A sad thing happened yesterday. The Washington Post’s
Thursday edition didn’t have Robert Novak’s column on the op-ed
page. And it won’t ever again.
Reading that column on Thursday mornings was a ritual of mine
ever since I picked up the habit of reading the Post. I
sometimes missed the Monday column because that’s a hectic day and
the Post — for whatever reason — never carried his
Sunday column.
But Thursdays I never missed. Hot coffee in one hand and smudgy
newsprint in the other, I’d read the front page and flip through
the rest to find out what had happened. Then I’d skip to Novak’s
column to find out why it had happened.
Well, no longer. Novak abruptly retired his column Monday in the
same press release that he announced that he had been diagnosed
with a brain tumor.
The prognosis? “Dire,” according to the Chicago-Sun
Times.
His column had been around for so long — 45 years! — and was
such an institution that I, like others, had simply assumed that
the “Prince of Darkness” really was immortal. Like the Washington
Monument, he’d always be there.
Instead, Thursday morning was a painful reminder that even
institutions can end.
NOVAK RARELY disappointed. His greatness came from the fact that he
remained a journalist.
He was not into spin, parroting a party line or sharing his
innermost thoughts and gripes with us. Every column was based on
actual shoe leather reporting. He worked sources, tracked down
leads, dug up documents, and reported what he found.
Looking back on it, you wonder how the man managed to do it. He
put out three columns a week, not counting magazine articles,
books, and regular appearances on CNN, Meet the Press,
etc. It’s a grueling pace for anyone, and he kept it up well into
his seventies.
Despite that long history in D.C., he rarely lapsed into
nostalgia. His columns were about what was going on here and now,
not how great things used to be. At 77, he was still breaking
news.
If the people mentioned in the column did not like what he
reported, well, they could go pound sand. Novak didn’t care. The
Prince of Darkness did what he did; you had to deal with it, not
him.
That extended to his fellow conservatives. To my mind, Novak did
some of his finest reporting on the GOP’s 1994 revolution. He saw
that revolution was going off the rails before anyone else.
It was from reading Novak’s columns that you realized that while
Newt Gingrich was a great revolutionary, he was not a great
parliamentary leader. More than a decade later, Gingrich was still
fuming over Novak’s reporting.
To take another example: Did you know that Richard Nixon hatched
a secret plot to take the GOP nomination away from Barry Goldwater
in 1964?
“His presumption was that the opposition to Barry Goldwater was
so extensive that deadlock was inevitable. Nixon figured he would
resolve it as the compromise candidate,” Novak wrote in his
memoirs. When the deadlock didn’t happen Nixon tried to force
it.
Novak reported all of this in a November, 1964 Esquire
article. His relations with Nixon were frosty for years
afterwards.
THAT’S THE PRICE of maintaining your independence. He accumulated
enemies like barnacles on a battleship.
It’s no secret that many people viewed the Plame affair as a
long-overdue comeuppance, regardless of what Novak actually
unmasked Valerie Plame as being. Former Post ombudsman
Geneva Overholser called him “a disgrace to journalism” to his
face.
Of course die-hard liberals hated him the most. I remember
mentioning his latest column to a fairly prominent left-wing writer
over coffee one morning. Our pleasant conversation immediately
turned south. Soon I was wiping spittle from my lapel.
“Novak said what?” snarled the writer. “Somebody’s paying him
off!”
The possibility that Novak’s reporting was actually right, well,
that was never contemplated by my liberal friend. I always thought
it’d be a great story to tell Novak.
Not sure I’ll ever get the chance now.
JUST LAST YEAR he published his memoirs, The Prince of
Darkness, which just happens to also be one of the best
alternative histories of 20th century American politics ever
written.
Reviewing it for Doublethink, I wrote, “one does begin
to wonder how much longer he can keep it going.” After all, the man
had suffered through “four cancer scares and two broken hips, among
other health problems.”
I pointed out that memoirs like this one are “usually preludes
to retirement,” but in the end doubted that Novak would be giving
up his “first and truest love” of breaking stories anytime
soon.
Boy does it ever smart to be proven wrong about that. Come on
Bob, prove me wrong once again. Beat this with the same gusto you
used to beat those deadlines for 50 years.
