One of the strongest supporters of the State of Israel in American journalism, New York Times conservative columnist William Safire died Sunday a few hours before the start of Yom Kippur at the age of 79.
Safire, who was once called "the most influential and respected pundit alive" (by author Eric Alterman) died in a Rockville, Maryland hospice of pancreatic cancer. He and his wife Helene, a British-born jewelry designer, lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The couple had a son and a daughter.
Born on December 17, 1929 in New York City, William Safire was the youngest of three sons in a Jewish family. He attended Syracuse University for two years and then began working for a Republican publicist and and columnist with the New York Herald Tribune.
During his years in Washington D.C., his friend and colleague, John Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine, noted that Safire hosted a catered party each year to break the Yom Kippur fast. He was known to be a passionate supporter of the State of Israel.
The sometimes controversial writer once famously called Hillary Clinton, currently the U.S. Secretary of State, "a congenital liar" -- an insult which earned him the threat of a punch in the nose by her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
A former speechwriter in the Nixon White House, Safire left the Administration before the Watergate break-in transformed the American political landscape. He subsequently made clear in a column at The New York Times, where he was hired in 1973, his pain at discovering that President Nixon, his vice president, Spiro Agnew and speechwriter Pat Buchanan were not above frequent anti-Semitic outbursts or even, in Buchanan's case, adopting anti-Semitism as a strategy.
Safire, who eventually totalled 3,000 columns by the end of his 30-year career as a writer on the Op-Ed page, earned a Pulitzer Prize and several years later joined the Pulitzer board of directors. He also wrote more than a dozen books, as well as the "On Language" column for the venerable U.S. newspaper.