Created the CNN pundit show 'The Capital Gang' in 1988. It was modeled after the syndicated show 'The McLaughlin Group.'
Robert Novak Detailed Biography
Robert Novak grew up in Joliet, Illinois, and started working as a part-time reporter for the Joliet Herald-News while attending the University of Illinois (1948-1952). After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he reported for Associated Press and later covered Congress for The Wall Street Journal.
He was raised Jewish, but in the early 1990s began attending Christian services, and in 1998 he was baptized into the Roman Catholic church.
In 1963, Novak began a 30-year collaboration with Rowland Evans, writing a political column called "Inside Report," which featured behind-the-scenes political scuttlebutt, mostly from the right-wing. Evans & Novak wrote together for 30 years, until Evans retired from the column in 1993. Evans later left their shared Evans & Novak TV show and died of cancer in 2001. But Novak valiantly carried on alone, writing his columns and appearing as a perpetual talking head on TV without his longtime companion.
Novak's biggest "scoop" was his weird involvement in exposing a CIA agent in 2003. Joseph Wilson, an American diplomat, had been sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate a report that Iraqis had tried to buy uranium there. In a nutshell, if Wilson had decided the report was credible, it would have helped make George W. Bush's case for war on Iraq. But when Wilson came back, he reported that the report was piffle.
Wilson was flabbergasted months later when Bush recited the Niger-Iraq-aluminum story in his 2003 State of the Union address, using it to justify military action in Iraq. Wilson went public, debunking what he'd already debunked privately to the President.
As Wilson started getting media attention, Novak reported on July 14, 2003 that "two senior administration officials" had told him that it was Valerie Plame, a CIA agent specializing in weapons of mass destruction and married to Wilson, who'd suggested sending her husband to Niger.
This was apparently meant to call Wilson's investigation into question, but since Novak's stated source was the White House, it meant someone at the highest level of U.S. government had clearly committed what's commonly called treason -- revealing a spy's identity.
In an indication of the changing ways of journalism, the mainstream media simply didn’t notice the newsworthiness of Novak's column that day. Webloggers -- little and largely amateur on-line news-hounds -- did, and kept the questions bubbling under the surface for three months, until The Washington Post reported that half a dozen reporters had received the same information from "a high White House source," but only Novak had run with it.
Novak, in a later interview, said he "didn't dig [the information] out, it was given to me. [White House officials] thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."
This no trivial matter. Just like in the movies, lives and national security sometimes hang in the balance. And in a subsequent column, Novak revealed the name of the cover company Plame had used, basically exposing every CIA agent and contact who'd used that cover.
For the record, naming a clandestine CIA agent would be a violation of the law by White House officials, but freedom of the press would presumably protect Novak from prosecution.
In 2004, co-hosting CNN's Crossfire, Novak became the first and so-far only journalist to insinuate that Richard A. Clarke's critique of Bush terror policies was fueled by Clarke's "problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?"
