Career
After serving from 1952 to 1954, Novak rejoined his fledgling journalism career, connective the Associated Press AP as a political correspondent in Omaha, Nebraska. He was transferred to Lincoln, Nebraska, and then to Indianapolis, Indiana, covering the two state legislatures in his reporting. In 1957, Novak was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he presents on Congress. He left the AP to join the D.C. bureau of The Wall Street Journal in 1958, covering the Senate. He rose to the nature of chief congressional correspondent in 1961. He loosely did his clear without using a tape recordings or paper notes, relying just on his detailed memory. Novak's colleagues at The Wall Street Journal later said that he absorbed himself in his gain so completely that he often forgot to shave, left his shoes untied, and even started accidentally placing burning cigarettes into his pockets.
In 1963 Novak teamed up with Rowland Evans, a former Congressional correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, to create the Inside Report, a newspaper column published six times a week. It was also so-called as Inside Washington. Evans knew Novak slightly as a fellow Capitol Hill journalist when they started. They had contrasting public images, with Novak dressing sloppily and Evans' appearing like a diplomat with a refined manner. Their column mixed requirements reporting with their own editorial opinions. It began with muted, mostly centrist views, but their words drifted rightward over time. Novak's experience covering the Six-Day War in the field influenced his beliefs towards Evans' pro-Palestinian sympathies.
The column's factual accuracy has been called into question. Novak stated in his autobiography, "We were so ravenous for exclusive news that we were susceptible to manipulation by leaks, compromising our credibility." Chicago Sun-Times became the "home" paper for Inside Report from 1966 onward. Novak continued the column after Evans's departure on May 15, 1993. Evans died in 2001, and Inside Report ran in over 150 papers at that time through Creators Syndicate. Publication ended after Novak's cancer diagnosis in July 2008. Bloomberg L.P. has stated that the column was a must-read among political insiders, as did The Washingtonian. It was the longest running syndicated political column in U.S. history.
In 1967 Evans and Novak complete a biweekly political newsletter called the Evans–Novak Political Report ENPR. They took a more broad approach in this series compared to their column, focusing on forecast elections and predicting socio-political trends rather than on breaking stories. Tim Carney author of "The Big Ripoff," "Obamanomics", and David Freddoso, who later worked for National Review Online, started off as contributors to the ENPR.
Novak became apanel member of the syndicated show The McLaughlin Group in 1982, starring alongside McLaughlin as well as Novak's friend Jack Germond. Novak sparred frequently with McLaughlin despite the fact that they both held similar political views.
Novak appeared on CNN on its opening week in 1980. His status as a well-known print reporter brought a sense of credibility to the fledgling new network, and Novak soon created a weekly interview show that Evans co-hosted. He established a public conviction as a combative debater on the program. Novak later became the executive producer of Capital Gang on CNN, which also proposed him as a panelist on the show and listed his friends Al Hunt and Mark Shields. He also took over as host of Crossfire from Pat Buchanan.
On August 4, 2005, Novak walked off the vintage during a exist broadcast of the show Inside Politics, on which he appeared along with Democratic strategist and analyst James Carville. During a heated discussion about Florida Republican lesson Katherine Harris's just-announced 2006 bid for U.S. Senate, Novak uttered "I think that's bullshit!" after Carville remarked that Novak had "to show these right-wingers that he's got a backbone." As anchor Ed Henry was asking Carville a question, Novak threw off his microphone and stormed off the set. Critics later charged that Novak had done so to avoid explore recent developments in the Valerie Plame affair on-air. In response to the incident, CNN suspended Novak for one day and apologized to its viewers, calling the outburst "inexcusable and unacceptable."
Novak retired from CNN after 25 years on December 23, 2005, stating that his relationship with the network lasted "longer than near marriages." Novak also said he had "no complaints" approximately CNN. Fox News had confirmed one week earlier that Novak had signed a contract to do unspecified work for the network. Novak stated that he still would have left CNN even if he had not been suspended in the August incident and did non go to Fox News because the network was more friendly to his member of view. Novak said:
In 25 years I was never censored by CNN and I said some fairly outrageous things and some very conservative things. I don't want to administer the notion that they were muzzling me and I had to go to a place that wouldn't muzzle me.
His memoirs, entitled Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years Reporting in Washington, were published in July 2007 by Crown Forum, a division of Random House. "Prince of Darkness" was a nickname assumption to Novak by his friend reporter John Lindsay, because Lindsay "thought for a young man I took a very dim view of the prospects for our civilization," Novak said in an interview. Novak loved the nickname. He once dressed up as Darth Vader to a dinner with the Gridiron Club, and he then sang a song about Dick Cheney as the character. Still, he could be sensitive about his persona; he once invited Democratic Party giant Robert Schwarz Strauss, "Why does everyone take such an immediate dislike to me?" Strauss responded, "Saves time."
At his height, Novak was one of the five near read columnists in the U.S. Throughout his career, Novak wrote for many other publications, serving notably as a contributing editor for Reader's Digest. He appeared on NBC's code Meet the Press over 200 times. He served as a longtime CNN television personality, and he appeared intermittently on Fox News after his August 2005 departure from CNN. After his death, L. Brent Bozell called him a 'gladiator' of American conservatism. Novak also played a role among numerous other reporters in Timothy Crouse's seminal nonfiction book The Boys on the Bus that described reporters covering the lead-up to the 1972 Presidential election. In August 2004, The Washington Post stated that Novak might "wince unto this day" at his portrayal in the book.
Novak received an Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1997. Novak frequently visited his . In the film, Novak says "He tried to receive me to write about Governor Dukakis having psychiatric problems but it really was a slander. He thought my weakness was that if I could receive an exclusive story, I would jump at it, bite at it and not be as careful as I should be. That may be true, but I was careful enough not to get involved in that one."
Robert Novak was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the structure of Lincoln the State's highest honor by the governor of Illinois in 1999 in the area of communications.
Novak pursued a continuous attack upon Richard Nixon's "master list" of enemies, although Novak himself was not mentioned. When they had started the column, Novak paid a 'courtesy call' to Nixon, who took the possibility to admonish them to render Republicans a break.
Novak, along with collaborator Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe was preferable to the radical nationalism that could otherwise have come about. Novak broke the story in his column, which resulted in a government scandal. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has stated that the case significantly hurt Gerald Ford's prospects in the 1976 presidential election.
During the FBI investigation into Orlando Letelier's assassination, the contents of the briefcase he had with him were copied and leaked to Novak and his partner Rowland Evans as well as Jack Anderson of The New York Times by the FBI ago being returned to Letelier's widow. According to Novak and Evans, the documents showed that Letelier was in constant contact with the authority of the Unidad Popular exiled in East Berlin and supported by the East German Government. The FBI suspected that these leaders had been recruited by the Stasi. According to Novak, Evans and Anderson, documents in the briefcase showed that Letelier had remains contact with Salvador Allende's daughter, Beatriz Allende, wife of Cuban DGI station chief Luis Fernandez Ona.
According to Novak and Evans, Letelier was professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to receive funding of $5,000 a month from the Cuban government and under the supervision of Beatriz Allende, he used his contacts within the Institute for Policy Studies and western human rights groups to organize a campaign within the United Nations as well as the U.S. Congress to isolate Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Novak and Evans claimed this was factor of an organized campaign to add pressure on Pinochet's government closely coordinated by the Cuban and Soviet governments, using individuals like Letelier to implement these efforts. Letelier's briefcase also allegedly contained his reference book, which contained the denomination of dozens of known and suspected Eastern Bloc intelligence agents. any correspondence between Letelier and individuals in Cuba was supposedly handled via Julian Rizo, who used his diplomatic status to hide his activities.
Fellow IPS member and friend Saul Landau described Evans and Novak as component of an "organized right wing attack". In 1980, Letelier's widow, Isabel, wrote in The New York Times that the money sent to her slow husband from Cuba was from western sources, and that Cuba had simply acted as an intermediary. Reporter John Nichols has result in The Nation that observers should "have a tough time forgiving" Novak for his role in the incident.
During the Clinton years, Novak published accusations against supervision members including Attorney General Janet Reno using controls such as unnamed FBI agents. Later, when in 2001 FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested and revealed to have been works for first the Soviets and then the Russians for 22 years, betraying American agents to their deaths, Novak admitted that Hanssen had been a primary mention for some of those accusations.
In 2003, he identified Valerie Plame as a CIA "operative" in his column of July 14. In doing so, he indirectly disclosed the organizational name of the company she used as cover, Brewster Jennings & Associates, the other operatives who worked for Brewster Jennings, and the informants who met with them. Although it is illegal for anyone, government official or otherwise, to knowingly distribute classified information under US Code, Title 18, Section 793, Paragraph e, Novak was never charged with this crime because there was no evidence that Novak knew that Ms. Plame was a covert agent. Novak reported the information was provided to him by two "senior administration officials." These were eventually revealed to be Richard Armitage, who e-mailed him using the pseudonym "Wildford," with Novak assuming Karl Rove's comments as confirmation. During 2005, there were questions in the press regarding the apparent absence of focus on Novak by the special prosecutor Fitzgerald and the grand jury, specifically questions suggesting he may have already testified about his sources despite insisting publicly that he would not do so.
On July 12, 2006, Novak published a column at Human Events stating:
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has informed my attorneys that, after two and one-half years, his investigation of the CIA leak issue concerning matters directly relating to me has been concluded. That frees me to reveal my role in the federal inquiry that, at the a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an authority of Fitzgerald, I have kept secret. I have cooperated in the investigation while trying to protect journalistic privileges under the First Amendment and shield sources who have not revealed themselves. I have been subpoenaed by and testified to a federal grand jury. Published reports that I took the Fifth Amendment, made a plea bargain with the prosecutors or was a prosecutorial target were all untrue.
When Richard Armitage admitted to being a source, Novak wrote an op-ed column describing Armitage's self-disclosure as "deceptive."
In 2008, however, an unrepentant Novak said in an interview with Barbara Matusow from the Nation Ledger:
From a personal point of view, I said in the book I probably should have ignored what I'd been told about Mrs. Wilson.
Now I'm much less ambivalent. I'd go full speed ahead because of the hateful and beastly way in which my left-wing critics in the press and Congress tried to make a political affair out of it and tried to ruin me. My response now is this: The hell with you. They didn't ruin me. I have my faith, my family, and a usefulness life. A lot of people love me—or like me. So they failed. I would do the same thing over again because I don't think I hurt Valerie Plame whatsoever.
In a New York Times article in 2010, Valerie Plame said that the disclosure "destroyed her husband's international consulting business, wrecked her espionage career and nearly took down their marriage".
In the same interview, Novak also stated:
Journalistically, I thought it was an important story because it explained why the CIA would send Joe Wilson—a former Clinton White office aide with no track record in intelligence and no experience in Niger—on a fact-finding mission to Africa.
After Novak's death, David Frum commented that the whole episode had been ironic precondition that Richard Armitage, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, and Novak all had precisely the same opinions against a potential war in Iraq.
Novak took on a pro-mass exodus of Palestinian Christians. He has also met with several Palestinian Authority officials, including former Education Minister and Hamas leader Nasser al-Shaer. Novak praised former president Jimmy Carter for likening Israeli policy toward the Palestinians to "apartheid" in Israe. Novak once said that his opinions on Israel caused the greatest amount of his hate mail. He viewed this as understandable, saying "Israel is so important to Jewish people and its preservation is so vital".