CHAPTER 38

Clinton = Republican Tsunami

THE 1993 SWEARING-IN of Bill Clinton was the first presidential inauguration after Geraldine and I moved from the suburbs to our Pennsylvania Avenue condo in downtown Washington, where our long terrace would provide a splendid view of the Inaugural parade route. We moved our quadrennial Inaugural party from an evening in the suburbs to a midday brunch, where my guests could watch the parade while sipping Bloody Marys on the terrace.

As the Clintons’ limousine passed our building, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw commented on the air in jest that the new president had better watch out because he was passing Bob Novak’s apartment. With the possible exceptions of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, no president had entered the Oval Office with a warm feeling toward me. But on January 20, 1993, I perceived unmatched hostility from the White House. I would have liked to write something nice about Clinton. That proved impossible. Clinton was a man of the Left who disguised himself as a man of the center. His opening agenda was higher taxes, socialized medicine, and homosexual rights. Combining this with his personal misadventures meant the nineties would prove a dreadful decade for Democrats.

During the Clinton transition, the Democratic Party was being suffocated by the demands of racial and ethnic quotas—my question Clinton had refused to answer during his campaign interview at the New York Post. Clinton reneged on his offer to Bill Daley to become secretary of Transportation because he needed a Hispanic in the cabinet. The only Hispanic immediately available was Federico Pena, who just had completed eight unexceptional years as mayor of Denver. The only available place for him was Transportation. Pena’s political importance did not extend beyond his surname, Clinton hardly knew him, and Pena knew nothing about transportation.

Daley was well known to the president-elect and had been instrumental in carrying Illinois as his state chairman. But Clinton correctly surmised that when he rejected Daley in favor of Pena, the son and brother of Chicago mayors was too much of a Democratic loyalist to protest publicly. Daley’s private analysis was included (without attribution to him) in my Evans & Novak column of January 4, 1993:

[Daley’s] rebuff shows how lightly Clinton seems to value the “Reagan Democrats” now that the election returns are in. The Cabinet contains no traditional urban Catholic typified by the Daley organization. Bill Daley has been an intrepid warrior in preventing a hemorrhage of whites from his ancestral party in Chicago.

Clinton’s diversity plan also called for the first female attorney general of the United States. He was turned down by sixty-four-year-old Judge Patricia Wald of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. Clinton subsequently nominated two young female lawyers unqualified to be attorney general. Both had to withdraw because they had not paid Social Security taxes for their nannies. Clinton, in a temper tantrum, demanded a woman who did not have and never would have any children and, therefore, no nanny. That peculiar standard for an attorney general produced Janet Reno, district attorney of Dade County (Miami), Florida. She was fifty-four years old, six-feet-two, homely, unmarried, and self-described as “an awkward old maid.”

Unsubstantiated rumors that Reno was a lesbian led to a compensatory deluge of praise for a woman nobody knew. The plaudits poured in from New York’s Daily News, the New York Times, New York Post, Boston Globe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mark Shields, Nina Totenberg, Al Hunt, Margaret Warner, Charles Krauthammer, Morton Kondracke, and Les Gelb, plus many more. Reno critics in Miami could not have cared less about her sexual preferences, but they were stunned that this woman of minimal talents was to be attorney general of the United States. I believe Clinton put a lower premium on talent in his cabinet-making than any predecessor in my experience.

         

CLINTON’S MALFEASANCE IN naming an incompetent Janet Reno to run the Justice Department was mitigated slightly for me when I realized she was not in charge. That task was assigned to the man Clinton identified as his closest friend: Webster Hubbell, a partner with Hillary Rodham Clinton in Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm. Hubbell preceded Reno at Justice as associate attorney general, the department’s third-ranking position. Justice sources told me Clinton demanded that prospective nominees for attorney general permit Hubbell to make all “political” decisions. Judge Wald refused, but Reno agreed.

Hubbell slowed down federal prosecution of veteran Democratic congressmen Dan Rostenkowski and Harold Ford and issued an unprecedented order for the resignation of all U.S. attorneys. He derailed temporarily a federal investigation of the Clintons’ investment in the Whitewater development. After the government’s fiery destruction of the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas, it was Hubbell—not Reno—who conferred with President Clinton.

Webb Hubbell did not understand how reporters in Washington functioned. “He yearned for the closed world of Little Rock,” I wrote in the June 1994 issue of the American Spectator, “where secrets were secrets and the lines between politics and business were fuzzy.” In the same article, I wrote:

In Washington, [Hubbell] is viewed, however dimly, as a slightly sinister figure who represents the unfortunate Clinton conjunction between personal affairs and government. In Little Rock, he is remembered fondly as a prototypical good old boy—football player, country clubber, regular fellow, distinguished citizen. On a visit to the Arkansas capital, we could find nobody—friend or foe—who would speak harshly of Webb Hubbell. Nothing better typifies the difficulty of transplanting to Washington this special culture.

The transplant failed. In 1994, Hubbell was convicted of federal mail fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to twenty-one months in federal prison. Clinton was responsible for his ruin, but Hubbell never said a word critical of the president.

(The visit to the Arkansas capital to report on Hubbell was made not by Robert Novak but by Zelda Novak. When my daughter’s boss, Vice President Dan Quayle, was defeated for reelection, I asked her to fill a vacant reporter’s job in my office. She came to work in mid-1993, after interning at the Northern Virginia Sun through Stan Evans’s National Journalism Center. Her duties for me included ghostwriting an international column distributed by Japan’s Kyodo news service and producing and writing for a weekly program I did for the conservative National Empowerment Television cable network.

Like other reporters, she found Clinton-dominated Little Rock gothic and intimidating. She provided about half the reporting and writing for the American Spectator article, which was signed “By Robert D. Novak and Zelda Novak.” Zelda at age twenty-eight was a relatively late-starting but talented journalist, and I fantasized about her becoming my column-writing partner before I quit. In October 1994, she married Christopher Caldwell, a brilliant journalist then with the American Spectator, and she left my employ to have her first baby, Jane, in 1996. I hoped she might return someday. But three babies later I’m still waiting.)

         

ON FEBRUARY 25, 1993, the day before my sixty-second birthday, Geraldine and I arose before dawn to fly to Champaign, Illinois, to visit my alma mater, the University of Illinois, for the ninth straight year. It would be different from the previous eight years because this year I would become a graduate—unexpectedly and forty-one years late.

I had kept my distance from the university my first thirty-three years as an alumnus. Solicited for capital campaigns, I had contributed small amounts. I am afraid my last year at the university, nearly being expelled and failing to graduate, may have cooled my ardor for my alma mater. My attitude improved in 1985 when I received an unexpected letter from Professor George Scouffas, who had cleaned up my writing more than any news editor ever did. He was up for the university’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching (he got it), and was soliciting former students for recommendations. I was flattered that he called me despite my senior-year academic flameout.

After writing a heartfelt endorsement, I suggested I would like to see him. The university rolled out the red carpet, including luncheon with Scouffas, an interview on the university radio station, a visit to the Daily Illini, and dinner with the chancellor. The visit reminded me how much the university had meant to my family, what a wonderful education it had given me, and how much fun I had there as a student. I wanted to repay the university, and in 1991, I endowed in perpetuity the Robert D. Novak Scholarship in nonfiction writing. The winner of competition administered by the Department of English gets five thousand dollars in senior tuition assistance.

From then on, my annual visit centered around meeting the year’s Novak scholar. On my 1993 trip, I also visited with Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (and soon to become president of the University of Texas). “I’ve got a surprise for you,” Faulkner said and handed me a black hard-covered folder. Inside was a University of Illinois diploma, dated January 15, 1993, making me a bachelor of arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

In the chaos of my senior year, I had fallen one hour short of the 120 hours needed for a degree in 1952. I figured I would go through the rest of my life without a college degree, listed as “student 1948–52” in Who’s Who in America.

Faulkner explained I had taken four mandatory courses in physical education my first two years in college when they were noncredit. But if taken in 1993, I would have received a one-hour credit for each. The real question is whether anybody would have found the loophole for my degree if I had not achieved some prominence and become a generous donor.

         

THE PARTNERSHIP OF Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in writing “Inside Report,” the longest-lasting double byline column in American journalistic history, came to an end on May 15, 1993—our thirtieth anniversary.

After Rowly’s false alarm in 1990, I asked him to give me a six-month notice in writing of his real retirement so I could reorganize our enterprises. On March 21, 1992, he handed me a full-page memo that said “Reddy [nickname of his redheaded wife, Kay] and I have decided to make the end of the year the goal”—ending the column between November 1992 and February 1993. He asked me to keep “this plan entirely confidential,” meaning he did not want me to go back to Fred Barnes.

As I read the memo thirteen years later, I find it no more comprehensible than I did in 1993. Rowly and I were very different people. Senator Phil Gramm, retiring from the Senate at the end of 2002, sat down that year for a farewell interview with me. When I finished Gramm asked me why I, then aged seventy-one, did not retire. I replied: “Phil, I don’t hunt, I seldom fish, I don’t golf, I don’t play cards anymore, I no longer gamble, I don’t drink much and I don’t chase women. What would I do if I retired?” Gramm replied: “Bob, you better not retire.” In contrast Rowly belonged to a regular poker group, played squash nearly every day and tennis once a week in season, rode horses at his country place, went skiing out West every winter, and went camping summers in Maine.

Yet Rowly’s 1992 memo, written when he was seventy, cited these pastimes as the reason to retire: “I find that the unusually high exertion level over weekends [horseback riding mainly], which I could not give up without heavy costs to psyche and joie de vivre, results in a kind of tiredness I did not have to cope with five or more years ago.” He was saying that he was ending regular reporting duties because it interfered with his athletic activity—a sentiment difficult to understand for anybody as nonathletic as I was.

Rowly agreed with me it would be a bad idea for him to retire simultaneously with a change of government in Washington probable after the 1992 election. We mutually decided to make it an even thirty years for the Evans & Novak column by ending it in May 1993.

At the time of Rowly’s false alarm resignation in 1990, he indicated he was withdrawing from everything—which is why I solicited Fred Barnes as a partner. Now, though Evans was three years older, he proposed something entirely different. He would continue to appear with me each week on CNN’s Evans and Novak, collaborate with me on three or four Reader’s Digest articles a year, help arrange and co-host our twice yearly Evans-Novak Political Forum, and help produce a report for a Japanese think tank that we put out thirty-six times a year. Rowly earlier had drastically curtailed his time on the lecture circuit and had not helped out much lately for the Evans-Novak Political Report (which we had sold to Tom Phillips’s publishing conglomerate).

So the only real change was leaving the double byline column, and even that was not ended totally. Rowly’s memo told me he wanted to “keep my hand in” reporting and making overseas trips, requiring him to write a column once every three or four weeks under the Evans & Novak double byline (for which I would compensate him). I considered this arrangement awkward, and I was unenthusiastic because it wrecked my hopes of gaining access to Rowly’s fabulous national security sources. But I agreed because of everything Rowly had brought to our extraordinary partnership.

In 1990, I had sought a partner because I could not continue all our activities by myself. In 1993, Rowly was retaining such a role that there would not be enough work—or income—for a new partner. When word got out that Rowly was retiring, a procession of would-be partners—most represented by surrogates—found its way to me. I will not embarrass anybody by revealing names, except to say Fred Barnes definitely was not among them.

On April 15, 1993, Rowly and I scheduled lunch with Meg Greenfield, as was her preference, at the Hay Adams. At age sixty-two, Meg was one of the most accomplished women in American journalism and also had become a grande dame of Washington. I was scared to death—frightened that Meg Greenfield would drop the column from the Post now that Rowly was retiring.

Actually, I knew Meg before Rowly did. She came to Washington in 1962 as a thirty-one-year-old correspondent for the Reporter, a wonderful magazine that I moonlighted for as a Wall Street Journal staffer. I thought we liked each other and that a warm relationship survived over the years. I had a particularly good time at the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City with Phil Geyelin, the Post’s editorial page editor and Meg Greenfield, who was promoted to be his deputy in 1970. Geyelin and Greenfield did not know that many Republicans. So Maureen Reagan, her boyfriend of the moment, and I escorted them on a tour of Republican parties the three nights preceding the convention. In 1979, Greenfield abruptly was promoted to replace Geyelin, and relations for Rowly and me with the Post editorial page improved sharply.

Meg in 1980 started hosting dinner parties the week before each political convention, a couple of which I have mentioned in this book. I valued these events as not only entertaining but also valuable to me as a reporter. Consequently, in the summer of 1992, I noted to Rowly that I had not received an invitation to her party at that year’s first convention, the Democrats in New York City. Rowly paused, then said: “Bob, she didn’t invite you because she doesn’t like you.” If anybody knew this, it would be Rowly. He was one of Meg’s best friends, and she adored Rowly. She regularly hosted Rowly and Kay at her Bainbridge Island, Washington, home on Puget Sound.

If I obsessed about learning about everybody in Washington who did not like me, I would be a wreck. But hearing that about the editor at the most important newspaper that ran the column was reason for obsession. I belatedly realized Meg had greeted me coldly in recent years when we met socially. I never knew why. I long had been a boogeyman to the Left, but Meg Greenfield did not take directions from the Left.

Rowly and I decided that in advance of the April 15, 1993, lunch, he would alert Meg to his retirement plans to avoid an explosion at the Hay Adams. “She was not pleased,” Rowly told me following the alert. Over lunch, I told Meg how much we appreciated the Post’s regular use of us for thirty years. She was coldly unresponsive. Then per our plans that Rowly would do most of the talking, he said I planned to cut the full column from three times to twice a week, from Monday-Wednesday-Friday to Monday-Thursday. (Rowly did not mention the Sunday item column, which the Post had not run for twenty years.) “Well,” Meg said, “I’m not so sure I want to anchor all our columnists for a set day of the week. Maybe they ought to compete with each other on a day-by-day basis.”

I left the hotel in physical pain. Being anchored in the Washington Post had been essential for our column. I feared I would be wiped out having to compete with Post staffers for the op-ed page twice a week. “Don’t worry,” Rowly told me. “Meg was just pulling your chain a little. If she was going to spike the column, she would have said so.” Rowly proved correct.

Rowly had asked Meg to keep his retirement quiet until it was announced, but I heard he was dropping hints about it on the dinner party circuit. The word got to the Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, who broke the story April 29. Kurtz dredged up a lot of old cliches, such as the “Prince of Darkness” versus “the picture of urban gentility” and the “Errors and No Facts” label, and used a snide quote from Michael Kinsley, who never had a good word for me. Kurtz’s conclusion: “The Evans and Novak column is a Washington institution—relentlessly conservative, frequently breathless, often consumed by political arcana—but required reading for insiders, particularly during Republican administrations.” Considering things written about me since then, I guess Kurtz could have done worse.

I still had not pinned down new arrangements with the syndicate. The old syndicate that had handled our column starting in 1963 was part of the Field properties that, along with the Chicago Sun-Times, were sold to Rupert Murdoch in 1984, with the Field News Syndicate renamed the News America Syndicate. When Teddy Kennedy’s legislation forced Murdoch to sell the Sun-Times in 1986, he sold the syndicate to Hearst, which renamed it the North America Syndicate. Three years later, we signed with Creators Syndicate, located in ground-floor offices near Los Angeles International Airport. Creators’s founder, Rick Newcombe, was a Chicagoan, the son of a Sun-Times executive, a former newsman himself, and a conservative Republican. It was a perfect fit.

Now, four years later in early May 1993, Newcombe was taking me out to dinner at the 72nd Main Street restaurant in Venice, California. Rick agreed to reducing the column’s frequency by one (so long as it was not my Sunday item column, our most popular offering for many newspapers). He surprised me pleasantly by saying that despite the reduction in the number of columns, I would receive the full $100,000 that Rowly and I previously had split.

The last regular Evans & Novak column was published May 14, 1993. I suggested to Rowly that the final column take an overview of thirty years’ collaboration, but he wanted no valedictory since there would be occasional future E&N columns.

There was no better company at work or at play than Rowly Evans, and I missed the nonstop political bull sessions and even the frequent disputes. But life had just gotten simpler for me. The processing time for each column was reduced by about two hours, and I could make decisions without hashing them out with Rowly. As of May 17, 1993, at age sixty-two, I was flying solo for the first time in my life.

         

ON JULY 24, 1993, Margaret Warner was a panelist on The Capital Gang for the last time. She was leaving Newsweek to become the replacement on PBS for her friend Judy Woodruff, who was moving to CNN. Margaret was just slightly Left of Center, her moderation diluting the left-wing dominance on the program that had been built in ever since Pat Buchanan left.

My first choice to replace Warner was Maureen Dowd, then a forty-one-year-old New York Times reporter in Washington. A year away from getting her own column in the Tunes, she was not yet that well known and without TV experience. But I knew her from the campaign trail and found her witty and irreverent, and she had an unusual voice and an exotic beauty. Ideologically, I did not think then she was any more liberal than Margaret Warner, and maybe a little less so. I thought she would be a star.

Consequently, I was disappointed when Dowd told me over the telephone she was not at all interested in television. I talked her into breakfast on August 19, 1993, at the Army and Navy Club, where she told me she had had one bad experience on TV and did not want to try again. I implored her to think it over, and said I would call her in a day or two. When I did, I suggested she try just one Capital Gang and see how it works out—“You know,” I said, “a one-night stand.” “Oh,” said Maureen, “if you’re really talking about a one-night stand, I might be interested.” I told her to get serious, but she made it clear the answer was no.

In her memoir-collection (Anyone Can Grow Up), Margaret Carlson mourned, tongue in cheek, that she was my second choice for Capital Gang. Actually Margaret was my third choice. My second choice was Newsweek correspondent Eleanor Clift, who had come on The McLaughlin Group as a substitute while I was still on the program and was now a regular. She made no pretense at moderation and would have moved the Gang’s orientation still farther Left. But Clift had become a proven performer on McLaughlin. I also admired her as a tough New Yorker and a single mother who had worked her way up from Atlanta’s Newsweek bureau secretary to become one of the magazine’s top Washington reporters. Finally, I was small-minded enough that I savored taking away one of John McLaughlin’s stars.

Eleanor and I met in my office at 1750 Pennsylvania Avenue on the thirteenth floor, one floor above the Newsweek bureau. She seemed concerned at trading a regular weekly slot on McLaughlin for alternating on the Gang with Mona Charen. I assured her she would be on much more often than half the time (substituting when Shields or Hunt could not make it), that her overall income actually would increase at CNN, and that she would have additional opportunities at CNN (for which I had authorization from executive producer Rick Davis). She told me she would let me know in a day or so, and I thought we had her. But Eleanor stayed with McLaughlin.

That left Margaret Carlson of Time, whose friends were lobbying me. I did not know her well, and being the frequent (albeit platonic) escort of Michael Kinsley did not recommend her to me. She was a woman who was “cute” into late middle age, and seemed to me higher on charm than talent. But among the substitutes who tried out after Warner left, Carlson was the best, and she became a member of Capital Gang on October 9, 1993.

Margaret Carlson’s ideology, though leavened with wit, sent the Gang’s political balance farther Left. But her chemistry on the panel was excellent. I have concluded I was lucky to be turned down by Maureen Dowd. She became a famous columnist and author and lost her television phobia to go on the air occasionally. As I watched her on a Meet the Press roundtable in September 2005, she seemed brittle while recycling her Times columns. I don’t believe she could have participated in the bantering give-and-take the way Margaret Carlson did during twelve splendid years. I was fortunate to get Margaret.

         

LATE IN SEPTEMBER 1993, James Carville and his partner Paul Begala were running the off-year reelection campaign in New Jersey of Governor Jim Florio. “Florio is a cold, unlovable professional politician who has spent his life running for office and owns neither home nor automobile,” I would write. In his first year as governor, he broke his 1989 campaign pledges and raised taxes by $2.8 billion. Anti-Florio anger revived a somnolent New Jersey Republican Party, which took control of the legislature in the 1991 elections (including two assemblymen whose campaigns were managed by my son, Alex). As for reelection in 1993, the governor should have been dead.

But Florio was far from dead. In September, a New York Times poll put him twenty percentage points ahead of his Republican opponent, Christine Todd Whitman, whose highest public office had been as Somerset County freeholder. On the morning the Times ran its poll, Carville called me to gloat. “It’s the end of supply-side, Novak,” he yelled. “It’s all finished.” Carville hated the Reagan tax cuts and desperately wanted to prove them politically untenable. His laboratory was New Jersey, where Christie Whitman was running on a tax cut crafted for her by supply-siders Steve Forbes and Larry Kudlow. Carville had pounded her with negative advertising that, I later wrote, put her “on the defensive over assault rifles, drunk drivers, and welfare while painting her as part of the uncaring rich.” Carville was euphoric to show that Jim Florio—or Bill Clinton—could raise taxes in his first year in office, confident the voters would forget about it by reelection time in the fourth year if the “Ragin’ Cajun” was around to change the subject. If Carville had not rung my bell with his boasting telephone call, I doubt I would have gone to New Jersey to report directly on the campaign.

After spending half a day with Whitman, I described her as “warm, a little fuzzy and a millionaire heiress” who, thanks mainly to Carville’s ridicule, regarded the Forbes-Kudlow tax plan as a burden rather than her salvation. “It’s the right thing to do,” she told me bravely. After covering her first debate with Florio on October 7, 1993, I wrote in an Evans & Novak column: “Whitman could not fire the tax pistol. Indeed, she seemed embarrassed by the weapon.” She looked like a loser to me.

I began to change my mind shortly after the debate when I sat down with peripatetic campaign consultant Ed Rollins, brought in at the end of September to try to save Whitman. The rap on Rollins in political circles was that he told the ugly truth to reporters about his candidates, which made him a reporter’s dream. He described Whitman to me as an upper-class airhead surrounded by Republican hacks who pushed her away from the Forbes-Kudlow tax cut. But Ed was a tough little guy, and he told me he would make Christie swallow the tax cut if he had to force it down her throat.

Also in trouble was George Allen, the Republican candidate in Virginia, the only state other than New Jersey with the governorship at stake in 1993. He was trailing the Democratic candidate, Virginia’s attorney general Mary Sue Terry, by more than twenty percentage points. Campaign consultant Bob Squier, one of my best Democratic sources, was working for Terry and called her a perfect candidate. Allen, at age forty-two, had served briefly in the Virginia legislature and Congress, but was best known as the son of the former Washington Redskins football coach George Allen.

I was ignoring this seemingly one-sided contest when I received a phone call from an acquaintance I made as a University of Maryland athletics booster. It was Russ Potts, director of the university’s athletic promotions in the seventies who I was amazed to learn was now Virginia State Senator H. Russell Potts Jr. He was later to abandon the GOP to make a quixotic independent run for governor in 2005. But in 1993 he was a loyal Republican who asked if he could bring George Allen in to meet me. Allen was more impressive than I expected—calm and confident despite a double-digit deficit. “I guarantee you I’ll beat Mary Sue,” he told me. “No problem.”

The third major Republican candidate running that November was Rudolph Giuliani in his second try for mayor of New York. Four years earlier, he barely lost to Democrat David Dinkins, who became the city’s first African-American mayor. Dinkins had brought a new level of incompetence to City Hall, and he was an even worse campaigner than he was a mayor. I began my premayoral election column on Monday, November 1, under a New York dateline, with this sentence: “Nearly every politician in this city not on Mayor David Dinkins’s payroll says Republican candidate Rudolph Giuliani will be elected tomorrow.” My friend Bob Shrum was on the Dinkins payroll, and he had assured me over dinner that Dinkins would be reelected.

The rap on Shrum, just the opposite of the complaint with Ed Rollins, was that he fell in love with every politician who hired him. Over dinner in Manhattan on October 28, Shrum claimed Giuliani had made a fatal error putting the “urban terrorist” label on blacks who had killed a housing policeman. Giuliani’s promise the final week of the campaign to arrest more drug dealers, Shrum said, would swing Jewish liberals and Hispanics back to Dinkins. I did not buy it. I thought Shrum was misreading New York as Democrats were misreading the whole country.

         

NOVEMBER 2, 1993, was unusually predictive of the future. The off-year elections were swept by Republicans, winning previously Democratic-held offices for governors of New Jersey and Virginia and for mayor of New York. Earlier that year on April 10, Republican multimillionaire Richard Riordan was elected mayor of Los Angeles, ending long Democratic occupancy of that office.

The Republican National Committee exulted over this four-for-four takeover, but the Republican quality of the victory actually was diluted. When I visited Riordan in his first year as mayor, he began our conversation by showing me a campaign-type pin saying “R.I.N.O.” That meant “Republican in Name Only,” and the jovial Riordan told me that was exactly what he was. In New York, Giuliani was not much more of a Republican. I had written of him:

Giuliani is no conservative and hardly a Republican (starting out as a George McGovern Democrat). He has switched from pro-life to pro-choice on abortion and courts homosexuals with gay rights advocacy. He has rejected term limits, private school choice and an end to New York’s rent controls.

Christie Whitman in New Jersey was at best a Bush Republican. Of the four winners, only George Allen seemed to be a Reagan Republican, and that was in conservative Virginia. Consequently, Democrats wrote off the 1993 results as wholly without national political consequence.

Notwithstanding the nature of the Republican winners, however, the 1993 results comprised terrible news for the Democrats, as I wrote in my postelection column of November 4. The best and the brightest of Democratic strategists—Bob Squier in Virginia, James Carville in New Jersey, and Bob Shrum in New York City—had lost to “Republican candidates ranging from lackluster to just above adequate and who convey little vision.”

The reasons, I concluded, were that the Democrats were on the wrong side of taxes, gun rights, the religious Right, bloc voting, and negative TV ads. Whitman won in New Jersey because Ed Rollins hounded her into plugging away for her tax cut “in the face of ferocious news media disapproval.” While Democrats linked Allen to Pat Robertson in Virginia, the Christian Coalition “was instrumental in Allen’s victory.” Even though 97 percent of the black vote backed Dinkins in New York and Hispanics were much more supportive of him than expected, the massive white turnout for Giuliani showed “a Democratic image as special pleader for minorities is counterproductive.” The merciless negative television spots against Giuliani, Allen, and especially Whitman were insufficient because “no positive image for Dinkins, Terry or Florio ever emerged.”

Bill Daley in Chicago was a loyal Democrat who also was astute and realistic. I quoted him (identified as a “well-placed Democratic leader”) assessing the 1993 results:

I’m afraid the Reagan coalition is forming again after we took it apart last year [1992] because we don’t know what we’re doing. Our people in Congress, and, I’m afraid in the White House, don’t have a clue. We have to look more conservative.

ON APRIL 22, 1994, Richard M. Nixon died at age eighty-one. I thought he was a poor president and a bad man who inflicted grave damage on his party and his country. In my column of May 6, I wrote about what was the only true link between Nixon and me:

Amid the deluge of words following his death, there was only passing mention of the seminal event in Richard Nixon’s half-century political career: the Hiss case.

Had it not been for the young Congressman from Southern California, Alger Hiss likely would have dodged exposure as a Soviet espionage agent. That exposure afforded Nixon a rapid escape from obscurity onto the national stage. Moreover, the case froze Nixon forever as the enemy of the Left and the champion of the Right, no matter how much he later deviated from those stereotypes.

In fact, Nixon was no conservative in either his domestic or his foreign policy. Both his inability to appease the implacable hostility of liberals and the steadfast loyalty to him by conservatives can be traced to his anti-Communist image forged by that long-ago struggle.

In that column, I did not dwell on my nonrelationship with Nixon during his long retirement. When Nixon started granting interviews to selected journalists during the 1980s, I contacted Roger Stone, the Republican political operative and my frequent source who was helping out the former president in arranging the press contacts. He failed to get me in. “Nixon still thinks you’re a Rockefeller Republican,” Stone explained.

Accordingly, I was surprised to receive in the mail a personal note from Nixon dated July 2, 1990. He told me he had discovered he was without his copy of Witness by Whittaker Chambers. Nixon purchased the book’s 1987 edition, published by Regnery and containing an introduction by me (in which I said Nixon performed an indispensable service in exposing the liberal icon Hiss as a Soviet agent). Nixon wrote to me: “The highest compliment I can pay is that it reads like Chambers.”

I presumed that the letter was Nixon’s way of opening the channels of communications between us that had closed many years earlier. But when I asked Stone to try again in 1990, he returned with the response that Nixon still considered me a Rockefeller Republican.

         

ON JULY 14, 1994, my internist, Dr. Charles Abrams, administered my annual physical examination. On July 18, I received a telephone message from Abrams informing me that X-rays revealed a spot on my right lung that could be my second bout with cancer. Abrams found the spot on an X-ray from two years earlier too small to be spotted even by his eagle eye. So it looked like a slowly growing cancer. That was a confirmed on July 27 by an MRI.

On Friday, July 29, Geraldine and I drove to Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, where my prostate cancer had been removed in 1991. The brilliant prostate surgeon Pat Walsh did not do lungs, but he recommended highly the Hopkins specialists. After examining the charts, a bright young doctor laid out a daunting schedule. I would be opened up for biopsy. If the growth was malignant as expected, a date would be set for removing most or all of one lung. That anticipated a long hospital stay and weeks of recuperation. As Geraldine and I drove back from Baltimore, I did not experience the same fear that had overwhelmed me when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer three years earlier. This time I was just depressed by the long ordeal awaiting me. I wondered why I had to undergo two operations—one for the biopsy and one for the surgery.

On Saturday night, we drove to our new getaway home: a large oceanfront place at Fenwick Island, Delaware, that we had bought the year before. In a state of depression Sunday night, I called Bob McCandless in Washington. It was he who in 1991 had steered me to Pat Walsh at Hopkins, and now he steered me toward Dr. Donald Morton, head of the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica (who had provided health care for TransAmerica, McCandless’s client).

McCandless faxed me a forty-page file on Morton’s life and times—awards, triumphs, and controversy. His life’s work was developing a vaccine for deadly melanoma, but he also was a world-class cancer surgeon. I telephoned him from the beach Monday morning LA time. He knew my name and said he agreed with my politics. (So did Dr. Walsh. A conservative patient must be pleased with conservative surgeons who have your life in their hands.) Without criticizing the Hopkins doctors, Morton said he preferred a procedure that would not be as onerous for me. He told me to catch a plane to Los Angeles that very night and be in his office at nine o’clock the next morning.

A big, athletic-looking man of fifty-nine, Morton was the son of a West Virginia coal miner and a nurse and still had the Mountaineer State in his voice. He was decisive bordering on arrogant, as any great surgeon should be. After new tests, Morton declared I had a small cancer on my right lung that should be removed forthwith. Was it because of my chain smoking that I ended in 1963? Morton did not know and did not care. There was no need for a biopsy, he said. Nor was there any reason to remove much of the lung. He would enter through my back, do a quick test to make sure that the growth was malignant, and then clip off the tumor without removing the lung. If all went well, Morton said, he would have me out of the hospital in three days and back home in Washington within a week. I cannot exaggerate how much this new prospect lifted my spirits. We set surgery for seven days later, Monday, August 10.

Geraldine and I took a noon flight on Sunday, August 9, to Los Angeles and checked into the Century Plaza where we had stayed many times over thirty-nine years. We scheduled dinner that night with Joe and Lee Cerrell, and for sentimental reasons I selected Trader Vic’s at the Beverly Hilton. That was the site in 1959 of the first of my many dinners with Joe and Lee. I suggested this would be a fitting place for what could be my last supper.

Monday, Morton operated at midday and I woke up in the early evening in excruciating pain. But the operation was a great success, and Morton was as good as his word. I was released from the hospital Thursday morning, worked on columns from my hotel room Thursday and Friday, went to the movies (Clear and Present Danger) Thursday night, had dinner at a Mexican restaurant with the Cerrells Friday night, flew back to Washington Sunday, and was at work in my office Monday, August 14, one week after surgery. People could not believe it when I told them, and I hardly could myself.

With brilliant diagnosis and superb execution having saved my life for the third time, I was the last person to criticize health care in America. People asked why I would fly three thousand miles across the continent when there were so many great surgeons on the East Coast. The answer is I wanted the top care available. My freedom to pick the best doctor I could find brought home the danger to me—and all Americans—posed by the Clintons’ plans for government-managed health care.

I pondered how I had survived spinal meningitis, prostate cancer, and lung cancer. Was it just good luck, or was it providential? Was I just meant to live a little longer for some unknown reason?

         

IN THE WEEK before the 1994 midterm elections, I was traveling with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich in preparation for a Reader’s Digest profile of him. On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 25, with a two-hour hole in his schedule after meeting in Midwest City, Oklahoma, with editors of the Midwest City Sun, Gingrich asked for use of the newspaper’s conference room for a private staff meeting—no outsiders, no local politicians, no Novak. “Last minute campaign planning?” I asked Gingrich. “No, that’s all wrapped up,” Gingrich replied dismissively. “We’re planning the transition.” That would be the transition for the U.S. House of Representatives from Democratic to Republican rule for the first time in forty years.

The conventional wisdom was that there was no chance of Republicans winning the House. I believe I was the only Washington journalist predicting a Republican takeover. In the September 7 issue of the Evans-Novak Political Report, I projected a thirty-seat Republican gain, much higher than the consensus. On October 4, I raised the number to thirty-five. On October 18 (seven days before my Oklahoma conversation with Gingrich) I saw a forty-seat gain—just enough to take control. On November 1 (seven days before the election), I raised the number to forty-five and predicted a takeover in the Senate with a gain of five seats. On CNN’s Capital Gang on November 5, I made the same prediction. As usual, my forecasts were based on seat-by-seat analysis, very cautious with a bias toward retaining the status quo.

A major reason Democrats could not recapture the House for the next decade was they had no inkling of what happened in 1994. They could not imagine how they lost so badly in a rising economy, with no war and no pending national crisis.

Clinton thought a big-government, universal care solution to health care would carry the Democrats. No decision was more feckless than his delegation to Hillary of this issue. Even so his bill nearly passed. Top Congressional Republicans were so frightened of being blamed for killing health care that they wanted desperately to cut a deal with Clinton that would have saved him. Pat Moynihan told me in the early summer of 1994 that at a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole passed this note to Chairman Moynihan: “Is it time yet?” That is, is it time to get together for a bipartisan health care plan? Moynihan did not reply. He had been treated badly by the Clintons and was not anxious to bail out the president.

Two people saved the Republicans from themselves. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her intransigence and arrogance, spurned Democratic dealmakers and insisted on her own grandiose health care plan. The other savior was Bill Kristol, who after Clinton’s victory in 1992 formed the Project for the Republican Future. From his small office came a torrent of paper that convinced Republican leaders to avoid a deal.

That summer I asked Paul Begala what the consequences would be if the Republicans prevented any health care bill from passing. “We’ll just beat the Republicans like a bad piece of meat,” said Begala, reverting to lingo from his Texas homeland. Indeed, he told me, Republicans would suffer for their sin for fifty years. I think that’s what Paul told Clinton, and I think it is what Clinton believed. They could not have been more wrong. “Hillarycare” was an albatross around the necks of Democratic candidates.

         

THE ELECTION OF November 8, 1994, was one of the most important I ever reported and not because I predicted the outcome. By gaining fifty-one seats in the House and five in the Senate, the Republicans commanded only relatively modest margins in each chamber (twenty-five in the House, four in the Senate). But they had changed the face of Congress for a dozen years.

Behind the numbers, the slaughter of famous Democrats in 1994 claimed Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, Senator Jim Sasser of Tennessee (poised to become senate majority leader), Speaker Tom Foley, House Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and Jack Brooks, the LBJ crony from Texas whose high-handed chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee typified forty years of one-party rule.

This finally was the realigning election I had awaited for a generation. For the first time Republicans won a majority of House seats in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, leading sixty-four to sixty-one with a pickup of sixteen seats in the region—a margin that would expand in years to come. The South would be as “solid” for Republicans as it once was for Democrats, compensating for losses elsewhere to keep control of the House.