The Prince of Darkness

CHAPTER 35

Blowup

AS MANEUVERING FOR the Republican presidential nomination got under way in early 1987, Don Devine, a prominent conservative and key adviser to Bob Dole, laid out for me a strategy to nominate his candidate as the real conservative. Devine advised Dole to support Reagan tax cuts but to draw the line against Jack Kemp by also stressing the reduction of budget deficits. Laboring under the delusion that Dole and I were both conservatives who could get along if only forced to spend time together, Devine invited me on a two-day trip with the candidate to New Hampshire on Sunday and Monday, February 15 and 16, 1987.

I arrived at Washington National Airport Sunday morning and climbed aboard a twin-engine private plane that would carry Dole north. The senator looked distraught when he spotted me. Either Devine had not told him I was coming, or Dole had not fully prepared himself for me.

We had no real conversations during my two days with the senator, the longest period I ever would be in close proximity to him. But overhearing him talk to Devine, to other aides, and over the phone, I gained an insight into Bob Dole (that I did not write about because I thought it would violate his hospitality). I never heard Dole utter a word about beliefs, policy, or strategy. He was into details. Who would be attending his events in New Hampshire and later that week in the Midwest? Who would greet him when he arrived? What was the stage configuration for a future rally? I cannot imagine such questions from Ronald Reagan, the old movie actor who trusted his directors. Dole was a hopeless micromanager, inappropriate for a presidential candidate and indeed for a president.

Still, Dole was following Devine’s instructions. I wrote in an Evans & Novak column datelined Keene, New Hampshire: “Dole frequently refers to himself as a ‘conservative’ or ‘spokesman for the Right.’ Refuting his pro-tax reputation, he pledges to keep the low rates set by last year’s tax reform and puts ‘economic growth’ first among deficit-reducers.” But Dole also returned to his Social Security benefits cut that President Reagan torpedoed in 1985 on Kemp’s advice. My column continued:

…Dole does not sound like a movement conservative. He still throws around the rhetoric of Republican moderation: “problem-solving,” “pragmatism,” “sensitivity.” To one adviser [it was Devine], the searing experience of being impaled by the news media in his disastrous [1976] run for vice president has made him “talk less conservative than he is.”

He certainly talks differently from the way he did before Devine came aboard in 1985. His formerly biting wit is invariably turned against himself, making him seem funny and humble at the same time. The former champion of Washington’s meanness derby is now into niceness. He resists the professional legislator’s impulse to list bills instead of talk issues.

I doubted Devine’s advice would stick, and it did not. Less than four months later at the biennial Midwestern Republican conference in Des Moines, I described Dole as “sounding like more of a moderate than Bush” when asked to describe his vision for America: “Open opportunity for all, a world free and peaceful, an end to the nuclear nightmare, breakthroughs in health and education, science and the environment.” I wrote that this vision was “congenial to liberal Republicans of the 1950s and similar to what today’s Democrats say.”

If Don Devine did not know he had failed to bring Dole and me together, my column of September 4 should have convinced him. I used government records to show that Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole was traveling the country at government expense (especially into presidential primary states) delivering unstinted praise for her husband. I was told that the senator was furious, at me and at the vice president’s office for leaking the information to me. He was right about the source. Lee Atwater, Bush’s crafty young campaign director, had slipped me the documents.

IN EARLY 1987, the conventional wisdom was that the Democratic nomination for president had been locked up by Gary Hart. I had never been impressed with Hart as a candidate when I went to Shenandoah in southwest Iowa on Wednesday, April 29, 1987, to watch him campaign among Democratic caucus-goers in rock-ribbed Republican Page County. The handful of super-liberal Democratic activists who ran the party there did not seem impressed either. I wrote in a column that local Democrats would not commit to him, making Hart a “shaky” front-runner.

I got home from Iowa on Thursday, May 1, and wrote my Hart column with a Shenandoah dateline for publication Monday. Hart’s schedule listed no weekend campaign activity that would affect what I wrote, with Friday and Saturday designated as “Washington: Private Time.” It turned out not so private. The Miami Herald, enticed by his fervent denials of philandering, reported a good-looking young woman named Donna Rice “spent Friday night and most of Saturday” with Hart at his Washington town house. Such was the lack of fervor for his candidacy that he was out of the race five days later.

That left eight little-known candidates (including Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder) competing for the Democratic nomination: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” I went to Houston for their first debate, a dull affair. I remember best a postdebate encounter in a steamy little press room. I was writing a special report for the Chicago Sun-Times, when I felt a presence behind me reading my laptop copy over my shoulder. I turned and looked into the smiling face of somebody with whom I had not exchanged a word in seventeen years: Albert Gore Sr.

“Senator,” I said, “can I help you?” “Yes,” he replied, “by not writing anything bad about my son.” His son was thirty-nine-year-old Senator Albert Gore Jr. (“Al” while the father was “Albert”), one of the “Seven Dwarfs” and a very dark horse for the 1988 nomination. I wondered how it would be to have a father (turning eighty in December) who thought the country made a terrible mistake in passing him over for president in 1960 and desperately wanted his son to redeem that error.

Gore was so lackluster in the Houston debate that I did not mention him, pro or con, in either my report to the Sun-Times or in the Evans & Novak column that followed. I wrote that the governor of Massachusetts, the “earnest, forceful” Michael Dukakis, “starred” at the event.

I dropped in to watch the Seven Dwarfs again on July 28 and 29, 1987, at the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) conference at Mackinac Island, Michigan.

My trip to Mackinac provided my third extended personal encounter with Bill Clinton, the first being a lunch with the governor of Arkansas at the 1985 Governors Conference in Boise and the second a chance meeting aboard an airliner in early July 1987.

In that second encounter, Governor Clinton suddenly plopped down next to me in the first-class section and volunteered, “You probably wonder, Bob, why I’m not running for president.” The word had spread through political circles that Bill did not want national exposure of his history of philandering and neither did Hillary for the sake of what was considered a tenuous marriage. Clinton explained to me that he and Hillary thought Chelsea was too young in 1988 to be deprived of her parents in a presidential campaign. “And, Hillary and I have really overcome our difficulties,” he said, reassuring a near total stranger.

At Mackinac, Clinton greeted me like a long-lost brother and filled me in on his assessment of presidential candidates who had appeared in closed session before the governors. His colleagues loved Clinton because he had so much of what they and the presidential candidates lacked: charisma. After drinking a little and talking a lot late into the night at Wednesday’s closing dinner, I was up early Thursday to catch a six thirty a.m. Northwest regional flight to Detroit to connect with an eight forty-five flight to Washington. I would arrive at eleven fifteen a.m., in time for a two p.m. taping at CNN with Attorney General Meese for the Evans and Novak program.

When I arrived at the little island airport at six a.m., I was informed the flight to Detroit—the only one that morning—had been cancelled because of a mechanical problem. There was no way now I could get back for the Meese interview. “I’m screwed! Absolutely screwed!” I shouted, stamping my feet and uttering a string of expletives. The few people in the small airport waiting room stared at me, and I recognized one of them. It was Bill Clinton.

“What’s the problem?” Clinton asked. When I explained, Clinton said: “That’s not a problem.” He was flying back to Little Rock, he told me, but would be happy to give me a ride to Detroit. “But won’t that take you out of your way?” I asked. “Yes, it would,” he said, “but I would like to help you.” I should not have done it, but it was the only way I could get to Washington for my TV date. The plane appeared to be a corporate jet from an Arkansas company, loaned to the governor for his use.

The flight to Detroit took only half an hour, and Clinton talked to me all the way. He expressed concern that his party was listing too far to the Left, and he came across as just the kind of moderate Democrat I might like. The column I wrote under a Mackinac Island dateline contained this paragraph:

Had Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas last month entered the race as expected instead of bowing out as he did, he could have been the DGA candidate. [Michigan Gov.] Blanchard was ready to back him, as were Montana’s Gov. Ted Schwinden and probably Kentucky’s Gov. Martha Layne Collins, perhaps setting off a parade. Clinton is what the governors want: attractive, Southern, moderately liberal, nonconfrontational.

Would I have written this if Clinton had not given me a badly needed ride to Detroit? Of course I would. At least that’s what I told myself.

My column from Mackinac Island said Dukakis once again performed best of all the presidential candidates. Dukakis, I wrote, “typifies today’s Democratic governors: earnest, intelligent, well informed, hard working, humorless, moderate in tone, a little boring” and was “well-liked” by his colleagues But he was not endorsed by them because they—Clinton included—thought him to be a loser in November.

MY PARTING OF the ways with John McLaughlin was preordained by the events of Friday, February 5, 1988, but the ground had been prepared long before that. The McLaughlin Group was in its sixth year, and the time when he would call me the night before a taping to seek my advice on topics or would ask me to drive him to a cut-rate auto mechanic’s garage were years in the past.

With the success of his television career (including a weekly interview show, McLaughlin: One on One), John’s hauteur was overpowering. Replacing his balky old car was a staff-chauffeured limo (copied after Bill Buckley’s). McLaughlin now hosted elegant dinner parties (that I report strictly by hearsay). His growing staff was instructed to address and refer to him as “Dr. McLaughlin.”

A former intern of mine, an ardent conservative and ambitious journalist looking for work (whom I shall call Jim), had two job offers: one from Rotor and Wing, a magazine about helicopters; the other to work for McLaughlin. Asked for my advice, I urged him to stay away from McLaughlin. Placing a quest for excitement over prudence, Jim went to work for McLaughlin and soon was performing the most menial tasks. When McLaughlin returned to Washington from out of town, Jim was stationed at the airport arrival gate. Upon spotting McLaughlin, he would notify a colleague driving the limo via mobile phone: “The eagle has landed! The eagle has landed!” Jim then would carry McLaughlin’s bags to curbside where the alerted limo would be waiting, not a moment having been lost for the founder and CEO of Oliver Productions.

Jim was a testy young man, and, as I expected, did not last three months before he quit. That was the rule, not the exception. The only permanent aide was producer Allyson Kennedy, a pleasant young woman who somehow stuck it out. By 1988, McLaughlin communicated off camera with panel members only through phone calls from Ally Kennedy.

Tension on the Group was palpable between the panelists and our common enemy, McLaughlin. Germond and I often made fun of him to his face during taping breaks. During one long intermission while technicians got ready for the PBS segment, I propounded a question I thought might annoy the former Jesuit priest: “John, now that you have broken your vows of poverty and chastity, I ask you what is more important to you, money or sex?” McLaughlin guffawed and answered promptly: “Money! Money, all the way!”

McLaughlin’s arrogance was most intense in road performances of the Group where we would simulate our program for conventions or corporate meetings. Each panelist would get $2,500 per road show, while McLaughlin would pocket the balance, from $10,000 to $15,000. Germond threatened not to appear at these events unless McLaughlin showed him a full accounting for every occasion. McLaughlin refused, and Germond took himself off the out-of-town trips. For all my newfound wealth, I could not turn down $2,500 a show. Besides, I had enough troubles with McLaughlin, and I was not ready to break with him.

McLaughlin’s introductions to each TV segment got longer and longer. I told him he was seeking a point where he could do the whole program by himself and the panelists would be irrelevant. At the same time, he complained (always through his staff) that I was talking too much and assigned staffers to count the words uttered by each panelist. At one point he hired Tammy Haddad, one of Washington’s most talented TV professionals (sometime producer of Crossfire, Larry King Live, and Hardball ). She was forced to give me my word counts and convey Dr. McLaughlin’s instructions that I talk less. Tammy did not last long.

Ally Kennedy once told me Dr. McLaughlin felt I was the only Group member who had the intellect to make it in the Jesuits. I am sure she passed on that piece of flattery at John’s direction. But increasingly, he was insulting to me and the other panelists. When Germond and I were inducted into the Washington Journalism Hall of Fame on the same night in 1987, McLaughlin declined an invitation but in an attempt at humor sent a graceless message that since he had saved the declining careers of Germond and Novak, we had him to thank for being honored.

Executive producer Richard Moore, an old Hollywood hand, told me there were many people in show business who hated each other but collaborated for years. “I just want to be an honest broker,” Dick told me, “and I want to make sure you get along well enough to keep you together.” No honest broker, Dick Moore was a hired gun for McLaughlin just as he had been for Nixon.

THE CRITICAL EXPLOSION came during the taping of February 5, 1988. Since it involved a confrontation between McLaughlin and me, let a third party tell the story. This is Germond’s account in his memoir (Fat Man in the Middle Seat):

During a segment on the [presidential] primary campaign, Novak accused McLaughlin of being opportunistic in trying to butter up someone in the Dukakis campaign he might need later on. It was an accusation we frequently made against McLaughlin and one that we knew was accurate. Usually he laughed them off. But this time, for reasons that never were made clear, was different. When we broke for a commercial, McLaughlin started screaming imprecations at Novak at the top of his lungs. His face was red, and the cords in his neck turned white.

Novak tried to reply, but he was more startled than angry and McLaughlin wouldn’t listen. He grew more and more offensive, suggesting finally that if Novak didn’t like the way he ran the show, he could take a hike.

I finally told him to cool down, turned to Novak, and said, “If you want to walk out on this son of a bitch, I’ll go with you.” Novak shook his head, and by the time the commercial break ended a minute or so later, McLaughlin had regained control of himself. We finished the taping somewhat awkwardly.

During the last commercial break, McLaughlin stared at me malevolently and intoned, almost chanting, “Vile. Vile. Just vile.” I knew then I had not heard the last of this incident.

Five days later, I received a call at home from Ally Kennedy. Dr. McLaughlin had decided it would be best for me not to be on this week’s program, she told me (adding that I would receive the full six-hundred-dollar program fee that my contract stipulated I received anytime McLaughlin cancelled my appearance). I asked Ally whether McLaughlin would talk to me on the phone. She said she was sure that he would not but suggested I might want to get in touch with Dick Moore. I failed to reach Moore before leaving for the airport, and figured I would try again from Columbus, Ohio, where I was making a luncheon speech to the American Society of Travel Agents.

McLaughlin had sent a message. Solely because of personal pique, he was willing to remove me from the program that would analyze the Iowa caucuses held earlier that week even though I had been there reporting the event and presumably had insights. McLaughlin was willing to risk permanently losing the panel’s most visible member in order to demonstrate his total control.

From my hotel room in Columbus, I got Dick Moore on the phone in Washington. I told him it was insulting and counterproductive for John to remove me from the post-Iowa program. I warned Moore that if I was pulled off this program, I probably would have to resign from the Group. With his trademark stutter, Dick told me not to do anything hasty and said he would get back to me. Moore called within half an hour and told me John was adamant about keeping me off this week’s program. I then told him I was quitting, and he could consider this my formal resignation. Once I hung up the phone, I wondered whether I had been too hasty. But Moore called me again within another half hour. He told me McLaughlin had thought better of it and I was back on this week’s program, provided I still wanted to be there. I said I did.

McLaughlin conducted the February 12 taping without incident, though we had nothing to say to each other off camera. That also was true of the February 19 session, when I had a lot to comment about that week’s New Hampshire primary that I had covered. But on Monday, February 22, McLaughlin dropped the other shoe. Dick Moore told me that with the Iowa and New Hampshire competition finished, John wanted to go in a different direction and that I would be off the program for the taping of February 26 (which happened to be my fifty-seventh birthday). Moore was no longer the friendly intermediary, and momentarily he had shed his stutter. He also informed me that I would not receive my six-hundred-dollar cancellation fee for this program or any other program from which I was pulled. When I protested this violation of my contract, Moore was strictly McLaughlin’s hard-nosed lawyer: “Bob, you don’t have a contract. Remember, on February 11 over the phone, you quit and said this was a formal resignation.”

I had unwittingly furthered McLaughlin’s grand design. It was not merely that he wanted to keep me on the hook every week, not knowing whether I would be on the panel until a few days before the taping. Every panelist would be given the same treatment. Nobody would have a regular spot on the program. Inadvertently, by my hasty “resignation” I had enabled McLaughlin to cancel me for any program without paying a cancellation fee, and he wrote the same leeway into future contracts with other panelists. McLaughlin seemed to have concluded that this program was his and he did not need anybody’s help. If he could risk my quitting, he could risk losing the rest of them. Ultimately he did lose most, and The McLaughlin Group suffered.

After receiving Moore’s call on February 22, I made one more effort to settle my differences with McLaughlin. I wanted to sit down with him and ask whether he wanted me to leave the program. If he did, I would go quickly. If he wanted me to stay, he had to restore the terms of my original contract.

His secretary told me he would be out of town all week. McLaughlin was going to Dallas early for a road show on Wednesday afternoon, February 24, with The McLaughlin Group, appearing before the National Roofing Contractors Association. I was flying to Dallas for the event late Tuesday night. As was frequently the case in the McLaughlin operation, we were staying in different places in Dallas—John at a luxury hotel, the rest of us at a commercial hotel. (Sometimes at airports, a limousine picked up McLaughlin while the rest of us traveled in a van.) I said I would be happy to go to McLaughlin’s hotel for breakfast, lunch, or a cup of coffee on Wednesday at any time before our two thirty p.m. appearance.

I soon received a call saying Dr. McLaughlin would be busy all day Wednesday preparing for the event. What’s more, he would be out of touch the rest of the week—and, indeed, for the foreseeable future. In short, McLaughlin would never see me.

I knew my days with The McLaughlin Group were numbered. I sat down at my computer when I returned to my office Thursday and drafted a memo to Ed Turner at CNN suggesting a talk show to compete against McLaughlin.

WHILE I WAS wrestling with John McLaughlin, George Bush and Michael Dukakis were sewing up the presidential nominations.

Although managers for Bush and Dole felt the prize would go to the candidate who convinced primary voters that he was the bona fide Republican, neither was a conservative. The conservative candidates, quite different from each other, were Jack Kemp, televangelist Pat Robertson, and former Delaware governor Pierre du Pont, who like Bush started as a liberal Republican but unlike Bush was now a sincere conservative. None could get the traction to contend against Bush and Dole.

Dole won the Iowa caucuses, thanks in large part to backing from Senator Chuck Grassley, leader of the state party’s conservative wing. Bush, who for four years had been marching majestically to the nomination, was staggered. He did not have the five weeks before New Hampshire that Reagan used in 1980 to recover from Iowa. The 1988 New Hampshire primary came in eight days, on February 16. Dole looked like the winner in New Hampshire and probably the nominee, if only he could come over as conservative as he had done in Iowa. But in New Hampshire there was no “conservative” to vouch for him, no Chuck Grassley. It was up to Bob Dole, and he did not, indeed, could not, play the conservative. That was shown in the final week when du Pont challenged Dole—still leading then—to take a no-tax-increase pledge. He would not.

I spent the night of February 16 at studios set up by CNN in a Manchester office building, dashing back and forth between commentaries for CNN and writing a report for the first edition of Wednesday’s Chicago Sun-Times on Bush’s comeback victory. It was after one a.m. before I got back to the no-frills Hampton Inn outside Manchester assigned me by CNN. I was up before five o’clock to write a postelection column that I wanted wrapped up before I left no later than twelve thirty to drive to Boston to catch a three thirty flight to Washington. At about seven a.m. I received a telephone call from John H. Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire.

I had first met Sununu in Washington a few weeks after the 1980 presidential election at the annual black-tie dinner of the American Enterprise Institute. He told me he was a conservative, a former member of the state legislature and the head of his own engineering firm for twenty years. He wanted to be Reagan’s secretary of Energy. The AEI dinner was loaded with conservative aspirants for high federal office, but Sununu was so pushy in urging my help that I checked him out with a Reagan transition team source. Not a chance, I was told quickly and with vehemence. Sununu was described as a loser who had lost several bids for statewide office in New Hampshire.

Two years later in 1982, Sununu arose from the chaos of New Hampshire Republican politics to be elected governor—helped by endorsement from the Manchester Union-Leader as the most conservative candidate. As the 1988 presidential primary approached, Sununu in his third two-year term attached himself to Bush. He had been a feisty governor with multiple enemies and there were anticipatory rumbles at Bush campaign headquarters making Sununu the scapegoat for Bush’s impending loss in New Hampshire that would probably give the nomination to Dole.

But Bush won and Sununu’s victory call to me Wednesday morning was an effort to make sure I got the story right and gave credit where it belonged. I remember being annoyed by this interruption from a self-serving politician as I sat at the tiny desk in my cramped motel room pounding on my laptop trying to meet my deadline. I inferred three basic messages from Sununu: First, Bush’s win was a spectacular resurrection from death’s door. Second, John Sununu had a lot to do with this triumph. Third, George Bush was a lot more conservative than I imagined. I incorporated part of Sununu’s analysis in my postelection Evans & Novak column. After calling Bush’s win “a triumph of organization and tactics,” I wrote:

On Friday morning just four days before the polls opened, the Vice President was a loser. It was then that campaign manager Lee Atwater and media consultant Roger Ailes decided on a negative commercial branding Dole as a straddler and a taxer.

While Bush spread-eagled Boston television, Dole was silent. He had no time to prepare commercials, even to say that all of Dole’s tax-increasing bills had been supported as administration measures by the Vice President….

Dole captured the most liberal, anti-Reagan precincts even after consciously wooing the Reaganite vote. His base was the upscale, ex-urban areas near the Massachusetts state line that had voted for George Bush and Howard Baker in 1980. Had Dole expanded beyond this base into conservative backwoods Republicans, he would today be hailed as the prospective nominee.

This column was published Friday, February 19, and I had breakfast that morning at the Army and Navy Club with David Keene, just beginning a long tenure as chairman of the American Conservative Union. Keene and his sidekick Don Devine had been tireless in trying to push Dole into the conservative void. He told me over breakfast that he agreed with my column’s point that morning that there was still such a void to be filled.

Keene disclosed that the Dole campaign had been unable to get an antitax ad on television in the closing hours when Bush was making his comeback. To Keene that represented the ineffectiveness of Bill Brock, who had resigned as secretary of labor the previous autumn to run Dole’s campaign.

After our breakfast, I later learned, Keene was phoned by a disconsolate Dole who invited him aboard his campaign plane as he headed west for primaries in South Dakota and Minnesota. Devine also was brought aboard, and the candidate’s spirits revived when the son of the Great Plains won in those two midwestern states against minimal Bush effort. I reported over CNN that Keene and Devine had taken over the campaign from the plane, cancelling Dole’s plans to go south and instead keeping the candidate in the Midwest and adding a new stop in Oklahoma. After my report, Brock issued an ultimatum to Dole: Fire Keene and Devine, or fire me. Dole could not at this late date lose Brock and thus dismantle his national campaign. Keene and Devine were literally removed from the campaign plane, taking with them whatever frail chance remained for Dole to win the Republican nomination as the conservative candidate.

TEDDY KENNEDY in 1986 slipped into law new regulations barring ownership of both a newspaper and a TV station in the same city, the purpose being to require Rupert Murdoch to sell the Boston Herald (which had taken the Evans & Novak column from the Globe on Murdoch’s orders after he purchased the Field Syndicate). Murdoch also had to sell the Sun-Times, but publisher Robert E. Page arranged a purchase by a New York leveraged buyout group that retained him in that post.

I suggested to Page the paper might throw a party to celebrate the twenty-fifth birthday on May 15, 1988, of Evans & Novak. I was thinking of a cocktail party at the National Press Club, but Bob wanted something grander. We ended up in the main ballroom of the Willard, which had been made over into a luxury hotel. I just got in under the wire to take advantage of Page’s generosity, because he was eased out of the Sun-Times in August.

The Evans & Novak celebration was grand indeed, not only because of the sumptuous buffet and open bar in the glorious new ballroom but also because of our one thousand invited guests—senators and congressmen, cabinet members and foreign ambassadors, many of whose limousines were lined up on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the Willard.

All living presidents, past and present, sent messages except Jimmy Carter (who my sources told me vehemently refused to do so). The “Dear Bob” letter from my old adversary Nixon concluded: “One of the best ways to learn what’s going on in politics is reading Evans and Novak. One of the best things about being retired from politics is not having to return their calls.” (Of course, he never returned them.)

Three people we asked to speak—Art Buchwald, Bob Strauss, and Washington Post publisher Donald Graham—roasted us, but with the flame turned down. A view of us after twenty-five years by the liberal establishment appeared on page one of the Washington Post Style section the morning after the party. The Post’s Marjorie Williams wrote a long piece about us illustrated by a huge photograph of us. She chronicled old complaints about our alleged lack of ethics and accuracy but conceded—as did Reagan and Nixon in their congratulatory letters—that we broke exclusive stories.

When Marjorie Williams visited our offices at 1750 Pennsylvania (“beyond messy, way past disheveled, inching toward foul”), she met me for the first time. I think she represented a younger generation of liberal Washington journalists who regarded me with fear and loathing as a mean-spirited reactionary. I am a “surprise,” she wrote, who “comes across in person as almost diffident” and somebody who “smiles easily and talks more softly than his partner.” But she also wrote, in comparing me to Rowly: “Novak is not only the one with the higher profile; he is also the one who, from the beginning, had a stronger ideology, and perhaps a stronger will to use the column to bring about change.”

Williams’s overall assessment:

Evans and Novak have practiced a form of journalism unlike anyone else’s—fact-based and ax-grinding at once, simultaneously far ranging and arcane. Deliberately melding their styles and even their ideologies, they have broken news and possibly careers. They are alone among journalistic partnerships—in their methods, their longevity, their passions.

That assessment, the entire Williams piece and the whole celebration, taken together, indicated to me that Evans and Novak had survived two decades of assault from the Left that was launched, following early praise for the column, when it was realized we were not liberals after all.

WHEN I ARRIVED in Atlanta on July 13, 1988, the week before the Democratic National Convention there, the presidential nomination had been locked up by Michael Dukakis for months.

On Saturday evening, July 16, in a reception at the Carter Center, Rowly and I waited in a long receiving line to shake hands with Jimmy Carter. Rowly told me he planned to ask the former president why he had refused to send a message of congratulations to our twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration. I implored Rowly not to, but there was no way to dissuade him when he was determined. “Oh, Rowly,” responded Jimmy, all smiles, “your invitation must have got lost. I would have been happy to send you a note.” I had been reassured by a Carter intimate that Jimmy had given strict instructions not to acknowledge Evans and Novak in any way. Nearly eight years after leaving office, Jimmy Carter was still lying about matters large and small.

On Sunday night, July 17, Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post hosted her customary preconvention dinner party. I had a long talk with Bill Clinton and again found him engaging and insightful. The governor of Arkansas confided he was apprehensive about fulfilling his only convention duty: the nominating address for Dukakis on Wednesday night. In fact, Clinton delivered one of the longest and worst speeches in convention history, unable to come to an ending until convention managers pulled the plug. It now occurred to me he might be too undisciplined and self-indulgent, not realizing that his reservoirs of charm and energy overrode his liabilities.

Dukakis made a bold overture to the white South by naming Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his vice presidential running mate. Bentsen was not the southern conservative he once was, particularly not since his 1976 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Still, he was a moderate tax-cutter, well thought of in the corporate world.

The great hope for Bentsen was that he would energize the old boy network in Texas to bring back that state’s big cache of electoral votes from the Republicans. In Atlanta, I encountered my Texas friend George Christian, Lyndon Johnson’s last White House press secretary who had become one of Austin’s big-time lobbyists and was not much of a Democrat anymore. But Bentsen had called on Christian to come to Atlanta to help out. Christian complied, attending his first Democratic national convention since LBJ’s nomination in 1964. “It’s like a college reunion,” Christian told me, referring to the conservative Texans rejoining the national party.

To keep these old boys loyal, Dukakis had to prevent black activist Jesse Jackson—his last remaining primary opponent—from taking over the convention. He tried, but failed. Word seeped out that Jackson was being bought off with money, additional members and staffers at the Democratic National Committee, and joint Dukakis-Jackson campaign appearances. I noted in an Evans & Novak column that Jackson’s “triumphal address” to the convention Tuesday night mentioned Dukakis “only in passing.”

I was on the convention floor after the Wednesday night balloting when Bill Daley spotted me and suggested we hit a nearby hotel for a drink. I incorporated in an Evans & Novak column what he told me that night of his “concern about the mood conveyed by Atlanta.” Without quoting him by name, I continued:

“For those who watched television,” one Midwestern Democratic operative [Bill Daley] told us, “what they saw looked like a black party.” That troubled Democrats who are anything but racists. The depletion of Dukakis’s lead, according to polls released during the convention, is attributable to the Jackson factor.

William M. Daley was no racist, and there was no more loyal Democrat. The son of a former mayor of Chicago and the brother of a future mayor, he was not one of the white Chicago Democrats defecting from their ancestral party. But Daley feared the disastrous candidacies of George McGovern, Fritz Mondale, and now Mike Dukakis posed a bleak future for traditional Democrats.

A FEW MONTHS before the Republican convention in New Orleans, press secretary Pete Teeley told me Bush had turned down my most recent request for an interview. Teeley was my good friend and all year had tried to bring his candidate and me closer together. Now Pete informed me: “Bush says he is giving up trying to get along with you. He’s tired of getting whacked by you.” The vice president was terminating a twenty-one-year relationship that began when George and Barbara Bush hosted Geraldine and me for dinner at the Houston Country Club in the summer of 1967.

Unlike Nixon, however, Bush never ordered his subordinates to stay away from me. One of them was Bush’s coolly ruthless campaign manager Lee Atwater. I first met Atwater at the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit when he was twenty-nine years old, introduced by his fellow South Carolinian and mentor John Carbaugh. Atwater, who seemed several steps below Carbaugh in intellect, was deferential to John. But since 1980, Atwater had ascended the greasy pole rapidly to become first a senior political aide at the Reagan White House and now Bush’s campaign manager.

The Republican convention was two weeks away when Atwater phoned to pitch me, unsuccessfully, an anti-Dukakis rumor that turned out to be false. I took the opportunity to ask Atwater about the one piece of unsettled Republican business going into the convention: selection of a vice presidential candidate. The consensus was that Bush’s choice was between Dole and Kemp. Although a month earlier Dole had seemed inevitable, Bush resented the harsh things Dole had said about him during the primaries. Conservatives were pressing for Kemp, but Bush told some he felt the former football star was “too light.” Actually, Bush aides told me he dreaded the prospect of a President Bush being second-guessed every day by a Vice President Kemp. Atwater, claiming he was just “speculating,” told me there was a way out for Bush. He gave me the name of a running mate who would replicate the vigor and conservative backing Kemp would bring to the ticket without carrying with him Kemp’s difficult personality.

Was Atwater trying to give me one of the great exclusives of my career? Or was he really just “speculating”? For once I erred on the side of caution—and thereby missed one of my biggest scoops.

I was writing a column that Monday, for publication on Wednesday, August 3, about the Republican condition in advance of the national convention. I threw in Atwater’s tip in the last paragraph, after briefly talking about the vice presidential selection:

The newest serious possibility is Sen. Dan Quayle, a 41-year-old moderate conservative from Indiana with a growing reputation in national security. Why an unknown? “We get Kemp without Kemp,” responds a Bush operative.

The “Bush operative,” was Lee Atwater. It is now clear he was trying to hand me a huge story and I was too stupid to accept the gift.

I WAS SITTING in for Pat Buchanan doing Crossfire on August 19, 1988, in what developed into an unpleasant incident with a long tail. The guest on the Left was Chris Matthews, former aide to Speaker Tip O’Neill who had been hired by the San Francisco Examiner with the title of Washington bureau chief (actually a columnist) as his entry into the riches of television.

Matthews had tried out as a substitute for Tom Braden as a left-wing co-host on Crossfire, and had not performed well. The future cocksure TV personality was tentative then. But now in 1988 he was developing his combative Hardball style in pounding away against Dan Quayle. It irritated me because Matthews on the attack adopted the manner of the hired political gun he used to be, while posing as a newspaperman. That was why I said to Matthews: “When I first met you, you were a paid flack for Tip O’Neill.”

That was not nice to say, but it was the truth. It wasn’t the kind of truth Matthews wanted to hear, as he launched his new career. He is an emotional man, and he reacted emotionally: “The reason you keep bringing up Tip O’Neill’s name is because he would never give [you] an interview and he threw you out of his office and you can’t get over it.” I was stunned. This was a reference to the imaginary incident in Speaker O’Neill’s 1987 memoir that was supposed to have occurred in 1973, six years before Matthews went to work for him. “That is a lie, like a lot of other things that come from you, Mr. Matthews,” I said. Contending I had tried for years to get into O’Neill’s office, Matthews said: “I was there.”

The “I was there” comment could only be interpreted by a viewer as meaning that he “was there” when I was thrown out by the speaker. That was a flat-out lie on national television and ended any relationship between us. Matthews’s only public comment on this I know of came in the media critic Howard Kurtz’s 1996 book Hot Air, that included this remarkable paragraph:

Matthews says he knew nothing of the original incident but that O’Neill repeatedly cited it to him in refusing to appear on Novak’s CNN show. “I was always a great source for Bob,” he says. “I liked the guy. But he decided he doesn’t like me. Tip O’Neill was too big for them to take on, so I guess he decided to focus on me. I was playing defense for my old boss, who I’m loyal to.”

Matthews was never a “great source” for me. As for O’Neill being “too big for them to take on,” the Evans & Novak column had called the former Speaker a liar in 1987 after his book was published. Finally, I take “playing defense” to mean he was not telling the truth on Crossfire.

I ARRIVED IN Los Angeles on Thursday, October 13, 1988, to cover the second and final Bush-Dukakis debate. Their encounter at UCLA could prove important for the presidential election, but I had my mind on something else. I was at a hotel on the UCLA campus in Westwood in time for a scheduled eleven thirty conference call to put the final touches on the debut of The Capital Gang on CNN just two days away. The gestation period had been six and one-half months, which in television is short for putting a new show on the air and much faster than the old broadcast networks ever could do.

I had decided I must leave The McLaughlin Group when John McLaughlin stiffed me in Dallas on February 24, but long before that I had been mulling over what kind of talk show I would run if I had the chance. I put it down on paper on Monday, February 29, in my confidential memo to Ed Turner at CNN in Atlanta.

I proposed a program called Novak’s Washington (following the pattern of The McLaughlin Group and Agronsky and Company). I would be the moderator and write the scripts setting up each segment. The regular panelists, if they agreed, would be Pat Buchanan, Al Hunt, and Mark Shields (though I had not yet breathed a word to any of them). Shields was fifty-one, Buchanan was forty-nine, Hunt was forty-six, and I was the senior citizen at fifty-seven. The fifth panelist would be a rotating nonjournalist newsmaker—a member of Congress, a White House staffer, a cabinet member, a governor, or political leader. We would alternate between Democratic and Republican guest panelists. Since the regular panelists would be split half and half ideologically (Hunt and Shields on the Left, Buchanan and Novak on the Right), rotating outside guests meant the ideological balance would alternate, liberal or conservative, three to two.

The political celebrity guest was one new twist setting this program apart from The McLaughlin Group and Agronsky and Company (which that year became Inside Washington with Gordon Peterson after Martin Agronsky retired). The other difference was that we would be aired live on Saturday night. The older programs, taped on Friday afternoons for Saturday night broadcast, missed news occurring Friday night or during the day Saturday. I proposed we broadcast at seven p.m. Eastern time, the same time as Inside Washington and a half hour ahead of McLaughlin.

Ed called me three weeks later to say the idea had cleared the CNN bureaucracy. I met for breakfast in the downstairs grill at the Army and Navy Club at eight a.m. on March 23 with Ed Turner and Randy Douthit, who was the executive producer for Crossfire and Larry King Live and would play the same role on the new program. Turner over the years had prodded me to leave McLaughlin and do this kind of program for CNN. As usual, he was my big booster and backer at CNN.

Turner liked my two innovations and was delighted by my proposed panel (if I could get them). Turner drew the line, however, at Novak’s Washington, saying: “I think one CNN program with your name on it is enough” (referring to Evans and Novak). That was wise because my tenure as moderator would be brief. My next step was to sign up my panelists, and there were problems with each of them.

I first learned of Albert R. Hunt antagonizing conservatives when he was a young Wall Street Journal reporter covering the House Ways and Means Committee on my old beat. I had written him off as a liberal stiff from Washington’s Cleveland Park leftist enclave until I met him on the campaign during the seventies. I had dinner with him and found him an engaging companion who loved two of the things I did: sports and politics.

Hunt and I had developed a personal relationship, exchanging insults and wisecracks in a framework of ideological debate. It sometimes got out of hand as it did one night at a small 1981 dinner party in the sumptuous Watergate apartment of Bob McCandless. The guest of honor was Chuck Grassley, an Iowa farmer just elected to the Senate. This was before spinal meningitis permanently curtailed my alcohol intake, and I had too much to drink that night. So did Hunt and we engaged in a profane shouting debate over tax policy, as our wives and the new senator looked on in horror.

I observed Hunt throwing a temper tantrum in the lobby of the dilapidated Dallas Hilton hotel at the 1984 Republican convention when he could not get into his locked room, exhibiting what reporters who worked for him say they experienced frequently. Although many of them hated Hunt, he was a terrific newspaperman who I thought put out the best product in Washington after he became the Journal ’s bureau chief in 1982 at age forty.

Al was the Washington personage near the level of Scotty Reston and Arthur Krock that Barney Kilgore, founder of the modern Wall Street Journal, had craved as his bureau chief. He also had become a poised TV performer as a regular panelist on PBS’s Washington Week in Review but quit when he was named bureau chief, to show his big, fractious staff how committed he was to the newspaper. I felt Al loved being on TV, and I hoped he was ready to terminate his sabbatical after five years.

I picked Hunt under false premises to fill what I conceived as a slightly left-of-center slot. For years, I had kidded Al about being a limousine liberal. While we were in Illinois covering the 1980 campaign, I needled him about his criticism of America and asked him to name his favorite country. Playing along with me, he replied: “East Germany!” That came back to haunt him as I passed on to dumbfounded interviewers doing articles on Hunt that he had told me his favorite country was the Stalinist dictatorship. In truth, however, I underestimated how reflexive a liberal Hunt was, which made for a livelier program.

The hardest choice for me was Mark Shields as the panel’s left-wing populist. Our relations had become relatively civil since our 1971 drunken shouting match in Bob McCandless’s living room, helped along because I no longer drank much and Shields did not drink at all. There was a cultural-ideological edge to our relationship rooted in class warfare and mutual accusations of hypocrisy. But I hesitated putting Shields on the panel because I was bothered by picking him over Jack Germond, an old friend whose company I dearly enjoyed. Jack wanted to be sprung from The McLaughlin Group, was staying there only because he did not want to give up the money and would have joined my new group in a second. Furthermore Germond was well known and good on television.

But Shields was the very best. In 1979 at the age of forty-two, he had made a midlife change ending his career as a Democratic political consultant. Meg Greenfield hired him as an editorial writer for the Washington Post, where he had to take typing lessons. That role did not work out, but Shields became a syndicated columnist, a much-acclaimed PBS commentator, and one of the most popular speakers on the lecture circuit. I had debated Mark in many venues, and I was lucky if I could hold my own. This was not a matter of my picking the person I liked best, but selecting the one I thought would do the most for the new program.

I wanted to make my offer to Mark in person, and it took a month before we could get together on Friday, April 22. I worried whether Shields would sign on to a new project with somebody whom he did not care for all that much, and he did not seem enthusiastic in that first discussion.

Patrick J. Buchanan had neither Hunt’s problem of going back on television nor Shields’s lack of affinity for me, but I thought he might be the least likely of the three to come aboard. Only Pat of The McLaughlin Group panelists enjoyed a good relationship with John McLaughlin. I thought he might think twice before leaving with me and delivering a double blow to his old Nixon White House comrade. To my surprise, Buchanan quickly said yes on the phone. I guessed that Hunt and Shields, who were close friends, conferred together. They soon called me back, separately, to accept. As much as print journalists profess disdain for television, I found few say no when offered the exposure and money that TV provides.

I now had my panel, but Ed Turner and Randy Douthit were busy getting ready for the national political conventions. Nothing more could be done until late August. The strictest secrecy had to be maintained because I did not want McLaughlin to know, and I cannot even find in my confidential schedule the taping date for our first pilot. I am fairly sure it was the last week of August. I decided to simplify it by not bringing in an outside panelist for this first test run.

Unlike the first McLaughlin pilot in 1981 when I knew even during the taping that it was a bomb, I felt pretty good about this effort—until I viewed the tape. It was awful. Feeling there was something basically wrong, I sought the opinion of David Smick, formerly Jack Kemp’s chief of staff who had become a multimillionaire financial consultant after losing a race for Congress in Maryland. Smick’s only television experience was as a fellow panelist with me on Money and Politics, an excellent Washington TV talk show that was cancelled after a couple of years. But he was one of the smartest people I knew, and I valued his judgment. After viewing the pilot, Smick had no trouble locating the problem: It was Bob Novak.

Smick told me that not only was I a poor moderator but that role robbed the program of the abrasive commentaries that were my trademark on The McLaughlin Group. I soon concluded that Pat Buchanan should be the moderator, and he agreed to give it a try.

We taped the second pilot on Saturday, September 10. This time I invited an outside guest: Robert Strauss, whom we swore to secrecy. As I expected, Buchanan was an excellent moderator, and the second pilot was terrific. I was exuberant as Geraldine and I took Bob and Helen Strauss to a celebratory dinner at the Jockey Club. Never shy about his own abilities, Strauss raised doubt that we could find outside guests matching his breadth of knowledge. We managed.

I once referred publicly to my relationship with John McLaughlin as “a bad marriage,” and now I felt like a man sneaking out on his shrewish wife for another woman. On October 6 CNN announced the creation of The Capital Gang with its first broadcast on Saturday, October 14. It took everyone by surprise, including McLaughlin. CNN’s official announcement listed Randy Douthit as senior executive producer and me as just another panelist. But I was much more than that. Calling it The Capital Gang was my idea. So was each panelist ending the program with an “outrage of the week.” The outside guest on the inaugural program—Thomas Foley, the House majority leader—was my decision, as was just about every outside guest over the next seventeen years.

I was doing the executive producer’s job, working all week on arrangements for the program, and coming in at eleven thirty a.m. Saturday for a seven p.m. live broadcast. Douthit designated me as co-executive producer. As such, I suggested to Ed Turner that $100,000 sounded right as my payment for the program. Ed said that was too much and came back with $60,000 (about $102,000 in 2007 money), which is what I wanted in the first place.

The story in the October 7 Washington Post by staff writer Carla Hall began by saying Novak, “the strident-hard-edged conservative who never talks in less than a raised voice on ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ is leaving his chair on the popular television show and starting his own.” One line in the Post story brought me up short. It said that Buchanan “will continue to accept invitations” to The McLaughlin Group. When I asked Pat about that it turned out he was going to be a McLaughlin regular. I had assumed that Buchanan was leaving McLaughlin along with me. He now said he had intended all along to do both programs, and I took him at his word. Would I have accepted Pat if I knew he was sticking with McLaughlin? I don’t know. Let’s just say it would have been The Capital Gang’s loss if we did not start with Pat Buchanan as our moderator.

The first Capital Gang program jumped 37 percent over CNN’s September average and led all of CNN’s Saturday night shows, setting a pattern persisting to the end. Randy Douthit placing the panelists cheek-by-jowl created a more conversational atmosphere than was the case on The McLaughlin Group, where panelists were seated distant from each other and tended to shout their positions. Substantively, we could not lose with the main topic on the Gang’s debut: The first round knockout in Thursday night’s final presidential debate.

NOBODY NEEDED TO wait to determine the winner of the Bush-Dukakis debate at UCLA. CNN anchorman Bernard Shaw, moderating the debate, began by asking Dukakis: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty?” Dukakis responded with perhaps the single worst answer I have heard in a half century of political debates. “No, I don’t, Bernard,” Dukakis replied without a trace of emotion. Cold and precise, he added there are “better and more effective ways to deter violent crime,” before launching into a wonkish discussion on liberal ways to do just that.

Two nights later on the first Capital Gang, our first outside guest, Majority Leader Foley, was blunt in saying what his candidate should have done: “I think that if he [Dukakis] had said something about human emotions: ‘I would get the guy and kill him right on the spot. He would never have left the house alive.’” That answer confirmed my shaky belief that politicians could contribute on a journalists’ talk show. Foley got the point that this was not about the pros and cons of capital punishment but a liberal candidate for president looking bizarrely uncaring.

Bush had erased a seventeen-point deficit. On the eve of the UCLA debate, the Evans-Novak Political Report had Bush leading in the Electoral College, 391 to 147. My final forecast had it 447 to 91. When it ended 426 to 112, we had picked forty-eight of fifty states correctly. The Bentsen ploy did not move Texas. New York was the only major state carried by the Democrats.

Although this was the third straight Electoral College landslide for the Republican Party, GOP celebration was restrained. My ENPR forecasts, which I was still making myself, were on the nose. I predicted the Democrats would gain one seat in the House and two in the Senate. It ended up a two-seat gain in the House and one seat in the Senate. That meant comfortable Democratic margins: eighty-two seats in the House and nine in the Senate. Realignment still seemed a distant dream.

The post-Reagan Republican Party was uninspired, and Bush did not have a clue as to what was wrong. He did not realize he won big because he was blessed with a Democratic opponent who could not have beaten anybody.