Posted by
Bill Crawford on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 1:47:46 PM
He had cancer, and this had been coming for a while. I grew up on the Evans-Novak Report, and their atention to detail taught me many things about how politics and government function.
After he went solo, that detail was there as always, but towards the end, it became clear that, while his data and human assessments were right on target, the predictions that followed them were skewed conservative. Always the hopeful one. This became more pronounced after the Democrats regaining majority in 2006, and one could read it in all his caveats sprinkled through his 2008 reports.
But he started as a lonely conservative voice covering the doings of D.C. under JFK and then the Great Society Congress of 1965. He had a ton of sources who found in him a sympathetic ear when they were disgruntled with the movements of government.
His last great involvement in goverment affairs, the sourcing behind the article outing Valerie Plame pushing her husband to a fact finding trip to Nigeria, was handled with his typical class and aplomb. Absent a subpeona, he held his tongue until his source was given away elsewhere. Then he later redressed the Scooter Libby investigation because they knew he wasn't the source of the leak before any grand jury was called, and were prosecuting him for a crime they knew was not connected to him.
Novak was ahead of his time in that he was a pundit in a world of Ed Murrow "just the facts" clones. He never pretended to be otherwise.