While many fondly recall Safire as the curmudgeonly essayist who wrote the witty and informative weekly columns on language for the New York Times Magazine, I primarily remember him as the propagandist who abused language to help our corrupt former vice-president Spiro Agnew and his boss, Richard M. Nixon -- still the only president ever forced to resign from the office -- to beat down their opponents in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

To his everlasting shame, Safire put the words "nattering nabobs of negativism" into the mouth of Agnew, the only U.S. vice president in U.S. history who was forced to leave office under criminal indictment for extortion, tax evasion and conspiracy.