Bob Novak is not one of the popular kids

The prickly right-wing columnist, covert-agent outer and all-around "Prince of Darkness" explains how he rose to the top of D.C.'s journalistic heap.

By Edward McClelland

Read more: Books, James Carville, CNN, Fox News, Karl Rove, Books Features, Patrick Fitzgerald

July 17, 2007 | In his half-century as a Washington news hawk, Robert Novak has been an AP deskman, a political columnist, an author, a convention-circuit speaker, a "Meet the Press" panelist, and a cable TV pundit. According to his new memoir, "The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington," there's only one item missing from his D.C. insider's résumé: He wasn't invited to enough Georgetown parties.

Shortly after launching his 30-year journalistic partnership with Rowland Evans, a polished Main Line patrician, Novak attended "a lovely al fresco sit down dinner party" at the home of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

"But the invitations soon ceased," he writes, because "I was not a dinner table raconteur ... I had a grim-visaged demeanor that led a friend to label me 'The Prince of Darkness' -- not because I was then a hard conservative but because of my unsmiling pessimism about the prospects for America and Western civilization."

And now, at the end of his career, after igniting a scandal by publishing the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the Prince of Darkness is lamenting his supposed friendlessness in the two worlds where he once reigned: the conservative movement, and the news business.

It is an audacious conceit for a veteran D.C. insider to cast himself as an outsider, but that's what Bob Novak does for more than 600 pages in his new autobiography. "I am not a person who is easy for other people to like," he writes, but it's a boast, not a confession. "No stirrer-up of strife," he sniffs, "is ever very popular."

In reality, the Prince of Darkness is the past president of the Gridiron Club, journalistic Washington's version of Skull and Bones, has a certain sulfurous charm, and has long had plenty of what pass for "friends" in the corridors of power, even if those friends think he's an "asshole."

Novak's dyspeptic persona is familiar to anyone who watched his humorless, abrasive appearances on "The McLaughlin Group," "The Capital Gang" or "Crossfire." His critics labeled him a brooding outsider -- unattractive, unrefined, insecure about hailing from Joliet, Ill., a run-down industrial city near Chicago -- who took a reflexively contrarian stance against the liberalism in style among his Washington press corps peers. That was how Timothy Crouse portrayed him in "The Boys on the Bus," his famed study of the reporters following the Nixon-McGovern presidential campaign:

"Novak was standing off to himself. He was short and squat, with swarthy skin, dark gray hair, a slightly rumpled suit, and an apparently permanent scowl ... Some of the other reporters pointed him out and whispered about him almost as if he were a cop come to shush up a good party.

"'There's a real tight coil of bitterness in the guy,' said a magazine writer. 'So much of what he writes and talks about in private tends to reinforce one impression: he's against anything fashionable, anything slick -- and liberalism is slick in the circles he travels in. Maybe that's why he's down on it.'"

If that were true, it would place Novak in the same company as nerdy right-wing intellectuals like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Samuel Alito and Kenneth Starr -- homely, brainy Debate Club types who embraced conservatism as a form of revenge against the swinging '60s liberals. But Novak is both older and more genuinely conservative than any of those men. Novak's father, the superintendent of a gas production plant, taught him to despise the New Deal for "meddling with the system" that had allowed a son of poor Jewish immigrants to scratch his way into the middle class.

At the University of Illinois, Novak wrote his freshman English paper on Thomas Dewey's inevitable election as president, and got a strong taste of social rejection when he lost an election for sports editor of the campus paper. He seemed to relish it. ("At my own fraternity house, there was private rejoicing ... that I got what I deserved for my arrogance. The younger members detested me.")

At Illinois, Novak also began a long political journey -- from the center-right to the far right. Naively, he writes, he supported Dwight D. Eisenhower for president, when the true conservative was Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, a fighter for small government and low taxes. "I was on the wrong side," Novak concludes. The rest of his book is the story of how he spent a career chronicling -- and promoting -- the rise of his beloved conservative movement, and how that career finally foundered due to the very event that ended the right wing's national dominance: the war in Iraq.

A genuine stub-pencil, spiral-notebook reporter, Novak got his start with the Associated Press, covering the state legislatures in Nebraska and Indiana. The comer was soon called up to Washington, and in 1962, at age 31, he got his big break when Rowland Evans of the New York Herald-Tribune asked him to partner up in a six-day-a-week political column that would always contain "exclusive information not previously published -- whether a scoop or a tidbit."

Much was made of their Mutt-and-Jeff act -- posh Evans, gathering news at society parties; bulldog Novak, with a telephone pressed to his ear -- and they became masters of background quotes from "senior administration officials."

Soon, Evans & Novak was the most influential political dope sheet in Washington, and politicians dealt with Novak whether they liked him or not. He was off on a garrulous round of scotch and steak meetings with congressmen and cabinet secretaries. They often dined at Sans Souci, a French restaurant also favored by old Washington hands Art Buchwald and Edward Bennett Williams. Novak was finally on the inside. He made enemies of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Edmund Muskie, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, but he outlasted them, becoming a D.C. institution.

(Novak still has some scoops in him. In early 1972, he quoted an anonymous Democratic senator saying George McGovern's presidential campaign was doomed because the candidate favored "amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot." Thomas Eagleton -- who later in 1972 was briefly McGovern's running mate -- died in March, so in this book, Novak can finally reveal him as the source.)

Next page: In the end, Novak 'fessed to Fitz