WILLIAM SAFIRE, NIXON SPEECHWRITER & TIMES COLUMNIST, DEAD AT 79. Here is his last Op-Ed column, ‘NEVER RETIRE.’

‘NEVER RETIRE,’ Wm. Safire’s last Op-Ed column in the Times:

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: January 24, 2005

The Nobel laureate James Watson, who started a revolution in science as co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, put it to me straight a couple of years ago: “Never retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy.”

Why, then, am I bidding Op-Ed readers farewell today after more than 3,000 columns? Nobody pushed me; at 75, I’m in good shape, not afflicted with political ennui; and my recent column about tsunami injustice and the Book of Job drew the biggest mail response in 32 years of pounding out punditry.

Here’s why I’m outta here: In an interview 50 years before, the aging adman Bruce Barton told me something like Watson’s advice about the need to keep trying something new, which I punched up into “When you’re through changing, you’re through.” He gladly adopted the aphorism, which I’ve been attributing to him ever since.

Combine those two bits of counsel – never retire, but plan to change your career to keep your synapses snapping – and you can see the path I’m now taking. Readers, too, may want to think about a longevity strategy.

We’re all living longer. In the past century, life expectancy for Americans has risen from 47 to 77. With cures for cancer, heart disease and stroke on the way, with genetic engineering, stem cell regeneration and organ transplants a certainty, the boomer generation will be averting illness, patching itself up and pushing well past the biblical limits of “threescore and ten.”

But to what purpose? If the body sticks around while the brain wanders off, a longer lifetime becomes a burden on self and society. Extending the life of the body gains most meaning when we preserve the life of the mind.

That idea led a lifetime friend, David Mahoney, who headed the Dana Foundation until his death in 2000, to join with Jim Watson in forming the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. They roped me in, a dozen years ago, to help enliven a moribund “decade of the brain.” By encouraging many of the most prestigious neuroscientists to get out of the ivory tower and explain in plain words the potential of brain science, they enlisted the growing public and private support for research.

That became the program running quietly in the background of my on-screen life as language maven, talking head, novelist and twice-weekly vituperative right-wing scandalmonger.

I had no pretensions about becoming a scientist (having been graduated near the bottom of my class at the Bronx High School of Science) but did launch a few publications and a Web site – www.Dana.org – that opened some channels among scientists, journalists and people seeking reliable information about the exciting field.

Experience as a Times polemicist made it easier to wade into the public controversies of science. Dana philanthropy provides forums to debate neuroethics: Is it right to push beyond treatment for mental illness to enhance the normal brain? Should we level human height with growth hormones? Is cloning ever morally sound? Does a drug-induced sense of well-being undermine “real” happiness? Such food for thought is now becoming my meat.

And what about what the cognition crowd calls “executive transfer” in learning? Does an early grasp of the arts – music, dance, drama, drawing – affect a child’s ability to apply that cognitive process to facility in math, architecture, history? New imaging techniques and much-needed longitudinal studies may provide answers rather than anecdotes and affect arts budgets in schools.

So I told The Times’s publisher two years ago that the 2004 presidential campaign would be my last hurrah as political pundit, and that I would then take on the full-time chairmanship of Dana. He expressed appropriate dismay at losing the Op-Ed conservative but said it would be a terrible idea to abandon the Sunday language column. That’s my scholarly recreation, so I agreed to continue. (Don’t use so as a conjunction!)

Starting next week, working in an operating and grant-making foundation, I will have to retrain parts of my brain. That may not make me a big man on hippocampus, but it means less of the horizon-gazing that required me to take positions on everything going on in the world; instead, a welcome verticalism will drive me to dig more deeply into specific areas of interest. Fewer lone-wolf assertions; more collegial dealing. I hear that’s tough.

But retraining and fresh stimulation are what all of us should require in “the last of life, for which the first was made.” Athletes and dancers deal with the need to retrain in their 30′s, workers in their 40′s, managers in their 50′s, politicians in their 60′s, academics and media biggies in their 70′s. The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.

In this inaugural winter of 2005, the government in Washington is dividing with partisan zeal over the need or the way to protect today’s 20-somethings’ Social Security accounts in 2040. Sooner or later, we’ll bite that bullet; personal economic security is freedom from fear.

But how many of us are planning now for our social activity accounts? Intellectual renewal is not a vast new government program, and to secure continuing social interaction deepens no deficit. By laying the basis for future activities in the midst of current careers, we reject stultifying retirement and seize the opportunity for an exhilarating second wind.

Medical and genetic science will surely stretch our life spans. Neuroscience will just as certainly make possible the mental agility of the aging. Nobody should fail to capitalize on the physical and mental gifts to come.

When you’re through changing, learning, working to stay involved – only then are you through. “Never retire.”

‘REV. FORREST CHURCH, WHO EMBRACED A GOSPEL OF PUBLIC SERVICE, DIES AT 61,’ from the obituary in today’s New York Times.

My friend & spiritual guide for over a dozen years died  one day after his 61st birthday here in Manhattan. Tributes and reflections can be read at : www.allsoulsnyc.org.

The service will be at All Souls on Saturday October 3rd at 4pm.

The Rev. Forrest Church, a longtime pastor at the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the Upper East Side who spent the last three years of his life, after being told he had terminal cancer, articulating a philosophy of death and dying and a complete expression of his liberal theology in two books, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 61. The cause was complications of esophogeal cancer, said his wife, Carolyn Buck Luce.

As the senior minister to the liberal and affluent All Souls congregation since 1978, Mr. Church preached a message of love, compassion and social service in stirring fashion, inviting his listeners on a shared quest.

“I don’t come thundering out of the pulpit with the quote unquote truth,” he told People in 1996. “I am involved in a search, and all of my conclusions are tentative.”

He set up a shelter for homeless women in Harlem, started a scouting program for boys and girls at a welfare hotel and organized free lunches and dinners for the homeless. In 1985, early in the AIDS epidemic, he organized a task force to place placards on buses and subways reading “AIDS is a human disease and deserves a humane response.”

He also wrote nearly two dozen books, many of which applied his theology to everyday life. They included “God and Other Famous Liberals” (1991), “Life Lines: Holding On (and Letting Go)” (1996) and “Lifecraft: The Art of Meaning in the Everyday” (2000).

“Much more than a parish minister, he was a writer, thinker and public intellectual of consequence,” Dan Cryer, who is at work on a biography of Mr. Church, wrote in an e-mail message on Friday. “In the ’80s and ’90s, he was a key national spokesman challenging what he depicted as the religious right’s hijacking of flag, family and Bible. He was an eloquent public speaker and commentator on radio and television who also wrote books of enormous spiritual power and who, as a historian, showed great insight into the nuances of church-state relations in American history.”

Mr. Church wrote and preached with particular eloquence on life, love and death. In 2006 he was told that he had inoperable cancer of the esophagus and had only months to live.

That prognosis turned out to be incorrect. He underwent what appeared to be a successful operation, but in 2008 doctors discovered that his cancer had returned and had spread to the lungs and liver. On five separate occasions he delivered what he thought would be his last sermon.

His illnesses motivated him to write “Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow” (2008) and a final book summing up his religious philosophy, “The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology,” to be published in November by Beacon Press. While battling cancer, he also completed “So Help Me God” (2007), a study of the religious views of the first five presidents.

“Every minister spends a lifetime preparing to ace the death test,” he said on the PBS program “Religion and Ethics” in February. “It’s what we do. We can’t fail that test, having gone through it with so many others.”

Frank Forrester Church IV was born on Sept. 23, 1948, in Boise, Idaho. His father was Frank Church, who later became a Democratic senator from Idaho, ran against Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential primaries and went on to serve as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at Stanford in 1970, the younger Mr. Church enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, where he received a master’s degree in 1974. He earned a doctorate in early church history from Harvard University in 1978.

Unsure of his next step, he interviewed for the post of parish minister at All Souls, where he delivered tryout sermons so moving that he won the job over 24 other candidates.

His speaking style was direct, and he expressed his religious philosophy in simple terms. “Do what you can,” he often said, “want what you have, and be who you are.” When he took the job, church attendance hovered around 100 on Sundays. Today, it is not uncommon for 1,000 worshipers to attend.

In addition to technical works on Christian and Gnostic literature, his books included “Father and Son: A Personal Memoir of Senator Frank Church of Idaho,” which was published a year after his father’s death in 1984, and many works on religion and American history aimed at a general audience. These included “Our Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism” (1989) and “The American Creed: A Biography of the Declaration of Independence” (2002).

While married to his first wife, Amy Furth Church, he met Ms. Luce as a member of his congregation. Their ensuing affair caused a public controversy, but the congregation voted overwhelmingly to keep him as senior minister.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his mother, Bethine, and a brother, Chase, both of Boise; two children from his first marriage, Frank Forrester Church V of Flushing, Queens, and Nina Church-Adams of Brooklyn; and two stepchildren, Jacob Luce of Manhattan and Nathan Luce of Golden, Colo.

In late 2006 he retired as senior minister of All Souls and became minister of public theology, a position that allowed him to preach on a limited schedule, officiate at weddings and memorial services and write on current issues in public theology and religion.

“I look back without regrets, and I look forward without fear,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “I have never been more in the present.”