Robert Novak, who died today, wrote thousands of news stories and columns in his 50-plus years as a Washington journalist. In each one, he said, he broke news. That is a staggering achievement. But journalism can be ephemeral and books, even in the digital age, live on. And here Novak also made a singular contribution.
His best known book to today’s readers is his 2007 autobiography The Prince of Darkness, which I had the honor to review in the Weekly Standard. It’s a superb and unflinchingly self-revealing piece of work. For those who want to understand Washington politics and journalism over the past half-century, it is part of the very small shelf of books I would recommend, together with Katharine Graham’s Personal History, Robert Merry’s Taking on the World (a biography of Joseph and Stewart Alsop) and
Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century. All these books are beautifully written and will tell you more about politics and journalism than any number of political science or journalism school tomes.
I also highly recommend the 1967 volume co-authored by Bob and his longtime partner Rowland Evans, Lyndon B. Johnson, The Exercise of Power: A Political Biography. It is based in large part on the superb reporting that Novak, then in his early 30s, did as the Wall Street Journal’s Senate correspondent when Johnson was Senate Majority Leader. I once asked Robert Caro, author of the monumental multi-volume biography of Johnson, what he considered the best book on Johnson. He answered, without hesitation, Evans and Novak. Writing in 1966 and 1967, they anticipated the problems ahead for Johnson’s Great Society and Vietnam war policies.
Bob Novak, as he reveals in The Prince of Darkness, was a very smart man, a conservative by conviction and a pessimist by temperament. Like so many of his generation, coming of age in the conformist America of the 1950s, he wanted to be thought of as a regular guy—a sports fan, a heavy drinker and smoker (until he quit both), a caustic realist.
But he was also an idealist with a fine appreciation for the few people he encountered who he thought were really smart. One of those was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In The Prince of Darkness, he recounts a dinner with Moynihan at Locke-Ober in Boston, after Moynihan had returned to Harvard from service in the Nixon White House. The food, generally considered the finest in Boston at the time, was accompanied by generous amounts of adult beverages.
In writing his autobiography, Novak reviewed his audiotapes of the dinner and found that the first hour or two contained a huge amount of the inside information presented in his and Evans’s Nixon in the White House: The Frustration of Power. But the last two hours of tape, he found, were unintelligible—and he assured his readers that they would never be heard by anyone again.
