Every now and then a book comes along that everyone interested in politics should read. The new memoir by veteran journalist Robert D. Novak, I think, is one of those books.Most people, even those who live there, wonder what Washington politics is really like behind the scenes. There is no one in political journalism better equipped to tell that story than Bob Novak. In The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington he tells it with an honesty and wit worthy of Balzac – he spares no one, including himself.
Bob Novak has been a political reporter in Washington since 1957. Along with Bill Buckley, Novak has written the longest running syndicated column in America. He has published the Evans-Novak Political Report since 1963 and pioneered television journalism culminating with CNN’s “Capital Gang” and “Crossfire.”
After 25 years at CNN he moved to Fox News over wrongful on-air accusations that he had leaked confidential information about a CIA operative, Valerie Plame. Novak’s chilling account of the Plame affair, grand jury and all, suitably begins and ends a book filled with accounts of politically motivated lies and deceptions.
Novak’s sometimes hilarious, often startling experiences with Washington notables through thirteen administrations combine to create a veritable Bonfire of the Vanities of our nation’s political life.
His personal takes and insider stories on presidents, congressmen, and media celebrities will not be well-received in the halls of power.
Novak’s memoir, however, has another more edifying side. Catholics and other religious conservatives will be fascinated by the conversion to Christianity of a non-practicing (but bar-mitzvahed) Jew from Joliet, Illinois. The grandson of Jewish immigrants, Novak was never -- uncharacteristically -- a liberal, although he was sometimes perceived as such. His father Maurice, an engineering expert in gas production, was fervently anti-New Deal and FDR, a “rare Republican Novak.” There was so much political news floating around the house, through newspapers, magazines, and radio shows Novak became “addicted to politics” before he was nine!
The counterpoint of these political and journalistic machinations is the warm account of Novak’s lifelong friendship with his partner Rowly Evans, his marriage to a former aide to Lyndon Johnson, Geraldine Williams from Hillsboro, Texas, and their mutual discovery of the Catholic Church. Without her husband knowing, Geraldine had become an anti-abortion activist in the early 90s.
When Geraldine began attending Mass at St. Patrick’s Church near the Capitol her husband began going with her. When he revealed their regular Mass attendance to a student from Syracuse University after a lecture she bluntly asked when they planned to join the Church. He replied that they had no such plans and she responded, “Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever.” When Novak returned to DC he “suggested to Geraldine that the time had come for both of us to enter the Church.” They were received on May 20, 1998
Reading The Prince of Darkness you encounter a long life lived navigating the tumult of political storms, but also a life that finds itself suddenly, and peacefully, coming to rest on a further shore.
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