The Politico
Jul 21, 2007 09:49 AM EST
Like many memoirs written by Washington insiders, Novak uses the opportunity to get even.
Photo by AP
Robert D. Novak is a different sort of journalist and his is a different sort of memoir. The “Prince of Darkness” – his nickname and the volume’s title – is the last of a vanishing breed. While his contemporaries pen op-eds that are long on opinion and short on reporting, Novak writes a column that is based on shoe leather and sources. His viewpoint is distinctly conservative, but his thrice-a-week product often breaks news from a perch that nowadays is almost exclusively used to offer analysis.
Novak’s style, which has been the subject of rigorous scrutiny in light of his role in the Valerie Plame affair, was once the rule rather than the exception. From Drew Pearson’s “Merry-Go-Round” to Jack Anderson’s sleuthing, the reported column was for decades a Washington fixture. And just as Novak teamed up with Rowland Evans to ferret out scoops as “Evans and Novak,” there was also once the duo of brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop on the scene and, more recently, the partnership of Jack Germond and Jules Witcover.
Few columnists, however, now sniff around the Hill’s cloakrooms or the corridors of far-flung state Capitols to uncover inside dope or discover tomorrow’s political stars. Instead, most columnists prefer to opine on the events of the day, seizing on the reporting of others instead of picking up the phone. There are exceptions – the Washington Post’s George Will frequently writes interview columns, for example, and Time’s Joe Klein and a few others are campaign trail regulars.
But one can’t help but wonder whether, say, a talent such as Illinois Sen. Barack Obama would’ve been discovered by the national press years before his big speech at the Democratic convention in 2004 if more political prognosticators got outside the Beltway and into places like Springfield, Ill.
For all that is lost with the disappearance of this style of journalism, the news is not all bad. There are inherent challenges that come with balancing reportage and opinion, and those come to life in both Novak’s columns and this book. Inevitably, Novak’s views bleed over into the how and why of the news he breaks. So as a supply-sider and Cold War hawk, for example, he was and is more apt to receive and report tidbits that advance the agenda of those who share similar beliefs.
Former Sen. Bob Dole, a frequent Novak target due to Dole’s insufficient devotion to tax cuts, captured the contradiction well in a 1985 television exchange with Novak, which is recounted in the book.
“You attack me in every column,” Dole complained.
“I’m not a Republican,” Novak shot back. “I’m a journalist…”
“You’re an advocate,” replied Dole. “You’re not a journalist.”
Novak seems to recognize the difficulty that comes with wearing two hats, but uses the book to argue that his approach is actually not all that unique. What’s different, he contends, is that he’s just more honest about the way business is done in a town where everything, journalism included, is done on a transactional basis.
Speaking of President Bush’s top political aide Karl Rove at the book’s outset, Novak frankly admits: “I never had enjoyed such a good source inside the White House.”
“Rove obviously thought I was useful for his purposes, too,” Novak surmises. “Such symbiotic relationships, built on self-interest, are the rule in high-level Washington journalism, though journalists seldom are as candid about them as I will be throughout this book.”
Of course, it was this specific symbiotic relationship that has done so much to threaten Novak’s status as a “high-level” Washington journalist in recent years. It was Rove who Novak used as a second source to go with his now-infamous column of July 14, 2003, that disclosed Plame’s identity as a CIA agent. Ironically, for all his hesitance to discuss the case – and especially his sources – during the investigation, Novak happily outs dozens of his go-to tipsters in his memoir.
Ranging from congressional legends such as Everett Dirksen and Wilbur Mills to present day pols like Trent Lott and Fred Thompson (!), the long-deceased and very much alive and active are alike disclosed as Novak sources.
And, Novak admits unapologetically, those who talk get better treatment.
Transcribing a portion of H.R. Haldeman’s diaries that portrays the Nixon chief of staff mulling with other White House aides how to get better treatment from the column, Novak chortles at how naïve they were.
“They probably never considered the simple expedient of Haldeman answering one of my phone calls and maybe inviting one of us to lunch in his West Wing office.”
Of course, Novak quickly adds, no source could buy him off “with a hamburger in the White House” and even some of his best came in for “an occasional dig.”
But Haldeman “was treated more harshly because he refused any connection with me,” Novak writes. “He made himself more of a target than he had to be by refusing to be a source.”
But Novak admits that for all his with-me-or-against-me bravado, the rules of the game were temporary and malleable.
Recalling an instance where another Nixon hand planted a not-totally-true story at Novak’s favorite lunch spot, the now-closed Sans Souci, the columnist admits he got played and cops to his chief weakness – and another vulnerability inevitable in a column that depends on news.
“Nixon had cracked the code on Evans and Novak,” he writes. “We were so ravenous for exclusive news that we were susceptible to manipulation by leaks, compromising our credibility.”
Novak also is not without guilt about the Faustian bargain he struck so often over the years on his way to fame and riches.
Though an admirer of Reagan – one of the few presidents he has anything good to say about the 10 he’s seen during his time in the capital – Novak admits he had his differences with Reagan Chief of Staff-turned-Treasury Secretary James Baker. A prodigious leaker – or, as he would surely prefer it, “backgrounder” – Baker had purportedly been trashing Novak to other journalists.
“Jim,” Novak carped to Baker in a White House meeting, “I don’t think any column has been more supportive of the president on the issues – tax policy and the Cold War – than ours. I don’t think we deserve the treatment you’ve given us.”
Baker replied that while Evans and Novak had been good to Reagan, they had been unfair to him.
“After our conversation on June 11, Baker and I treated each other differently,” Novak writes.
Which is to say that they reached an understanding, a “mutual nonaggression pact,” Novak calls it. Others may deem it as buying protection.
Considering that prospect, Novak admits that “was no way for an independent journalist to act.”
“It bothered me in 1982 and still troubles me today.”
It’s likely to be Novak’s decision to disclose so many of his sources, however, that will spur the most raised eyebrows from his journalistic brethren.
While stating in his author’s note that he “heeded the wishes of those who wanted their identity kept secret,” he writes that he did out others “without asking permission because [he] felt that the material divulged was not that sensitive or that so much time had passed that no great damage would be done.”
But when it comes to the dead, Novak assumes he’s not bound by confidentiality pledges.
In perhaps the most newsworthy and riveting portion of the book, Novak recounts writing a letter to a “Senator X” in 2003 seeking permission to use his name for the memoir.
“No” was the quick and sure answer.
But four years later, in March of this year, the source died and Novak felt it ok to identify Thomas F. Eagleton as the man behind the description of former Sen. George McGovern as the “Triple-A” candidate of 1972, backing “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion.” Eagleton, who served up the description for a column in April of that year, would go on to become McGovern’s running mate until he was dumped when it was revealed that he had undergone electric shock therapy.
Like many memoirs written by Washington insiders, Novak uses the opportunity to get even. Only Novak has 50 years of scores to settle. And that doesn’t even include the 26 years he spent on earth before arriving in the nation’s capital. So it takes 638 pages – down from 1,400 in the original manuscript – for the columnist to tell his side of the story about every slight, real or perceived, he had to endure over the years.
From being beaten out by Morrie Beschloss (historian Michael’s father) for sports editor of the Daily Illini in his senior year at the University of Illinois to being accused of hating America by commentator David Frum in the run-up to an Iraq war that he opposed, Novak pours out the bitterness as the years go by.
So Beschloss’ editorship was “undistinguished, free of mistakes and equally free of successes,” Novak writes, and his “column was pedestrian.” Beschloss never became a journalist, Novak can’t help but add, but rather became “a rich and successful businessman by running the factory he took over from the man whose daughter he married.”
Frum, of course, gets it just as bad. A “Canadian journalist” who “resigned as a presidential speechwriter to write a memoir of his 13 months at the White House [under George W. Bush],” Frum had, of course, lunched with Novak before leaving his job.
“During a pleasant lunch, he dispensed no news and few insights,” Novak shares. But Frum did reveal his restlessness as “low man on the Bush speechwriting totem pole” who “saw his prose discarded” and confessed to missing journalism. Later, when Frum resigned, Novak reported on CNN that there had been suspicion he’d been pushed.
So, naturally, when Frum wrote his story later, lumping Novak with other anti-war conservatives as America-haters, it was “payback time.”
As juicy as such nuggets are, they have the effect of overwhelming the book, particularly as it advances closer to the present. While there remain many fascinating anecdotes of previous campaigns and scandals, Novak insists on using valuable page space to correct past injustices and criticize those who’ve criticized him over the years.
By the time the reader reaches the 2004 Democratic primary, Novak dispenses with the Howard Dean phenomenon and the resurrection of John Kerry’s candidacy in a breezy three paragraphs. Meanwhile, the Frum affair gets nearly six pages.
But, as his readers know, that’s Novak. He’s as irascible and opinionated as he is dogged and well-sourced. To him, the personal, political and professional are all the same. But at 76, he’s still breaking news. His way.
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