties and Israel while tangling with political figures. Bill Clinton famously wanted to punch the curmudgeonly columnist in the nose after Safire called his wife "a congenital liar." ...

As a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, Safire penned Vice President Spiro Agnew's famous phrase, "nattering nabobs of negativism," a tongue-in-cheek alliteration that Safire claimed was directed not at the press but at Vietnam defeatists.

related: the speech safire wrote for richard nixon if the apollo11 astronauts got stranded on the moon