Battling for the Right
by Dick Polman
AUGUST 20, 2009 TAGS:
Within minutes of the announcement on Tuesday that the Prince of Darkness had died, the multitudes who hated him were already busy posting celebratory comments online. Without delving into the lurid specifics, suffice it to say that a fair number of people dearly hoped that Robert Novak would spend eternity in the netherworld best known for its fiery climate.
But it’s a testament to Novak’s sheer durability that he sparked such a clamorous sendoff. Thousands of political journalists, many of them quite gifted, work productively in Washington without ever piercing the public consciousness. Novak, who died of brain cancer at age 78, attained celebrity notoriety not simply because he scowled, sneered, and smirked on CNN for nearly 30 years, but also because, dating all the way back to the Eisenhower era, he had perfected the Zelig-like ability to be wherever the action was.
Actually, Zelig was just a Woody Allen character that popped up in the background of historic events; Novak was always a disruptive foreground kind of guy. Indeed, he was 72 years old -- an age by which most journalists have long been put out to pasture -- when he wrote the now-infamous column that outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. He wrote it with some backstage help from Karl Rove, who was angry that Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had publicly questioned President Bush’s false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Rove had long been a Novak source, but so, it seemed, was everybody else. Young Novak covered Lyndon Johnson when LBJ was still a senator, once serving as Johnson’s designated driver when the future president got drunk. Novak rode around Georgetown with JFK. He interviewed Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa decades before Hoffa wound up in cement somewhere.
Basically, Novak was a shoe-leather reporter who outworked virtually all his colleagues, and by age 31 he was partnering with Rowland Evans on a national column that retailed news scoops and inside dope five days a week. A lot of their “inside” stuff was hyped for faux intrigue -- veteran D.C. scribe Jack Germond once quipped that Novak’s phrase “secret meeting” was really a synonym for “a meeting nobody gives a [darn] about” -- and critics referred to Evans and Novak as “Errors and No Facts.” But Washington big shots learned that it was wiser to leak to Novak, who did most of the grunt work, if only to stay on his good side.
Such as it was. Indeed, Novak’s image as the Prince of Darkness (an epithet he happily embraced, using it as the title of his 2007 memoir) first took root during this early period. By nature he was a stubbornly independent loner who always seemed ticked off; as a magazine journalist once told author Timothy Crouse, “there’s a real tight coil of bitterness in the guy.”
Unlike so many Washington journalists, Novak lacked a preppy Eastern pedigree. His grandfather had worked on the John Deere assembly line, and his dad was a gas company superintendent in Joliet, Ill. He grew up in a family of Jewish Republicans, and there aren’t too many of them. Novak’s contrarian outsider instincts were further honed in Washington. The fashion during the ’60s was to be liberal; Novak went the other way, increasingly so.
Consider, for instance, his instinctive distaste for George McGovern, the liberal Democratic nominee in 1972. That spring, he quoted an anonymous source who complained that McGovern favored “legalization of pot.” He never bothered to fact-check the quote; if he had done so, he would have discovered that McGovern opposed the legalization of pot. The story was better without checking, and it damaged McGovern’s efforts to connect with conservative Democrats.
Then came the advent of cable television. When CNN dawned one weekend in 1980, Novak was there.
He was actually way ahead of his time, becoming one of the first multiplatform journalists. The problem, however, was that the conflict-driven medium accentuated his natural combativeness -- and his increasingly shrill conservatism. Shortly after 9/11, for instance, he took issue with a viewer who had suggested in an e-mail that it was patriotic to debate foreign policy during wartime. His on-air response to the viewer: “It was people like you who undermined our forces in the Vietnam War and brought communist tyranny to a country that didn’t deserve it.”
In 2004, he was particularly besotted by the paradoxically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the gang that smeared John Kerry’s war record. Yet Novak, in the midst of his Swift Boat pitches and anti-Kerry bellowings, never deigned to reveal this little detail: His son was the marketing director for the conservative firm that was publishing Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. (After that conflict came to light, Jon Stewart called Novak “a douche bag of liberty,” and Novak retaliated by calling Stewart an “idiot.”)
It’s altogether appropriate that the Valerie Plame affair capped Novak’s career. In the summer of 2003, when it wasn’t cool to question Bush’s march to war, Novak was openly dismissive of anybody -- such as Joseph Wilson -- who tried. On Meet the Press, eight days before he outed Wilson’s wife, Novak insisted that any complaints about the dearth of WMDs in Iraq “are little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.”
There are laws on the books that prohibit the outing of a CIA agent, but Novak was never charged with anything. A federal prosecutor was tasked to find out who had leaked Plame’s identity, and a slew of journalists got caught in his web. Matt Cooper of Time nearly went to jail for refusing to reveal his sources and what they knew. Judy Miller of the New York Times did go to jail, for 85 days.
As for Novak, he stayed mum for two years; only later did he reveal that he had cooperated with the prosecutor all along. In the meantime, he never voiced a word of regret for outing Plame, or for putting journalistic colleagues in legal jeopardy. And in a magazine interview last November, he had one final message for his critics: “To hell with you.”
Yet, despite his bellicosity and flexible ethics, he died as a member in good standing of the D.C. establishment. His sheer longevity and range of contacts were sufficient to ensure his status, which in the end says more about Washington than about Bob Novak. As Congressman Barney Frank told Vanity Fair a few years ago, Novak’s undimmed celebrity “is the worst, most glaring example of people in Washington putting personal relations over their principles.”
The Prince is dead. Long live the city that indulged him.
But it’s a testament to Novak’s sheer durability that he sparked such a clamorous sendoff. Thousands of political journalists, many of them quite gifted, work productively in Washington without ever piercing the public consciousness. Novak, who died of brain cancer at age 78, attained celebrity notoriety not simply because he scowled, sneered, and smirked on CNN for nearly 30 years, but also because, dating all the way back to the Eisenhower era, he had perfected the Zelig-like ability to be wherever the action was. Actually, Zelig was just a Woody Allen character that popped up in the background of historic events; Novak was always a disruptive foreground kind of guy. Indeed, he was 72 years old -- an age by which most journalists have long been put out to pasture -- when he wrote the now-infamous column that outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. He wrote it with some backstage help from Karl Rove, who was angry that Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had publicly questioned President Bush’s false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Rove had long been a Novak source, but so, it seemed, was everybody else. Young Novak covered Lyndon Johnson when LBJ was still a senator, once serving as Johnson’s designated driver when the future president got drunk. Novak rode around Georgetown with JFK. He interviewed Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa decades before Hoffa wound up in cement somewhere.
Basically, Novak was a shoe-leather reporter who outworked virtually all his colleagues, and by age 31 he was partnering with Rowland Evans on a national column that retailed news scoops and inside dope five days a week. A lot of their “inside” stuff was hyped for faux intrigue -- veteran D.C. scribe Jack Germond once quipped that Novak’s phrase “secret meeting” was really a synonym for “a meeting nobody gives a [darn] about” -- and critics referred to Evans and Novak as “Errors and No Facts.” But Washington big shots learned that it was wiser to leak to Novak, who did most of the grunt work, if only to stay on his good side.
Such as it was. Indeed, Novak’s image as the Prince of Darkness (an epithet he happily embraced, using it as the title of his 2007 memoir) first took root during this early period. By nature he was a stubbornly independent loner who always seemed ticked off; as a magazine journalist once told author Timothy Crouse, “there’s a real tight coil of bitterness in the guy.”
Unlike so many Washington journalists, Novak lacked a preppy Eastern pedigree. His grandfather had worked on the John Deere assembly line, and his dad was a gas company superintendent in Joliet, Ill. He grew up in a family of Jewish Republicans, and there aren’t too many of them. Novak’s contrarian outsider instincts were further honed in Washington. The fashion during the ’60s was to be liberal; Novak went the other way, increasingly so.
Consider, for instance, his instinctive distaste for George McGovern, the liberal Democratic nominee in 1972. That spring, he quoted an anonymous source who complained that McGovern favored “legalization of pot.” He never bothered to fact-check the quote; if he had done so, he would have discovered that McGovern opposed the legalization of pot. The story was better without checking, and it damaged McGovern’s efforts to connect with conservative Democrats.
Then came the advent of cable television. When CNN dawned one weekend in 1980, Novak was there.
He was actually way ahead of his time, becoming one of the first multiplatform journalists. The problem, however, was that the conflict-driven medium accentuated his natural combativeness -- and his increasingly shrill conservatism. Shortly after 9/11, for instance, he took issue with a viewer who had suggested in an e-mail that it was patriotic to debate foreign policy during wartime. His on-air response to the viewer: “It was people like you who undermined our forces in the Vietnam War and brought communist tyranny to a country that didn’t deserve it.” In 2004, he was particularly besotted by the paradoxically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the gang that smeared John Kerry’s war record. Yet Novak, in the midst of his Swift Boat pitches and anti-Kerry bellowings, never deigned to reveal this little detail: His son was the marketing director for the conservative firm that was publishing Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. (After that conflict came to light, Jon Stewart called Novak “a douche bag of liberty,” and Novak retaliated by calling Stewart an “idiot.”)
It’s altogether appropriate that the Valerie Plame affair capped Novak’s career. In the summer of 2003, when it wasn’t cool to question Bush’s march to war, Novak was openly dismissive of anybody -- such as Joseph Wilson -- who tried. On Meet the Press, eight days before he outed Wilson’s wife, Novak insisted that any complaints about the dearth of WMDs in Iraq “are little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.”
There are laws on the books that prohibit the outing of a CIA agent, but Novak was never charged with anything. A federal prosecutor was tasked to find out who had leaked Plame’s identity, and a slew of journalists got caught in his web. Matt Cooper of Time nearly went to jail for refusing to reveal his sources and what they knew. Judy Miller of the New York Times did go to jail, for 85 days.
As for Novak, he stayed mum for two years; only later did he reveal that he had cooperated with the prosecutor all along. In the meantime, he never voiced a word of regret for outing Plame, or for putting journalistic colleagues in legal jeopardy. And in a magazine interview last November, he had one final message for his critics: “To hell with you.”
Yet, despite his bellicosity and flexible ethics, he died as a member in good standing of the D.C. establishment. His sheer longevity and range of contacts were sufficient to ensure his status, which in the end says more about Washington than about Bob Novak. As Congressman Barney Frank told Vanity Fair a few years ago, Novak’s undimmed celebrity “is the worst, most glaring example of people in Washington putting personal relations over their principles.”
The Prince is dead. Long live the city that indulged him.
RELATED CONTENT
TO ADD A COMMENT, PLEASE FIRST SIGN IN OR REGISTER.
