William Safire is a man of many careers: reporter, public relations man, politician, historian, novelist, lexicographer, and columnist. As a reporter, he worked on a column in The New York Herald Tribune and later served as a correspondent for New York radio and television stations. As a PR man, he built a firm serving dozens of corporate and financial clients, and he was best known for arranging the "kitchen conference" in Moscow between Nixon and Khrushchev to publicize his client's kitchen. As a politician, he worked on the first Eisenhower Presidential campaign and later became a senior speechwriter in the Nixon White House. He escaped from there in time to do a stint as an historian, writing Before The Fall, a history of the pre-Watergate White House. As a novelist, he wrote Full Disclosure, a best-seller about a President under fire, which spent 14 weeks on the best-seller lists. His latest novel is entitled Sleeper Spy. As a lexicographer, he is author of Safire's New Political Dictionary, a half-million word study of the words that have inspired and inflamed the electorate, and You Could Look It Up, a language book drawn from his Sunday language columns in The New York Times. As a political columnist, he began his twice-weekly column 20 years ago in the New York Times, writing from the point of view of a libertarian conservative. His series exposing the Bert Lance affair earned him the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. He is now a member of the Pulitzer Board. His political columns have been collected in book form as Safire's Washington. Additionally, he and his brother, Leonard Safire, compiled Good Advice, a collection of more than two thousand quotations to help you live your life.
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