There I was, 27 years-old and still working my first job in Washington. And I was staring down Robert David Sanders Novak.
“Writing an editorial,” he told me, “is like wetting your pants in a dark suit. It gives you this a nice, warm feeling, and no one notices.”
I wasn’t a source — I was a job applicant. This was Novak’s way of counseling a young, conservative writer to stick to factual reporting as much as possible, to avoid becoming a career commentator. After asking me a series of questions — all of which surely violated some federal employment law (“Do you plan on getting married soon? What are your politics?”) — Novak hired me as his assistant.
In late 2004, when I started working for him, Novak was writing three news-filled columns every week. By itself, the column was more work than most people could handle, but it was only a small part of what he did in a typical week. At age 74, and still recovering from a broken hip, he was also making two or three appearances on CNN’s Crossfire each week. He was producing and appearing on Capitol Gang, which taped every Friday for Saturday night. He made brief Monday afternoon appearances with Judy Woodruff on the CNN segment called “Novak’s Notebook.” He was still doing a show then called “The Novak Zone,” in addition to writing about one-third of the 4,000-word Evans-Novak Political Report every two weeks.
As if that wasn’t enough, he was also writing his memoir at that time, The Prince of Darkness. He would produce a new chapter every two to three weeks for me and his other two staffers to copy-edit. The final, 667-page product is formidable, but consider that Novak’s first draft was twice that length — and just as gripping, in my opinion. (By unfortunate necessity, some great material had to be left on the cutting-room floor.)
If Novak’s schedule seems unrealistic or ridiculous to you as I’ve recounted it above, just imagine how I felt as I watched him stick to it, week after week.
Novak was a master of using time well, which is part of why he was so effective. Despite his dark public image, he was not a mean or angry man — in fact, he was a very dear friend to me and a kind, generous man. But he could become very angry when someone was impeding his work. That was how he got so much done.
On one particular day in 2007, I was the problem. I had been out of cell phone service range for 90 minutes, watching some of the Republican presidential candidates address conservatives at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington. I ducked outside after Mitt Romney’s speech to find eight messages waiting: “David, I could just ***ing kill you right now. Where the hell are you?”
In that brief period, the boss had somehow lost his column for Monday — he couldn’t figure out where he had saved it on his computer an hour earlier.
There are a lot of famous stories in circulation about Bob Novak, and surely many of them will find their way into print this week — the blowup with James Carville and the Plame Affair, for example. But the man I’ll always remember is the one who used to call me late at night with his Microsoft Word problems: “The screen just turned all blue;” “It just doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to;” “Why is everything I type red and underlined?” I once had to talk him through “recovering” a file he had accidentally minimized on his screen. Sometimes I wondered whether he ever slept.
I will also remember that even if Novak needed a lot of help with some aspects of the modern world, he never needed help understanding its politics or finding a story in it. He worked tirelessly, and he spoke with everyone. That’s how he kept his must-read news column running so hot for so long and with such consistency. He could always find something fresh and newsworthy with which to treat his readers in every column.
Novak’s column, Inside Report, was the joy of his working life. He never cared much about his performance on television, but he’d always ask your opinion of his column. And the most important columns were not always the ones that got the most attention. The throwaway tip he got from Richard Armitage in July 2003 was the one that caused the biggest political mess. But, to offer just one example, his less-noticed column of July 30, 2007might have prevented U.S. involvement in a bloody new war over Kurdistan.
I spoke to Novak only a few times in the last year of his life. I was told that his illness was hard on him in his final days, and he was unable to see a small group of us Novak alumni a few weeks ago.
When he was forced to retire — and he never would have retired otherwise — I wondered whether perhaps God, whom he found late in life, was giving him a chance to experience rest and peace while he was still alive. God willing, he rests now in peace.
