The news of Bob Novak’s death recalled a line of Roy Blount’s
about a deceased friend: “I was shocked to learn of his death. It
was so unlike him.” So it was with Bob Novak. He was so
relentless in pursuit of his boyhood dreams, so delighted to be
the Joliet kid all grown up and still chasing big-deal Beltway
stories, so alive. After working alongside him for a few years, I
told him that I had finally discovered the secret of his success.
“Novak, you’re not all that smart. You just work harder than
everybody else.” He replied, “My secret is that, for me, it’s not
hard work.” It is a great pleasure, unfortunately a rare
pleasure, to run across somebody who knows exactly what
he should be doing with his life. That was Bob Novak, boy
reporter, dead this week at 78.
I was grateful to Bob Novak for many things, but especially so
for three personal favors. (I’m assuming that anybody reading
this page would know by now that Bob was not really a curmudgeon,
that he just played one on TV.) My first encounter with him was
back in the Sixties when I was dispatched to Washington to open a
bureau for National Review. In terms of journalistic
experience — that fingertip-savvy required to navigate one’s way
through a bureaucracy — I might as well have been dispatched to
Ulan Bator. I was wet in front of the ears. The political climate
was a bit chilly, as well. With LBJ and his Great Society
liberalism running amok (and with many of its excesses covered
sympathetically by then-moderate columnist Bob Novak, recently
married to one of LBJ’s pretty assistants), the idea of helping
an indigent rightwing journal was not high on Bob’s must-do list.
But he was always a sucker for scrappy journalism and he lent a
friendly hand. He found me some space that could pass for an
office, invited me to press events (i.e., events with free food
and drink) and, virtually alone among his peers, didn’t seem
embarrassed to be seen in public with NR’s callow correspondent.
When my tour ended, Bob quickly took my successor in hand. It was
a concierge service, I would later calculate, that he provided
over the years to scores of young journalists.
Roughly twenty years later, with Bob by that time firmly
established as a mega-pundit in multi-media, I, by that time a
semi-established TV producer, was trying to persuade the ABC
station to carry my new show, MoneyPolitics. I knew it
would work, I just knew it would work, but of course TV
executives spend all day talking to guys who just know their
shows will work; almost all of those guys, the record will show,
turn out to be wrong. There was no sale at ABC. What to do? It
was time to call Bob Novak. I needed him, both as “talent” and as
friend of the enterprise. He listened to my pitch, which we both
recognized was canted several rungs beneath his station, almost
insultingly so: “scale wages” (that’s industry jargon for
“peanuts”), no car service, no residuals and — best of all for a
guy who owned a beloved beach house on Fenwick Island — we
planned to shoot the show Friday nights. Only the last point
provoked a question from Novak, a skeptical newsy’s question:
“You’re going to tape Friday night for Sunday air?” I replied,
trying to sound thoughtfully frugal, “Yes, we can split crew
costs by using the hot studio between the 6 and 11 o’clock
newscasts.” To a pro like Bob Novak, a pillar of the talk-show
punditocracy, this was the equivalent of Judy saying to Mickey:
“We can borrow Mr. Wilson’s barn and put on a show that will
knock the socks off the whole town.” Novak glowered at me for a
long moment (he was a world-class glowerer) and said, “I’ll do
it.” And he did. He helped sell ABC on the show and then, Friday
after Friday, he showed up at the end of a long day at the end of
a long week and knocked our socks off. The boy reporter would
always arrive with a scoop for our viewers, our precious few
viewers. Along about ten-thirty at night, he would tool off to
his beach house in a black Corvette, $367 richer.
Some years later, at a reunion of the MoneyPolitics
crew, I noted that we all had gotten something out of the series.
Several of our newbie talents had shot to the edge of stardom —
Alan Murray, Larry Kudlow, Pat Choate and Jim Glassman, among
others. TV can do that. Most of our production team had gone on
to bigtime network jobs. And I, of course, had gained street cred
as a producer. (We frequently beat Meet the Press in the
ratings.) All of us got something out of the show except Bob
Novak, who had done us all a professional favor by agreeing to
play Mr. Wilson’s barn.
Then a few years ago, Bob brought out his autobiography, The
Prince of Darkness. I have yet to meet a reader who was not
simply stunned by that book. It wasn’t that we didn’t think Bob
had it in him. It’s that we didn’t think he had it all in him:
the patience, the fine judgments, the narrative skills and the
sheer balls to pull it off. The book is a masterwork, capturing a
time and place — late-century Washington, D.C. — as indelibly
as Tom Wolfe captured Wall Street in The Bonfire of the
Vanities. For the rest of time, whenever a student or an
anthropologist or a cultural coroner wants to know just what it
was like, that fin de siècle Beltway world, he has only
to crack a copy of Prince. It’s all there.
In the manner of all magisterial books, Prince can be
read at several levels. For the citizen, it’s a file from a
clear-eyed foreign correspondent, reporting with an air of
disbelief from a distant capital. For us recovering journalists,
it’s an operating manual. For every big story he covered, which
was every story worth covering, Bob opens his files and tells us
who told him what about whom. (His text settles the open
question: Bob Novak, deadline Manichean, did indeed see the world
as divided fundamentally between two opposing groups. No, not
Righties and Lefties. But sources and targets. I suggested to him
once that if he ever got around to founding the Novak School of
Journalism, he should consider adopting the motto, “Leak, or be
leaked upon.”) Doris Lessing, feeling her years, once said: “The
thing about getting old is the number of things you think you
can’t say aloud because it would be too shocking.” In
Prince, Bob Novak says all of those things, loudly.
Bob’s autobiography also includes a few passages about himself,
written, typically, with raw candor. He was too ambitious. He was
too selfish. He drank too much. He was aloof in the Disraeli
mode, never complaining, never explaining. Maybe. But he was
nowhere near as tough as he pretended to be. He could feel pain,
and never more sharply than when David Frum and National
Review gang-punched him for being “unpatriotic.” (His tense
and moving account of this episode appears near the end of Prince
and is worth a second reading.) But let’s not let Bob Novak’s
candor bury our own lede. Even from his own unforgiving account,
it’s clear that he was all you could hope for in a friend, a
journalist and a fellow citizen. He was honest in his work,
humble in his quest for understanding, devoted to his country,
faithful to his family and friends. A man in full.
