The informer
For nearly 50 years, Robert Novak badgered and bullied his way to the top of Washington. His disgrace in the Valerie Plame affair has brought him crashing down -- and he has only himself to blame.
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By Sidney Blumenthal
Picked up in media res:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/08/11/novak/print.html...
Novak had now become a cottage industry. Evans retired, but Novak's column remained syndicated to more than 300 newspapers, including the Washington Post. The Evans and Novak show turned into "The Novak Zone." Novak was ubiquitous on CNN. "He's Novak -- he can do what he wants," a CNN source told me. He was also a frequent guest on the political panel of NBC's "Meet the Press." He continued the political newsletter he had begun with Evans, an important stream of income. He charged high fees to business executives to attend his retreats, which featured leading politicians who appeared at Novak's beck and call. They understood the implicit exchange for positive coverage.
Novak's columns always play favorites, ranging from neoconservative Richard Perle to supply-sider Richard Gilder. Gilder, who has run the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee, also happens to be Novak's investment advisor, in charge of his financial portfolio. Twice, Karl Rove was dismissed from George H.W. Bush's campaign, in 1980 and 1992, respectively, for leaking to Novak. Those who agree to serve as sources for him receive protection from his wrath and an outlet when their interests and Novak's coincide. "Look, I'm not David Broder," Novak told Amy Sullivan of the Washington Monthly. "I'm not one of the real good guys. They try to make things nicer. That's not my deal."
Novak lives and breathes the nuts and bolts of politics, so it was somewhat startling when he held a public conversion to Catholicism from Judaism in 1998. He was raised as a Jew in Joliet, Ill., but his columns have been almost uniformly hostile to Israel. No one had ever seen his spiritual side before. His conversion ceremony at St. Patrick's in Washington was packed with invited guests, liberals and conservatives alike, with whom he has appeared on talk shows, from Fred Barnes to Margaret Carlson.
Novak's conversion was more than met the eye, as he became a member of the tightly knit far-right Catholic coterie clustered in Washington. Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Catholic writer, observed: "Perhaps the least-known aspect of Robert Novak's public persona is that he is a convert not just to Catholicism but to its most hard-line sect, Opus Dei. It helps explain Novak's occasional, weird digressions into defenses of the most far-right social causes, and also why those columns appear, without this context, to be, well, slightly unhinged."
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