Conservative columnist Robert Novak announced his immediate retirement Monday after being told his prognosis for a malignant brain tumor was “dire.”
Novak, 77, said he plans to focus all his energies on his treatment and recovery, according to a story in the Chicago Sun-Times, his home paper. “The details are being worked out with the doctors this week, but the tentative plan is for radiation and chemotherapy,” he told the paper.
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One of the nation’s most influential and widely read syndicated columnists, Novak revealed several days ago that he had a brain tumor and was undergoing testing at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
That diagnosis came less than a week after he struck an elderly pedestrian with his Corvette in downtown Washington and drove away. At the time, he said he was not aware he hit anyone, and received a $50 citation for the accident. The pedestrian was treated for a dislocated shoulder.
Novak is perhaps best known for outing Valerie Plame as a covert operative of the Central Intelligence Agency in a July, 2003 column, several months after Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed piece questioning the factual justification for the invasion of Iraq.
The outing created a political furor about the source of Novak’s information, and an investigation that resulted in the conviction of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. President Bush subsequently commuted Libby’s sentence.
Novak himself avoided any legal entanglement, although Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, was sent to jail for refusing to reveal her sources to a grand jury, even though she had never written about Plame. Novak’s source was eventually revealed to be Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state. Novak later acknowledged that he got confirmation of that information from then-White House Political Director Karl Rove.
Novak launched his career as a political columnist in 1963 as a sidekick to Rowland Evans, and continued writing it even after his partner retired in 1993. Novak was also a longtime co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, and appeared frequently on MSNBC’s Meet the Press and on Fox News, where his scowling presence became almost a caricature of a right-wing pundit.
Last year, he published a memoir of his life called The Prince of Darkness, using a nickname bestowed by another journalist for his unrelentingly negative view of the world and which he seemed proud to claim.
In his memoir, he described how he began life as a political centrist and once turned down a job writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal because he didn’t think he was conservative enough.
Born into a secular Jewish family in Joliet, Ill., Novak converted to Catholicism in the 1990s. His baptism was attended by a bevy of Washington insiders, including journalists Al Hunt and his wife, Judy Woodruff, the late Rep. Henry Hyde and the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Novak himself liked to quote Moynihan’s quip: “Well, we’ve now made Bob a Catholic. The question is, can we make him a Christian?”
Novak has been diagnosed with cancer at least three times. He underwent surgery in 2003 to remove a cancerous growth on his kidney and was under medical observation for a possible recurrence.
He and his wife, Geraldine, who worked for the late Lyndon Baines Johnson, have two children: Alex Novak is the marketing director of Regnery, the conservative publishing house; his daughter, Zelda Caldwell, is a Republican activist who has worked for Dan Quayle and Jack Kemp, among others.
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