Still Living It Up

His son, Joel Buchwald, said, "He's like an Energizer Bunny -- well, an Energizer Bunny who wanted to live through another election so he could have new material."

Joel noted that his father, who had a stroke six years ago, became a poster boy for stroke. He was also a poster boy for depression. (Buchwald, Mike Wallace and the late William Styron, all close friends, called themselves the "Blues Brothers," Joel said.) Now he's a poster boy for hospices.

As Joel asked, "Who else can write a book after leaving one?"

The man who wouldn't die also has written a book that can't end. It has an afterword, also titled "Too Soon to Say Goodbye." And then it has an epilogue. The latter is a collection of eulogies -- "In case of being memorialized after my death, I get to read what they were going to say now," he writes -- from Bradlee, Wallace, Tom Brokaw, George Stevens Jr., Ken Starr and Buchwald's doctor, Michael Newman.

"The individual in question is, plain and simple, a fraud, a publicity-seeking, lying, greedy fraud," wrote Wallace.

When Buchwald spoke last night, plugging his new volume to the roomful of friends, relatives and admirers, the biggest laugh came from his Donald Rumsfeld story, which is on Page 82. The recently ousted defense secretary, who played tennis with Buchwald in the Gerald Ford years, visited him at the hospice. Buchwald told him: "Donald, if you ever get fired, I'll get you in a room in the hospice."

In Latin, there's a saying that goes, "Ars longa, vita brevis": Art is long, life is short.

Art Buchwald, who celebrated his birthday on Oct. 20, is 81 and, it seems, long for this Earth.