between then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at that year 's American National Exhibition in Moscow . Safire was the publicist for a builder at the time . `` What I was publicizing was the typical American house , '' he recounted during a conference at George Washington University in July . `` It was my kitchen . '' The next year , he went to work for Nixon 's first , unsuccessful presidential bid . He rejoined the Nixon team in 1968 , when the Republican eventually won the White House , and became one of the administration 's top speechwriters . Perhaps his best-known line in that job was Vice President Spiro Agnew 's denunciation of journalists as `` nattering nabobs of negativism . '' But Safire left the administration to join that nattering club in 1973 , when he left the Nixon administration to join the Times . His often-pugnacious voice -- he once denounced then-first lady Hillary Clinton as a `` congenital liar '' -- held down the right flank of the Times ' op-ed page for more than three decades . He won his Pulitzer in 1978 for columns on the travails
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- William Safire , a onetime speechwriter for President Nixon who became a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times , has died at age 79 , the newspaper announced Sunday . William Safire died in Maryland following a battle with pancreatic cancer , The New York Times reported . Safire joined the Times as a columnist in 1973 . In addition to his conservative news columns , which he wrote until 2005 , he wrote a language column for the paper 's Sunday magazine from 1979 until shortly before his death . He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978 . In 2006 , President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest U.S. civilian honor . Safire had suffered from pancreatic cancer and died Sunday at a hospice in Rockville , Maryland , the newspaper reported . Born in New York in 1929 , Safire began his career as a reporter for newspapers , television and radio stations after dropping out of Syracuse University . After becoming a public relations executive in the late 1950s , he was credited with putting together the 1959 `` kitchen debate ''