Robert Novak
Robert David Sanders Novak 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 notable biweekly newsletter, in 1967.
Novak and Evans played a significant role for CNN after the network's founding. He worked as a well-known 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 notable 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.Novak's journalism career began when he was in high school as a student-writer for the Joliet Herald-News, his hometown newspaper, and he received ten cents per inch. After high school, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1948 to 1952. His father had attended the college, and he later remarked that "I was an Illini from birth". He became a brother of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, at the time a mostly Jewish college fraternity, while attending the University of Illinois. Novak would later use the group's 'secret handshake' whenever he met fellow alumnus Wolf Blitzer.
He continued gaining journalism experience as a sports writer for the Daily Illini, 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.
During the Korean War, Novak served in the U.S. Army, and he reached the rank of lieutenant. He later stated that he had fully expected to die in the service.
Career
After serving from 1952 to 1954, Novak rejoined his fledgling journalism career, joining the Associated Press as a political correspondent in Omaha, Nebraska. He was transferred to Lincoln, Nebraska, and then to Indianapolis, Indiana, covering the two state legislatures in his reporting. 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. He rose to the rank of chief congressional correspondent in 1961. He generally did his work without using tape recordings or paper notes, relying just on his detailed memory. Novak's colleagues at The Wall Street Journal later said that he absorbed himself in his work so completely that he often forgot to shave, left his shoes untied, and even started accidentally placing burning cigarettes into his pockets.In 1963, Novak teamed up with Rowland Evans, a former Congressional correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, to create the Inside Report, a newspaper column published six times a week. It was also known as Inside Washington. Evans knew Novak slightly as a fellow Capitol Hill journalist when they started. They had contrasting public images, with Novak dressing sloppily and Evans' appearing like a diplomat with a refined manner. Their column mixed standard reporting with their own editorial opinions. It began with muted, mostly centrist views, but their words drifted rightward over time. Novak's experience covering the Six-Day War in the field influenced his beliefs towards Evans' pro-Palestinian sympathies.
The column's factual accuracy has been called into question. Novak stated in his autobiography, "We were so ravenous for exclusive news that we were susceptible to manipulation by leaks, compromising our credibility." Chicago Sun-Times became the "home" paper for Inside Report from 1966 onward. Novak continued the column after Evans's departure on May 15, 1993. Evans died in 2001, and Inside Report ran in over 150 papers at that time through Creators Syndicate. Publication ended after Novak's cancer diagnosis in July 2008. Bloomberg L.P. has stated that the column was a must-read among political insiders, as did The Washingtonian. It was the longest running syndicated political column in U.S. history.
In 1967 Evans and Novak set up a biweekly political newsletter called the Evans–Novak Political Report. 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, 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. He also took over as the conservative co-host of Crossfire from Pat Buchanan.
On August 4, 2005, Novak walked off the set during a live broadcast of the show Inside Politics, on which he appeared along with Democratic strategist and analyst James Carville. During a heated discussion about Florida Republican Representative Katherine Harris's just-announced 2006 bid for U.S. Senate, Novak uttered "I think that's bullshit!" 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. Still, he could be sensitive about his persona; he once asked Democratic Party giant Robert Schwarz Strauss, "Why does everyone take such an instant dislike to me?" Strauss responded, "Saves time."
At his height, Novak was one of the five most read columnists in the U.S. Throughout his career, Novak wrote for numerous other publications, serving notably as a contributing editor for Reader's Digest. He appeared on NBC's program Meet the Press over 200 times. He served as a longtime CNN television personality, and he appeared intermittently on Fox News after his August 2005 departure from CNN. Novak also played a role among many other reporters in Timothy Crouse's seminal nonfiction book The Boys on the Bus that described reporters covering the lead-up to the 1972 Presidential election. In August 2004, The Washington Post stated that Novak might "wince unto this day" at his portrayal in the book.