A glance at the index of "The Boys on the Bus," the story of the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential campaign, turns up a list of names full of journalistic talent, most of whom are either out of the business of daily journalism or no longer with us — Jack Germond, Curtis Wilkie, Martin Nolan, R.W. Apple, Jules Witcover, and Theodore White. While most of the others have moved offstage over the years, Robert Novak is still making news with his columns. Mr. Novak, rivaled perhaps only by David Broder of the Washington Post for longevity covering goings-on inside the Beltway, is now, at age 76, out with a 638-page memoir, "Prince of Darkness." The book chronicles his years of Washington reporting, television hosting, and general trouble-causing. Attached as bookends to this personal history of reporting, much of it set at the now-defunct Washington bistro Sans Souci, are two chapters that recount Mr. Novak's role in the Plame affair.
The story of Mr. Novak, who was born and raised in Joliet, Ill., to Jewish parents, begins in earnest with a stint at the Wall Street Journal, where he wrote both news stories and "edit-pagers" — longer reported columns on the editorial page — and picks up steam when he joined forces with a WASP from the Philadelphia Main Line, Rowland Evans, commencing a career as a syndicated columnist. The story is filled with private moments of the powerful, his entrée into a senators' cocktail hour hosted by Everett Dirksen of Illinois, his helping a drunken President Johnson into a taxi to get home from the bar at the National Press Club, getting a sporty drive home from President Kennedy. Through it all is a relentless drive to get scoops. It is this characteristic, above all, that keeps Mr. Novak's name on the lips of Washington politicos even as the news business endures entrenchment and younger reporters often look beyond sometimes-mundane source building as they strive to propel their careers forward.
"I think journalists are smarter, better educated today, but they're so interested in getting an angle, they miss a lot of stories," Mr. Novak said. "I'm always stunned at how many stories just aren't covered on the Hill. I don't think they cover what's happening on the floor of the House. They are all looking to be Woodward and Bernstein." Mr. Novak cited a "big battle" over earmarks on Capitol Hill that involved a Democratic effort to single out for termination only one earmark — offered by a Republican congressman, Rep. Patrick McHenry of California. This story, he suggested, reflected the cynicism of legislators. As far as the community of Web commentators goes, Mr. Novak said he wasn't impressed. "The bloggers bloviate. They give their opinions. They don't try to find things out."
In preparing his book, Mr. Novak revisited the pages of the newspapers of the day. He said he was surprised by what he discovered. "I was just amazed at how straight the stories were in all the papers. There was no editorializing, no commenting," Mr. Novak said. "It was a good picture of what happened the day before."
As sourced up as Mr. Novak was in the early stages of his career, he said the trick to staying current is to constantly strive to find people who are in the know right now, such as Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, with whom, he said, he has a good relationship. He recalled a "great old reporter for the Washington Post" who took a day off from a trip to California to see a source in Los Angeles. The source had not been active in California politics for several years, and the piece the reporter turned in subsequently was offbase. "That was a good lesson for me," Mr. Novak said, adding that no matter how senior, a reporter has to seek out new sources. "You have to call them up, take them to lunch."
For much of the past three decades, Mr. Novak became as well known for work on television — "The McLaughlin Group," "Crossfire," and "The Capital Gang" — as for his newspaper work. "I enjoyed television. It makes you a ham. It ruins your privacy, but it brings in a lot of money," Mr. Novak said, explaining that television also helped him get his calls returned by big-name sources. "Germond said he didn't make an oath of poverty when he became a journalist, and neither did I."
Mr. Novak's book is not laced with compliments for politicians, although it contains a transcript of a remarkable interview that he and Evans conducted with President Reagan, who, unstaffed, rattled off the names of obscure economic philosophers, such as Claude Frédéric Bastiat, John Bright, and Richard Cobden.
One Democrat of whom Mr. Novak spoke highly is Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington. "I love Scoop," Mr. Novak said, lauding Jackson's status as a staunch anti-communist. "I would have voted for him for president any time. The left wing of the Democratic Party just hated him. They just thought he was a fascist."
The man who beat Jackson for the nomination, President Carter, doesn't fare as well under Mr. Novak's analysis. "For a guy like that to be elected president, he was a very clever political tactician," Mr. Novak said, going on to criticize Mr. Carter's post-presidential career. "For a former president to go abroad and attack the sitting president on a war is terrible. I think he was the worst president of my time, even worse than Nixon."
One constant bugaboo between Mr. Novak and some on the right is his status as a critic of Israel, which is not listed in the book's index. Mr. Novak, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1998, said that for much of the tenure of the column, the Middle East was Evans's territory. He did acknowledge that following the demise of the Cold War, his interests with some fellow conservatives, such as Richard Perle, diverged. This, however, did not stop Mr. Novak from recounting anecdotes that show Mr. Perle as a superior source, for example, handing Mr. Novak a seven-page State Department cable that provided the determination of Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the department to concede Soviet dominion over Eastern Europe. (Mr. Novak, in the book, attributed President Ford's flub during the 1976 presidential campaign — "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" — to a desire to roll back the memo.) Mr. Novak also took credit for helping to persuade Mr. Perle against a plan to open up a national chain of restaurants serving soufflés, Mr. Perle's culinary specialty.
Mr. Novak's book is further illuminating in the division of labor between himself and his partner, who was a personal friend of Robert Kennedy. "I didn't like Bobby at all," Mr. Novak said. "I thought he was completely wrong on Vietnam because his position was that what we needed to do was get a coalition government in Saigon. The Commies didn't want a coalition government in Saigon, they wanted to take it over." It was only through research that Mr. Novak learned how close Evans and Kennedy really were. Evans almost ended his writing partnership with Mr. Novak after the latter penned a column criticizing Kennedy's Vietnam proposal. What Mr. Novak learned only through an oral history Evans gave to the Kennedy Library regarding his relationship with the assassinated president was that Evans telephoned Kennedy and went out to his home at Hickory Hill to mend fences with the New York senator.
As much as he has been identified as a television commentator, Mr. Novak said he relishes his role in the writing game. "I've always considered myself mostly a writer," he said.
Mr. Novak's longtime friend and ideological opposite, Mr. Germond, praised Mr. Novak for his work ethic. "He works so hard. That's what it is," Mr. Germond said, speaking from his home in West Virginia. "He's willing to suspend himself."
Martin Nolan, formerly of the Boston Globe, added: "It's a magic, four-letter word, ‘w-o-r-k.'"
