CJ Interview: Robert Novak on 50 Years in D.C.

[Editor’s note: Veteran political columnist and television pundit Robert Novak, 78, passed away Tuesday morning after a yearlong battle with brain cancer. In his honor, Carolina Journal Online is republishing an interview with Novak produced originally for Carolina Journal Radio in July 2007.] Robert Novak marked his golden anniversary in the nation’s capital with the book The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Crown Forum, 2007). Novak recently addressed a John Locke Foundation Headliner luncheon in Raleigh. He also discussed his book with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (For the full video of his Headliner appearance, click here. Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

Kokai: I want to start with a quote from the first chapter of your book. You describe your journalistic philosophy, and here I quote, “To tell the world things people do not want me to reveal, to advocate limited government, economic freedom and a strong, prudent government, and to have fun doing it.” So how did you come up with that philosophy?

Novak: Well, I think you just develop it over the years. When I arrived in Washington at the age of 26, and with the Associated Press, all I wanted to do was break some stories and survive and have a good job. They say you develop that over the years, but that—that whole business about having fun doing it, some people looked at my book and said, “You know, you shouldn’t put that in there. That is not dignified.” Well, the newspaper gang that I grew up with, the Jack Germonds and the Jules Witcovers, and the guys like that, we had a lot of fun. And I hope that some people read my book, young people, find out just what a great way to make a living it is to be a journalist, to do the things I said, and to make some of the politicians uncomfortable while you are doing it.

Kokai: Having fun seems to be one of the things that has changed in D.C., and you outline a number of things that have changed in the capital in 50 years. On the whole, would you say that these have been good changes or bad changes?

Novak: Well, it’s — I don’t know if I can make a judgment on that. The town is a lot slicker than it used to be. The restaurants are better, and it looks cleaner than it was. I live in a fancy apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue, which used to be a place where a department store was. There were a lot of little two- or three-story buildings. But, and, of course, you know, I have to say that the—for many, in many ways, I think the government is doing things it should be doing, but it’s too big. It’s way, way too big. And I think that is a real problem. And the other problem, Mitch, is money. So if you wanted me to give you one more change—answer to what the change in Washington is, it’s M-O-N-E-Y. It’s more like New York. It’s high-priced lobbyists, high-priced journalists, high-priced lawyers. It’s a money machine in Washington, everybody running to make money. And I think that stems from the fact that government has become so gargantuan.

Kokai: Your book has an anecdote from 1959 in which you talk to a senator who introduces a bunch of amendments to a bill, knowing they won’t pass, but he’s going to get some campaign money out of it. You said you learned at that point that the system was no more on the level in Washington than it had been in some of the state capitals that you also covered. Do you think that that’s still true today?

Novak: Yes, I think it is. I’ll tell you who the senator was. It was Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana. I mention him in the book as the son of the famous Huey Long, the Kingfish. I think the big difference is that the people wouldn’t admit it now. If it’s — it still goes on, but as a way to raise money. But Russell, I liked Russell a lot, but he was a scoundrel and a rogue, not as big a scoundrel and a rogue as his father, but a very smart guy. And that was a great lesson for me when he told me that, and I was a—at that time, a 28-year-old reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Kokai: You also had some interesting advice early in your career from the poet Ezra Pound about accuracy.

Novak: I was a major in English literature at the University of Illinois, and one of my favorite authors was the poet, Ezra Pound, who was a great poet. He was a bit of a madman, and he got caught and stuck in — you know, he had some fascist, anti-Semitic ideas — and he got caught in Italy during the war, giving broadcasts for Mussolini, and so he was arrested by our troops. And do they try him for treason? An old poet, now that — what they did was they put him in the insane asylum, Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, in Washington.

And I was given an interview by a congressman that I knew, who was helping to get him out after all these years. And so I had the only exclusive interview with him as he got out of the hospital. And I was just thrilled to meet the great poet. And as I was leaving, Mr. Pound said to me, he said, “Young man, do you plan to spend the rest of your life in journalism?” I said, “Yes, I do.” And he said, “Well, let me give you one piece of advice. Above all,” he says, “Avoid too much accuracy.” And I went back and told my colleagues with the AP, who I worked for, about that. And they said it shows he’s insane.

I thought, at the time, he meant don’t reveal too much about yourself, or you’ll end up in trouble with the authorities like I did, but that isn’t what he meant, I don’t think. I think what he meant was don’t let the little details avoid the big picture. And sometimes, in the course of writing this book, I have let the little details avoid the big picture. I didn’t really fully appreciate, until he got out of office, what a great president Ronald Reagan was because he wasn’t good on the little details, but he was great on the big picture.

Kokai: You mention Ronald Reagan, and I’m going to run by you a few of the names of some of the famous people you’ve covered and ask you what one thing people should know about this president or political figure that they don’t know. Let’s go ahead and start with Reagan. What should people know about Ronald Reagan that they probably don’t know about him?

Novak: What they should know is that the had no interest in these little internal feuds of people working for him. He wasn’t interested in micromanaging. He had three goals: improve the economy with tax cuts, win the Cold War, and restore the morale of the American people. He just kept his eye on that, and that’s why he was successful in all three things, and that is why he was a successful president.

Kokai: More than 40 years after he died, many people have thoughts about JFK. What do you know about John Kennedy that people should know?

Novak: Great charm. Wonderful for younger people, as I was, covering him, but really not that strong a leader and not that — not the kind of tough Irishman he pretended to be.

Kokai: How about his brother, Robert, who seems to be an icon for so many liberal Democrats these days?

Novak: A really tough Irishman, but not that nice a person, awfully tough, not too interested in civil liberties.

Kokai: Reading your book, I would say that you didn’t have much nice to say about Richard Nixon. I guess that shouldn’t surprise a lot of people at this point.

Novak: I thought he was a bad man and a bad president, very insecure. I think his insecurity affected his presidency and did great damage to the Republican Party, to himself, to the country. The one thing he did was he stuck with Whittaker Chambers in unveiling Alger Hiss as a spy.

Kokai: What about the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton?

Novak: Bill Clinton was a man of great charm, great likeability. I’ve got some anecdotes in there where he tried to seduce me, but it didn’t quite come true. But the thing about Clinton, Clinton posed as a center-left person, a centrist; he wasn’t. He was an out-and-out big-government liberal, and that’s what eventually made him an unsuccessful politician. He lost, after his first election, every election that he was in. The Republicans won Congress.

Kokai: How about the current President Bush, what can you tell us about him?

Novak: A mediocre president. I believe he is — this is the third generation of Bushes I’ve covered. I covered his grandfather, a senator from Connecticut. I think that Bush really, at heart, is a Connecticut Yankee liberal, though he’s got a Texas accent. Too much government, and of course his big mistake of waging a preventive war and trying nation building in Iraq.

Kokai: You’ve covered many things that readers will encounter in your book. One item that doesn’t seem to be as big as others ends up taking up the entire first chapter and also the end of the book, and that is the whole furor around the Valerie Plame CIA leak case. Is it a sign of the times that this incident became as big as it did?

Novak: If I were to die in Raleigh here today, which I hope I don’t, my obituary tomorrow morning would have Valerie Plame in the lead. It’s a very small part of my life, but it was made such a trigger for the destruction, attempted destruction of George Bush. He handled it so badly, in my opinion, that it became a big story. It caused me great damage. And what I hope to do in the book is to — it’s only two chapters of a long book — but to give what really happened factually. And a lot of people still don’t understand it.