Robert Novak, Conservative Columnist, Is Dead at 78

Robert Novak, Conservative Columnist, Is Dead at 78
By DOUGLAS MARTIN and JACQUES STEINBERG
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/business/media/19novak.html?_r=1&hp


Robert D. Novak, the pugnacious political columnist and cable television fixture whose scoops reached across five decades and whose nickname, “the prince of darkness,” was invoked with renewed fervor in 2003 when, acting on a tip, he revealed the name of a C.I.A. officer, setting the stage for a criminal investigation, died Tuesday morning at his home in northwest Washington. He was 78.

The cause was a malignant brain tumor, according to his wife, Geraldine. It was the latest of a number of cancers and maladies, including spinal meningitis and broken bones, that Mr. Novak had suffered in recent years.

Mr. Novak rose from a $68-a-week cub reporter to become the wealthy proprietor of almost a cottage industry, achieving prominence and celebrity as an influential Washington pundit whose views leaned decidedly to the right while parlaying that renown into books, newsletters and political seminars he organized.

At one point his column appeared in as many as 300 newspapers, and he was one of the first personalities to emerge on all-news cable television. CNN put him on the air its first weekend.

He first drew attention as an old-fashioned, notebook-and-shoe-leather newspaperman. For three decades his was the second byline with “Inside Report,” a syndicated column, written with Rowland Evans, that became a must-read for many both inside and outside Washington.

After Mr. Evans retired in 1993, Mr. Novak continued the column alone, writing as recently as September about the tumor that ultimately took his life. Mr. Evans died in 2001.

Among the column’s scoops was a 1978 interview with Deng Xiaoping, which carried a conciliatory message to the United States. Some say the overture helped pave the way for the resumption of diplomatic relations with China the following year.

There were more than 120 Evans and Novak columns about the Watergate burglary alone, one telling of a White House plot to blame the Central Intelligence Agency for the break-in.

During the 1980s, the Evans and Novak column was called, for better or worse, the bulletin board of the Reagan administration. But Al Hunt, the Washington executive editor of Bloomberg News, said it was difficult to pigeonhole Mr. Novak.

“Bob was known for his very tough and hard-line views, but he was also a great reporter who liked a good story even more than his ideology,” said Mr. Hunt, who had worked for The Wall Street Journal for 39 years before joining Bloomberg in 2005. “He was the ‘reverse’ Washington. If you were riding high, Novak loved to kick you. And if you were down, he’d be there for you.”

On cable television, Mr. Novak was the churlish chap in the three-piece suit with the permanently arched eyebrows and contemptuous scowl. He was a regular on various CNN programs, most notably “The Capital Gang,” “Crossfire” and “Evans, Novak, Hunt and Shields,” with Mark Shields, the longtime Washington journalist and former Democratic strategist.

Mr. Novak relished making outrageous comments. He once complained that his Thanksgiving dinner had been ruined by seeing so many homeless people on television. Always combative, he left CNN in 2005 after storming off the set in a row with James Carville, the Democratic strategist and commentator. He later contributed to Fox News.

Morton Kondracke, a colleague on the talk program “The McLaughlin Group,” now on CNN, once characterized the role Mr. Novak played so enthusiastically as “the troll under the bridge of American journalism.”

As for the “prince of darkness” moniker, which John J. Lindsay, a Newsweek reporter, had bestowed, Mr. Novak said he was amused by it. Indeed, he made sly use of it in the title of a memoir in 2007, “The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington” (Crown Forum). He said in the book that the name referred to his pessimism about civilization, not his conservatism.

On television or in print, Mr. Novak had uncanny access to top officials in many administrations. Tucker Carlson, a former CNN colleague, likened Mr. Novak to Bob Woodward.

“You can’t not talk to Bob Novak,” Mr. Carlson told Washington Monthly in 2004. “It’s the law.”

Yet Mr. Novak did not rely solely on senior officials. “Bob Novak was always a human Electrolux, in terms of pulling information from every corner and nook,” Mr. Shields said. “He may be the only major syndicated columnist in Washington who regularly had a meal with the assistant minority staff director of House subcommittees. His sources weren’t status sources.”

Mr. Novak exulted in the fame his broadcast success had brought. “Now strangers come up to me and they say, ‘I love you on television,’ ” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1985.

So when Mr. Novak became embroiled in perhaps the messiest story of his career, Americans had a face on which to focus. The episode began on July 14, 2003, when Mr. Novak published the name of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson. Her husband, the former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, had made public assertions that the Bush administration had justified the invasion of Iraq by distorting intelligence about Iraqi efforts to acquire unconventional weapons. Referring to Ms. Wilson by her maiden name, Plame, Mr. Novak disclosed her identity as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”

A federal investigation began; federal law prohibited the disclosure of the identities of C.I.A. officers in some circumstances. And it led to the conviction of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Mr. Libby was not charged with leaking Ms. Wilson’s name; instead, he was charged with perjury, for lying about his conversations with reporters about Ms. Wilson, and obstruction of justice.

Some reporters were pressured to identify sources with whom they had discussed Ms. Wilson. But to the consternation of some liberals and news media critics, there seemed to be little focus on Mr. Novak. Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, went to jail for 85 days before she agreed, with Mr. Libby’s permission, to testify to a grand jury about her conversations with Mr. Libby.

In interviews, Mr. Novak seemed to rub salt into the wounds of the other journalists. “I don’t know why they’re upset with me,” he told Brian Lamb of C-Span in 2004. “They ought to worry about themselves. I worry about myself.”

Mr. Novak insisted that he would not name his sources, then disclosed them to investigators and a grand jury, saying he had felt free to speak because the sources had identified themselves to the authorities.

(Mr. Novak’s sources were eventually revealed to be Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, and Karl Rove, the longtime political adviser to President George W. Bush. Neither official was charged with violating the law.)

The episode all but culminated a career that had taken off in earnest some 40 years earlier, when, in 1963, James Bellows, the editor of The New York Herald Tribune, asked Mr. Evans, the paper’s chief Washington correspondent, to write a political column, initially six days a week, and agreed to hire another reporter to help. Mr. Evans chose Mr. Novak, then at The Wall Street Journal.

They were an odd couple: Mr. Evans was Philadelphia Main Line, Yale, squash and exclusive clubs. Mr. Novak was a razor-smart small-town boy “looking for trouble,” in his own phrase.

The humorist Art Buchwald said: “Novak is the guy who hits you over the head with the truncheon. And Evans is the guy who offers you a cigarette.”

The Evans-and-Novak method was to unearth a nugget of real news from inside Washington, or pick up on a piece of political gossip, and build a column around it. Over the years the column leaned increasingly in a conservative direction. (The Chicago Sun-Times became its home paper in 1966.)

For all its influence, though, the column could not always document its scoops. In April 1972, Mr. Evans and Mr. Novak reported that Senator George S. McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate, favored abortion rights, legalization of marijuana and amnesty for draft dodgers — positions that crippled his standing with most conservative voters.

Mr. Novak said the source had been a Democratic senator, but his refusal to say more prompted accusations that he had made up the story. Only in 2007 did Mr. Novak say that the source had been Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, who had briefly been Mr. McGovern’s running mate before being forced off the ticket by disclosures about electric shock treatments in his past. Mr. Novak said he had felt free to reveal his source after Mr. Eagleton died that year.

Mr. Novak also admitted to giving, on occasion, misleading descriptions of people quoted anonymously. He might say, for example, that someone worked in Congress when the person actually worked for the State Department, he told Right Wing News in 2007.

“It’s shady on the ethical side,” Mr. Novak said.

Mr. Novak liked to own sporty cars. In July 2008, he was fined $50 for striking a homeless pedestrian in Washington with his black Corvette. He said he did not know that the accident had happened until a witness on a bicycle told the police. The witness said the victim, who was not seriously hurt, had been splayed across Mr. Novak’s windshield.

Shortly afterward, a brain tumor was diagnosed, and Mr. Novak underwent surgery. . But by September of that year, though now officially retired, he was writing again.

“There are mad bloggers who profess to take delight in my distress, but there’s no need to pay them attention in the face of such an outpouring of good will for me,” Mr. Novak wrote in a column that month. “I had thought 51 years of rough-and-tumble journalism in Washington made me more enemies than friends, but my recent experience suggests the opposite may be the case.”

Robert David Sanders Novak was born in Joliet, Ill., on Feb. 26, 1931, in a Republican home. His father was a chemical engineer who ran Joliet’s gas company. Robert worked on the local newspaper as a high school student and attended the University of Illinois, but he left one course short of graduation to serve in the Army for two years during the Korean War.

He then worked in Omaha and Indianapolis for The Associated Press before being transferred to Washington. Mr. Novak was recruited by The Wall Street Journal in 1958 and became known as a skilled political reporter. He also wrote for the paper’s editorial page.

In writing about his life, Mr. Novak said he had a brief first marriage to an Indianapolis debutante but did not identify her. He later married Geraldine Williams, a secretary for Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. Mr. Johnson insisted on giving the wedding reception.

Mr. Novak is survived by his wife; his daughter, Zelda Jane Novak Caldwell; his son, Alexander; and eight grandchildren. A funeral is planned for 10 a.m. Friday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Washington. Mr. Novak wrote seven books, some with Mr. Evans, on Washington politics and personalities. Robert Caro, who is writing a multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, praised their 1966 book “Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power” (New American Library).

“Sometimes you read old biographies where you scarcely take a note,” Mr. Caro told Vanity Fair in 2005. “My sheaf of notes on that book is really thick.”

Mr. Novak grew up Jewish and was in a Jewish fraternity in college, but, like Mr. Evans, he was critical of Israel. He prompted a firestorm when he said the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 had been provoked in part by the United States’ closeness to Israel.

After largely ignoring religion and dabbling in Unitarianism, Mr. Novak, in 1998, at age 67, converted to Roman Catholicism. In a ceremony, Msgr. Peter Vaghi proclaimed that the “prince of darkness” had been transformed into a “child of light.”

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who was in attendance, warned against jumping to conclusions.

“Well, we’ve now made Bob a Catholic,” Mr. Moynihan said, according to Washingtonian magazine. “The question is, Can we make him a Christian?”