CHAPTER 34

The Last Days of Reagan

PAT BUCHANAN, as White House communications director, was trying to put Reagan in closer touch with ideologically sympathetic journalists by inviting them for lunch at the White House. Each luncheon would include three journalists, the president, Don Regan, and Buchanan for an hour-long off-the-record conversation.

It was my turn on February 18, 1986. The story of the day was the struggle of Ferdinand Marcos to survive as president of the Philippines. The P.I. vote held February 6 was tainted by fraud so massive that Marcos’s defense minister and senior army commander both defected to challenger Corazon Aquino. On February 15, Reagan declared Aquino the winner

At the White House lunch, Reagan signaled that the U.S. government had ended support for the corrupt despot and was seeking ways to get him out of the country and avert civil war. I saw Don Regan cast a worried glance at the president, as if admonishing the president for divulging too much. At that point, Reagan asked: “Have you ever heard of the Philippine Scouts?” Without waiting for a reply, he declared he had always wanted to make a movie of these Filipinos who fought for the United States against the Japanese invaders, first as scouts and later as guerrillas. As Reagan verbally sketched out his imaginary screenplay, precious time was ticking away. But who could tell the president of the United States to knock it off?

In one other peculiar exchange during the lunch, I asked Reagan: “What ever happened to the gold standard? I thought you supported it.” “Well,” the president began and then paused (a ploy he frequently used to collect his thoughts), “I still do support the gold standard, but—” At that point, Reagan was interrupted by his chief of staff. “Now, Mr. President,” said Don Regan, “we don’t want to get bogged down talking about the gold standard.” “You see?” the president said to me, with palms uplifted in mock futility. “They just won’t let me have my way.”

After we left the White House and were on the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk, one of the other journalist guests pulled me aside. It was Arnaud deBorchgrave, editor of the Washington Times and a conservative admirer of Reagan. “What in the world was all that about the Philippine Scouts?” asked deBorchgrave, suggesting the president had gone around the bend. I urged Arnaud not to worry, because this was Reagan’s way of getting us off the scent of his still unrevealed decision to move Marcos out of the Philippines.

That Reagan was more clever—and more devious—than most people imagined also was signaled by how he handled my question about the gold standard. The supply-side movement’s hopes to regularize global financial arrangements by going back to gold had foundered against the financial establishment’s opposition. It would have been a hopeless undertaking, and the best thing Reagan could do was pose as an undefiled pure believer and helplessly blame his all-powerful chief of staff for frustrating him.

         

IN THE Evans & Novak column of March 17, 1986, I pierced the veil of secrecy enveloping the Federal Reserve Board, America’s central bank. I revealed that the announced unanimous vote by which the Fed had cut the discount rate was preceded a week earlier by a secret vote of four to three for the same result. I also reported the startling fact that the seemingly all-powerful Fed chairman Paul Volcker was on the losing side.

Don Regan at the White House and Preston Martin, the conservative Republican named by Reagan as Fed vice chairman, had been furious at Volcker (while silent publicly) for keeping money tight, I wrote, “to wring out the last drop of inflation despite unused capacity and sluggish economic growth.” Volcker was arrogant and shortsighted, for he had lost his majority on February 7 when two new Reagan-appointed governors took their seats. “What was surprising,” I wrote, “was that master bureaucrat Volcker did not turn around and lead the new majority but instead opposed the four Reagan appointees.” Thus, the secret four-to-three vote on February 27 to ease money. My conclusion in the column:

The backstage revolt at the Fed shows how President Reagan’s two newly appointed governors have changed the central bank. Volcker, the Fed’s most masterful leader ever, is now a lame duck whose tight anti-inflation attitudes can be outvoted by his new board. The Volcker era is ending.

Volcker had dropped his mask of imperturbability at the prospect of this humiliation. His colleagues never had seen him so upset. He pleaded with them to keep the decision secret, wait for the impending interest rate cut by the German Bundesbank and then vote unanimously for the cut, as if in reaction to the Germans. The plan was strictly a device to save face for Paul Volcker. It worked until the Evans & Novak column was published March 17.

That column, I am sure, generated yawns from most readers. Even Rowly was less than excited. But in the global financial community, this was the greatest scoop of my career. It was devastating for Paul Volcker. While he would serve out his final term as chairman until the summer of 1987, his domination was over. As in The Wizard of Oz, the curtain had been pulled back and revealed not the masterful central banker but an uncertain bureaucrat.

How could Evans & Novak, who only sporadically wrote about the central bank, uncover a story that eluded publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post, all of which had excellent financial reporters covering the Fed?

For years, I had been seeking a personal relationship with at least one Federal Reserve governor. I finally succeeded in the early eighties with Vice Chairman Martin, who became my occasional luncheon companion. I was even closer to one of the two new Reagan appointees to the Fed: Manuel Johnson, a supply-sider who as an assistant secretary had been my best source at Treasury. But neither Martin nor Johnson leaked this story to me.

On Friday, March 14, at nine a.m. while seated at the office computer (we had reluctantly abandoned typewriters in 1979), I received a telephone call from Alfred Kingon, the fifty-six-year-old secretary of the cabinet. He had spent ten years as editor in chief of Financial World when in 1981, Treasury Secretary Regan brought him to Washington as an assistant secretary. He was one of four aides taken by Regan from Treasury to the White House when he became chief of staff. They all were slight of stature, pale, and ostentatiously subservient to their overbearing chief. Holdovers at the White House wickedly labeled them the “Mice.” I cultivated all the Mice and was most successful with Kingon. In telephone conversations and lunches, I found him insightful though unwilling to leak any information to me that Don Regan would not approve.

The March 14 call lasted no more than five minutes. A nervous Kingon pressed me not to reveal my source. All that remained to write a column for Monday was for me to confirm what Kingon told me by calling Preston Martin and Manley Johnson. Though sworn to keep the secrets of the temple, they could not deny the accuracy of Kingon’s report.

Kingon had not interpreted his facts for me. He figured that as a sophisticated reporter, I would understand the significance of the story and the significance of Kingon’s call (which, of course, I did not put in the column). Don Regan felt that Volcker had cut him out when he was at Treasury and instead worked with Jim Baker at the White House. I was sure Regan could not tolerate Volcker having foolishly allowed himself to be outvoted at the Fed and then keeping secret the chairman’s humiliation. I cannot imagine Kingon leaking this information without his boss’s approval or even inspiration.

Journalists like to give the impression they develop exclusive stories through exhaustive investigation and research. Most such scoops, I believe, come on a single leak such as Al Kingon gave me. Kingon called me partly because he knew I had criticized Volcker’s tight money policy. As a columnist, I could comment on this development as a straight news reporter could not. In addition, I was a columnist whom Kingon knew. That is why Rowly and I spent so much time with sources who produced scant hard news. Rowly and I did not get much column material out of many meals we separately scheduled with Al Kingon. But when he had a big story to leak, he thought of us.

         

WITH CNN’S LAMP still in the window for Buchanan in 1986, there was no designated replacement for Crossfire. But I was the undesignated substitute, appearing on 166 programs for the second year of Buchanan’s absence. The most memorable of them for me came on July 11 with an interview that rivaled in nasty intensity the Dole program a year earlier. I think it widened the already considerable gap between me and Tom Braden. The reason was the guest, Robert Strange McNamara.

Of many political personalities I have disliked during a half century in Washington, I would place McNamara on top. From my first interview with him as secretary of defense when the Evans & Novak column started in 1963, I regarded him as overbearing and hypocritical.

McNamara had been moving left to expiate his role as architect of the Vietnam catastrophe. By the summer of 1986, I thought he had gone much too far in appeasing the Kremlin by advocating that the U.S. pledge no first-use of nuclear weapons, even if the Soviets invaded Europe. This was unprecedented for a former secretary of defense, and McNamara compounded the outrage by quoting Reagan out of context to make it appear that the president had the same position.

The reason McNamara came on Crossfire on July 11, 1986 (as he had on previous programs with us), was a personal request from Braden. I knew they both traveled the Georgetown party circuit, but I thought there was something odd about the self-professed friendship between the two dissimilar men, McNamara hyperactive and Braden lethargic—how odd, I was not to realize for more than a year.

The July 11 program started with an intense though still civil debate between McNamara and me over U.S. strategy. What I said next prompted McNamara, for the only time in my experience, to start shouting:

Novak: Mr. McNamara, you are a very clever man, and you’re giving a lot of people the idea that you and Ronald Reagan are in the same boat on this issue, and you know you’re not. And we can agree that there is a big difference between his concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative and yours…. I don’t want to say something behind your back that I wouldn’t say to your face…. [W]hen distinguished Americans such as you and [Carter disarmament chief] Paul Warnke are defending the Soviet position and saying that these are good offers and the American president is at fault for not responding to them. I really feel I have never seen anything with former Cabinet members in my time in Washington taking that position in regard to a Soviet-U.S. negotiating stance. And I just question whether or not you are performing an invaluable service, inadvertently—

McNamara: Mr. Novak, let me say something to your face. I deeply resent the implication. You’re implying I’m a Communist.

Novak: I did not imply—

McNamara: You sure as hell did. And I deeply resent it. And you’re absolutely wrong to present it. And you’re absolutely wrong in stating my beliefs. I am not taking issue with the President…. Will he respond to the Soviets? I think he will respond. I hope he does. I have respect for our President. Maybe you don’t, but I do.

Novak: I have a lot of respect for him. I have respect for you.

McNamara: Well, I hope you do, but it doesn’t sound like it.

Novak: I am not questioning your patriotism.

McNamara: Well, it sure as hell sounds like it. You were implying I’m a Communist. I don’t like that at all….

Novak: I’m questioning your judgment, which is different from questioning your patriotism.

McNamara: Novak, let me go back. You were implying I’m a Communist. I don’t like that at all.

Novak: Now that’s—

McNamara: You shut up for a moment and let me talk.

Novak: Well, that’s rude.

McNamara: It is rude, and its rudeness is deserved….

Novak: Mr. McNamara, you are advocating that he [Reagan] go into extension of the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] treaty.

McNamara: Absolutely.

Novak: Which would undoubtedly, downstream, reduce our ability to have a Strategic Defense Initiative and put us again at the mercy of the Soviet strategic superiority.

McNamara: Mr. Novak, [Reagan] senior military adviser Paul Nitze has recommended exactly the same thing…. Nitze’s not a Communist and neither am I!

Novak: I never said you were. I said it four times. I said your judgment is bad and I think you are performing a disservice to the country.

McNamara: A service for the Soviets. That is absurd.

That ended the interview. During the commercial break, McNamara told me he never would appear with me again and might well boycott all CNN programs—then stormed out of the studio. Braden acted as if personally wounded. “You have insulted our guest and humiliated me,” he said in the few seconds prior to our postinterview analysis. The temperature of our never-warm personal relationship dropped significantly and permanently after the McNamara program. However, Braden had been even more detached than usual during my rancorous dialogue with McNamara. The passivity continued during the yip-yap, with Braden saying to me: “Maybe I’ll leave it to you. Do you think you handled the guest correctly? Were you kind? Were you insulting?”

(The possible source of what I viewed as Braden’s ambivalence toward McNamara was suggested on September 8, 1987, in the Style section of the Washington Post when staff writer Charles Trueheart disclosed a “zesty” book proposal by Tom Braden’s glamorous wife, Joan. In it, she revealed her longtime “romantic” relationship with McNamara, including travels with him throughout the world. Joan Braden was quoted by Trueheart as saying Tom “encourages” her travel with McNamara, adding: “He never asks me what goes on.” I was told Joan’s relationship with McNamara was common knowledge in Washington social circles, but those were circles I did not frequent. By the time the Post story ran, Buchanan had returned to Crossfire and I was no longer on the program regularly. I was glad I was not sitting next to Tom Braden on the set the night of September 8, 1987.)

         

ON OCTOBER 5, 1986, in Nicaragua, Sandinistas shot down a C-123 transport plane carrying supplies for the Contras. One crew member survived and was taken prisoner by the Sandinistas, the first appearance of a long shadow cast over the final two years of the Reagan administration. The prisoner was Eugene Hassenfus, a former U.S. Marine who as an American soldier of fortune had worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a “kicker” (kicking supplies off transport planes). Now he was performing the same function in the Nicaraguan resupply effort under the supervision of Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North at the National Security Council. This was a covert government operation violating various Boland amendments passed by Congress to prohibit U.S. government help for the Contras.

Prisoner Hassenfus told the Sandinistas he was working for the CIA, just as he had in Vietnam. But the CIA denied having anything to do with Hassenfus, and President Reagan contended the pilot was working for “private groups and private citizens that have been trying to help the Contras.” That story was gripping the capital on Friday, October 10, at two fifteen p.m. when Elliott Abrams came to the CNN bureau to tape Evans and Novak (to be broadcast the next day). It was to be one of the most consequential of our weekly programs over twenty years.

Abrams was the neoconservative prototype: Democrat, Jewish, New Yorker, son-in-law of neocon pathfinder Norman Podhoretz, fierce anti-communist and cold warrior, intrepid supporter of Israel. Like his close friend Bill Kristol, Abrams was a quick-witted graduate of Harvard College (and went on to Harvard Law School). At age twenty-seven in 1977, Abrams joined the Senate staff of neocon Democrat Pat Moynihan. When Moynihan moved into the Democratic Party’s liberal womb, Abrams went the other direction and became a Republican.

In 1981, President Reagan named Abrams, at age thirty-two, as the youngest assistant secretary of State in the nation’s history and a key supporter of the Contras. Abrams was my source, and I liked him personally. His answer to Rowly’s opening question in the October 10 taping would haunt him for years:

Evans: Mr. Secretary, can you give me categorical assurance that Hassenfus was not under the control, the guidance, the direction, or what have you, of anybody connected with the American government?

Abrams: Absolutely. That would be illegal. We are barred from doing that, and we are not doing it. This was not in any sense a U.S. government operation. None.

After I took up the questioning, Abrams reiterated that Hassenfus was not working for the government. He expressed a desire “to repeat that categorical assurance that he was not.” I persisted:

Novak: Now when you give “categorical assurances,” we’re not playing word games that are so common in Washington? You’re not talking about the NSC, or something else?

Abrams: I am not playing games.

Novak: National Security Council?

Abrams: No government agencies. None.

Abrams’s answers were so “categorical”—and so incorrect—that they became the basis for efforts to paint Contra support as a sinister conspiracy and ultimately to impeach or indict Ronald Reagan. I know of no statute that prohibits lying, intentionally or not, to a journalist. Yet, when it became clear that the Contra resupply was being run out of the White House, what Abrams told us was seized on by enemies of Reagan and the Contras. The leftist writer Theodore Draper, in his anti-Contra book A Very Thin Line, upbraided Abrams for the “temerity” of his performance on our program. If Abrams were to escape criminal conviction, wrote Draper, “it is hard to see why anyone should have been punished for misbehavior in the Iran-Contra affair.”

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, an octogenarian retired federal judge, agreed. What Abrams said on our program was used by Walsh to hound him into a plea bargain on charges of misleading Congress. He failed to wring from him information incriminating Walsh’s real prey, Ronald Reagan.

Abrams’s foes regarded Rowly and me as feckless victims of the conspiracy, who did not bother to question him closely. On the contrary, Evans and Novak was an adversarial program—and never more so than on the October 10 taping. We pressed Abrams hard, but he would not budge on his insistence. It led me to conclude in our postinterview, on-camera conversation: “You know, I’ve seen a lot of cover-ups in this town, Rowland, and we both may end up with egg on our face before this is over, if this is all an elaborate lie. But this doesn’t look like a cover-up, and it doesn’t because there is no equivocation.”

We did get egg on our face, but I am still convinced Abrams was not lying to us that Friday afternoon. He just did not know the truth.

         

THE FINAL MIDTERM election campaign of an eight-year presidency can be a dreary business, and 1986 fit that description. In the preelection issue of the Evans-Novak Political Report, I began:

In the final weeks of the campaign, President Ronald Reagan failed to nationalize the campaign on any issue other than himself. What little trend has appeared in recent weeks looks to be Democratic, but not enough to promise a real sweep.

In the ENPR, I predicted a Democratic gain of three seats in the House and three in the Senate. The actual gains for the Democrats on November 6, 1986, were five seats in the House and eight in the Senate.

The difference between prediction and results was insignificant in the House. The eighty-one seat Democratic edge continued the same magnitude of Republican deficiency prevailing since the 1982 midterm elections. But missing the Senate outcome by five seats was a disaster for me as well as the Republicans. A three-seat Democratic gain would have meant a fifty-fifty balance in the Senate, enabling Vice President Bush to cast the deciding vote and maintain Republican control of the upper chamber for the full eight Reagan years. An eight-seat gain meant a fifty-four to forty-six edge for the Democrats—ending six years of Republican control. My only defense was that nobody else—including my Democratic sources—saw the takeover coming. The consequences were far-reaching, the most immediate being the defeat of Robert Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court. That blocked a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and saved Roev. Wade for the abortion lobby.

Since Democrats still enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in the House of Representatives, I wondered what had happened to political realignment. A partial answer was that realignment was blocked by the South’s lingering attachment to its ancestral party. In the states of the old Confederacy, the 1986 election for the House still returned eighty-two Democrats against forty-two Republicans. But realignment was not dead—just moving very slowly.

         

POLITICAL FOLKLORE HAS attributed the poor Republican performance in the 1986 midterms to the revelation of the Iran-Contra scandal. In truth, the disclosure came twenty-one days after the election. For the covert arms sales to Iran’s revolutionary regime and the diversion of their proceeds to the Contras, Ollie North was immediately fired from the National Security Council staff and his boss, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, resigned as NSC director. Firing North and handing him and Poindexter over to the inquisition was a brutal act of political disloyalty urged on President Reagan by Don Regan and by an even more influential presidential adviser, Nancy Reagan. If Don Regan thought he saved himself by throwing North and Poindexter overboard, he was wrong. He too was on Nancy Reagan’s purge list, and was gone on February 27, 1987.

On Thursday, February 26 (my fifty-sixth birthday), I flew to Boca Raton, Florida, for the annual conference that Rowly and I put on with Jude Wanniski. Early Friday morning at Boca Raton, a White House source called to advise that Reagan’s third chief of staff would be Howard Baker and would be announced that afternoon. As Senate majority leader, Baker had made no secret of his displeasure with Reagan initiatives from tax cuts to the Contras. Since leaving the Senate at the end of 1984, he had spent scarcely two years cashing in as a seven-figure lawyer-lobbyist. He was coming back, out of duty to a thankless job.

On Friday afternoon in my Boca Raton hotel room, I wrote an Evans & Novak column for Monday contending that Howard Baker succeeding Don Regan “means respectability rather than renewal of the Reagan Revolution is the goal of the President’s final two years.” This was the column’s last paragraph:

[W]hatever happened to Secretary of Education William Bennett, pushed by the New Right as a chief of staff who might revive the Reagan Revolution? “Too contentious,” said one insider, adding that Bennett would cause trouble on the Hill. The First Lady and her friends were seeking succor in Congress, not a new agenda.

Hand-wringing by me and other conservatives meant we still did not understand Reagan. He was a successful president because of tunnel vision that kept his gaze on big goals. Chiefs of staff came and went just as directors did in his Hollywood days, and Reagan did not care much about them.

Reagan’s implacable calm in the face of adversity was demonstrated early in January 1987 when Rowly attended the last in a series of intimate lunches with the president arranged for conservative journalists by Pat Buchanan. After a full hour over lunch with the president, Evans—in typical Rowly style—sidled over to him for a private word. “Mr. President,” he asked, “how in the world do you keep so cool when all hell is breaking loose?” Reagan smiled, cocked his head, and, as he often did, answered the question by telling a joke. “Rowly,” he replied, “did you ever hear the story about the two psychiatrists?”

Two psychiatrists, one old and one young, traveled to and from work together each day. The young psychiatrist finished each day bedraggled and disheveled, with a mournful look on his face. The old psychiatrist, on the other hand, finished each day as chipper and bright as he had started it. The young psychiatrist finally asked, “Doctor, how do you look so good after a full day of hearing endless stories of woe and sadness from your patients?” The old psychiatrist answered: “Doctor, it’s simple. I don’t listen.” Reagan added to Evans: “Neither do I.”

         

ON THE EVENING of Friday, January 2, 1987, Maurice Pall Novak died at the age of eighty-five at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. My parents had lived in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland, since 1982. After the death in 1981 of Sarah, my mother’s only sister and her last sibling still living in Joliet, Geraldine suggested that there was nothing anymore to keep my parents in Joliet, and they should join us in Washington to be near their beloved Zelda and Alexander.

In my eulogy, I described my father’s story as “a quintessentially American story—specifically a story of Jewish-American immigrants and their values.” I praised his “keen insightful mind” but said “what set Maurice Novak apart were his personal virtues. They were old-fashioned virtues, seen ever less frequently in a fragmented society: loyalty, devotion to duty, morality, love of friend and family.” I concluded by turning from eulogist to only son.

I am so grateful for the way he taught me to enjoy sports and follow current events, for his advice, his patience and his support in hard times, his tolerance of my shortcomings. What estimable qualities I have resemble my father’s; my defects clearly were not derived from him.

A few days after the funeral, I received my first telephone call in many years from Katherine Graham. My mother had met the proprietor of the Washington Post during a reception at the Graham mansion many years earlier. Jane Sanders Novak was awed by no one and felt she could charm anybody. So Mrs. Novak sat down and had a very nice conversation with Mrs. Graham. Now, with the publisher the only person in authority at the Post whom my mother knew, she had sent her a text of my eulogy with the suggestion that it might be nice if the Post printed it. Clearly embarrassed, one of the most powerful women in America told me: “Bob, it is a lovely eulogy, but it really isn’t—” I interrupted her: “Kay, please don’t give it a moment’s thought.” I thanked her for the compliment, told her how much our family appreciated the report on my father’s death published at the top of the Sunday Post’s obituary page, and assured her I would explain to my mother that Mrs. Graham liked the eulogy even if it had no place in the newspaper.

IN THE SPRING of 1987 not long after Howard Baker’s appointment as White House chief of staff, I walked out of the Capital Hilton Hotel after lunch and found the billionaire founder of CNN standing alone on the 16th Street sidewalk. Ted Turner said he had a date with Howard Baker in forty-five minutes, with nothing to do until then. I suggested he take the ten-minute walk with me to my office at 1750 Pennsylvania Avenue, take a look at our office, and then stroll over to the White House, a block away at 1600 Pennsylvania.

This would be my first extended personal conversation with Turner since my pre-CNN employment chat with him in Atlanta seven years earlier. Turner had been a guest on Crossfire from Moscow in 1986, where he was attending the first Goodwill Games international athletic competition that he arranged. When I pressed him during the interview about getting too close to the Soviets, Ted snapped back in his raspy Georgia accent: “Remember, this is my network.” Subsequent efforts to book him as a guest on Evans and Novak all failed.

As we walked across Lafayette Square on the way to my office, Turner said: “I can’t understand, Novak, why you’re in favor of all-out nuclear war.” He then launched a defense of the Kremlin’s arms control policies and lauded the people’s paradise in Cuba. I tried to argue back, but it was tough getting a word in edgewise with Ted Turner. When we reached my thirteenth-floor office, I introduced him to a young woman in the Evans & Novak outer office whose main job was handling the phone calls. Turner looked her in the eye and asked: “How do you feel working for a man who is in favor of a nuclear holocaust?”

The woman looked at Ted as though he were mad, and to a certain extent he was. I think it is easier for madmen to be creative entrepreneurs and visionaries, and that’s what Turner was. He made CNN a wonder of the world of communications, and the network was never the same after he left.

         

THOMAS P. O’NEILL Jr. left Congress at the end of 1986 and a year later published his memoir of ten years as Speaker of the House, thirty-four years in Congress, and sixty years in elective politics. A brief passage in Man of the House about Rowly and me constituted the worst lie about us ever committed to print by a public figure. O’Neill claimed that after he had been elected House majority leader in 1973,

Evans and Novak came to my office [and] had the gall to offer me a deal. If I kept them informed as to what was happening in Congress and the White House, they would see to it that they would help smooth the way for me to be the next speaker. I was ashamed to be in their company, and I kicked them right out of my office.

Rowly and I agreed that such a blatant untruth must be answered immediately, and I did so in the column of September 14, 1987:

In a combined 70 years of reporting in Washington, neither of us has offered anybody such a deal or been kicked out of anybody’s office. We did visit O’Neill when he became leader (as we similarly visited Jim Wright years later). When we expressed hope we could see him occasionally, O’Neill smiled assent.

Indeed, after that meeting, we enjoyed an amiable relationship with O’Neill for many years. When he encountered me, he would cuff me on the head (which I took as a sign of affection, though I disliked it). As indicated earlier in this book, the Evans & Novak column praised Tip extravagantly after his election as Speaker in January 1977.

On March 18, 1977, he addressed the closed-door semiannual Evans and Novak Political Forum. In February 1978, we interviewed him on television for our RKO General series. That was the interview in which he made wild charges against Republican congressman Bruce Caputo for which he underwent the humiliation of a public apology on the House floor.

The bad taste left with O’Neill by that interview (his fault, not ours) may have been why he spurned further invitations from us for the remaining eight years of his congressional tenure, but he never offered an explanation. When the lie appeared in Man of the House, I called the former O’Neill aide with whom I had the most experience. He said he had not come to work for the Speaker until six years after the fictitious 1973 incident but added that Tip talked about it frequently. That was O’Neill’s “reason”—not previously conveyed to me—for spurning my invitations. In the September 14, 1987, column, I quoted the aide as saying: “I think that if you gave the Speaker sodium pentothal, he would tell the same story.” I did not use the aide’s name, but it was Chris Matthews. (In a 1989 Crossfire guest appearance, Matthews implied that he was present in O’Neill’s office that day. That ended for me what until then had been a cordial relationship.)

I was not the only victim of lies in O’Neill’s memoir, but the other victims were dead and could not defend themselves. Reviewers of Man of the House made no effort to check out O’Neill’s fantasies. That included Bill Safire, the former New York press agent and Nixon publicist who gushed in his New York Times column about O’Neill’s “disarming frankness” and “practical political reasoning.” Fawning book reviews fit the general news media attitude toward O’Neill, who became a lovable national icon after his retirement in 1987 (and even more so after his death in 1994). The news media made over the mean-spirited O’Neill who was a big government ideologue, soft on Communist penetration of the Western Hemisphere, and a Boston machine politician who was brutal to such enemies in the House Democratic Caucus as Phil Burton and Tony Coelho. My regret is that, like many colleagues, I was deceived by his Irish charm into writing too many admiring columns about him.

         

THE SEPTEMBER 25, 1987, issue of USA Today carried CNN talk show host Larry King’s breezy, Walter Winchell–style column that captured my attention because of one single-sentence item: “I’ll bet you that Pat Buchanan comes back to Crossfire on CNN.” That’s all he wrote, but it spoke volumes to me.

I knew Larry would not write that sentence without having been informed by somebody in authority at CNN. So why did CNN tell Larry King and not me, the person Buchanan would be replacing? It was just the CNN way, in good times (which was 1987) and in bad (which would come later). At CNN, people were discharged and transferred without notice. When King’s item aroused press interest, Crossfire producer Sol Levine told reporters that CNN over the last two years just had not been able to find anybody who filled the program’s need as Pat Buchanan did. So much for me.

Pat had resigned from the White House on March 1, 1987, just two days after the man who had hired him, Don Regan, had been forced out. However, Buchanan would have been gone even if Regan had stayed.

After the dreary election of 1986, Howard Phillips and other right-wingers began pressing Buchanan to run for president in 1988. I wrote in an Evans & Novak column published Friday, January 16, that Buchanan “has all but decided to run for president.” But I was then unaware of a meeting in Buchanan’s big suburban Virginia home two evenings earlier when a wide assortment of conservatives gathered to plan Buchanan’s campaign. It was thought Pat was ready to flash the green light that night, but things did not go as expected, as I wrote in a column published January 21:

It was not a happy evening. Supporters ready to get the campaign rolling were disturbed by a lack of organization and the presence of conservatives who preferred [Jack] Kemp to Buchanan (notably Tom Winter and Allan Ryskind of Human Events). What bothered them most was their prospective champion’s newly apparent indecision.

By the following Monday morning, Buchanan had decided not to run and let the world know it. I talked to Pat on the phone that morning, and he relayed to me his apprehension about splitting conservative forces so that George Bush or Bob Dole was nominated. He told me that if a conservative (presumably Kemp) were elected, Pat Buchanan would get the credit; if not, maybe 1992 would be Pat’s time.

I asked Buchanan if that meant he was going to stay in the White House. “No, Bob,” he replied. “I can’t do that now. I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I cannot go back down.” I did not realize at the time that Pat’s “mountaintop”—running for president—in his mind forever barred him from future government service, in the White House, in the cabinet, in Congress (either House or Senate). But he felt a calling to be president.

         

BUCHANAN WAS WRITING a new book and did not return to Crossfire until Monday, October 26, 1987. I had become more comfortable on Crossfire and sometimes even missed being on the program, but the reduction in income from CNN did not hurt me.

Art Buchwald had guided me in 1986 to the Washington Speaker’s Bureau, my third lecture agency. They produced $100,000 of income for me in 1987, a year where my taxable income was $440,000 ($784,000 in 2007 dollars). I could not believe I was making that much money, because I sure did not feel rich. Being a millionaire did not mean what it once did, but my net worth—thanks to riding the Reagan stock market with Richard Gilder—was more than a million dollars. I no longer had to take out emergency bank loans, but I was still the same driven, obstreperous newspaper reporter looking for news and looking for trouble.

         

AT NOON ON September 15, 1987, at Aspen, Colorado, I debated Carl Rowan, my fellow Chicago Sun-Times columnist, before executives and customers of Quaker Oats. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci also was speaking at the event. A Quaker Oats official noted to Carlucci that in our debate, Novak would be pro-Reagan and Rowan would be anti-Reagan. Carlucci snorted: “Well, if we have to rely on Novak, we’re in a hell of a shape.”

Reading my columns for the last two years of the Reagan administration, I can understand Carlucci’s exasperation. I found little good to say about the administration, whose natural fatigue in its seventh and eighth years running the government was intensified by Iran-Contra.

But as in the story of the two psychiatrists, I doubt Reagan paid much attention to our column. He saw himself winning the cold war, energizing the U.S. economy, and transforming the American political balance of power. The Lilliputian maneuvers I dwelled on in the column did not bother him. He knew better than his critics the power of his rhetoric. On May 31, 1988, amidst the hand-wringing, Reagan went to the Soviet Union to deliver a speech at Moscow State University that seized the world’s attention by extolling “the power of economic freedom.”