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Conservative columnist Robert Novak passes away

By Raw Story

Published: August 18, 2009
Updated 6 months ago




Robert Novak, the longtime conservative columnist who became infamous for outing a covert CIA operative, has passed away.

The Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet reports that “Novak, one of the nation’s most influential journalists, who relished his ‘Prince of Darkness’ public persona, died at home here early Tuesday morning after a battle with brain cancer.”

“He was someone who loved being a journalist, love journalism and loved his country and loved his family,” Novak’s wife, Geraldine, told the paper.

Excerpts from Sweet’s column:

On May 15, 1963, Novak teamed up with the late Rowland Evans Jr. to create the “Inside Report” political column, which became the must-read syndicated column. Evans tapped Novak, then a 31-year old correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, to help with the workload of a six-day-a-week column.

….

Mrs. Novak said that her husband passed away at 4:30 a.m., returning home after being hospitalized between July 10 and July 24. Novak’s malignant brain tumor was discovered July 27, 2008.

In a Human Events op-ed, Kenneth Tomlinson, who “served five years in the Bush administration as chairman of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors,” writes that “few journalists have ever affected this country like Bob Novak.”

Excerpts from Tomlinson’s column:

As influential as Bob’s work would be on the Reagan presidency, he did not care for many of the people (e.g. Jim Baker and Dick Darman) who surrounded the President in the White House. (He obviously liked Pat Buchanan and also respected Don Regan.) Novak believed that Reagan’s ability to survive those around him in the White House years is explained by a story the President once told him.

Two psychiatrists, one old, one young, commuted to work together. At the end of each day the young psychiatrist was exhausted and disheveled while his elder was as fresh as when he started the day. “Why are you so unaffected by your day?” the young psychiatrist asked. “I don’t listen,” his elder replied.

It was Novak’s theory that Reagan was so secure in his beliefs and so focused on the world he wanted to see that it really didn’t matter who was running his White House.

….

Novak had little regard for either President Bush (for different obvious reasons), but he found Karl Rove and his encyclopedic understanding of American politics irresistible. And was Karl ever a source that would have a profound influence on both their careers, ending with the truly strange Plame affair. I will never understand why some did not believe that the Plame role in the CIA’s dispatching her husband to Niger was not a legitimate story.

“I will be suspending my journalistic work for an indefinite but, God willing, not too lengthy period,” Novak said in a statement released July 28, 2008, upon retiring from his position with the Chicago Sun-Times.

After more than four decades in Washington, Novak built a Rolodex of sources throughout the conservative political establishment, with more than a few Democrats delivering information to the journalist, as well.

In recent years, Novak has become best known for his role in the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. Novak fingered former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who the columnist described as not having a political ax to grind, as the primary source for his July 14, 2003, column that first publicly identified Plame, who was the wife of administration critic Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador.

An investigation into who leaked Plame’s name later resulted in Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, being convicted of lying and obstructing the probe. The trial revealed that Libby had leaked Plame’s name to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

A little over a year ago, Novak hit a pedestrian on a Washington street with his car but did not stop immediately and later said he was unaware he had hit the man.

(with wire services)





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