Robert David Sanders Novak (February 26, 1931 – August 18, 2009) was an American syndicated columnist, journalist, television personality, author, and conservative political commentator. After working for two newspapers before serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and then for The Wall Street Journal. He teamed up with Rowland Evans in 1963 to start Inside Report, which became the longest running syndicated political column in U.S. history and ran in hundreds of papers. They also started the Evans-Novak Political Report, a biweekly newsletter, in 1967.
Novak and Evans played a significant role for CNN after the network's founding. He worked as a television personality in programs such as Capital Gang, Crossfire, and Evans, Novak, Hunt, & Shields. He also wrote for numerous other publications such as Reader's Digest. He died of a brain tumor on August 18, 2009.
His colleagues nicknamed Novak the "Prince of Darkness", a description that he embraced and later used as a title for his autobiography. He started out with moderate or liberal views, but later served as a voice for American conservatism in his writing and television appearances.
Early life
Novak was born on February 26, 1931, in Joliet, Illinois, the son of Jane Sanders and Maurice Novak, a chemical engineer. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Ukraine, and his mother's family was from Lithuania. Novak's parents were secular Jews who had little interaction with their local Jewish community and rarely attended religious services. Novak suffered from chronic bronchitis through his early childhood, which led his mother to drive him to and from school instead of letting him walk. Because of the constant family attention, his cousins mockingly called him "Baby Jesus". Novak also loved to tease, offend, and shock his family from an early age, and he later compared himself to French rebel Bertran de Born.
He continued gaining journalism experience as a sports writer for the Daily Illini (DI), the college's student newspaper. Novak wrote how his disappointment about not being named the paper's main sports editor for the 1951–52 school year led him to skip his senior classes and to work full time for the Champaign-Urbana Courier. After four years at the University, Novak left it to become a full-time journalist without a degree, even though he was only one course short of the requirements. In 1993 a college Dean determined that four mandatory physical education classes that Novak had gone through for no credit should constitute enough credit hours, and Novak received his bachelor's degree. Novak later described his academic achievements as "very uneven." He spoke at the university's May 1998 commencement, and in his speech he credited the college for bringing him up from working class immigrant status into the American middle class.
In 1967 Evans and Novak set up a biweekly political newsletter called the Evans–Novak Political Report (ENPR). They took a more broad approach in this series compared to their column, focusing on forecast elections and predicting socio-political trends rather than on breaking stories. Regnery Publishing eventually bought ENPR from Novak, but it left editorial control and hiring decisions in Novak's hands. In 2006, Timothy P. Carney of Regnery became Novak's partner in the newsletter. On February 4, 2009, Novak announced he was ending ENPR's publication. This last issue described the implications of Barack Obama's election as President, which the authors labeled a political 'paradigm shift'. Conservative writers such as John Fund, who later worked for The Wall Street Journal, Tim Carney (author of "The Big Ripoff," "Obamanomics"), and David Freddoso, who later worked for National Review Online, started off as contributors to the ENPR.
Novak became a regular panel member of the syndicated show The McLaughlin Group in 1982, starring alongside McLaughlin as well as Novak's friend Jack Germond. Novak sparred frequently with McLaughlin despite the fact that they both held similar political views.
Novak appeared on CNN on its opening week in 1980. His status as a well-known print reporter brought a sense of credibility to the fledgling new network, and Novak soon created a weekly interview show that Evans co-hosted. He established a public image as a combative debater on the program. Novak later became the executive producer of Capital Gang on CNN, which also featured him as a panelist on the show and included his friends Al Hunt and Mark Shields. after Carville remarked that Novak had "to show these right-wingers that he's got a backbone." As anchor Ed Henry was asking Carville a question, Novak threw off his microphone and stormed off the set. 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."
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 suspended in the August incident and did not go to Fox News because the network was more friendly to his point of view. Novak said:
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. Novak loved the nickname. He once dressed up as Darth Vader to a dinner with the Gridiron Club, and he then sang a song about Dick Cheney as the character.
At his height, Novak was one of the five most read columnists in the U.S. He served as a longtime CNN television personality, and he appeared intermittently on Fox News after his August 2005 departure from CNN.
Recognition
Novak received an Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1997. Novak frequently visited his alma mater and interacted with students, establishing a scholarship in his name to support English and rhetoric majors in 1992. He spoke at the college's May 1998 commencement, urging graduates to use their education as a "bulwark against tyranny." Novak also served as a Radford Visiting Professor of Journalism for Baylor University in 1987. He was the 2001 winner of the National Press Club's 'Fourth Estate Award' for lifetime achievement in journalism as well. Novak appears in the 2008 award-winning documentary on political strategist Lee Atwater, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. In the film, Novak says "He tried to get me to write about Governor Dukakis having psychiatric problems but it really was a slander. He thought my weakness was that if I could get an exclusive story, I would jump at it, bite at it and not be as careful as I should be. That may be true, but I was careful enough not to get involved in that one."
Robert Novak was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the governor of Illinois in 1999 in the area of communications.
Notable events
Nixon administration
Novak pursued a continuous attack upon Richard Nixon's key aide H. R. Haldeman. He later wrote in his autobiography, "Bob Haldeman was treated more harshly because he refused any connection with me. He made himself more of a target than he had to be by refusing to be a source." When they had started the column, Novak paid a 'courtesy call' to Nixon, who took the opportunity to admonish them to give Republicans a break. 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. The FBI suspected that these leaders had been recruited by the Stasi. 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.
According to 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 and western human rights groups to organize a campaign within the United Nations as well as the U.S. Congress to isolate Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.
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. Reporter John Nichols has written in The Nation that observers should "have a hard time forgiving" Novak for his role in the incident.
CIA leak scandal
In 2003, he identified Valerie Plame as a CIA "operative" in his column of July 14. In doing so, he indirectly disclosed 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 knowingly distribute classified information (under US Code, Title 18, Section 793, Paragraph e), Novak was never charged with this crime because there was no evidence that Novak knew that Ms. Plame was a covert agent. 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 "Wildford," with Novak assuming Karl Rove's comments as confirmation. 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.
On July 12, 2006, Novak published a column at Human Events stating:
When Richard Armitage admitted to being a source, Novak wrote an op-ed column describing Armitage's self-disclosure as "deceptive."
In 2008, however, an unrepentant Novak said in an interview with Barbara Matusow from the Nation Ledger:
In a New York Times article in 2010, Valerie Plame said that the disclosure "destroyed (her husband's) international consulting business, wrecked her espionage career and nearly took down their marriage".
In the same interview, Novak also stated: