CHAPTER 33

“I’ll Try Ollie North”

WHEN I HEARD Nancy Reagan was blaming Jim Baker for Ronald Reagan’s poor performance in the 1984 Louisville debate, I figured there would be a new White House chief of staff in 1985. Actually, Baker had had enough as ringmaster of the Reagan circus. What nobody could imagine was that Baker would go to the Treasury to replace Donald Regan, who would come over to the White House in place of Baker. The swap was cooked up by Baker and Regan, then accepted by the president.

Reporters were shocked that a passive Reagan would let two subordinates exchange senior positions in the government, demonstrating to them that the president was an empty suit of clothes. I thought I understood Reagan better than they did, thanks in part to The Films of Ronald Reagan by Tony Thomas (1980), an obscure book about his Hollywood career. Each chapter was devoted to one of Reagan’s fifty-two motion pictures over twenty years, with a variety of different directors. So Ronnie was accustomed to seeing an unfamiliar face in the director’s chair the first morning of shooting a new movie. What difference did it make whether Baker or Regan was the White House director?

But I did not fully appreciate how Reagan’s leadership transcended maneuvers between his lieutenants. Viewed from too close, the second term was marred by Don Regan’s ineptitude and looked like a failure. Viewed from a distance, the second term was seen making the Reagan presidency a historic success—winning the cold war, presiding over sustained economic growth, and invigorating the American people. I came to understand that the presidency is a leadership position that has very little to do with management.

         

SOON AFTER THE great Baker-Regan swap, a second surprise had far-reaching personal implications for me. At noon on Friday, February 1, 1985, as The McLaughlin Group gathered at the NBC studios for our weekly taping, we learned it would be Pat Buchanan’s last broadcast. He was returning to the White House for the first time in a decade, now as communications director. Buchanan was rich by a journalist’s standards, thanks to his TV, radio, syndicated newspaper column, and lecture income—annually over $400,000 (in 2007 money, around $752,000), according to his government disclosure form. Why would he give that up for a staff job? “Bob, this is our time,” Pat told me. “Our time has come, and I have to be with the chief.”

That convinced me that Pat Buchanan’s journalism was a temporary expedient, not a life’s work as it was for me. It explained Pat’s position on The McLaughlin Group in support of Reagan’s first-term backtrack for higher taxes, leaving me as the only panel member in opposition. “I’m a party man,” Buchanan told me off camera, in explaining his pro-tax position.

The reason Buchanan had not joined “my chief” earlier was that he had not been asked. And he never would have if Jim Baker had remained. It was Don Regan’s most daring move when he took over. Buchanan was put in charge of what Reagan considered the strike force of his White House: the speechwriters. They were militantly, eloquently conservative in a White House whose staff was otherwise surprisingly nonideological. For Reagan’s first term, they had been supervised—and suppressed—by Baker’s hit man, Dick Darman. Now, in 1985, Darman was with Baker at Treasury as deputy secretary.

Freed of Baker and Darman, President Reagan used conservative speechwriters to flourish as the Great Communicator when he told Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” and preached freedom at Moscow State University. Baker and Darman never appreciated what a weapon the spoken word could be for a president. Buchanan did, and so did Ronald Reagan. That helps explain why Reagan was the first truly successful president since Franklin Roosevelt.

         

BUCHANAN’S DEPARTURE TOOK CNN management by surprise. The network was able to catch its breath Monday, February 4, 1985, Buchanan’s first day at the White House, because it had in the can a taped Crossfire program with regulars Buchanan and Braden. It made sense to run the tape as Monday night’s broadcast—to everybody except Dan Schorr. He had a fit over Buchanan being on CNN’s air when he already had become a member of Ronald Reagan’s staff. Schorr’s fits were commonplace at CNN, but this time he vented his displeasure in public. It was a fatal mistake for Schorr’s desire to continue with CNN beyond his contract’s expiration in mid-1985. It gave Ed Turner a pretext for getting rid of him.

Schorr was renowned as the last of “Murrow’s Boys”—CBS newsmen hired by the legendary Edward R. Murrow. Schorr was in the CBS tradition that threw out objectivity and broadcast a resolutely leftish work product. Ted Turner, who had signed Schorr to a personal service contract, was grateful to him for giving the cable network needed credibility at the start. But after Schorr’s outburst over Buchanan, Ed Turner convinced CNN president Bert Reinhardt and Ted Turner that Schorr was so prone to publicly criticizing the network that he had to go. Ed Turner was a conservative Republican who did not want CNN to become a cable version of CBS News with Dan Schorr impersonating Ed Murrow.

         

ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, Ed Turner called from Atlanta and said that, “for the time being,” I would do most Crossfire shows. But, Ed stressed, I was not the “permanent” replacement for Buchanan because that had yet to be determined. I interpreted that to mean CNN considered me the best they could find for now but were searching for something better. I did not see anything wrong with agreeing to this temporary arrangement, with one caveat. I had been going on Crossfire under terms of my general contract with CNN that now paid me twenty-five thousand dollars a year. I needed a little something extra. Turner offered two hundred dollars a program. That was only half the rate paid Braden, but I accepted it as a “temp.”

Some temp. After Buchanan left, I was on Crossfire 109 times in 1985, all but the first three at the $200 rate. That yielded me an extra $21,200 ($39,900 in 2007 cash), nearly doubling what CNN had been paying me. That was not much by big-time TV standards but extra money I could use with a daughter in college and a son in private school.

I cannot say I ever thoroughly enjoyed being on Crossfire in the way I did on Evans and Novak and The McLaughlin Group. Doing Crossfire was more difficult. I often had to perform on Crossfire more as a political advocate than a journalist.

But Crossfire did change me. My deepening conservatism was based mainly on anticommunist foreign policy and supply-side economics. But now, because of Crossfire, I found myself engaged on issues I seldom wrote about: capital punishment, gay rights, abortion, and gun control. I was never asked to take any position I opposed, but the process had the effect of hardening my positions. I was ever more becoming a right-wing ideologue.

         

ROWLY SCHEDULED A meeting on May 14, 1985, about Nicaragua at the Metropolitan Club with John Carbaugh and Mad Dog Sullivan. Carbaugh, my longtime super-source, by 1985 had left Senator Jesse Helms’s staff to open a lucrative international consultancy. But Carbaugh was still performing international missions for Helms and worked closely with the most colorful member of the senator’s colorful staff: David (Mad Dog) Sullivan, an alumnus of the Marine Corps and CIA.

Sullivan, Carbaugh, Rowly, and I were gathered around a table in the Metropolitan Club’s library. Mad Dog had just returned from visiting a maverick band of Contras in Nicaragua commanded by Eden Pastora, the most famous Sandinista guerrilla fighter against the Somoza dictatorship under the nom de guerre of Commandante Zero. He had turned against the Sandinistas and entered an unlikely alliance with Jesse Helms, opposing both the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship in Managua and the Republican administration in Washington. The U.S. government, concentrating efforts on the main force of Contras, was not giving Pastora a dime.

The CIA had poisoned the water against Pastora, according to Sullivan and Carbaugh, wasting a vital manpower source under an experienced guerrilla leader. Sullivan pulled out photographs he had just taken in Pastora’s camp, showing armed young men ready for battle. There was Mad Dog, a .45 pistol on his hip, arm-in-arm with Commandante Zero. Sullivan said these people were ready to wreak havoc with the Sandinistas if we would supply them more arms.

Sullivan and Carbaugh said a Pastora supporter had made available an old C-47 transport plane, which put Sullivan in the insurgent camp. It would be available to me, I was told, if I wanted to go.

I would go—with one stipulation. I could not go to Nicaragua to report on Commandante Zero’s ragtag band without also visiting the main force of Contras. But with Congress cutting off aid to the Contras, the freedom fighters did not want reporters poking around. Pat Buchanan at the White House and Adolfo Calero, now the Contras’ man in Washington, each failed to get permission for me.

“I’ll try Ollie North,” Rowly told me. “Who is Ollie North?” I asked. Rowly said North was a marine lieutenant colonel assigned to the White House to handle Nicaraguan affairs. North and I got together at a reception in a downtown Washington hotel, where we chatted about what I wanted to do in Nicaragua.

“Well, enjoy yourself down there, and call me afterwards to tell me your observations,” North said. I suggested it was not that easy to gain access to the Contras. “Mr. Novak, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll call you tomorrow.” True to North’s word, his staff worked out the details of the trip the next day. I learned then who was running the U.S. show in Nicaragua.

ON SATURDAY MORNING, May 25, 1985, the creaky old C-47 loaned to Pastora landed on a makeshift landing strip at the camp of the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE). Pastora had four hundred soldiers—several without rifles, some barefoot—lined up to greet me. I began an Evans & Novak column, datelined the San Juan River, Nicaragua.

Eden Pastora, fabled and much maligned guerilla leader, is operating on the Nicaraguan side of this river where his impoverished men are daily fighting and dying against Nicaragua’s Marxist forces.

Those facts are based on our personal observations, contradicting accusations that Pastora is a pure propagandist based in Costa Rica—perhaps in collusion with his former Sandinista comrades.

I found the famous Commandante Zero, who became a national hero when he led the storming of the National Palace in Managua in 1978 to begin Anastasio Somoza’s downfall, to be charismatic and engaging. We stayed up late Saturday night talking about ARDE’s plight. He was bitter about CIA specialists on Nicaragua (“the geniuses from Harvard”) and told me: “If we had gotten as much money from the CIA as the FDN [the main force of Contras], we would be in Managua today.” He said: “The CIA is fooling the President of the United States. I would like to see the President so that I could say to him, ‘These people are lying to you, Mr. Reagan.’”

When I expressed surprise at a picture of Augusto Sandino over his bunk, Pastora told me the regime in Managua misrepresented itself as “Sandinista” and should be called “Communist.” He added: “Sandino was never a Communist. He was a nationalist—like Senator Helms.” The catalyst for the improbable alliance of Jesse Helms and Commandante Zero was revealed to me Saturday after dinner with a short-wave radio call from Deborah DeMoss, another of Helms’s fascinating staffers. After saying hello to me, she engaged Pastora in a conversation in Spanish for an hour.

Deborah DeMoss was a lovely, committed young woman from a rich Republican family. She had her hands on all aspects of Helms’s Central American policy and was able to charm the toughest warriors. In El Salvador, she worked closely with Roberto D’Aubuisson. She brought Helms and Pastora together, explaining them to each other as fellow “nationalists.”

I could not attest to the accuracy of the briefing by Pastora’s high command, claiming that seven thousand of his guerrillas occupied ten thousand square kilometers inside Nicaragua. But one thing was certain: The FDN charge that ARDE never left the Costa Rican capital of San José and did not fight was demonstrably false. Late Sunday afternoon, I witnessed the arrival of a motorboat containing casualties from a skirmish that afternoon fifty kilometers away: two dead ARDE guerrillas, and their twenty-nine-year-old platoon leader, still alive but dying from a gunshot wound in the belly.

When I arrived, Pastora apologized for catching him at a bad time for food. We would have to skip lunch, but he hoped for provisions coming in by boat. Unaccustomed to missing meals, I was ravenous when we sat down for Saturday night dinner. It featured roasted meat in plentiful supply. As I retired for the evening listening in the distance to Commandante Zero conversing with Deborah DeMoss, I wondered about what I had eaten. I had seen no food supply arriving, but then it occurred to me. Monkeys! The jungle was filled with wild monkeys, and they surely were my Saturday night dinner.

I spent Sunday night at a San José hotel, where I enjoyed a badly needed shower and a good meal. But the next morning, my stomach was queasy, and I decided it was prudent to skip breakfast. Tuesday morning in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, Ollie North delivered as promised. The FDN picked me up in a four-wheel drive vehicle for a three-hour trip through the mountains to the Contra encampment inside Honduras. By now, I was feeling miserable from what I believed was the delayed effect of Commandante Zero’s monkeys. When we stopped for lunch, I made the mistake of trying to eat—and lost everything.

I next learned that the last miles to the Contra camp would be covered by donkey. I told my FDN guides that I had never ridden a donkey (or a horse, for that matter) and was not about to start at age fifty-three with my stomach in an uproar. “Then you’ll have to walk, Mr. Novak,” I was told, “and the distance is seven miles through the mountains.” I rode the donkey.

In contrast to Pastora’s forces, every man in the FDN had shoes and a rifle. I wrote in an Evans & Novak column (datelined On the Nicaraguan-Honduran Border):

Operating nearly 200 miles from the border, guerillas last week cut the road leading to Bluefields on the Atlantic (temporarily capturing two towns).

This is cause for the visibly high morale we found at the base camp. Here was no band of revanchist Somosista thugs. Some 800 guerillas passed in review before FDN political leader Indalendo Rodriguez, former president of Nicaragua’s Catholic University and son of an associate of Johnny Sandino himself. “I was anti-Somoza from childhood,” he told us.

I was a guest at an elaborate dinner for Rodriguez with barbecued meat (not monkey) that I dared not touch. I had a long talk with Commandante Enrique Bermudez, the FDN’s military leader, who claimed seventeen thousand troops under his command, with only four thousand in Honduras. The rest, he said, were inside Nicaragua fighting the enemy.

Bermudez, though lacking Eden Pastora’s charisma, seemed more credible. While his troops were better equipped than Pastora’s, they still suffered from the cutoff of U.S. funds nearly a year earlier and were financed by private money sources who kept the revolution alive with weapons bought on the open market (including Soviet AK-47 rifles and SAM-7 ground-to-air missiles).

Both Pastora and Bermudez, both ARDE and FDN, heartened me. Here in Nicaragua were people fighting for their freedom while the Democrats in Congress were doing their best to save a brutal Communist dictatorship. I concluded in the column that “the survival of the Contras is indisputable.” What I never expected was that the effort by patriotic Americans to aid that survival would nearly bring down Ronald Reagan.

         

ON THIS LATEST visit to Central America, I stopped in El Salvador for another look—my third in the last four years—at how the government there was coping with Communist insurrection.

In the capital of San Salvador, I interviewed the minister of defense, General Carlos Vides Casanova. He told me U.S. aid and trainers had so improved the army that victory was inevitable, but he added that a long battle against FMLN guerrillas was in store.

My plan was to see for myself how the government was coping with the old guerrilla stronghold of Chalatenango Province in northern Salvador. In September 1984, the esteemed Colonel Sigfredo Ochoa had been given command of the 4th Infantry Brigade at El Paraiso in Chalatenango. Nine months before Ochoa got there, guerrillas had overrun brigade headquarters and occupied it briefly. On the day he arrived, 50 percent of the province was under FMLN control. Now, less than nine months later, the colonel had restored government control to all but the fringes of Chalatenango. He was the man of action I needed to see.

On the night before this planned sojourn, I was guest of honor at a large buffet dinner in the palatial home of Alfredo Cristiani. He was the thirty-eight-year-old son of one of El Salvador’s richest families. Like other Salvadoran businessmen, Fredy Cristiani saw his personal interests and the nation’s economy being crushed between two competing leftist dogmas: Communists and Christian Democrats. Consequently, they created and bankrolled Major Roberto D’Aubuisson’s ARENA.

I had met both D’Aubuisson and Cristiani on my first visit to Salvador in 1982 at Billy Sol’s house. D’Aubuisson was a dynamic figure, under global leftist assault as a killer. Cristiani was a slight, nice-looking young man, who had graduated from Georgetown University in Washington and spoke flawless English (and, unlike D’Aubuisson, did not carry a gun). But he seemed obscured by D’Aubuisson.

I had followed D’Aubuisson into rural El Salvador in his 1984 campaign that came close enough to electing him president of the country that professional diplomats at the U.S. State Department were terrified. My column was the only favorable comment on his campaign in any major American newspaper, and I gave him a global platform with a thirty-minute CNN interview on the campaign trail with each of us in khaki jungle garb. At Cristiani’s house a year later, D’Aubuisson embraced me as a brother.

After dinner that night, I was called to the telephone. It was the embassy’s press officer telling me he had been ordered to cancel our scheduled motor trip to El Paraiso because it was too dangerous. I shouted over the phone that it was outrageous to cancel the trip after ten o’clock at night, too late to make new travel arrangements for my last day in the country.

Cristiani asked the source of the trouble after overhearing the uproar, and I told him. Cristiani then offered to fly me in his own helicopter. We took off at dawn the next morning, just Fredy at the controls and me. When we reached El Paraiso, a squad of soldiers carrying rifles was on the ground waving us away. “Don’t they know we’re coming?” asked Cristiani. “Yes,” I said, “but not by helicopter.” Fortunately, nobody shot us down. With Fredy as my interpreter, I explained who I was and that I had an appointment with Colonel Ochoa.

The colonel showed me his troops, and they looked vastly superior to the undisciplined soldiers I observed two years earlier. Ochoa was grateful that all his soldiers now had M-16 rifles, but he said he needed grenade launchers, trucks, radios, and helicopters. He added: “So long as the Sandinistas rule Nicaragua, this war [in Salvador] may last another twenty years.”

It all fit together, as Ronald Reagan understood far better than the Foreign Service professionals now that he was fully engaged in the problem. Nicaragua’s Marxist-Leninist dictatorship was a cancer infecting its neighbors.

I am a pessimist by nature, which is why I have spent my life as a journalist instead of trying to be a leader, which requires optimism. I didn’t really believe the Nicaraguan Contras could force the Sandinistas to capitulate, as they did. I wasn’t sure ARENA could win an election in El Salvador. What I never dreamed was that four years later the ARENA candidate elected president would be Alfredo Cristiani.

         

FOR ITS FIRST fifteen years, the Evans & Novak column was litigation free. That streak ended on May 4, 1978, with the publication of our column on the appointment of Bertell Ollman, a tenured professor at New York University, as head of the University of Maryland’s Department of Politics and Government. Ollman would be the first avowed Marxist to head the political science department at a major public university.

My May 4 column said Ollman’s “candid writings avow his desire to the use the classroom as an instrument for preparing what he calls ‘the revolution.’” Ollman twice had finished sixteenth and last among all candidates in unsuccessful candidacies for the council of the American Political Science Association after campaigning “to promote the study of Marxism.” In his principal scholarly work published in 1971, he wrote that the “present youth rebellion,” by “helping to change the workers of tomorrow,” would help produce “a socialist revolution.”

To buttress our claim that Ollman was a Marxist hack, we quoted a “political scientist in a major Eastern university, whose scholarship and reputation as a liberal are well known” as saying “Ollman has no status within the profession, but is a pure and simple activist.” Would he say that publicly? “Not a chance of it. Our academic culture does not permit the raising of such questions.”

Identity of that professor has been concealed for twenty-seven years, and keeping it secret caused me anxiety and threatened disaster. The reasons for concealment have long since disappeared. The source was Professor Jeane Kirkpatrick of Georgetown University. The use of “he” was an effort to limit attempts to discover her identity. As for calling her a “liberal,” she was then a Hubert Humphrey Democrat whose rapid journey into the Reagan administration and the Republican Party was still in the future.

The decision to hire Ollman was reversed by the university president, John Toll. Ollman blamed the Evans & Novak column, and filed a six-million-dollar libel suit against us. Although Ollman’s attorneys had cited the column as it appeared in the Washington Post, they filed suit not against the Post but against Rowland Evans and Robert Novak (thus the name of the case, Ollman v. Evans). The Post had deep pockets; Evans & Novak did not.

Rowly arranged lunch at the Metropolitan Club for us with the in-house legal counsel of the Washington Post. I fantasized that he might offer to defend us on the Post’s dime. No such luck. It was not the Post’s problem. The lawyer politely suggested that Rowly and I might avoid debilitating litigation by settling with Ollman out of court.

After lunch, Rowly and I agreed that a settlement ought to be our last resort. That would require a statement we indeed had libeled the Marxist professor and an apology—a humiliating surrender that was Ollman’s goal. Our only hope for financing our legal resistance—a frail one—was our flagship newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times.

In a telephone call to Sun-Times editor in chief Jim Hoge in Chicago, I acknowledged that the newspaper was not a party to the libel suit. But noting that Rowly and I had been employees of the paper since 1966, I expressed hope that the Sun-Times could help us. Hoge did more than just help. He generously assigned the newspaper’s lawyers, the prestigious Chicago firm of Isham, Lincoln & Beale (the Lincoln was Robert Todd Lincoln, eldest son of President Abraham Lincoln) to defend us—fully paid for by the Sun-Times. A. Daniel Feldman, a crack litigator and experienced libel lawyer, took the case.

In September 1979, a federal district judge in Washington threw out the suit. Ollman appealed, and it took four more years for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overrule the district court and set the case for trial. The appellate court agreed with Ollman’s lawyers that the anonymous quote about Ollman having “no status in our profession” was libelous if not attributed to a real person. If I had just made up the quote, it would constitute “actual malice.” Our attorney, Dan Feldman, told me it was imperative that we identify the source if we went to trial. I told him I would not do it unilaterally.

Soon after the libel suit was filed in 1979, I explained my predicament to Jeane Kirkpatrick and asked her if I could reveal her name if necessary. Her silence on the phone was not reassuring, after which she said she would get back to me. A few days later Kirkpatrick’s lawyer told me she could not release me from my pledge of anonymity because it might endanger the job of her husband, Evron Kirkpatrick, executive director of the American Political Science Association. When the 1983 decision by the appellate judges had made the quote all-important, I renewed my request through her attorney. Her husband’s job security was no longer at issue because he had retired in 1980. She now was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a conservative icon, presumably no longer threatened by “our academic culture.” Nevertheless her answer was still no, this time without explanation. I thought her attitude selfish and arrogant.

In 1983, Feldman told me I would have an agonizing choice when the suit came to trial. I could break my reporter’s unwritten oath and reveal Kirkpatrick’s identity, or I could lose the suit with a jury likely to go well beyond six million dollars in punitive damages. Given Kirkpatrick’s intransigence, Feldman said our only fragile hope was an appeal to the D.C. Court of Appeals for a rehearing to prevent a trial—a tactic that succeeded very rarely, he told us.

But the judges on the prestigious D.C. Circuit thought that the suit raised important questions about freedom of expression by a columnist, as distinct from a reporter, and on October 7, 1983, ordered a rehearing.

The hearing was set for March 6, 1984, but on January 10 came unexpected news. Rupert Murdoch had purchased the Chicago Sun-Times from the Field family. Rowly and I had several handshake agreements with the newspaper not included in our written contract. The most important of these was assuming legal costs of the Ollman case, which I calculated by now at more than a hundred thousand dollars and counting. Would the new Sun-Times owner pick up the tab?

I had not seen Murdoch since eight years earlier when Rowly and I pitched him on keeping our column in the New York Post. Shortly after the announcement of the Sun-Times purchase, I made an appointment to see Murdoch at the old Post building. I hurried through the noncontract benefits provided us by the Sun-Times, ending with the open-ended commitment to Isham, Lincoln & Beale for defending the libel suit. Before I could make my impassioned plea for help, the publishing king interrupted me: “Oh, that’s no problem. Consider it done.” I think Rupert had more important things to do that morning, but it was an extremely generous act. Other people I have worked for would not have done that.

On December 7, 1984, the D.C. Court of Appeals reversed the three-judge panel by a six-to-five vote and again threw out Ollman’s suit. The alignment on the court ran counter to normal expectations, which would have liberal Democratic judges supporting a journalist’s expression of opinion and conservative Republican judges preserving what was left of libel law. Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a future Supreme Court justice, was the only liberal who opted for press freedom by ruling in favor of Evans and Novak. Judge Antonin Scalia, also a future Supreme Court justice, was the only conservative who ruled against us. In his dissent, Scalia, who took a constricted view of First Amendment press freedom, called our column “a coolly crafted libel.”

The majority opinion was written by Judge Kenneth W. Starr, the future special prosecutor. Starr might have recalled that three years earlier I had whacked him for his recommendation (as a Justice Department lawyer) of Sandra Day O’Connor for the Supreme Court. Readers of the Evans & Novak column, Starr wrote in his opinion, expect “strong statements, sometimes phrased in a polemical manner that would hardly be considered balanced or fair elsewhere in the newspaper.” Judge Robert Bork’s concurring opinion asserted Starr had not “adequately demonstrated that all of the allegedly libelous statements at issue here can be immunized as expressions of opinion.” Not for the first time, Bork led all his colleagues in eloquence.

Ollman appealed to the Supreme Court. In early May 1985, Dan Feldman called me from Chicago with bad news. The high court’s two most conservative members, Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice William Rehnquist, had agreed to accept the appeal. Feldman opined that with the chief on board, the two additional justices needed for the high court to accept the case surely would be found. Once the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Feldman went on, it almost surely would reverse the D.C. decision and order a trial, with all the expense, pain, and danger that involved.

But surprisingly, no other justice ever joined Burger and Rehnquist. On May 28, 1985, while I was in Central America, the Supreme Court announced it was rejecting the appeal in Ollman v. Evans. The legal nightmare finally was over after seven years.

In the New York Times of December 10, 1984, three days after the D.C. Circuit ruled, left-wing columnist Anthony Lewis—who had never evidenced affection for Bob Bork or me—wrote in praise of the D.C. Circuit’s decision and especially Bork’s concurrence. Tony Lewis stood alone. Liberal mainstream journalists ignored this landmark decision expanding their own freedoms. They seemed more interested in protecting a Marxist professor. Maybe some were rooting for Novak to get his comeuppance.

         

AT AGE FIFTY-FOUR I had been so engrossed in my work that I had paid little attention to my children. Zelda was a nineteen-year-old Kenyon College student who surprised me in the spring of 1985 by saying she loved Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and especially the episodes at Pamplona in Spain, with “the running of the bulls” and death in the afternoon at the bull ring. I had fallen in love with the same episodes in the same novel at the same age. But to me as a college sophomore, Hemingway’s profiles of the “lost generation” in the twenties were a world away. I never would have dreamed of asking my loving but staid parents to go to Pamplona on vacation. But that’s what Zelda wanted of me, and that’s what she got.

We went to Pamplona for the Festival of San Fermin, which ran for ten days beginning July 8, 1985. San Fermin had not been a secret since Hemingway wrote about it, and thousands of teenagers from all over Europe now descended on the town. Many, camping out in the park, were astounded to find Zelda and Alexander staying at the pricey Hotel Tres Reyes with a room of their own.

Every night our children left us for dancing and drinking (the Spanish were not bothered by underage alcohol consumption). Geraldine, concerned about her children in a foreign city, would try to stay up until they came in, but she never made it before falling asleep. One morning, Geraldine awoke early and found the children’s bedroom empty. She was terrified, but they soon arrived from all-night revels.

Alexander, at age fifteen, had decided he would run with the bulls down the main street of Pamplona early each morning. Geraldine was opposed, but I talked her into letting him do it. Several runners each day were gored and hospitalized. But I figured Alexander, unlike me a good athlete with quick reflexes, could stay out of harm’s way. He became more daring as the week went on, dodging around the bulls in the final stage of the spectacle when the bulls and amateur toreros all were inside the bull ring, until he was nicked on the arm by a hoof (earning a scar to show the girls back home in Maryland). Geraldine called it the worst vacation of her life, not knowing whether to worry more about her son running with the bulls or both her children’s late-night adventures with the youth of Europe. I enjoyed it because it showed our children could adapt to exotic new situations and that Alexander was brave and adventurous. The sadness for me was that I had not become better acquainted with them, a regret my frenetic life had left so little time for my children.

         

I RETURNED FROM Spain on July 17, 1985, to find Ronald Reagan convalescing from two blows. On Saturday, July 13, surgeons at Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington removed a large tumor from the colon of the seventy-four-year-old president. While the surgery was in progress, Reagan also was cut by the Republican majority leader of the Senate. It led to one of the unique TV experiences of my life.

The new majority leader, starting in 1985, was Robert J. Dole, a former national chairman of the Republican Party, its nominee for vice president in 1976, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and a serious candidate for president in 1988. Dole’s rigid mind-set favored the “old-time religion” of deficit reduction even if it meant higher taxes. As Finance chairman, he had collaborated with Jim Baker and David Stockman in passing tax increases during Reagan’s first term that lessened the impact of the Kemp-Roth cuts. But immediately after Reagan’s reelection, I wrote that Baker was bailing out of tax increases for the second term and Stockman was “on a solo flight” in his fifth (and last) year as OMB director. That also isolated Dole as an old-time religionist.

Blocked from further tax increases by the White House under newly installed chief of staff Don Regan, revenue-enhancer Dole moved to reduce cost of living allowances on multiple federal programs—including Social Security. Democrats could not believe their good fortune for the 1986 midterm elections as Dole carried this politically poisonous package through the Senate by a single vote.

Unfortunately for Dole, Reagan followed Jack Kemp’s advice and reneged on accepting the Dole plan—dooming the Social Security cuts. As Reagan went into the hospital, the Saturday newspapers on September 13 reported the majority leader’s extraordinary attack on the president. Dole accused Reagan of “surrendering to the deficit” and lashed out at Don Regan, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and unnamed House Republicans (meaning Kemp).

Crossfire executive producer Randy Douthit was frantic to book Dole and got him for Thursday, July 18, my first full day back from Spain. When Crossfire was cancelled in 2005 and I was asked to suggest memorable programs for valedictory presentations, I selected that Dole interview. CNN’s archives in Atlanta were in deplorable condition, and the tape could not be found in time for the closing programs. But in preparation for this book, my staff located a tape at the Dole Institute of Politics in Lawrence, Kansas.

In my mind’s eye, I thought of Dole and me shouting at and constantly interrupting each other. That failure of memory, I believe, is testimony to the decline of Crossfire, where shouting and interruptions over time became commonplace.

In 1985, Dole and I spoke in modulated tones and seldom interrupted each other. The primitive set at Wisconsin Avenue had Dole, Braden, and me seated in upright chairs at close quarters. The eerie quality of the tape is enhanced by how good Dole and I looked. The tape is stunning because of what Dole and I actually said to each other.

Novak: Senator, you said you don’t want to quarrel with Republicans. But I was just going through the clips of the last couple weeks—

Dole: Probably yours.

Novak: No, I was just going through the news story clips, Senator.

And I found you attacking—

Dole: I didn’t know you read news stories.

Novak: I sure do.

Dole: I thought all you read was Evans and Novak.

Novak: Well, I write Evans and Novak. I read the news stories, sir. And I was reading that you were attacking the Republicans in the House. You were attacking the President for surrendering to the deficit…. You were attacking Don Regan. You were attacking Caspar Weinberger…for giving you wrong information.

Dole: He did give us wrong information. That’s not an attack. That’s credibility….

Novak: You think that’s productive in the Republican Party? To go day after day after day—

Dole: I don’t know. You do a lot of it. You attack me in every column.

Novak: I’m not a Republican. I’m a journalist….

Dole: You’re an advocate. You’re not a journalist….

Novak: Do you think that it’s productive in the Republican Party to attack the President?

Dole: I think that it’s productive that people understand where we come from…. But you don’t want me to succeed….

Novak: Oh, I want you to. I want you to be strong.

Dole: You’re against me. Every time you come out with a column, it’s “Bob Dole is a bad guy” and “he’s always doing somebody in.” So, we start off: you’re an antagonist.

Novak: That’s not true.

Dole: You wouldn’t give me a break if I hung the moon. You’d write something bad about me….

Novak: We wrote an article in Reader’s Digest that predicted—

Dole: You accused me of bribery.

Novak: No, we didn’t. We predicted that you were going to be the strongest Majority Leader since Lyndon Johnson…. Do you think that maybe we went overboard for you? Because I don’t see that you’ve done that much in the Senate….

Dole: Well that’s how much attention you pay. I think we’ve done quite a bit in the Senate…. We passed, I think, a terrific deficit reduction package….

Novak: But it’s not going anywhere.

Never before had I been spoken to that way by a United States senator. Nor had I ever before spoken that way to a United States senator. The postinterview dialogue between the co-hosts (an Ed Turner touch that internally at CNN was called the “yip-yap”) was unusually harsh, sounding like a conversation between two men who did not like each other much (which was the truth). Braden could not even bear to call me by my first name that night.

Braden: I was glad to see the Senator go after you, Novak. I really was. Because he’s one of the few leaders in the Republican Party who is not an ideological, rigid kind of man.

Novak: What his problem is is that he’s got left-wingers like you who like what he’s doing.

Crossfire executive producer Douthit was beside himself with joy over what he considered Crossfire at its best. Dole came in to do the program twice more within the next five months with me as co-host, but Douthit was sorely disappointed. Dole was, as usual on TV, colorless and uncommunicative.

The circumstances of his July 18 flameout could not be replicated. Dole was a bitter man who stored up grievances against many people—including me—that he normally kept under control. He felt Jack Kemp and Don Regan had conspired to get the president to betray him, and viewed me somehow as a co-conspirator. Apart from Dole’s obsession with the deficit in the midst of the longest economic recovery in American history, I submit his temperament was unsuited for high political leadership, much less the presidency.

         

I AM SOMETIMES asked who was most qualified to be president and did not make it. A clear contender would be Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was an effective public servant, an inspired innovator, and an eloquent orator. But he had serious problems, the most important of which was that he never figured out where he belonged politically—as witness his service in Richard Nixon’s cabinet as a Kennedy Democrat.

In 1977, the new senator had an all-star staff of conservatives: Elliott Abrams, Charles Horner, Checker Finn, and Eric Breindel. Moynihan might have been a one-term senator had not a young Democratic political operative named Tim Russert arrived from Buffalo to become his press secretary. Russert gently edged Moynihan leftward, and the conservative all-stars left his staff—and ultimately the Democratic Party—one by one. Moynihan survived for a twenty-four-year Senate career, but the liberals who ran the Democratic Party distrusted him and barred him from presidential consideration.

Pat’s other problem was that he drank too much. Still, he was able to perform remarkably while under the influence. A classic example came September 19, 1985, when Moynihan was a guest on Crossfire. We were taping the show early because I was invited to a stag dinner that night at the Madison Hotel honoring television executive Frank Shakespeare, about to leave the country to become U.S. ambassador to Portugal. Moynihan told me he was going to the same event for his old Nixon White House colleague Shakespeare, and he suggested we have a drink or two after the taping. I could not keep up with Pat drinking in my best days, and now I could hardly drink at all. I begged off his invitation without fibbing because I had to get back to my office and finish editing a column with Rowly.

Knowing Moynihan’s destination after Crossfire, I was not surprised when the senator did not show up at the Madison. Well after dinner was finished and halfway through speeches honoring Shakespeare, Moynihan staggered in about as drunk as I had ever seen him. My table was closest to the door, and he walked over to it. Pat said nothing but picked up the wineglass of Ed Meese, now attorney general of the United States, and drained it as Meese looked on in astonishment.

This being a well-organized Republican-style event, the speakers were lined up and their speeches prepared in advance. Moynihan was not on the list. But as he stood drinking Meese’s wine, Pat quietly waited for the current speaker to finish his remarks. Without permission or introduction, he then delivered his own oration. He described each of Frank Shakespeare’s sterling qualities by quoting an appropriate line from William Shakespeare—and then staggered out. To prepare this clever Shakespeare-on-Shakespeare rendition and commit it to memory and then deliver it flawlessly would have been remarkable for someone sober. To do so (albeit with thickened tongue) despite depredations of alcohol was truly amazing. What an intellect! What a performer! What a waste!