White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

In Praise of Robert Novak

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The op-ed page of The Washington Post is full of type, but not enough to fill the gaping hole where Robert “Bob” Novak’s column used to appear. Novak’s column nominally originated from The Chicago Sun-Times, but he was the first to say that much of his success was the result of appearing in The Washington Post. If you write about politics it helps to do it where the politicians will read you. In Washington the best place for that is The Post, with its dominant circulation among the three newspapers published in the nation’s capital.

Now that Novak, 77, has had to retire to fight a brain tumor, it is clear that he has no successor. Some of his colleagues on The Post are more articulate than Novak. His fellow conservatives Charles Krauthammer, George Will and Michael Gerson all are great stylists. The liberals Ruth Marcus and Harold Meyerson turn a beautiful phrase, and Richard Cohen has remained fresh and funny for three decades.

But none of them sets out to do what Novak did for 45 years–break news. He believed the old adage that “there is nothing as good as news in the newspaper.” First with his late partner Rowland Evans, and in recent years by himself, Novak broke news. He understood that opinion alone grows tired, especially when everyone knows the sympathies of the columnist, but news is always self-refreshing.

For Novak, the column was a newspaper inside a newspaper; and he was going to fill it with news whether it was hurtful or harmless to his Republican friends. Because Novak was an ardent conservative for most of his professional life, conservatives always felt hurt when Novak’s reporting revealed chinks in their armor. As a commentator, particularly on television, Novak was a fierce partisan. But as a reporter he went where the story led, as they say, without fear or favor.

Novak got the news, which distinguished his column, the old-fashioned way: He worked for it. In this he was like the liberal Jack Germond, who worked hard for his stories.

Timothy Carney, who worked for Novak on the Evans-Novak Political Report, and now edits that newsletter, said in his Washington Examiner column last week, “The hardest working man I have ever known has retired.”

Carney went on: “What we’ve lost primarily is a reporter who cast a cynical eye on the best-laid plans of bureaucrats, who took the same level of skepticism to his coverage of both political parties, and who was motivated, above all, by the desire to unearth information that powerful people would prefer remain buried.

“To the detriment of the republic, there is now one fewer skeptic calling around Capitol Hill until he gets the real dirt–there is one fewer sleuth–freed by his spot on the opinion pages from what Novak calls ‘the deaf-dumb-blind’ sort of impartiality that often makes news reporting worthless–exposing the true machinations in the government. This can be a cause for relief for many powerful people.”

I first met Novak at a conference. We were both speakers, but he was the star. I do not remember the conference or where it took place–Texas, I think. But I do remember Novak and how kind he was to me, and generous with his praise of my talk.

Over the years I ran into Novak at the White House, at receptions, and one glorious evening at the National Press Club in 2001, when we lampooned Novak. Actually that was not the plan, but it was the result. The plan was to give him the prestigious Fourth Estate Award and to say pompous, platitudinous things about journalism. Instead his fellow columnists filled the stage, and there was much merriment and roasting “The Prince of Darkness.” This moniker came from a fellow journalist, John Lindsay, and was a commentary on Novak’s Slavic looks and pessimism about the human condition. Novak loved it.

To my mind Novak’s politics were tortured, but his journalism shone through. He believed that the purpose of his column was to find out what is going on and to tell us. He was true to the old journalistic concept that you have failed if the reader does not know something he or she did not know before they picked up your piece.

A Little Hate Is Good for Fourth Estate

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There must be some nostalgia at CBS News for the good old days, when the network was roundly hated and people at the political extremes longed to see it fail. Now that it is failing (it is a laggard in the ratings), nobody seems to care. Gone are the conservatives, who wanted to buy the network to sanitize it and rout out alleged liberal journalists. Also gone are the political lefties, who believed that CBS was the captive of its advertisers.

In media, to be hated is an affirmation that you are succeeding.

At The Radio & Television Correspondents’ Association annual dinner this week, the happiest people were at the Fox News tables. Roger Ailes, the principal architect of Fox’s huge success as a news network, and his star host, Bill O’Reilly, were beaming—well aware that most people in the room believe that the Fox cable channel has degraded broadcast news.

It is not just CBS that is hurting, but also other traditional media as well—most especially newspapers. Marylanders used to hate The Baltimore Sun. Now they worry that their venerable newspaper is on the ropes, and may be sold to quite the wrong kind of person.

They used to say in newsrooms, “If you aren’t hated, you’re not doing this job right.” Unfortunately, the quality of hatred that most news organizations face is sadly watered down. Generalized attacks on the “liberal media” and the “mainstream media” just don’t pack much of a wallop. They tell us more about the attacker than the attacked.

Happily, two newspapers—maybe two of the three best newspapers in the country—can still agitate those who believe in media conspiracies. These are The New York Times and The Washington Post. The third is The Wall Street Journal, which has never raised the same kind of intense feeling as the other two. Its editorial page is so predictable that even liberals cannot get mad at it. And its news coverage is pretty faultless.

The two big East Coast newspapers can really get the critics going. The New York Times, through a series of terrible blunders, has opened itself up to particularly virulent criticism. The Washington Post, which sells five times as many newspapers as its nearest competitor, The Washington Times, unerringly gets the brickbats. Civil rights groups accuse it of racial insensitivity. And radio talk show hosts like to refer to it as “The Washington Compost.” Even so, the paper has just bagged six Pulitzer prizes. Particularly, it showed the whole world last year that it could still deliver great journalism by revealing the scandalous treatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have the resources to do the job right. Although The Times is in a slump, and appears to be in desperate need of an editor who has a vision and a publisher who is competent, it still triumphs on solid, day-to-day coverage of big continuing stories. Its coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis and its on-the-ground reporting out of Iraq are excellent.

Michael Wolff, the media critic of Vanity Fair, is in full pursuit of The New York Times in his May column. Wolff catalogs the humiliations the newspaper has suffered in recent times (including the Jayson Blair fictions, Judith Miller’s partisanship, and the insinuation that John McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist) and speculates on the possibility that the special voting stock, which gives the Sulzberger family control of the paper, may be under attack.

It may be very difficult to change the bylaws of the company, but Wolff thinks that angry shareholders could force the sale issue; or that the Sulzberger family, like the Bancroft family that used to own The Wall Street Journal, can simply be bought off. One way or the other, Wolff sees dissident shareholders changing the corporate structure of the paper.

At the same time, with a similar stock arrangement, the Graham family, greatly assisted by Warren Buffet, is firmly in control of its newspaper.

Yet, neither the Sulzbergers nor the Grahams have had huge financial successes with the properties they inherited. Both have had considerable editorial successes by lavishing resources on the papers. But as publishing ventures, the families have been timid and sometimes foolish. They profited from near monopolies, but mostly failed in diversification. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the father of the present publisher of The New York Times, confounded the publishing industry when he bought The Boston Globe. Analysts warned that two newspapers in the same advertising market would hurt more than a different kind of diversification. But the man who got it right in launching a national edition of The New York Times got it very wrong in Boston. The Globe is losing money and is a drain on The New York Times Company.

Katherine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, who is revered in newspaper circles, did some pretty odd things herself. She clung to Newsweek, when it could have been sold profitably; invested in newspapers in New Jersey and Washington state; and nibbled at small publishing ventures in Washington, D.C. It can be argued that it wasn’t until Buffet came onto the scene with his steadying hand—he is a large shareholder and director of the company—that The Post started hedging the risk of newspaper publishing. In particular, it bought Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Centers, which has turned out to be a cash cow and is now more profitable than The Post.

Unlike The New York Times, The Washington Post had a clear idea of what to do with its Web pages, which are now in profit–as is Slate, the online magazine that The Post bought from Microsoft.

Nobody knows the future of newspapers. But we do know that the well-being of a democracy depends on them. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post are still making a profit, though not as much as in years past. And the public still has the energy and good sense to hate them.

The Most Traumatic Year, 1968

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Nineteen sixty-eight was, as they say, a year to remember.

 

Many extraordinary events were crammed into 1968, including the launching of the Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese; U.S. ground troops from Charlie Company rampaging through the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, killing more than 500 civilians; President Johnson’s announcing of his decision not to seek re-election; the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; student rioting in Paris; the assassination of Robert Kennedy; the “Prague Spring” uprising against communism in Czechoslovakia; and the tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago.

 

As an editor at The Washington Daily News, an evening newspaper, the enormity of King’s assassination was hard to get my mind around. And the riots that ensued left scars on the infrastructure of the nation’s capital that would never quite heal. Only now, two generations later, is the Shaw neighborhood, which grew out of freed slave encampments in Northwest Washington, returning to normal urban vitality. Much of Shaw was engulfed in flames in1968, and it fell into the worst kind of decay; its hollowed-out buildings housing crack addicts, feral animals and rats.

 

As in other cities, fire did the damage, but politics and litigation delayed the recovery. There may be something informative here for those who think Baghdad will spring back to life, or that Zimbabwe will return to the status quo ante. Recovery is hard and slow.

 

Little did we know it, but The Washington Daily News was to be a victim of the riots. Looters and rioters destroyed the newspaper kiosks that were a feature in Washington and essential to selling our afternoon tabloid. The Daily News began to fail because it depended on street sales, and the infrastructure for that was destroyed. The city’s other two newspapers, The Washington Post and The Washington Evening Star, fared better because they had a larger percentage of their circulation home-delivered.

 

After the fires were extinguished, the smell of smoke hung over the city, a curfew was in effect, and troops were deployed on street corners. Those of us with press credentials were able to drive around, and we were constantly speculating how eerily similar this must have been to events behind the Iron Curtain.

 

Over time, the riots of 1968 have been referred to more and more as “race riots.” But at the time we just called them “the riots,” because one of the consequences was a period of elaborate politeness between whites and blacks. This was noted by two of the best chroniclers of the time: Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard News Service and Richard Harwood of The Washington Post. One of them beautifully encapsulated the calm after the storm, when he referred to black drivers yielding to white drivers at street intersections. After one such incident, Harwood said that “both thought they had done something significant.”

 

The rioters’ anger seemed to be directed more toward property than to people: It seemed to be black rioters against white-owned property than blacks against whites. In the worst of the rioting, on April 5, I walked up the Shaw-U Street corridor without any sense of trepidation. Looters–their arms full of appliances–were everywhere. When they banged into you, they apologized. One looter even suggested that I walk on top of a wall for safety. “That way the brothers will see you, and you will be safe,” he said.

 

It was after the riots that fear gripped the city. White flight to the suburbs began and continued for many years.

Washington’s suburbs boomed, and the inner-city decayed. A somewhat unconsciously integrated city became a segregated one that pretended otherwise. Large corporations added blacks to their boards of directors, television stations added black anchors, and the newspapers searched high and low to beef up their core of black writers. Tokenism became an industry.

 

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message advanced in some ways–mostly because there was a recognition that black grievances were well-founded and deeply seated. But some of the remedies have been as harmful as the disease–excesses of affirmative action and reverse racism.

 

Of course, civil rights was only one of the issues roiling the nation in 1968. There was also the women’s liberation movement; the environmental movement; and underlying it all, the Vietnam War.

The war touched every aspect of national life. And as people turned against it, they did so with anger, often fueled by the drafting of a family member. Some institutions were torn apart by the division. The Reporter magazine, a liberal alternative to The National Review, was destroyed by contention. Washington columnist Joseph Alsop lost the confidence of editors across the country. And Paul Harvey, the conservative radio commentator, reversed his position on the war because his son was facing the draft.

 

Nineteen sixty-eight tested loyalties and caused many people to re-examine their politics and to think through their predispositions. A majority of Americans were well on their journey from right to left because of the war.

 

The assassination of King, followed shortly after by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, convinced many people that the nation had lost its way. Unfortunately, it chose Richard Nixon to lead it out of the darkness.