Robert David Sanders "Bob" Novak died he was 78. Novak was a syndicated columnist, journalist and conservative political commentator and for 45 years the author of what was during his lifetime the longest-running current syndicated column in U.S. political history.[1] Over his career, Novak became well-known as a columnist (writing Inside Report since 1963) and as a television personality (appearing on many shows for CNN, most notably on three former programs, The Capital Gang, Crossfire, and Evans, Novak, Hunt, & Shields). On August 4, 2008, Novak announced that he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and that his prognosis was "dire", and that he was retiring.[2] However, on August 27, 2008, he resumed writing opinion columns distributed by Creators Syndicate.[3](February 26, 1931 – August 18, 2009)
Novak was born in Joliet, Illinois, the son of Jane Sanders and Maurice Novak, a chemical engineer.[4] His paternal grandparents immigrated from the Ukraine, and his mother's family was from Lithuania.[4] Novak's journalism career began when he was in high school as a student-writer for the Joliet Herald-News, his hometown newspaper. After high school, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I) from 1948–1952. While attending University of Illinois, he became a brother of Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. He continued gaining journalism experience as a sports writer for the Daily Illini (DI), the student newspaper at University of Illinois. However, his disappointment at not being named Sports Editor his senior year (he lost the job to Tony Garcia) caused him to quit the DI and go to work for the local community newspaper, The Champaign-Urbana Courier, where he was also a sportswriter. After four years at University of Illinois, Novak was one course short of graduating, and when he left the university to become a full-time journalist, he did so without a degree (Some forty years later, the University of Illinois saw fit to award Novak sufficient credits from his career in journalism to qualify him for a degree, and he became an Illinois graduate).
During the Korean War, Novak served in the U.S. Army, and reached the rank of lieutenant. After the war, he joined the Associated Press (AP) and became a political correspondent in Indianapolis, Indiana. In 1957, Novak was transferred to Washington, D.C. where he reported on Congress; he left the AP to join the D.C. bureau of The Wall Street Journal in 1958, covering the Senate, and in 1961 becoming their chief congressional correspondent.
In 1963, he teamed up with Rowland Evans to create the Evans-Novak Political Report, a six-times a week newspaper column. Novak continued the column after Evans' death in 2001, though the traditional Evans-Novak name continued. In the early 21st century, Regnery Publishing bought the newsletter from Novak, but left editorial control and hiring decisions in Novak's hands. In 2006, Timothy P. Carney of Regnery became Novak's partner in the column. On February 4, 2009, Novak announced he was ending publication of the newsletter.[5]
Novak's column was syndicated by the Chicago Sun-Times. His columns often contained original reporting in addition to analysis and opinion. Novak is one of many reporters mentioned in Timothy Crouse's seminal non-fiction book about reporters covering the 1972 U.S. presidential campaign, The Boys on the Bus.
Novak was a Radford Visiting Professor of Journalism at Baylor University in 1987.
Novak's column had been distributed to newspapers nationally by Creators Syndicate since 1989. He is the 2001 winner of the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award for lifetime achievement in journalism.[6]
Novak's wife Geraldine was a secretary for President Lyndon Johnson. Their daughter, Zelda, worked for Ronald Reagan's Presidential campaign and for Vice President Dan Quayle. They have a son Alex, who works as an editor at Regnery Publishing.[7]
Robert Novak was not related to social commentator Michael Novak.[8]
Novak was a registered Democrat despite his conservative political views. He held more centrist views in his early career, and he supported the Democratic presidential candidacies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, of whom he was a friend.[9]
Novak tended toward low-tax, small-government libertarian views, but his disagreements with mainstream Republicans and neoconservatives—specifically his opposition to the Iraq War[10]—have earned him the label of being a "paleoconservative". In July 2007 Novak expressed support for Ron Paul's bid for the presidency.[11]
Raised Jewish, Novak was introduced to Catholicism when his friend, Jeffrey Bell, Republican political consultant and former Reagan aide, gave him some books on the Catholic faith.[12] Novak converted to Roman Catholicism in 1998,[13] after meeting Peter Vaghi, whom he had known before Vaghi switched from politics to the priesthood.
During the FBI investigation into Orlando Letelier's assassination, the contents of the briefcase he had with him were copied and leaked to Novak and his partner Rowland Evans as well as Jack Anderson of the New York Times by the FBI before being returned to Letelier's widow.[14] According to Novak and Evans, the documents showed that Letelier was in constant contact with the leadership of the Unidad Popular exiled in East Berlin and supported by the East German Government.[15] The FBI suspected that these leaders had been recruited by the Stasi.[16] According to Novak, Evans and Anderson documents in the briefcase showed that Letelier had maintained contact with Salvador Allende’s daughter, Beatriz Allende wife of Cuban DGI station chief Luis Fernandez Ona. [15][17]
According to the Novak and Evans, Letelier was able to receive funding of $5,000 a month from the Cuban government and under the supervision of Beatriz Allende, he used his contacts within the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and western human rights groups to organize a campaign within the United Nations as well as the US Congress to isolate the new Chilean government.[18] Novak and Evans claimed this was part of an organized campaign to put pressure on Pinochet’s government closely coordinated by the Cuban and Soviet governments, using individuals like Letelier to implement these efforts. Letelier's briefcase also allegedly contained his address book which contained the names of dozens of known and suspected Eastern Bloc intelligence agents. All correspondence between Letelier and individuals in Cuba was supposedly handled via Julian Rizo, who used his diplomatic status to hide his activities.[16][19]
Fellow IPS member and friend Saul Landau described Evans and Novak as part of an “organized right wing attack”. In 1980, Letelier's widow, Isabel, wrote in the New York Times that the money sent to her late husband from Cuba was from western sources, and that Cuba had simply acted as an intermediary.[20]
In 2003, he identified Valerie Plame as a CIA "operative" in his column[21], as well as the organizational name of the company she used as cover, Brewster Jennings & Associates, the other operatives who worked for Brewster Jennings, and the informants who met with them. Although it is illegal for anyone, government official or otherwise, to distribute classified information (under US Code, Title 18, Section 793, Paragraph e)[22], Novak was never charged with this crime[why?]. Novak reported the information was provided to him by two "senior administration officials." These were eventually revealed to be Richard Armitage, who e-mailed him using the pseudonym "Flannel", with Novak assuming Karl Rove's comments as confirmation.[23] During 2005, there were questions in the press regarding the apparent absence of focus on Novak by the special prosecutor Fitzgerald and the grand jury, specifically questions suggesting he may have already testified about his sources despite insisting publicly that he would not do so. For his perceived lack of journalistic integrity, Robert Novak was awarded the epithet of Douchebag of Liberty by political satirist Jon Stewart.[24]
On July 12, 2006, Novak published a column at Human Events stating:
| “ | Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has informed my attorneys that, after two and one-half years, his investigation of the CIA leak case concerning matters directly relating to me has been concluded. That frees me to reveal my role in the federal inquiry that, at the request of Fitzgerald, I have kept secret. I have cooperated in the investigation while trying to protect journalistic privileges under the First Amendment and shield sources who have not revealed themselves. I have been subpoenaed by and testified to a federal grand jury. Published reports that I took the Fifth Amendment, made a plea bargain with the prosecutors or was a prosecutorial target were all untrue.[25] | ” |
When Richard Armitage admitted to being a source, Novak wrote an op-ed column describing Armitage's self-disclosure as "deceptive."[26]
In 2008, however, an unrepentant Novak said in an interview with Barbara Matusow from the Nation Ledger:
| “ | From a personal point of view, I said in the book I probably should have ignored what I'd been told about Mrs. Wilson. Now I'm much less ambivalent. I'd go full speed ahead because of the hateful and beastly way in which my left-wing critics in the press and Congress tried to make a political affair out of it and tried to ruin me. My response now is this: The hell with you. They didn't ruin me. I have my faith, my family, and a good life. A lot of people love me – or like me. So they failed. I would do the same thing over again because I don't think I hurt Valerie Plame whatsoever. [27] | ” |
In the same interview, Novak also stated:
| “ | Journalistically, I thought it was an important story because it explained why the CIA would send Joe Wilson – a former Clinton White House aide with no track record in intelligence and no experience in Niger – on a fact-finding mission to Africa.[27] | ” |
In fact, Joseph Wilson is a former United States Foreign Service diplomat who had been posted to African nations and Iraq during several administrations, including the George H. W. Bush administration.
Novak has taken on a pro-Palestinian stance.[28] In his syndicated column, Novak has blamed Israel for the plight and mass exodus of Palestinian Christians. He has also met with several Palestinian Authority officials, including former Education Minister and one of the leaders of Hamas, Nasser al-Shaer. Novak praised former president Jimmy Carter for likening Israeli policy toward the Palestinians to "apartheid" in Israel.[29]
On April 25, 1972, George McGovern won the Massachusetts primary and Novak phoned Democratic politicians around the country, who agreed with his assessment that blue-collar workers voting for McGovern did not understand what he really stood for.[30] On April 27, 1972 Novak reported in a column that an unnamed Democratic senator had talked to him about McGovern.[31] "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot," the Senator said.[31] "Once middle America – Catholic middle America, in particular – finds this out, he’s dead."[31] The label stuck and McGovern became known as the candidate of "amnesty, abortion and acid."[30][32]
Novak was accused of manufacturing the quote.[31] Novak has claimed that, to rebut this criticism, he took the senator to lunch after the campaign and had asked whether he could identify him as the source,[31] but the senator said he would not allow his identity to be revealed.[31] "Oh, he had to run for re-election", said Novak.[30] "The McGovernites would kill him if they knew he had said that," Novak added.[30]
On July 15, 2007, Novak disclosed on Meet the Press that the unnamed senator was Thomas Eagleton.[30] Political analyst Bob Shrum says that Eagleton would never have been selected as McGovern's running mate if it had been known at the time that Eagleton was the source of the quote.[30] Shrum said:
| “ | Boy, do I wish he would have let you publish his name. Then he never would have been picked as vice president. Because the two things, the two things that happened to George McGovern – two of the things that happened to him – were the label you put on him, number one, and number two, the Eagleton disaster. We had a messy convention, but he could have, I think in the end, carried eight or 10 states, remained politically viable. And Eagleton was one of the great train wrecks of all time.[30] | ” |
Eagleton died March 4, 2007, "relieving me of the need to conceal his identity," Novak wrote.[31] Some of Eagleton’s former aides were reportedly angry that Eagleton's name was attached to a quote that made him appear duplicitous.[31] Asked about the story, Novak acknowledged that disclosing Eagleton’s identity was "a judgment on my part."[31] If there’s any disagreement, Eagleton could settle it with him in heaven "or wherever we end up," Novak added.[31]
Novak and Evans both joined CNN as political analysts in 1980. Eventually they were given their own weekend interview program Evans and Novak where they interviewed prominent figures in the news. He was the co-host from the right-wing of CNN's Crossfire, a political debate show featuring a host from the left-wing and a host from the right-wing debating each other. He also appeared regularly on CNN's Inside Politics as a commentator.
On August 4, 2005, Novak walked off the set during a live broadcast of the CNN show Inside Politics, on which he appeared along with Democratic strategist and analyst James Carville (with whom Novak had debated for years on Crossfire). During a heated discussion about Florida Republican Representative Katherine Harris' just-announced 2006 bid for U.S. Senate, Novak uttered an expletive; and as anchor Ed Henry was asking Carville a question, Novak threw off his microphone and stormed off the set.[33][34] Critics later charged that Novak had done so to avoid discussing recent developments in the Valerie Plame affair on-air. In response to the incident, CNN suspended Novak for one day and apologized to its viewers, calling the outburst "inexcusable and unacceptable."[35]
Novak retired from CNN after 25 years on December 23, 2005, stating that his relationship with the network lasted "longer than most marriages". Novak also said he had "no complaints" about CNN. Fox News had confirmed one week earlier that Novak had signed a contract to do unspecified work for the network. Novak stated that he still would have left CNN even if he had not been kicked off in the August incident and did not go to Fox News because the network was more friendly to his point of view. Novak said:
| “ | In 25 years I was never censored by CNN and I said some fairly outrageous things and some very conservative things. I don't want to give the impression that they were muzzling me and I had to go to a place that wouldn't muzzle me. | ” |
Novak was third in most appearances on NBC's Meet the Press, behind David Broder of the Washington Post and May Craig of the Portland Press Herald. He was a Fox News contributor since 2006 and continued to write his opinion column for the Chicago Sun-Times.[36]
His memoirs, entitled Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years Reporting in Washington, were published in July 2007 by Crown Forum, a division of Random House. "Prince of Darkness" was a nickname given to Novak by his friend, reporter John Lindsay, "because [Lindsay] thought for a young man I took a very dim view of the prospects for our civilization," Novak said in an interview.[37]
On May 15, 2008, Novak wrote a column celebrating and reviewing his 45 year career as a reporter and columnist. Novak noted that, presently, his column is the "nation's longest-running current syndicated political column."[1] Novak also stated it was his intention to continue to report and write his column and to "die in the saddle without retiring."
On July 23, 2008, Novak received a citation from police for "failing to yield a right of way" to an 86-year-old pedestrian, Don Clifford Liljenquist, who was hit by Novak's Corvette in slow-moving traffic. Novak drove approximately one block from the scene before being flagged down by a cyclist who had witnessed the accident and subsequently called the police. Novak said that he was unaware that a collision had occurred until being informed by eyewitnesses. The pedestrian was taken to George Washington University Hospital and treated for a dislocated shoulder.[38][39][40][41]
On July 27, 2008, just days after the car accident, Novak was admitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In a written statement given to his publisher, Novak said: “Doctors will soon begin appropriate treatment. I will be suspending my journalistic work for an indefinite but, God willing, not too lengthy period.”[42] Hospital residents check for brain tumors in patients who didn't realize they struck something in a car accident, as this can be a focal neurologic sign.[43] Novak tendered his resignation from his column on August 4, 2008 after revealing that the prognosis on his tumor was considered "dire".[44] Later that month, he began writing new opinion columns for Creators Syndicate.[45]
On February 4, 2009, Novak announced in his newsletter, the Evans-Novak Political Report, that the biweekly newsletter would be coming to an end due to his illness. The newsletter, started four years after the column, had been published continuously since 1967.
Novak died on August 18, 2009, due to complications from brain cancer.[46]
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