CHAPTER 31

A Near-Death Experience

ON NOVEMBER 10, 1981, David Stockman celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday. That day, Democrat Gary Hart rose in the Senate to read into the record an advance copy of an article in December’s Atlantic: “The Education of David Stockman” by the left-wing journalist William Greider (then a Washington Post assistant managing editor).

Greider’s article dealt Reagan a devastating blow, based on eighteen tape-recorded conversations between Stockman and Greider during ten months of Saturday morning breakfasts at the Hay Adams (alternating with me every other Saturday). OMB Director Stockman pronounced supply-side tax cuts, whose virtues he had been proclaiming publicly, a fraud on the American public. It was as if Stalin, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution, had repudiated Marxism.

There were early warning signs about Stockman beginning with a Washington Post Magazine article on February 8, 1981. Walter Shapiro, a staffer for the magazine who had been a Carter presidential speechwriter, painted Stockman as a small-town Midwest version of Sammy Glick. He portrayed Stockman’s journey from anti-Vietnam student protester to live-in acolyte of Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan to liberal Republican aide and friend of Congressman John Anderson to supply-side congressman and ally of Jack Kemp. After Geraldine read Shapiro’s article, she told me: “If this is true, he’s a monster.” I shrugged off Shapiro’s piece to Geraldine, but I learned from it things about Stockman I had not known and that bothered me.

The Washington Gridiron Club president for 1981 was Ed O’Brien, the Washington correspondent of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and a rare conservative in the capital’s press corps. The Gridiron president picked speakers for the club’s annual white-tie spring dinner, and O’Brien asked me for suggestions. I recommended Stockman, the most interesting member of the new administration, as the Republican speaker and his old mentor, Pat Moynihan, as the Democrat. Ed agreed, and at his request I called them. Both accepted.

Senator Moynihan was the hit at the ninety-fourth annual spring Gridiron dinner on March 28, 1981, at the Capital Hilton as he related his experiences with Stockman when he was a Harvard divinity student and guest in the Moynihan home:

…Liz [Moynihan’s wife] and I were assigned David Stockman. Fresh from Michigan State and the Students for a Democratic Society and Vietnam Summer.

Dave was everything you could dream of as a mole. Corn fed and cowlicked, he was the best boob bait for conservatives ever to come out of the Middle West.

The only trouble was he couldn’t stop talking about the Viet Cong and American imperialism and the immorality of the Vietnam War….

Stockman is peerless. I have never known a man capable of such sustained self-hypnotic ideological fervor. One day he arrives at Harvard pressing the infallibility of Ho Chi Minh. Next thing you know he turns up in Washington proclaiming the immutability of the Laffer Curve.

“The Gridiron may singe, but it never burns” was the motto of the club’s soft-core satire, and I thought Moynihan crossed the line. He was not kidding.

Even before Stockman was sworn in, Jude Wanniski had come to regard as the enemy the new budget chief he had helped select. Stockman was such a good source for me I was reluctant to write him off. But he quickly moved to another stage of his life’s twisting political journey. Our eight a.m. breakfast on October 12, 1981, at the Hay Adams was the last of so many private contacts between Stockman and me.

In the Atlantic article, two vivid metaphors used by Stockman—“Trojan horse” and “trickle down”—seized the political community’s attention. Greider wrote:

“The hard part of the supply-side tax cut is dropping the top rate from 70 to 50 percent—the rest of it is a secondary matter,” Stockman explained…. “I mean, Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.”…

“It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down,’” he explained, “so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.”

I was traveling with Jack Kemp in upstate New York (getting material for a Reader’s Digest article about him) as this story broke on November 10. Kemp was a sunny optimist who wanted to think the best of everyone. When we arrived at Washington National Airport in early evening, Kemp called Stockman (celebrating at a Washington restaurant) to wish him a happy birthday. Then Kemp handed me the telephone: “Bob, say hello to Dave and wish him a happy birthday.” After I did so, Stockman told me: “You must think I’m Judas. We’ve got to get together soon.” We never did. That was the last conversation I ever had with David Stockman.

I assumed Stockman was finished, but he stayed on, incredibly, for three and one-half years until he resigned, of his own volition, on July 31, 1985. All that time, he was fighting the supply-siders and pushing for tax increases. His 1986 memoir, The Triumph of Politics, repudiated supply-side doctrine and the ideological foundations of Reagan’s Republican Party. “By keeping Stockman on the job,” I wrote in the Evans & Novak column of November 27, 1981, “they [Reagan and his closest aides] court divisiveness on economic policy.”

I predicted to friends that Stockman would climax his life of twists and turns with a final metamorphosis to become a liberal Democrat. Instead, he went underground politically. His wife, Jennifer, became a leader in Republicans for Choice. I was told by a friend of Stockman that after 2000 he went on cable television to abjure his apostasy and return to faith in the supply-side gospel. It did not get much attention, because nobody cared about him any longer. My personal anger toward David Stockman because of his duplicitous conduct toward me has subsided, and I hope he finds whatever he is seeking.

         

JEFF BELL NOTED that after the Atlantic article, I quoted anonymous Stockman aides (it usually was his chief economist, Lawrence Kudlow) rather than Stockman himself. “Won’t Dave return your calls?” Bell asked me. “I don’t call him,” I replied.

Why did I end nearly all contact with Stockman after the Greider article? (I use the word “nearly” because I twice requested, through channels, Stockman as a guest to be interviewed by Rowly and me on CNN. Stockman refused.)

I answered the question in the New York Times Book Review of June 22, 1986. In the May 11 issue, Michael Kinsley (then editor of the New Republic) had reviewed Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics in which he repeated with obvious relish Stockman’s distorted depiction of our relationship. Kinsley, my future liberal debating partner on CNN’s Crossfire, was incensed that my conservative column was based on reporting (as Kinsley put it, “an ideological agenda masqueraded as factual reportage”). Through my book agent Esther Newberg, I got the Book Review to publish a long letter correcting Stockman that was a short essay on my dealings with the OMB director (the only time I ever have been published in that publication). I concluded:

The reason I stopped seeking private chats [with Stockman] was not because we no longer agreed on what was best for the American economy. If, as a columnist, I was so arrogant as to see only public officials with whom I agreed, I would not be getting much news and, in truth, would see precious few people. Some of my oldest and most valuable news sources are people who disagree with me about virtually everything. Instead, I had simply come to the point where I could not tell when David was or was not telling the truth.

         

EARLY ON THE morning of Wednesday, January 13, 1982, Rowly and I flew up to New York’s La Guardia Airport to be driven by limo to Nassau County, Long Island, to address a luncheon meeting of real estate agents. After we arrived on Long Island, a severe snowstorm cancelled all flights between New York and Washington. Now we had to take a train home, and we wanted to catch one early enough to attend a black-tie dinner in Washington that night honoring Lyn Nofziger. An abbreviated lecture performance was fine with me. I felt one of the bad colds I got every winter coming on but never bothered to see a doctor about or take any medicine for.

When Rowly and I arrived via limo at Penn Station in Manhattan, we encountered at the ticket window William Colby with his frozen, unrevealing expression. This was the man who as head of “pacification” in Vietnam had enraged liberals with the Phoenix program to murder Vietcong operatives and who as director of Central Intelligence had enraged the CIA’s old hands by giving a hostile Congress the Agency’s most treasured secrets (“the family jewels”). Colby’s cold spymaster stare was intimidating but now suggested a confused man unaccustomed to finding his own way in a blizzard without help from aides.

Colby told us he just learned what I thought anybody would know: his plane ticket was useless at Penn Station. He was in a quandary because he did not carry money or credit cards. I was at the ticket window, and Rowly shouted: “Bob, buy Bill a ticket to Washington.” I did, amid promises by the former spymaster that I would soon be repaid. When Colby excused himself to visit the washroom after we boarded the train, Rowly—ever the enthusiastic reporter—rubbed his hands in glee over the prospect of grilling Bill Colby on a long train ride through the snow to Washington.

Thanks to the storm, that trip took more than eight hours or nearly twice the normal duration. We all had drinks, and I put down two or three Scotch and waters. Little did I dream that these were the last Scotch and waters I would ever finish.

My impression is that Colby, Rowly, and I talked about Vietnam and the CIA the whole trip, and I have a vague recollection that Colby was philosophical rather than informative. But it is only vague. I kept nodding off, because now I was getting really sick. I felt feverish and about to pass out. (As I expected, Colby did not repay me for the train ticket. Those little details escape the attention of a DCI.)

We arrived in Washington around midnight, far too late for the Nofziger dinner (which had been cancelled anyway). It was surreal as huddled masses braved the continuing snowstorm outside Union Station, queuing for taxis. I had to wait more than a half hour in the snow, and I thought I would faint. I dozed most of the long ride into the Maryland suburbs in the storm.

I had not missed a day’s work during nineteen years as a columnist, and I was not going to let a little cold keep me from meeting two of my best sources. I had a ten thirty a.m. Thursday meeting scheduled on Capitol Hill with Senator Scoop Jackson and a twelve thirty lunch at the Maison Blanche restaurant (would-be successor to Sans Souci) with Richard Perle, now an assistant secretary of Defense. So, rotten though I felt, I arose at six a.m. to drive the snow-covered roads into Washington. I found that the Jackson and Perle appointments had been cancelled because of the weather. I also found that, feverish, dizzy, and in pain from a nonstop headache, I could not concentrate enough for writing or reporting. For the first time, I could not finish the day because of illness and, in early afternoon, I drove back home to Maryland.

When Geraldine took my temperature and found it was 104 degrees, she called the doctor. He was Dr. George T. Economos, who became our physician twenty years earlier when I was in need of help for an asthma attack and the medical society gave me his name. Geraldine and I grew fond of George, a warm human being without the hauteur of many physicians. A Greek immigrant with a mostly African-American patient list, Economos was no society doctor.

What bothered us were his diagnostic skills. “He’s never cured us of anything,” Geraldine would say. Her lack of confidence in George stemmed from a 1966 incident when Zelda was an infant. Eva, a pretty teenager from Sweden living with us as an au pair, was injured on the roller coaster at the Glen Echo amusement park outside Washington. Dr. Economos treated her, but after a couple of weeks her wound was not healing. We were terrified that this poor foreign girl in our care was dying of gangrene. We took her in to see George again, but he said after examining her he could do no more than continue the same ineffective medication. Geraldine, uncharacteristically assertive because of her concern about Eva, told him that simply wasn’t good enough. “Well,” Economos told Geraldine in his thick Greek accent, “I’m open to suggestion.”

A very different George Economos was functioning the night of January 14, 1982, when, over the telephone, Geraldine described my symptoms—fading in and out of consciousness, headache, and very high fever. He said he better come right over. A house call! I had not experienced a doctor’s house call since I was a little boy. Economos lived nearby. But the previous day’s snowstorm had resumed, and it took him forty-five minutes to reach our home.

George found my fever had risen to 105 degrees. He told us he believed I had spinal meningitis. It was only his opinion, and he was not sure because he had never before encountered that dreaded disease. But if he was right, he felt we must quickly get me under expert care—the world-class neurology department at the George Washington University Hospital in Foggy Bottom. He said I should have an ambulance, but it could take hours to get one in this snowstorm. “That would be too late,” Economos said. Too late! He thought I was about to die if I did not get attention quickly.

So George took me in his car. This was amazing in 1982. A doctor was making a night house call and then driving his gravely ill patient to a distant hospital—in the midst of a severe snowstorm. On the way to GW, George passed two perfectly good hospitals—Suburban and Sibley. But neither had the neurology department he felt was needed to save my life. What normally would be a thirty-minute journey took two hours, as I intermittently lapsed into a fitful nightmarish sleep.

The doctors at GW were ready when we arrived after eleven p.m. After bombarding me with questions about whether I knew where I worked and how many children I had (which I had trouble answering), the neurology team instituted an excruciatingly painful spinal tap. Dr. Economos’s intuitive diagnosis was dead-on. I had spinal meningitis. George T. Economos had saved my life. No more did Geraldine and I kid about his diagnostic skills.

When I checked into the hospital that night, it was not certain that I would ever check out. Rowly came to see me the next day and played the macho combat marine, refusing to put on a hospital mask as everybody else wore in my room. He took my wife and children out to dinner Friday night, trying to reassure them everything would be all right. He later confided to me he thought I was going to die, a thought that entered my own mind.

I survived after a struggle of nearly two weeks in the hospital and another two weeks convalescence at home. I was not the same man I had been before January 10. The illness left me, permanently, a little deaf in my left ear. Tests showed I had suffered a small stroke—information I did not impart to anybody except Geraldine. Mostly I felt depleted, lacking the energy that had been more important than talent in propelling my journalistic career.

Our first social engagement after my convalescence was a dinner on February 26 hosted by Andy and Ellie Glass at their Northwest Washington home, celebrating my fifty-first birthday. At that point, I had not touched an alcoholic beverage in more than a month—my longest period of abstinence since I was sixteen years old. I eagerly anticipated my usual Scotch and water and made an occasion of breaking my alcoholic fast at the Glasses. But I gagged on my first sip, tried another sip and gagged again. I just could not get it down. I tried again a few days later, with the same result.

After downing countless thousands of them over thirty-four years, I had consumed my last Scotch and water. I learned to like vodka straight in small doses, enjoyed an occasional beer, and sometimes drank wine with meals. But my serious drinking days were over. If I had a drinking problem, it was gone. Spinal meningitis had applied a drastic remedy.

Not long after the Glass dinner, Geraldine and I dined with Jeff Bell at Montgomery County’s Marriott Hotel—my first restaurant meal since my illness. Bell brought some Catholic literature for me. Jeff had converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1978 (the year of his first Senate race in New Jersey), but this was his initial step toward proselytizing me. I have kidded Jeff that he must have figured I was near death and he had better try to convert me before it was too late. In fact, he thought my experience might move me closer to my God.

I thought Bell was wasting his time if he expected me to become a Catholic. But I began wondering whether there was some purpose in my illness. Was it mere chance that Dr. Economos had saved my life? Was there a purpose that illness abruptly curtailed my drinking? Was a hidden hand changing my life? Would it bring a spiritual awakening?

         

ON SUNDAY, Valentine’s Day, February 14, I was convalescing at home in the Maryland suburbs when John McLaughlin telephoned. He asked to come over to see me with Richard Moore, his old colleague from the Nixon White House and now his business partner.

Months earlier, McLaughlin called to say he had finally found a tentative sponsor for “our” program. What program? I had forgotten our 1974 conversation. He had asked me then to be a panelist on a more conservative version of Agronsky and Company. I said yes then, thinking it just another of the dozens of TV shows pitched to me and then abandoned.

McLaughlin had doggedly sought financial backing and snagged Dick Moore, a White House lawyer during Watergate, as a partner. In 1981, Moore was semiretired at age sixty-seven after a successful career as a television executive. Moore brought to the table three things McLaughlin lacked: money, broadcasting experience, and a warm and engaging personality. Everybody liked Dick Moore. Hardly anybody liked John McLaughlin.

Even with Moore’s help, it is mind-boggling to think that McLaughlin contemplated putting together a major television program. His journalistic and political credentials were slender, and he was remembered in Washington, not at all fondly, as an unpleasant Nixon super-loyalist who still supported the disgraced president after the battle was lost. But persistence paid off. McLaughlin informed me that the Edison Electric Institute, a national association of shareholder-owned power companies, had agreed to bankroll the program if he produced an acceptable pilot.

With McLaughlin having spent eight years searching for sponsors, I was surprised how little thought he had given to who would join what became The McLaughlin Group other than him as moderator and me as a conservative panelist. He had no candidates to be my liberal counterpart, and requested my suggestion. I immediately proposed Jack Germond, who I said was feisty, funny, and much farther to the Left than he admitted. I’m not sure McLaughlin knew exactly who Germond was, but—without further search—he asked Germond to join us.

McLaughlin’s interest in tilting his panel rightward had waned since 1974. He now was more interested in diversity and told me the other two seats on his panel must be filled by a woman and a black man. McLaughlin wanted thirty-four-year-old Judith Miller of the New York Times, who had joined the newspaper’s Washington bureau five years earlier with her glittering journalistic reputation still in the future. The ex-Jesuit priest had an eye for the ladies, and I think John was smitten with Judy Miller’s exotic beauty.

As for the black man, McLaughlin had no idea and asked me if I had any. I suggested C. Sumner (Chuck) Stone, a Philadelphia Daily News editor. I had known Stone since the early 1960s when, as editor of the Chicago Defender, he was helpful to me as I covered Chicago’s civil rights conflicts. He was an odd choice as a non-Washington journalist for a Washington talk show, but he had worked for Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem (and was an excellent source for me). Chuck was good-looking, articulate, and experienced in TV with his own interview program in Philadelphia.

We shot a pilot at WETA, the public broadcasting station in Arlington. Although I never saw the tape, it did not feel like a good performance and I gather the technical quality of the station’s production was poor. McLaughlin a week later said we had to shoot a second pilot, this one at the NBC studios in Northwest Washington. After the taping on December 15, I felt our performance was even worse the second time around.

The Christmas–New Year’s holidays delayed progress on the show, and my illness stopped anything from being done because McLaughlin and Moore wanted me to see the second pilot. That’s why they brought the videocassette to my home on Valentine’s Day. Geraldine, our two children, and I viewed the thirty-minute tape in our family room. I was still groggy from my near fatal encounter with spinal meningitis, but not so groggy I could not tell that the performance I now watched was horrible.

There was dead silence when the tape concluded. McLaughlin turned to me and, in that stentorian tone that would become familiar to TV viewers nationwide, demanded: “Novak, what do you think?” Unwilling to deliver a death sentence, I answered passively: “I think we’ll get better.” Another silence followed. Then McLaughlin turned to my sixteen-year-old daughter with a demand for her opinion. Zelda was lovely, demure, and a little shy, much like her mother, and never had been encouraged by me to boldly express her opinions. But she was gaining in confidence and next year as a high school senior would be editor in chief of the student newspaper.

Zelda paused for a moment, then said softly: “I think it’s pretty bad.” “Well, young lady,” McLaughlin thundered, “what would you do about it?” She quickly replied, raising her voice a little: “Get rid of the black guy and the woman!” McLaughlin responded with his trademark chortle, but Zelda was right and we all knew it. Judy Miller and Chuck Stone were fine journalists and engaging personalities, but poor fits for McLaughlin’s show. Miller lacked opinions, and Stone lacked knowledge. The program needed Washington generalists; Miller was a foreign affairs specialist and Stone was no longer a Washingtonian.

McLaughlin in the next week asked me about replacements. From the start, I thought that Pat Buchanan would be terrific, had not McLaughlin’s yearnings for diversity gotten in the way. They had been comrades in the Nixon White House and were good friends. (Buchanan had declined an invitation to be best man at McLaughlin’s wedding.) But McLaughlin resisted, noting Buchanan had his own TV programs—including the nightly Crossfire on CNN. “Wouldn’t this downgrade our product?” McLaughlin asked me. John obviously feared that the better informed, more insightful Buchanan would eclipse him. I tried to reassure McLaughlin that adding Buchanan would be a sign of strength, and McLaughlin—somewhat reluctantly, I thought—finally agreed.

With McLaughlin, Buchanan, and Novak tipping the panel rightward, we obviously needed another liberal to join Germond. Mort Kondracke was strictly McLaughlin’s idea, but I thought it was brilliant. Morton Kondracke was my fellow townsman from Joliet who as a recent high school graduate worked for me for two weeks in the late summer of 1954 when I filled in as sports editor of the Joliet Herald-News. By 1982, Kondracke had begun a slow shuffle to the middle of the road. But when McLaughlin put his panel together, he was a senior editor for the liberal New Republic and still far enough Left to represent ideological diversity for the panel. He was forty-six years old but looked much younger, a needed contrast to the program’s grumpy old men.

Buchanan and Kondracke both accepted, and the five of us shot a third pilot at NBC on Thursday, May 20, 1982. This quintet worked, as the previous combination had not, and WRC Channel 4, NBC’s owned-and-operated station in Washington, liked what we had done so much that they were going to run the tape at seven thirty p.m. on Saturday, May 22. What’s more, the plans were for WRC to run us every Saturday night at that time (a half hour after Agronsky and Company on WDVM Channel 9).

Dick Moore got NBC to agree to tape the show every Friday at noon at its Washington studios and to carry the program on its owned-and-operated stations in New York, Los Angeles, and Cleveland as well as in Washington. Simultaneously, Moore had arranged for WTTW Channel 11 in Chicago, a prestigious public TV station, to carry the program and sponsor it for all Public Broadcasting outlets except for those in the four designated NBC cities. Edison Electric was providing commercial sponsorship and financing.

From the start, the capital’s political mavens loved The McLaughlin Group as a substitute for Agronsky and Company, which had become predictable. Germond was no enthusiast about anything run by John McLaughlin. But after a month of programs, Jack noted to me (out of McLaughlin’s hearing) that talk around town about the program was growing at an “exponential” rate.

In all fairness to a man I came to loath, McLaughlin’s skillful performance as moderator had a lot to do with the program’s instant popularity. This was neither the demagogic Nixon apologist of the past nor the autocratic TV shouter of the future. McLaughlin was innovative when not consumed by ego, and in the early stages of The McLaughlin Group his obnoxious personality was restrained by fear of failure. I think it galled John that each of his four colleagues on the panel, all younger, was better known than he was and knew more about both politics and broadcasting. At age fifty-five, he knew this was his last chance to become rich and famous.

         

THREE WEEKS AFTER being diagnosed with spinal meningitis, I concluded I was not going to die from the disease and wrote Rowly a two-and-a-half page memo thanking him for doing all the work during the past three weeks. The memo’s tone indicated I was physically and psychologically spent, gloomy about my future at age fifty-one:

…I well remember that each of us agreed [last summer] that we were working at the peak of productive capacity and could do no more. Now, some nine months later, I must reduce the level of my work.

The solution was to hire a full-time reporter. I had raised the idea with Rowly the previous summer and he expressed reluctance as he always did with any suggestion that would cost our partnership money—a TV set, a refrigerator, and then a color TV set. He finally accepted these expenditures, as he did now for a $16,000-a-year reporter ($35,000 in 2007 dollars).

We quickly agreed the reporter would be John Fund, who in 1981 as a University of California at Davis student was the best intern we ever had. He was well equipped to take off our backs the burden of writing the column for The Star and the special column we then wrote for weekly newspapers, plus legwork for our column. I called Fund in Davis, where I thought he was graduating in June. John informed me he still had a quarter to go but could come to work in September. I told him that was too late, that it was now or never: leave college without a degree, or permanently give up a chance to work for us. He left college. (John later picked up his degree. But I believe his subsequent splendid career with the Wall Street Journal was made possible because Evans & Novak, not a UC Davis degree, was on his résumé.)

Although I stressed in my memo to Rowly that I needed to make more money as well as cut my workload, my financial situation was not nearly so desperate as I indicated. My new CNN annual salary was up to $15,000 ($31,400 in 2007 money), the McLaughlin payment began at $15,600 and my net income for 1982 from multiple sources totaled $138,000 (the equivalent of $289,000 in 2007 dollars). I wasn’t rich, but I was getting by nicely.

         

MY ILLNESS HAD forced me to cancel a trip to Central America, which I considered a key battleground in the cold war but then was on the back burner in the Reagan White House. Nicaragua had joined Cuba as the second Communist state in the hemisphere, and a full-scale war against communist guerrillas was being waged in El Salvador. Low-level civil war persisted in Guatemala, and a leftist insurgency was in danger of sprouting in Honduras. But Ronald Reagan, the staunchest cold warrior to enter the Oval Office, had yet to heed these developments. That enabled State Department professionals to carry on the same passive policy they ran under Jimmy Carter.

I rescheduled my Central America trip, arriving in San Salvador on Sunday, May 16, for a ten-day journey through four countries. The winds were blowing rightward in embattled Salvador. To the State Department’s dismay, voters had just expressed their frustration with vacillation in handling the Marxist insurrection by giving a dynamic new political party, the right-wing National Republican Alliance (ARENA), a majority in the National Assembly. ARENA was eager to tell its story to a conservative columnist from Washington and arranged an informal buffet supper at the home of a rich supporter to meet the party’s leaders.

The host was Guillermo (Billy) Sol, an American-educated (Texas A&M 1952) landowner getting into politics for the first time. He was among Salvadoran businessmen who felt that the land reform policies of the former president, Christian Democrat Juan Napoleon Duarte, were wrecking the economy without stalling the communist guerrillas. Sol picked me up at the Hotel Camino Real. I was surprised he was driving his own auto without a bodyguard. When I mentioned this as we drove away from the hotel, he told me to look behind us. We were trailed by a truckload of heavily armed men. Sol had reason to be cautious. His arm was in a cast because of gunshot wounds—fired, he said, by Duarte’s Christian Democrats rather than Communists.

The National Assembly was in session that night to water down Duarte’s land reform, which looked to me a lot like the old Bolshevik model but was uncritically applauded by the U.S. State Department. Arriving late at Billy Sol’s spacious home were ARENA’s leading assemblymen, who had just passed their bill. They were headed by the newly elected Assembly president: Roberto D’Aubuisson, a thirty-eight-year-old former major in the army’s secret service. To read the U.S. and European press, he was the most notorious figure in the hemisphere—accused of leading death squads and called a “pathological killer.”

D’Aubuisson was small, dark, and intense. Taking off his jacket in Billy Sol’s living room, he revealed an automatic pistol stuck in his belt. I wrote in an Evans & Novak column of May 24 that D’Aubuisson sounds more like Ronald Reagan, whom he “greatly admires, than a Latin American caudillo as he talks about free-market economics.”

I did not know the truth about D’Aubuisson’s past, but I liked him and what he said about the present—describing him as El Salvador’s “most charismatic” political figure. He was devastated that the United States was supporting land reform and other leftist economic programs ruining the country’s economy. His theme was that Ronald Reagan could not possibly be consciously pursuing this disastrous agenda. In my column, I pointed up the irony of Reagan’s representatives defending “confiscation or collectivization of private property against exponents of a free market economy.” In fact, it would be ARENA and D’Aubuisson, not Duarte, who would lead El Salvador to victory over the Communists.

The U.S. diplomats I met in Central America were earnest professionals, but almost all seemed oblivious to the Sandinista regime establishing the first Marxist-Leninist state on the American mainland. The exception was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras: John Negroponte, a forty-two-year-old Foreign Service officer on his first ambassadorial assignment. During a one-on-one dinner at his residence in Tegucigalpa, Negroponte stressed the need to stop the Communists in Salvador and get rid of them in Nicaragua. “Alone among senior U.S. diplomats I met in Central America, Negroponte perceives the potential trail of fallen dominoes triggered by Nicaragua,” I wrote in the American Spectator.

My faithful source John Carbaugh at that time was covering Central America for Senator Jesse Helms and was invaluable to me in putting me in touch with sources throughout this trip. In the lobby of the Hotel Maya in Tegucigalpa, I met and conversed with two men whom I never would have been able to contact had it not been for Carbaugh. Dressed in blue jeans and polo shirts, they were former officers of dictator Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard and leaders of the anti-Sandinista guerrillas (the future Contras), located in a secret location in Honduras. They told me their ranks expanded with new volunteers after each new cross-border raid into Nicaragua. But they admitted being in desperate need of arms and trainers from the United States.

In Managua, I lunched with Adolfo Calero, the Coca-Cola bottler there who I was told would have a lot to say if I gained his confidence. He was a big, good-natured man who picked me up in his Mercedes to take me to an elegant little restaurant. Like other private citizens I met in Managua, he described Sandinista Nicaragua as a Communist police state. Swearing me to secrecy, he described himself as part of the anti-Sandinista underground. (He soon left Managua to become the Contra civilian leader in Washington.)

“I think your Ambassador is too soft,” Calero told me, referring to the boyish-looking new U.S. envoy in Managua, Anthony C. Quainton. “I would say your diplomacy is very meek.” In his second ambassadorial posting at age forty-one, Quainton was a rising star in the Foreign Service. He would not publicly label Nicaragua’s Sandinistas a Communist regime—a ridiculous position he reiterated to me privately over drinks at his residence.

I concluded in the American Spectator that “the role of the United States in Central America seems confused, contradictory, committed to no overriding strategy.” But the Reagan Revolution would reassert itself in Central America before long.

         

ON FRIDAY, May 28, 1982, General Alexander Haig was forced out as secretary of state. Haig was less than a true-believing Reaganaut. A protégé of Henry Kissinger, he overrode Reagan’s own wishes as he more vigorously pursued détente with Moscow. But the Evans & Novak column treated Haig more gently than other apostates, protected frankly as a longtime source of Rowly’s. On the day Haig fell, Rowly had just completed a European reporting trip and was taking a little vacation time with Katherine at an English country inn. That meant I would write the column for Monday, May 31, and it would not be nearly as understanding of Haig as it would have been had Evans been in Washington.

In that May 31 column, I noted that the dismissal of Richard V. Allen as national security adviser had not been, as generally interpreted, “a coup for Haig, cementing his vicarship.” Instead, it sealed his fate. Allen’s successor was William Clark, Reagan’s close friend and first chief of staff as governor, who “would not tolerate Haig’s insistence on overriding everybody—including the president himself—on policy questions.” Haig’s final mistake was setting himself against Reagan’s hard-line opposition to the proposed Soviet natural gas pipeline to western Europe.

The Evans & Novak column had lost a source, but Reagan had gained a secretary of state in George Shultz who would not interfere with his winning the cold war.

         

THE MAY 31 Newsweek described what was purported to be the president’s rage (“Ronald Reagan, mad as hell, was not going to take it anymore,” the story began) over the “steady drumbeat of criticism from the Republican right, much of it aimed at chief of staff James A. Baker III.” Newsweek reported:

The critics find outlets not only in New Right publications…but also in the Evans and Novak column, which some Reagan aides call “Errors and No-facts.” Not long ago the President himself, incensed by an Evans and Novak column accusing Baker of sniping at Secretary of State Alexander Haig, dashed off a note—unsent—calling the columnists’ sources “liars—repeat—liars.” Some Reagan advisers suspect Evans and Novak of giving space to anti-Baker sentiment to help derail a possible 1984 Presidential bid by [Vice President] Bush in favor of Rep. Jack Kemp, if Reagan does not run again.

The authors of the story listed by Newsweek were two strong liberals: White House reporter Eleanor Clift, my future colleague on The McLaughlin Group, and deputy Washington bureau chief James Doyle, my old source in the Watergate special prosecutor’s team. They might seem odd as protectors of Ronald Reagan from his vilifiers, but they were being fed by Jimmy Baker.

Nobody in my long experience was more skillful in manipulating reporters than Baker, who devoted the equivalent of one full working day each week to massaging the important news media. Eleanor Clift and other newsmagazine reporters came by at week’s end for a Baker “feeding.” Baker boosted the president’s cause, but his primary concern was protecting Jimmy Baker. Newsweek’s hit job was Baker’s retaliation for our criticism of him though he couched this in terms of the president, not himself, denouncing us. The remarks in Newsweek did not sound much like Reagan, who never in our meetings ever uttered a word critical of me. It sounded like Baker, and that did not bother me.

But it bothered Bob McCandless, my former target who had become not only a source but a friend. He insisted I could not, as a leading conservative columnist, afford to be called a purveyor of lies by the president. He urged me to go to Baker in the White House and inform him that attack and counterattack between us should not continue. In effect, McCandless was urging a mutual nonaggression pact, which I considered a lapse in journalistic ethics. Still I pondered what McCandless proposed, and after a week asked Baker for an appointment.

I was uneasy about my mission when I entered Baker’s White House office at eleven a.m., Friday, June 11, 1982, with nobody else present. After small talk I told Baker I did not appreciate his smearing me to newsmagazine reporters. He neither denied nor defended his conduct. “Jim,” I said, “I don’t think any column has been more supportive of the president on the issues—tax policy and the cold war—than ours. I don’t think we deserve the treatment you’ve given us.”

Baker, after a moment’s silence, said something I never shall forget: “Bob, we appreciate your support of the president. But you have been very unfair to me.” There was nothing wrong in the literal meaning of what Baker said. But I interpreted him as really telling me: “It’s all very well for you to be in the bag for Reagan, but I’m interested in what you do for me.”

After our conversation on June 11, Baker and I treated each other differently. He stopped dumping on me in conversations with other reporters. The column was still zinging Baker on occasion (on July 9 I wrote that Baker and Stockman had foisted on Reagan “a policy of austerity in the teeth of a recession.”). But my hits on Baker were less frequent and not nearly so punishing. In the early autumn of 1982, I hardly mentioned him and, halfway through a column of October 4, wrote: “Baker, stigmatized as a liberal mole but actually a traditional conservative, has industriously mended his fences on the right.”

Had Baker changed? Had I merely reassessed his posture? Or had I backed off in a tacit version of the mutual nonaggression pact McCandless suggested? The last possibility was no way for an independent journalist to act. It bothered me in 1982 and still troubles me today.

         

I WAS SCHEDULED to address a business group in Atlanta on Thursday, August 19, 1982, and I called Ed Turner at CNN headquarters to make a date for dinner on August 18. I wanted to review my future, if any, with CNN as the cable network began its third year. As I expected, the daily commentaries for Rowly and me had run their course. All that was left for us was alternating, every other week, on the Newsmaker Saturday interview program hosted by Daniel Schorr.

Turner made a dinner reservation at Bones, a steak house on the outskirts of Atlanta, for what I had hoped would be a confidential chat. Consequently, I was disconcerted to see Ed walk in with Burt Reinhardt, president of CNN. Reinhardt had been a cold fish in dealings with me. An old news service executive (UP Movietone News), he concentrated on pinching pennies.

Over dinner, Reinhardt and Ed Turner indicated they were not pleased with Press Box, a half-hour weekend discussion program. Indeed, Ed asked Reinhardt, “What would you think, Burt, if we put back together the ‘Evans and Novak’ interview show I had at Metromedia to replace ‘Press Box’?”

I was ecstatic to have my own interview program again, and thought Rowly would be as well. But when I telephoned him the next morning, he expressed concern we would be pushed into live Saturday broadcasts. I was too insensitive to realize that at age sixty-one and with no money worries, my partner had started the long, slow glide to retirement. He did not want a new TV show to interfere with weekends at his farm in Rappahanock County, Virginia, where he would ride his horse and enjoy bibulous dinners with the neighboring country squires.

We were told we could tape the show Friday except under extraordinary circumstances. Rowly could still ride his horse Saturdays. CNN in those days was short of programming, so Evans and Novak would be broadcast for the first time at seven p.m. on Saturday and then be repeated three more times over the weekend.

We got Ed Meese as the guest for our first program to be taped at ten a.m. on Thursday, September 9, 1982. We made a little news when Meese predicted Reagan would seek a second term in 1984, the first time anybody that close to the president had said so. Our little show was off on a twenty-year run—an eternity in television.