CHAPTER 40

Conversion

IN EARLY JANUARY 1997, my CNN executive producer Rick Davis asked me into his spacious office. His face was even more mournful than customary, and he appeared uncomfortable. I liked Davis, and I was fond of his lovely wife and two cute little daughters. I think he liked me. Yet, we could not become true friends because of the role he played. Like many business executives, he brought to the table no particular talents. Rick prospered because he was tall, nice looking, and well groomed with a winning personality, and worked very hard. My problem with Rick was that, like other people climbing the CNN corporate ladder, he was most interested in pleasing the corporate suits in Atlanta. As friendly as Rick was to me, when it came to the choice between “the company” and me (or any of his colleagues), “the company” always came first.

That was what was involved when Rick called me into his office. He informed me that Pat Buchanan, having concluded his second presidential campaign in 1996, was coming back to Crossfire—the third such return after a political sojourn. Buchanan would split conservative host time with John Sununu, with Novak the odd man out.

“Rick,” I asked, “can you really say that John did as good a job as I did?” Of course, he could not. Instead, he said something so blatant that I wrote it down immediately: “It would look bad politically if CNN dropped Sununu.” I had no idea CNN was in politics. Buchanan told me he urged Davis to drop Sununu and keep me, but it was no use.

I had two CNN contracts then, both expiring in the spring of 1997. One paid me $62,400 a year for Capital Gang, and the other $95,000 for Evans and Novak and other programs for a combined $157,400. However, my 1099 form for 1996 showed $360,000 from CNN! The difference came from my splitting Crossfire right-wing host duties with Sununu while Buchanan was running his 1996 presidential campaign.

With Buchanan returning Davis came back with a new compensation package that added up to $207,500 a year—more money than I had ever anticipated from TV, but still a pay cut of $152,500 from 1996. It would not put me in the poorhouse. I was then making a combined $250,000 from other journalistic sources, but a pay cut of this magnitude was a vote of no confidence from CNN. I told Davis I might have to look elsewhere.

Davis passed my warning on to Atlanta. Ed Turner, my longtime benefactor and Davis’s boss, scheduled an eight thirty a.m. breakfast on February 10, 1997, at the ritzy Four Seasons Hotel, where he always stayed in Washington. After hearing my varied complaints about CNN, on the spot, he proposed increasing my package from $205,700 to $225,000. That $20,000 bump meant my pay cut would be $130,000. I decided to test the market with a couple of telephone calls.

One was to Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief and Meet the Press moderator. Tim sounded excited when I told him I was thinking of leaving CNN and asked him whether there might be anything at NBC or its cable network, CNBC. He got back to me quickly to report no interest by NBC News president Andrew Lack.

My other call was to Eric Breindel, who had just moved up in Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire from editorial page editor of the New York Post to executive vice president of News Corporation in charge of strategic planning. Breindel was an original neoconservative, who in 1977 joined the Senate office of his former Harvard professor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I first met him when he joined the New York Post in 1986. We became good friends, and my column never had a stronger supporter in the newspaper business. (Tragically, he died from liver failure in 1998 at age forty-two.) When I called Breindel in early March 1997 to ask whether there might be a place for me at Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox cable network competing with CNN, he answered enthusiastically in the affirmative.

At four fifteen p.m. on March 4, 1997, I entered the Manhattan office of Roger Ailes, CEO of the new Fox News Channel and a former Republican political operative. I first met Roger in the mid-seventies and we had an amiable relationship. In 1993, Ailes became head of CNBC and made the struggling cable network watchable and profitable. In 1996, Murdoch tapped Ailes to do the same thing with his new network challenging CNN.

“Are you sure you really are willing to leave the mighty CNN for our little network?” Ailes asked soon after I sat down. He was not being sarcastic. CNN in 1997 was far ahead of Fox in prestige and profits. Because of CNN’s huge lead in ratings and Fox’s trouble getting on major cable systems, I would be seen by far fewer people if I changed networks.

Ailes then raised an issue I had not expected. He said he would like me to reproduce Capital Gang at Fox and asked whether I could bring Al Hunt and Mark Shields with me. Al and Mark were not that happy with CNN. After being pledged to secrecy when I called them separately, each indicated a willingness to go where I went.

Finally, Ailes got down to money, asking how much I wanted. I said I could not leave CNN for less than $300,000 (not mentioning that I received $360,000 the past year or that the highest CNN offer on the table was $225,000). “That’s a little rich for our blood,” he said. Ailes said he would confer with “my people” and be back with an offer in two weeks. He said there would be no counteroffer if CNN bettered it because he did not want a bidding war. I said I did not either, and I did not envision CNN as a possible bidder considering what had transpired so far.

On April 10, Ailes submitted his offer to my lawyer, Les Hyman. My $300,000 was no longer “too rich” for Fox’s blood, because it offered me $380,000, going up to $405,000 the second year and $430,000 the third. It also contained “fringes” that I had not requested: health and life insurance, and four weeks’ vacation. For all that, I would be executive producer of a “panel program (similar to Capital Gang)” including Hunt and Shields, I would appear on a weekend half-hour interview show that looked like Evans and Novak without Evans and with Fox’s Brit Hume occasionally joining me, “frequent” on-air reporting, commentary, and analyses, and twelve appearances a year on Fox’s Sunday talk show (hosted by Tony Snow).

Hyman informed me of something in my CNN contract that I had signed but not read in its entirety. I was required to submit to CNN any competitive offer, which CNN then had twenty-one days to match or surpass. Since Fox was abjuring a bidding war, CNN could keep me by matching its offer. I was sure it would not.

On the very last day of the twenty-one-day clock, CNN came through with an offer that took my breath away. Its first-year offer of $292,000 was still $88,000 short of Fox’s, but its second year of $418,000, third year of $442,000 and fourth year at $462,000 significantly surpassed Fox. It was at least a matching offer, and the bidding was over thanks to previously stipulated ground rules. I was staying at CNN.

The reason for CNN’s big jump from the first to the second year was that it had to pencil in a big pay cut when they moved me off Crossfire. In adhering to its pay-for-work policy, CNN decided they had to bring me back to Crossfire and drop John Sununu. CNN could have put me on Crossfire immediately by buying out Sununu’s contract, but instead it waited until the contract expired. That means I did not resume my duties as a Crossfire regular, one hundred times a year, until May 11, 1998. Under the CNN system, I fell a little short in the first year with the difference made up the next year.

I do not retell the details of these negotiations to demean Rick Davis, who is a decent man. It was the cultural climate of CNN that led executives to find ways to protect themselves from mistakes rather than seek creative initiatives. I believe that mind-set caused Rick to lowball me in order to win plaudits from Atlanta when he could have had me signing for half the money CNN finally paid, without my ever approaching Fox. I also think this climate contributed to CNN’s long, slow decline relative to Fox.

The one loose end that had to be tied up was sweetening the pot for Hunt and Shields now that they, too, were staying at CNN. Keeping to CNN’s policy of matching pay with work, it was decided that Al and Mark would be added to Evans and Novak which was given the unwieldy new name of Evans, Novak, Hunt and Shields. I believe CNN felt that Rowly at age seventy-six had lost a step, and was phasing him out. He would be on the program only once a month. I would be on every program, with Hunt and Shields alternating on the other programs. Rowly did not like this arrangement, and neither did I.

My subsequent eight years at CNN were productive, and I am grateful to CNN for its confidence in me. In all candor, however, I feel I would have been treated with more respect at Fox and would have been better off there. But because of the fine print in my contract, I had no choice.

         

ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, July 16, 1997, a phone call alerted me to a story in that day’s edition of The Hill, one of two competing newspapers covering Congress.

Written by a young reporter named Sandy Hume, it was perhaps the greatest exposé of behind-the-scenes Capitol Hill machinations that I had seen in half a century of Congress-watching.

Hume reported that long-simmering discontent within the big, unruly Class of 1994 had reached critical mass when Speaker Gingrich continued his leftward lurch by abandoning efforts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. The ringleader in a plot to oust Gingrich as Speaker was a second-term member who until then had not received much attention: Lindsey Graham, a forty-two-year-old trial lawyer from Seneca, South Carolina.

Majority Whip Tom DeLay, third-ranking in the leadership, contacted Graham. DeLay then brought three other members of the leadership into the cabal: Majority Leader Dick Armey, Conference Chairman John Boehner, and Bill Paxon, who held an appointive leadership position created by Gingrich. They met July 8 and 9 and hammered out details of a coup under which Armey would become speaker, Paxon would replace Armey as majority leader, and Gingrich would be toast.

DeLay reported back to the rebels. But Tom Coburn, a forty-nine-year-old practicing obstetrician from Muskogee, Oklahoma, one of the really hard edges in the Class of 1994, told him the rebels did not want Armey as speaker. Their choice was Paxon, in his ninth year representing his upstate New York district, though he was only forty-three years old. Stunned by this development, DeLay left the room to report back to his fellow leaders, and Coburn commented ruefully: “I think I made a big mistake.” On July 10, knowing now he would not become Speaker, Armey told his colleagues in the leadership that it would be “immoral” to proceed against the Speaker and then notified Gingrich’s office of the plot. That ended the coup, and its planners could only hope it was kept secret.

It was secret until Sandy Hume’s July 16 story. What The Hill reported was news to most House Republicans. I wrote in my column of July 20:

At Wednesday’s [July 16] closed-door meeting of the House Republican Conference, Armey denied complicity. An outraged Lindsey Graham crashed through rows of chairs toward a floor microphone but was restrained by colleagues. Graham…told friends he was considering resigning from Congress then and there….

Once the coup plot was publicized, Gingrich’s advisers told him that a head must be severed. It had to be Paxon’s, the only member of the leadership appointed by the Speaker rather than elected by the Conference. At a leadership meeting, Paxon volunteered to quit. “I’ll take it,” said Armey.

Paxon, the rising Republican star on Capitol Hill, was finished in congressional politics. More significantly, the failed coup spelled the end of visionary aspirations that the Republican landslide of 1994 would bring true reform to Capitol Hill.

I wrote that Republican spin-doctors were claiming that Gingrich’s colleagues in the leadership had not been plotting a coup but “were just trying to warn him.” I added: “But after extensive checking of sources, I am convinced that Hume’s reporting was 100 percent correct.”

Sandy’s father, Brit Hume, the Washington managing editor of Fox News, told me that his son viewed my column with so much pride that he posted it on his wall. After my column ran Sandy made an appointment to see me in my office. A delightful young man, he expressed the opinion that if I had not substantiated his reporting, the perfidy of the House Republican leadership never would have been known. I replied that someone else would have supported Sandy’s reportage if I did not, but I added the failed coup never would have come to light if it had not been for him and The Hill. Sandy told me he always had admired my reporting, but I told the twenty-five-year-old reporter it was I who admired him for getting a story that none of the old pros, including me, even suspected.

A year later, Sandy Hume committed suicide. The circumstances of this tragedy were none of my business, but I was devastated. While I was not in the practice of mentoring young journalists (not many sought me out), I knew Sandy was something special. At age twenty-six, he had been on his way professionally, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, wooed by U.S. News, and going to work for Fox News. I did not like wakes and usually went only when a very close friend or relative died. Yet I was drawn to Gawler’s Funeral Home for Sandy’s. When I spoke to Brit at the viewing, I could not keep my voice from breaking, and my eyes were filled with tears.

         

MY OBSESSION WITH University of Maryland basketball by 1998 had developed to a point where I tried to attend every game, home and away. My routine for road games was to take a commercial flight from Washington the afternoon of the game, and Coach Gary Williams would let me fly back on the team’s chartered flight so that I could put in a full day’s work the next day.

On January 21, 1998, I took a three p.m. flight from Washington to Atlanta, arriving in plenty of time for that night’s nine o’clock game between Georgia Tech and Maryland. But when I landed in Atlanta and called my office in Washington, I learned that the world had turned upside down with reports of a sexual affair between Bill Clinton and former intern Monica Lewinsky. I was told CNN wanted me to come to its main studios in Atlanta immediately to comment on something about which I knew nothing. I admitted on the air I never had heard of Monica Lewinsky and then suggested that we all should avoid indicting or impeaching the president of the United States on unsubstantiated rumors.

On Capital Gang Saturday night, I was less censorious about the president than his staunch supporter Al Hunt, who suggested it was a matter of time before Clinton left office. “I think that is premature,” I contended, adding: “I don’t think you can impeach a president on the basis that he lied about having sex, [and] I don’t believe that this president is about to resign.” Nearly a month later on February 15, I was still cautious when I appeared on Meet the Press. I said: “[H]e cannot be impeached, in my opinion, and won’t be impeached by a Republican majority. It has to be bipartisan. The Democrats are solidly with him right now, and so I think it’s going to be very unlikely that that happens.”

Beginning in 1991 with the rumors about Clinton’s sexual infidelity spread by enemies in Arkansas, I had been on record against traveling this road. But did I pull any punches on the Lewinsky affair because I was president of the Gridiron Club that year and did not want to frighten Clinton away from sitting next to me at the club’s annual dinner? I hope not.

         

I SPENT FOUR hours seated next to Bill Clinton on Saturday night, March 21, 1998, after not having exchanged more than a word or two with him since the 1992 preconvention campaign. The president of the Gridiron Club of Washington by tradition had the head table seat next to the president of the United States at the organization’s spring dinner.

There was an archaic quality about the Gridiron that was part of its addictive charm for members. Prestige journalists such as Al Hunt might say the club provided a moment in the sun for the bureau chiefs of provincial newspapers, but even Hunt grew fascinated with the oddity of the club when he became its president—as did I. The club’s spring dinner was one of only two Washington functions (the other being a charity ball) to require white tie and tails.

I was admitted to the club in 1979, and it took me two decades to become president in 1998. The Gridiron operated under laws of term limits (one year only for president) and seniority. Active or inactive, members inexorably climbed the seniority ladder. There were no contested elections. Some presidents devoted full-time to the club, but I could not and still fulfill my journalistic responsibilities. So I delegated like mad to the talented producers of the annual show.

However, I used my dictatorial powers to make sure the Gridiron lived up to its philosophy of singeing but never burning just in case Clinton came to the dinner. The smart money was that in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton would not show up to be satirized by smart-aleck journalists, sitting at Novak’s side no less.

We did not get a clear response from the White House, and I killed anything in the show that would humiliate Clinton, including a wickedly clever parody of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” This was one of those magic Gridiron songs where the entire audience was sure to burst into applause and laughter as they heard the first words. I would have loved it if I were not facing the prospect of being seated next to Clinton. Alan Cromley, retired bureau chief of The Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City and one of the Gridiron’s all-time great songwriters, pleaded in vain with me to reinstate “Little Girls.” It was a decision I did not regret when we received word that the president would attend the dinner.

         

IF AGREEING TO spend four hours with me was Bill Clinton at his most open-minded, the 1998 Gridiron Dinner exhibited Hillary Rodham Clinton at her worst. I had spent weeks trying to get her to be the Democratic speaker. Her staffers stalled me until finally I insisted on a yes or no, and they said no. I talked the White House chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, into speaking. White House staffers later told me any chance I had of getting Mrs. Clinton as Democratic speaker vanished when they learned whom I had secured as the Republican speaker: Newt Gingrich.

An hour before the dinner, the Gridiron Club office in the Capitol Hilton was asked by the First Lady’s press aide when Speaker Gingrich was scheduled to give his speech. While the president appeared only five minutes late for the dinner’s seven p.m. start (punctual for him), we received word from the White House that Mrs. Clinton was unavoidably detained but would be along as soon as possible, so we should start without her.

Shortly after Gingrich finished his speech, the White House called saying Mrs. Clinton was on her way to the hotel. In keeping with Gridiron tradition, Geraldine as the wife of the club president was dispatched to meet Hillary and escort her to the head table.

Poor Geraldine! She hated politics, avoiding debate and confrontation. But beneath her calm, Geraldine cared deeply about issues. The born-and-bred Texas Democrat long ago had switched her party registration to Republican. Geraldine detested the Clintons, and now she had to be Hillary’s hostess. Geraldine did not care for the Gridiron, and I am sure she got through this ordeal only because she knew it was her first and last Gridiron spring dinner.

This was the presenatorial Hillary who did what she wanted and did not conceal her hardness. There never had been anything like the First Lady’s politically purposeful tardiness in the 113-year history of the Gridiron Club. Her husband, however, delivered the best speech of the night.

“So how was your week?” asked Clinton, guaranteeing an opening wave of laughter following seven more days in which he was hounded by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “Please withhold the subpoenas until all the jokes have been told. I offer my remarks with this caveat: They were a whole lot funnier before the lawyers got ahold of them.”

People asked me what Bill Clinton and I had to talk about for four hours. Well, it wasn’t really four hours. Clinton spent one hour with me and three with the man on his right: Conrad Black, the Canadian CEO of Hollinger International, Inc., the owner of the Chicago Sun-Times. Traditionally at the Gridiron, the seat to the right of the president of the United States goes to the publisher of the Gridiron Club president’s newspaper. But the publisher of the Sun-Times, another Canadian named David Radler, was Black’s junior partner in the Hollinger publishing empire, and so the place of honor next to Clinton went to Black. (Within six years, Black and Radler would have lost all their newspapers and faced prison sentences for fraud.)

Conrad Black was somewhere to my Right ideologically and had been far more enthusiastic than I in seeing Clinton’s personal peccadilloes investigated and reported by the American Spectator. Black was a good friend of Spectator editor (and Clinton nemesis) Bob Tyrrell and a financial supporter of the right-wing magazine, which in 1993 bestowed its highest annual award on Black. So I could not figure why Clinton seemed much more at ease talking to Black than to me.

Only later did I learn that Clinton and Black had a common hero: Franklin D. Roosevelt (who was no hero of mine). Five years hence, Black published a massive (1,360-page) biography called Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom. That night, these two strong, complicated men enjoyed themselves talking about another, strong complicated man. Beyond that, I think Clinton and Black liked each other because they both were intelligent, reckless, charismatic risk-takers. I simply was not in their class.

I did get a rare hour with Clinton, albeit chopped up in pieces. I had made clear in my column and on TV that I found almost nothing to applaud in Clinton’s five years as president. So Clinton and I talked about a common interest—college basketball. He dispatched a Secret Service agent to give us periodic reports of that night’s University of Arkansas Razorbacks game. He chuckled at skits making fun of him, not knowing that they had been toned down on my orders.

In one skit, Gridiron Club member Deborah Howell played a prostitute. Howell, the Washington bureau chief of the Newhouse newspapers, was a mature woman who normally would not attract Bill Clinton’s attention. The head table was on the other side of the large ballroom from the stage, and so we could not see the performers in great detail. But Clinton could see Deborah’s nice set of legs shown off in her hooker’s costume. He pointed toward her and asked me almost reflexively: “Now, who is that woman?” In the midst of the Monica turmoil, Clinton was instinctively attracted by a woman with beautiful legs.

I did raise one serious matter with the president, and I wrote about it in my column:

I was not about to pose embarrassing questions, and the President did not lecture me on the error of my right-wing extremism. But late in the evening…I told him that young people whom I often address are surprised and angry when they discover the havoc wrought by FICA [tax deductions] on their first paychecks.

Had he read Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Harvard speech of March 16? The Senator proposed to cut the payroll tax by one-sixth from 12.4 percent to 10.4 percent (returning $800 billion to Americans over the next decade) as part of a plan to save Social Security.

The President did not even seem familiar with Moynihan’s latest plan but remembered that in 1989, the Senator had proposed payroll tax cuts…. [T]he President told me he is repelled by the regressive nature of the tax, which is hardest on lower-wage workers and takes more money from 80 percent of American taxpayers than the progressive income tax….

Bill Clinton could make all the difference. But Democratic skeptics caution not to make too much of what the President, charming and congenial, says in the midst of a festive evening.

The skeptics were correct. Clinton never said another word about payroll taxes.

         

FOR MOST PRESIDENTS of the Gridiron Club, the spring dinner affords rare exposure in the Washington spotlight for hardworking journalists who labor in lifelong anonymity. Even for somebody with the TV omnipresence that I had achieved by 1996, it was a special weekend. It began Friday night with a sit-down dinner in my honor at the Army and Navy Club for 126 guests, mostly Gridiron members and their spouses, co-hosted by Conrad Black and Tom Johnson. Starting Friday night and extending through Sunday night, Geraldine and I stayed in the Capitol Hilton’s presidential suite.

The long Gridiron dinner, concluding around eleven fifteen p.m. Saturday, was not the end of the evening. Postdinner receptions continued well into Sunday morning, though as I grew older I went home shortly after midnight. But as club president staying overnight in the hotel, I planned to be around until the last dog was buried. I was sixty-seven years old, and had cut back my drinking ever since spinal meningitis fourteen years earlier. But I drank a little more on Gridiron nights, and I certainly would have more than my usual one drink the night I was president. At Friday night’s dinner, I enjoyed two predinner vodkas, quite a bit of wine with dinner, and a glass of port afterward. On Saturday night, I had two vodkas before the dinner, followed by a generous intake of wine at dinner, and then the closing champagne.

I was in high spirits following the dinner and, as usual, I started off the rest of the evening by going to the Hearst reception, where I guzzled another vodka. I was receiving congratulations on an excellent Gridiron night, when suddenly I was assaulted by nausea and dizziness.

I staggered to the hotel men’s room and barely made it to a toilet stall before I vomited all over my white ruffled shirt. I then fainted, falling heavily against the toilet. The next thing I knew, my son-in-law, the journalist Christopher Caldwell, was bending over me. I was conscious now, though still dizzy and suffering from what I thought was a sore leg resulting from my fall. Fire department paramedics were called to the scene, but I adamantly refused to be taken to a hospital. Instead, I insisted on going to my hotel suite. Incredibly, amid the Gridiron hubbub, my misfortune attracted no attention.

I awoke Sunday morning to discover my “sore leg” in fact was a damaged ankle (I thought it must be sprained) that hurt so much I did not think I could walk. Geraldine got me a cane, and I showed up with it, limping badly, at the Sunday brunch for Gridiron members at the Mayflower Hotel sponsored by General Motors. Reporters are normally the most inquisitive of people, but hardly anybody noticed. Nor did I get much reaction at the Capitol Hilton Sunday night when I presided onstage over the rerun of the skits and repeated my “speech in the dark,” cane in hand. Not a word appeared in gossip columns or in the Washington Post account of Gridiron weekend, which usually chronicled mishaps and embarrassments.

When belatedly I got medical attention on Monday, I learned that my ankle was broken. Dr. Chuck Abrams, who twice had saved me from cancer, put me through a battery of tests and found no evidence of heart trouble or any other serious malady. He suggested that I now had a low tolerance for alcohol and had too much to drink on Gridiron weekend. I should have taken his advice more seriously than I did.

Eight months later in November 1998, I was in New Orleans for a post-midterm election Republican gathering and was attending a party at the home of Julia Reed, the Vogue and Newsweek writer and daughter of my old friend, Mississippi Republican leader Clarke Reed. I was seated with the antitax activist Grover Norquist, who was orating to me when again I got that dizzy and nauseated feeling, simultaneously vomiting and fainting. Once again, I refused to go to a hospital and showed up for a lunch date with Julia the next day.

In June 2003, I collapsed at the outdoor reception in Greenville, Mississippi, celebrating Julia Reed’s wedding. I was taken to the hospital but refused to stay overnight. The word had circulated among wedding guests that I was near death, and I created a stir when I showed up at the Sunday brunch concluding the gala wedding weekend.

I went to Dr. Abrams for a thorough examination, and he found nothing wrong with me as a seventy-two-year-old man except for high blood pressure and high cholesterol that were kept under control by medication. Abrams’s prescription: I must further reduce my drinking, no more than one a night and perhaps limited to three a week. Being old is hell.

         

AT ST. PATRICK’S Church in downtown Washington a few blocks from our apartment on May 20, 1998, a Roman Catholic mass starting at six thirty p.m. marked a milestone in my life. In the ritual lasting until after eight o’clock, I was baptized as a Christian and confirmed as a Catholic at age sixty-seven.

A sizable congregation assembled at St. Patrick’s, the oldest church in the Federal City. It was diverse, including many non-Catholics such as Rowly and his wife Kay (practicing Episcopalians), CNN colleagues, and fellow University of Maryland sports fanatics. A few politicians were headed by two Catholic friends, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Republican Congressman Henry Hyde. Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a conservative Republican, called me and asked to come to the mass. I did not know him well, but he was a daily Catholic communicant and I welcomed him. After the mass, we all adjourned to my apartment for a festive reception and buffet dinner.

Most people who heard about my conversion were curious, but a few were nasty—especially fallen-away Catholics who somehow resented me entering a church they had left. That probably included Kitty Kelley, the notorious pop biographer who encountered me at a large reception. Describing herself as having been “raised Catholic” (a euphemism used by hostile lapsed Catholics), Kelley demanded of me: “What in the world made you become Catholic?” For the first time, I replied: “The Holy Spirit.”

I heard nothing from my many Jewish relatives, most of whom had come to Washington in 1994 for Zelda’s wedding. But I ran into Cherie, a favorite cousin, at a political reception in Los Angeles that autumn. Although she lived in California, we had remained in frequent contact and I had flown out to San Francisco the year before for her daughter’s wedding. No sooner had we embraced at the Los Angeles reception than she repeated pretty much what Kitty Kelley said: “Bobby, what possessed you to become a Catholic?” I gave the “Holy Spirit” answer, and Cherie shot back: “What do you think your mother would think of this?” “I guess she’s rejoicing in Heaven,” I said. I refrained from adding, as I contemplated saying, “with Jesus at her side.” Even without that flourish, my answer did not sit well with Cherie. Since then I have seen her only once, at a family wedding (Jewish) in Illinois.

         

IN THE YEARS since my 1998 conversion, I have gradually doled out some of my story, but what follows is the fullest account.

Although I abandoned my adolescent pretensions at agnosticism when I prayed as a young army officer that I would handle myself bravely if I went to war in Korea, I still flinched at religious ritual. My first marriage in Indianapolis in September 1957 had been planned at a Unitarian church. My father-in-law to be, a devout Presbyterian, at the eleventh hour insisted that his pastor deliver a blessing at the ceremony. I refused to allow it. A tough lawyer and hard-shelled Republican, he said that killed his bankrolling of a big church wedding and lavish reception. So be it, I replied, ignoring my fiancée’s pleas for compromise. I felt the Unitarian ceremony represented enough compromise by me, and I maintained the deal to which I had agreed had been broken.

The invited wedding guests were uninvited. We were married in the Unitarian church sacristy, with only our immediate families present. With my new father-in-law and me barely speaking, the marriage was off to a rocky start. From the distance of half a century, it is hard for me to understand why at age twenty-six I was so adamant against the introduction of Christianity in our wedding. Including it might have helped our marriage.

In the marriage’s early months, we occasionally attended Unitarian services in Washington. We soon decided to sleep in Sunday mornings rather than endure an experience we both found uninspiring. I now believe the reason was the absence of God.

In trying to cope with my depression when my wife left me in 1958, after several weeks I unilaterally ended my visits to a psychiatrist and walked unannounced into the study of Reverend Russell C. Stroup, pastor of the Georgetown Presbyterian Church near my apartment. He bucked me up a little and suggested I might want to attend Sunday services. I did for a while, and it helped, even though the Christian ritual made me feel out of place. Four years later, I returned to Georgetown Presbyterian and asked Reverend Stroup to perform the wedding ceremony for Geraldine and me. It was short, beautiful, and essentially non-Christian.

Geraldine had grown up in a devoutly Methodist family in rural Texas, but she was nearly as uninspired by her church’s ritual as I was by Jewish services and had no desire to return to her religious roots. In the early days of our marriage in 1963, we occasionally attended an Episcopal church on Capitol Hill. But soon after Zelda was christened there in 1965, we ceased attendance. I often have said I was repelled by the pastor’s political (liberal) sermons, but in retrospect I believe I really was uncomfortable with the Christian liturgy. Except for weddings and funerals, I did not attend a religious service for another thirty years. I left everything in child raising to Geraldine, and that included religion. She sometimes took Zelda and Alexander to Protestant Sunday school in the Maryland suburbs. But they were uncomfortable as outsiders who did not know the other children, and Geraldine discontinued the practice.

I think Geraldine and I both were experiencing spiritual hunger, but only she recognized it. We never talked politics with each other, and I was one of the last to know that she had become an antiabortion activist by the 1990s. She started going out Sunday mornings in quest of a church in suburban Maryland that accommodated her prolife beliefs and provided spiritual sustenance—without success.

When we moved into downtown Washington in 1992, Geraldine walked the few blocks to St. Patrick’s to attend Catholic mass. She told me she really liked it, and asked whether I would like to go with her. I did and, in contrast to my previous Christian church experiences, I was moved by the ritual.

One reason I was more comfortable there was the presence of Father Peter Vaghi. As an active Republican lawyer and adviser to Senator Pete Domenici before he became a priest, Vaghi had been a source for the Evans & Novak column. He was much closer to Rowly, to whom he broke the news over lunch at the Metropolitan Club that he was entering a Catholic seminary in a late vocation. “Peter,” an alarmed Episcopalian Evans warned his friend and source, “that will ruin your career!” Vaghi greeted me warmly when he first spotted me at St. Patrick’s attending mass with Geraldine.

Another reason for my comfort level with Catholic liturgy was Father C. John McCloskey. A decade after Jeff Bell handed me the Catholic reading matter following my recovery from spinal meningitis in 1982, he introduced me to Father C. John. We began a series of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners spread over two decades. Father C. John, a politically and theologically conservative Opus Dei priest, was a world-class proselytizer. He brought the abortion doctor Bernard Nathanson, New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman, and the Wall Street economist Lawrence Kudlow into the church, and now he was working on me.

I was a tough nut to crack, but McCloskey never faltered. He was a fascinating table companion, and sometimes whole meals would go by without a mention of theology. At one Army and Navy Club lunch, I mentioned the homily delivered the previous Sunday by Peter Vaghi (now a monsignor and St. Patrick’s pastor) deploring young Catholics who thought the Communion wafer only symbolized the body of Christ when in fact it is the body of Christ. “How can anybody believe that?” I asked Father John. “It comes from the mystery of Holy Communion,” he told me. I realized then how much I must believe that if I ever was to become a Catholic.

Monsignor Vaghi and Father McCloskey surely helped, but now as a Catholic I feel that they were part of a divine plan which led me to embrace this church. Could Geraldine’s quest for a church, Peter Vaghi’s presence, and C. John McCloskey proselytizing all be coincidental? Or did they reflect the hand of the Holy Spirit? My realization that the latter was the case was brought home by a spiritual event at highly secular Syracuse University.

On October 22, 1996, I came to Syracuse to deliver the annual Flowers Lecture, partially financed by the conservative Young America Foundation and sponsored by the College Republicans. Standard procedure for college lectures is a prespeech dinner for the speaker, hosted by the sponsoring student committee. There was one woman on the College Republicans committee, seated across the table from me. She was striking looking, wearing a gold cross on her neck.

What happened next may be distorted in my memory and shaped by the religious mysteries that I see entwined in this episode. Without mentioning the cross, I was impelled to ask the woman a question that normally I would not consider posing. Was she a Catholic? I thought she answered yes and then asked me whether I was one. “No,” I replied, “but my wife and I have been going to mass every Sunday for about four years.” “Do you plan to join the church?” she asked. I answered: “No, not at the present time.”

Then the young woman looked at me and said evenly: “Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever.” I was so shaken by what she said that I could barely get through the rest of the dinner and my speech that night. Sometime during the short night before rising to catch a seven a.m. flight back to Washington, I became convinced that the Holy Spirit was speaking through this Syracuse student.

I did not seek the name of the woman. But in writing this book in 2005, I asked my staff to try to find it. The only woman we could identify at the dinner was named Barbara Plonisch. When we located her, she said she could not recall any such exchange with me. An e-mail response from Barbara P. Edmunds (her married name) began: “Well, I am Russian Orthodox Christian, not Catholic. I do wear a small gold cross. I don’t think I’m the one you’re looking for. Although I can’t help but think that I may have made such a comment.”

That ambiguous response from Mrs. Edmunds would have left me in a quandary had she not also sent along by e-mail a recent photo of her with her husband and infant son. It was she! I could not forget that distinctive face, even though she now was nine years older. That she had forgotten what she said to me only confirmed my belief that the Holy Spirit was speaking through her.

Back in Washington, I suggested to Geraldine that the time had come for both of us to enter the church. I believe Geraldine had been ready for some time and was waiting for me. Geraldine joined RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) at St. Patrick’s, a process under which a small group of initiates takes instruction in the faith and then is confirmed on Easter Sunday.

The semipublic nature of RCIA was not for me, and Monsignor Vaghi agreed to give me private instruction. I would read assigned sections of the Catholic Catechism, and meet Vaghi early in the evening each week at St. Patrick’s. He told me our dialogue went deeper into the mysteries of the faith than most cradle Catholics experience.

The special May 20, 1998, mass for my baptism and confirmation at St. Patrick’s was celebrated by Monsignor Vaghi with Father McCloskey as a co-celebrant. The godparents that I selected both were younger than I: Jeff Bell (himself a convert) and Kate O’Beirne. I chose as my patron saint the martyred Thomas More, who beneath his robes as chancellor of England wore the hairshirt of a Christian ascetic.

At our apartment after the mass, Pat Moynihan said to Al Hunt: “Well, Novak is now a Catholic. The question is: When will he become a Christian?” Behind the laughter was the serious inquiry of whether my conversion would change me. Liberals wanted me now to favor redistribution of income and oppose capital punishment, but those changes were not to happen. I do know my new faith has given me a source of strength in coping with an old age that was to be anything but serene.

         

REPUBLICANS NEVER RECOVERED from the government shutdown of 1995, which Clinton successfully blamed on Gingrich. Now in October 1998, I wrote that House Speaker Gingrich would give Clinton anything to avoid another presidential veto shutting down the government. Gingrich passed the Clinton budget with only 30 percent of Republicans voting for it, and far more Democrats than Republicans in support. That was a dangerous posture that former history professor Gingrich years before told me always meant disaster for a party leader.

On the morning of October 15, 1998, when my anti-Gingrich column (“GOP Surrender”) was published, I was in Los Angeles at the Century Plaza Hotel. At five thirty a.m. California time, my office patched through a call from the Speaker of the House.

Gingrich shouted his displeasure with that morning’s column: “Everything in it is wrong!” He demanded a column by me correcting my alleged errors, but he did not inform me that he already had sent client newspapers a letter critiquing the column. Gingrich’s outburst yielded not a corrective column but another critical one, which ran a week later on October 22 and included this:

Gingrich initiated his first telephone call to me since the last week of December 1996, when he was on the brink of losing the Speakership and convincingly pleaded his ethics case. Last Thursday, Gingrich told me that I had accomplished the impossible by getting everything wrong except critical quotes from the Speaker’s old friend, Jack Kemp, which he said would have meant more “if he was elected Vice President.” Claiming I ignored Republican “victories,” Gingrich in his letter to newspapers accused me of “an exercise in disinformation, rumor and outright falsehoods” of which “the White House would be proud.”

“In reality, I made no errors,” I wrote, then disposed of Gingrich’s complaints, one by one. The October 22 column included a zinger that was harsher than anything in my previous column. It accused Gingrich of “a mindless tactical incompetence that invites defeat.” My long-standing relationship with Newt had gone up and down over his four years as Speaker, but I think it came to an end with our exchange in October. I regretted it, but I was sure Newt would not be on the national stage much longer.

         

THE EVANS-NOVAK POLITICAL Report predicted Republican gains in the 1998 midterm elections of eight seats in the House and four in the Senate. In fact, the ten-seat Republican margin in the Senate was unchanged. In the House, the Republicans lost five seats, a thirteen-seat variance from my prediction. Journalistically, that was not acceptable.

Gingrich had promised Republican gains in the House, a losing result for Clinton that would have been normal for a president in his second midterm election. I could try to correct myself for 2000, but it was too late for Gingrich. He resigned from Congress three days after the election, recognizing he could not be reelected Speaker because he had alienated the conservative base in the House. I wrote in my column this appreciation of Gingrich’s four years as speaker.

The former college history professor envisioned something never before attempted in American history: reshaping the Republican Party, and indeed the nation itself, from the House of Representatives. In reaching for that unachievable goal, Gingrich failed as a legislator or even as a party leader unifying a slender House majority.

Lost in the Republican confusion was the fact that Republicans had controlled Congress for the third straight election despite an indifferent record on Capitol Hill. Call it realignment.