Scoop! Tireless columnist Bob Novak tells his tale.

New York Times, Aug. 19, 2007. Book Reviews

The Prince Of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, by Robert D. Novak, 662 pp. Crown Forum. $29.95.

In this sprawling memoir, the journalist Robert D. Novak feeds his keyboard more than five decades of newspaper clips, expense account filings and graying memory to chronicle his career as political reporter, syndicated columnist, television commentator and, finally, leading character in the outing of the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame. As artless as it is fascinating, "The Prince of Darkness" dishes gossip and delivers payback to enemies for ancient slights; and on nearly every page it illustrates Novak's noisome journalistic methods.

Unlike other members of the commentariat, Novak has always been more a reporter than a pundit. He learned the art of covering politics at The Associated Press, where he worked two state capitals before being promoted to the wire service's Washington bureau. From The A.P. he went to The Wall Street Journal and in 1963 left to partner with the preppy Georgetown insider Rowland Evans Jr. in their eponymous column. Upon Evans's retirement in 1993, Novak became the column's sole proprietor. He has reported from battlefronts in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Rhodesia, and visited China for a sit-down with Deng Xiaoping.

Because politics is a game of inches, much of political journalism is a game of inches. Competing with the news pages for scoops, Novak has learned to dress up the tiniest motion as the crashing of tectonic plates. The "clearest, cleanest scoop ever on a big story" Evans and Novak probably ever had, he writes, was being first to report that President Richard Nixon had chosen Representative Melvin R. Laird as his new secretary of defense. The "greatest scoop of my career" within the global financial community comes when he reports that a weakened Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker could now be outvoted by his board. Novak understands that many of his triumphs are perishable, minor things. "That column, I am sure, generated yawns from most readers," he writes.

And yet the news miniatures scudding through Novak's flat prose have attracted readers because he gets Washington to speak to itself through his column. That the tidbits come wrapped in his conservatism have proved no barrier to Novak's access or journalistic success. Donkeys and elephants both take their beatings.

Although he is often lumped with other conservatives, Novak belongs to a party of one. He was born in 1931. His father, a utility company superintendent, steered him toward liberal Republicanism and away from unions, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. As a very young reporter, he deliberately committed voter fraud by casting two ballots for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. He voted for John Kennedy in 1960, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and then for Richard Nixon--reluctantly, he says--in 1968.

Novak writes that the bedrock of his conservativism has been anti-Communism, as well as a commitment to supply-side economics; he also supports free trade and liberal immigration policies. He blames television for turning him into a "right-wing ideologue" because appearing on CNN's "Crossfire" required him to express views on subjects he rarely wrote about, like capital punishment, gay rights, abortion and gun control. But his opposition to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, his doubts about invading Afghanistan and his criticism of the war in Iraq separate him from most conservatives.

His idiosyncratic conservatism seems congenital, an expression of the lifelong pessimism that inspired a journalist friend to call him the "prince of darkness" in the early 1960s. Recalling his youth, Novak remembers being viewed as arrogant (what a surprise!). "I am not a person who is easy for a lot of people to like," he writes, twice naming my former boss Michael Kinsley as one who scorns him. But he considers a sour disposition an asset, not a liability. "No stirrer-up of strife is ever very popular," he says.

"Little in Washington is on the level," Novak writes, but "The Prince of Darkness" reads convincingly because it's so unflattering to its author. He confesses to lying about the source of a memo to protect the leaker, of writing that Nixon's aide Charles Colson wouldn't comment for a story when Colson was the story's source and of shielding Jeane Kirkpatrick with the pronoun "he" to give her added anonymity. He regrets having neglected his family. Until a near-fatal case of spinal meningitis killed his taste for alcohol, he was a lush, drinking cocktails as fast as he could swizzle them and draining bottles of Scotch. (There's so much boozing in this book that it makes you thirsty.) In 1978, he was wagering $1,000 a day on sports (about $3,200 in today's money). "I suppose I had a gambling problem to accompany my drinking problem," Novak writes, relying on understatement for perhaps the first time in his career.

Novak has long denied operating a journalistic protection racket, but he testifies many times in his book to giving politicians the choice of being his source or his target. Evans and Novak were gentle with Alexander Haig because he was a longtime Evans source. Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, "was treated more harshly because he refused any connection with me. He made himself more of a target than he had to be by refusing to be a source." When David Gergen--not someone simpatico with Novak--leaks to him in 1981 from the Reagan White House, Novak figures it out. "I think Gergen, the ultimate Washington survivor, was working the source-or-target model with me. Gergen never really became my source, but he was not my target either--which I believe was his intent."

"Journalists like to give the impression they develop exclusive stories through exhaustive investigation and research," Novak confides, but most scoops emerge after journalists have spent a lot of time with sources at fancy restaurants. When the source finally decides to sing, a good columnist knows where to find the microphone. (Imagine ants farming aphids for honeydew at Sans Souci, and you get the picture.) The Washington journalist-source relationship is "symbiotic" and "built on self-interest," Novak says, and what a source list he has compiled! Russell Long, Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, Robert S. Strauss, Melvin Laird, Wilbur Mills, the Nixon aides Bob Ellsworth and John Sears, William C. Sullivan (No. 3 at Hoover's F.B.I.), Jeb Magruder, Charles Colson, William S. Cohen, Trent Lott, Ken Clawson, Maureen Reagan, John Lehman, Richard Perle, W. Michael Blumenthal, James Baker, Edwin Meese, Donald Regan, Caspar Weinberger, James Watt, Martin Anderson, Lyn Nofziger, David Stockman, Jimmy Carter's speechwriter James Fallows, Elliott Abrams, John Sununu, Vin Weber, Dick Morris, Karl Rove (a "grade A-plus source") and William Kristol all get credit for feeding him.

When a Novak source delivers, he really delivers. In 1971, according to Novak, the Nixon speechwriter William Safire--who later became a New York Times columnist--walked domestic intelligence documents from the White House to Novak's office, one block away. The handoff was made behind the building. A legislative assistant for Senator Jesse Helms, he says, provided Evans and Novak with a year's worth of classified documents.

One problem with Novak-style scoop journalism is that reporters don't always know what's in the water they're carrying. In spring 1972, the Nixon aide Jeb Magruder showed Novak a White House "internal memo" at Sans Souci that threatened to move that year's Republican National Convention from San Diego to Miami Beach unless the city got its act together. The Evans and Novak "scoop" sourced the memo to the "habitually secretive Nixon men." In his 1974 book, "An American Life," Magruder crowed that "my talk with Novak resulted in a column that said exactly what we hoped it would say." He leaked to the pair for maximum impact and to make it appear as if the administration was unhappy with San Diego when what it actually feared was large antiwar demonstrations that local authorities couldn't control.

"I had been used," Novak writes, with what appears to be genuine shock. "Nixon had cracked the code on Evans and Novak. We were so ravenous for exclusive news that we were susceptible to manipulations by leaks, compromising our credibility. I am surprised other politicians did not use this technique and surprised Nixon used it so seldom."

Cracked the code? Did Novak not read his own book as he composed it? As he knows, few leaks to journalists are unadulterated whistleblowing. Sources usually have motives, often ulterior, and the competent journalist finds a way to tease out real news when publishing self-serving tips like Magruder's.

It would make for a neat conclusion to this review if another "code-cracker" were behind Novak's publication of Valerie Plame's C.I.A. identity. Some liberals accused Novak of actively conspiring with the Bush administration to punish Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of its Iraq policy, by publishing the name and occupation of his wife in a July 2003 column. If he hadn't been part of the conspiracy, they say, he was its dupe.

But Novak protests that he learned her identity from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. "I am sure it was not a planned leak," Novak insists. He makes a credible case that his aim in writing the column was to examine the logic of the C.I.A.'s sending Wilson, whom he considers an intelligence lightweight, to Niger on the yellowcake fact-finding mission. Novak writes that he thought the Wilson trip may well have been designed by the agency to undermine the Bush administration. Supporting that claim is the oddly understated manner in which the Plame information pops up in Novak's column. If Armitage's leak was a bomb directed at Wilson, Novak turned it into a bit of a dud.

Journalism is the first rough draft of history, Philip Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, once said. Many Novak columns--including the Plame piece--are first rough drafts of journalism; they require further assembly by readers. While other writers concentrate on the arteries of power, Novak has made a specialty of the capillaries. Still, his book is an enlightening field guide to the politicians and journalists who inhabit those micro places.