This review appears in the October 2007 issue of The
American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
edition, click here.
The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in
Washington
By Robert D. Novak
(Crown Forum, 662 pages, $29.95)
“I am not a person who is easy for a lot of people to like,” Bob
Novak writes early in this not-massive-enough memoir. But how can
anyone ever dislike someone who never fails to make an
impression, and always with an economy of words and never by
shooting his mouth off?
I remember the first time I met him. It was early June 1983, in a
conference room at the Army-Navy Club in Washington, where my
magazine was hosting a dozen or so visiting British and European
journalists and such eminences as Novak, Chris Matthews, and
Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post had kindly come by
to brief them on U.S. politics. One problem: the visitors were
nowhere to be found. “I’m getting angry, I’m getting angry,”
Novak soon enough let on, drumming his fingers on the table in
front of his chair and giving me a look that could kill. The
session was to have begun promptly at 1 p.m. Our visitors didn’t
stagger in from their three-beer lunches until about 10-15
minutes later, oblivious to the insult they’d caused.
Fortunately, the storm clouds lifted, Novak gave an expert
presentation (certainly better than Matthews’s hammering away at
“the gender gap”), answered questions, and soon was off to his
next designation.
One thing was immediately clear. This was a no-nonsense
professional, someone who works very hard, can’t afford to waste
time, yet is also generous with it, as I’ve had occasion to
observe many times since. Whenever I come across Michael
Kinsley’s famous slam at Novak, “Underneath the ass—— is a nice
guy, but underneath the nice guy is another ass——,” I cringe,
not just for Kinsley’s sake, who for all we know was projecting,
but for Novak’s, who has probably suffered more abuse than any
journalist in Washington history, the recent Plame nonsense being
merely the latest example. Typically, though, in a memoir that
has some wonderfully blunt things to say about numerous
Washington personages, Novak never responds to Kinsley in kind.
Not even close. Underneath it all is a well-mannered gentleman.
And a gentleman reporter keeps most everything tight to the vest
(his first came with the three-piece suit he purchased in frigid
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1960). It’s been like that for five
decades and counting. Consider a small recent dinner for Fred
Thompson attended by Novak and George Will, among others. The
discussion was political, cordial if cool. If not for this
memoir, one would not have known that Thompson was a source of
his during Watergate — they’d first met at a Washington watering
hole — or that the fiercely competitive Novak has been a
longtime admirer of Will, and in 1972 had unsuccessfully
recommended Will to succeed David Lawrence at the Publishers-Hall
syndicate. Rejecting Will’s sample columns, Novak’s contact at
the syndicate told him, “The words are too long, the sentences
are too long, the paragraphs are too long, the whole damn columns
are too long. Bob, it’s not a newspaper column.”
Novak knew better, of course. Already by 1972 he’d been in the
newspaper business for more than 20 years, including a senior
year at the University of Illinois spent working for the
Champaign-Urbana Courier (which almost cost him his
senior year — but that’s another story). A temporary AP gig in
Omaha led to full-time political reporting in Lincoln and then in
Indianapolis, a transfer to Washington in 1957 and a year later a
move to the Wall Street Journal, whose presence in
Washington grew exponentially once it had Novak to cover the
Senate and the 1960 presidential campaign. In 1961 Vermont
Royster offered him a leading editorial position in New York that
in 1963 would go to Robert Bartley. By then he had accepted
Rowland Evans’s offer to join him as his partner in a
double-bylined syndicated column for the New York
Herald-Tribune. An instant hit, initially it ran six
mornings a week (among book and other writing projects, and soon
enough, television, thanks above all to the pioneering work of Ed
Turner). Even today, almost 15 years after Evans’s retirement,
Novak files three columns a week.
INSIDER WASHINGTON REPORTING has not seen anything like it,
providing new information in every offering and requiring its
authors to be no less politically savvy than its subjects and
cultivating sources relentlessly. I lost track of the individuals
Novak mentions as important sources — at times he comes across
as a director of central intelligence continually tapping into
many networks of informants, knowing all the while that some
might be more self-serving or devious than others. Some would
arrange drops. Others would meet only in dank restaurants. And
once in a while one of them would get Novak into trouble.
In one such instance, a good friend of his passed along a long
memorandum from an off-the-record lunch in New York with
Washington Post-Newsweek executives at which
Secretary of State Dean Rusk heatedly denounced
“pseudo-intellectual” critics of the Vietnam War. It was too
juicy not to use, even though Novak had to lie to protect his
source-who happened to be a Washington Post reporter-and even
though Katharine Graham, president of the Washington Post
Company, had attended the lunch. Imagine her surprise when in her
own newspaper on the morning of October 13, 1967, she read about
Rusk’s off-the-record remarks to “a select group of New York
executives.” First thing that day, Novak received a frosty call
from her. “She told me that I had caused her personal
humiliation,” and said to him “our personal relationship is now
at an end.” That was no skin off Novak’s nose — he had met her
for the first time only several weeks earlier when, at LBJ’s
request, she had called Evans and Novak in to ask them to be
nicer to him. Novak just didn’t want to see their
professional relationship come to an end. A profuse,
500-word letter of apology from Novak helped save his neck. The
Washington Post was and remains the Novak column’s most
important outlet.
Other sources Novak liked he later learned were snakes — David
Stockman, for instance, who it turned out was alternating
Saturday breakfasts with Novak and William Greider, author of the
notorious Atlantic article in which Stockman mocked the
supply-side policies he was supposedly championing. “You must
think I’m Judas,” Stockman said to Novak, in the last
conversation they ever had. At least they had one. Bill Kristol,
a source and friend for 17 years, Novak writes, never returned a
call as promised after Novak’s patriotism was questioned in
National Review on the outbreak of the Iraq war, and
when asked about Novak on C-Span during the Plame hysteria,
replied, “Novak is a friend — [pause] — an acquaintance.” One
can sense this washing of hands hurt Novak more than all the
physical pain he’s withstood in his long career — since 1981
alone he has survived spinal meningitis, two cancer operations,
and two broken hips. He’s a very tough guy, but even tough guys
have real feelings.
You won’t be able to put this book down.
