William Safire, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and columnist for the NY Times, died yesterday. He was 79 and had been suffering from cancer.

Mr. Safire also wrote four novels, including Full Disclosure (Doubleday, 1977), a bestseller about succession issues after a president is blinded in an assassination attempt, and non-fiction that included The New Language of Politics (Random House, 1968), and Before the Fall (Doubleday, 1975), a memoir of his White House years.