Remembering Robert Novak: An Intern's View

I cannot say I knew Robert Novak well. I worked for him very briefly – on a six-week internship in October and November of 1987 as part of a program at the National Journalism Center. But working for him and his partner Rowland Evans was an important educational experience for me.

The first thing I feared was getting chewed out by Novak, which I had heard happened to many NJC interns. One of the first things I was assigned to do was assemble a news-clip file for Evans & Novak to interview then-Rep. Les Aspin about national defense. I mistakenly found a set of older Aspen clips in the Newsweek Washington bureau downstairs. Novak saw my thin folder and said in an exasperated tone to his secretary, "Caroline, tell the intern how we do things." (They wanted a pile of newspaper clips from the last few days.)

At this time, Novak was a busy man, taping Crossfire on CNN many weekday afternoons, and I remember being sent to discuss matters with him as he shaved shortly before heading over to CNN. He never did yell at me, and for that, I was grateful.

Some of the real treats of that short tenure were attending some TV tapings. I saw Evans & Novak interview Sen. Daniel Patrick Moyhihan for CNN (Evans was nice enough to ask me for my opinion afterwards, as if I knew that much.)

But the most memorable event in my internship was the collapsing Supreme Court nomination of Douglas Ginsburg under the weight of word that he enjoyed marijuana while he served as a Harvard professor. One Friday, Novak allowed me to hop in his car for a taping of "The McLaughlin Group." While he drove furiously from downtown to the NBC studios to the northwest, he was on the phone with Gary Bauer, then Reagan’s domestic policy adviser and a key Novak source. (The car looked like it was having a series of seizures as he drove and talked.) Apparently, the word from the inside was that Ginsburg’s nomination was finished.

What made this memorable is that McLaughlin asked his quartet of panelists if Ginsburg was toast, and all four said his nomination was dead as a doornail – with that kind of certainty. What happened next showed the liberal bias of NBC: a full 24 hours before McLaughlin’s show aired in D.C., NBC Nightly News showed a soundbite of the "he’s toast" roundup – just to emphasize how badly Reagan had lost.

The biggest surprise to me, for some reason, was seeing up close how Evans and Novak dealt with sources – at least from their half of phone conversations. They could be friendly, they could be aggressive, and with less experienced Washington hands, they could even sound (to my young ears) like they were bullying. All of those methods were ways of extracting information from sources. But it drove home to me how much journalists are players in the political process, not just casual observers. They push and pull and make things happen, which shook me out of some civics-textbook idea that journalists just politely stood before the powerful and asked gently for a nugget or two of information.

For the last few decades of his career, Robert Novak wasn’t just a columnist, but was a major television warrior for the conservative side. When he finally slammed the door on CNN, after just one too many nasty provocations from co-host James Carville, the only surprise was that he could stand Carville as long as he had.

Robert Novak didn’t begin his columnist’s career as a conservative, but he certainly became one of the nation’s most intelligent and persistent and persuasive conservative watchdogs of the powerful. As someone who barely knew him, I can only say thank you for what you taught me, and thank you for how you fought for all of us.