Robert Novak, who died today of brain cancer at the age of 78, had such a long and varied journalistic career that different people probably remember him in different ways. Some younger readers may completely associate him with the Plame saga, or with his career as a conservative gabber on cable. Others may recall the many years in which his syndicated newspaper column was (as David Stockman once put it) a “bulletin board” for movement conservatives who wanted to make their views known to members of the Washington establishment–or sometimes, vice versa. And a few of us oldsters will remember his earlier days, when he was actually a Democrat and an old-fashioned shoe-leather muckraking reporter, in association with his Odd Couple co-columnist (and co-participant in his pioneering cable television show) Rowland Evans.
The book Evans and Novak wrote about LBJ, Lyndon Johnson: The Exercise of Power, remains one of the best political biographies around, particularly if you are interested in the arcane operations of either the U.S. Senate or the White House. I haven’t read his recent autobiography (entitled, in a reference to his longtime nickname in Washington, The Prince of Darkness) but through other obituaries I am hearing that it’s a fascinating book even if you deplore the author’s politics, and intend to go out and buy it directly.
I only met Novak once, just a few years ago, when I had the strange experience of being on a political panel seated between the Prince and another right-wing legend, Paul Weyrich. I found Novak to be smart, cynical, and appropriately scary. By then he had undergone a late-life conversion to Catholicism, reportedly via the agency of the mysterious conservative organization Opus Dei. That, too, was fitting, given his long association with the Cultural Right. I gather his final illness was characterized by excrutiating pain. Much as I dislike large elements of the man’s journalistic and political legacy, I hope his faith gave him comfort, and may he rest in peace.