CHAPTER 43

Attacking Iraq and Attacking Novak

THE NOVAK, HUNT and Shields program of Saturday, November 9, 2002, featured Representative John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, son of the former governor and White House chief of staff. His election to the U.S. Senate four days earlier clinched, early in the evening, the return to a GOP Senate majority. This was the last program of what had started twenty years earlier as Evans and Novak.

I got the bad news a month earlier in a telephone call from Walter Isaacson, CEO of CNN. When I first met Isaacson on the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign plane as a twenty-eight-year-old reporter for Time magazine, he struck me as the reflexive liberal typical among journalists of his generation. But he was a smart, charming New Orleansian whose company I enjoyed and someone, I was sure, who was destined for big things. He would become a best-selling biographer (of Henry Kissinger and Benjamin Franklin), managing editor of Time in 1995 at age forty-three, and in 2001 Time-Warner’s choice to head CNN.

Why pull the plug on Novak, Hunt and Shields, that was being cancelled as of November 9? Its ratings were decent, the budget was low, and guests were high caliber. It was the only national program of its kind anywhere on Saturday, so that we often got a good play in Sunday morning newspapers. I asked Isaacson in 2005 in preparation for this book why the program was axed, and he replied that the suits in Atlanta had been after us for a long time and that he repeatedly had saved Novak, Hunt and Shields (and Capital Gang as well). These weekly programs, he said, just did not fit the network’s advertising game plan. That did not make sense to me. After all, didn’t the network have to run something on the weekend? I think the problem was that the Atlanta executives, unlike Isaacson, did not like politics and probably never watched our programs.

Isaacson softened the blow for me by saying I would be given a new CNN vehicle in which I would conduct a seven-minute, one-on-one weekly interview. Walter asked me to come up with a name. I offered The Novak Zone.

The show debuted November 23, 2002, with an interview of Don Rumsfeld (he was in Brussels, I was in Washington) that could be described, charitably, as leaden. The inaugural Zone was so bad, in fact, it convinced me that fitting conventional newsmakers, who had been given twenty minutes on Novak, Hunt and Shields, into a seven-minute hole would not work. I decided to seek offbeat guests, many who had nothing to do with politics, whom we would tape at interesting locations away from the CNN studios. All guests and I would be eye-to-eye, never separated at remote locations as I was with Rumsfeld.

With those requirements, the Zone would need more time for preparation than I could spare. Bob Kovach came to the rescue. He was the producer of Capital Gang and had produced Novak, Hunt and Shields. Kovach was an ethnic from Cleveland who went to Catholic school from first grade through college, working for a network whose executive ranks were dominated by Jews in an industry where WASPs and Ivy Leaguers prospered. He reminded me of a lot of guys I grew up with in Joliet.

The Novak Zone energized Kovach. He did guest booking, site selection, question preparation, and technical production. He supplied most of the ideas as we taped the Zone at Ford’s Theater, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the Kennedy Center, the World War II Memorial, the former presidential yacht Sequoia, RFK Stadium, FedEx Field, Arlington Cemetery, and assorted museums and galleries. The guests included opera superstar Placido Domingo, baseball greats Cal Ripken and Frank Robinson, Hollywood actors Robert Duvall and Suzanne Farrell, cyclist Lance Armstrong, broadcaster Tom Brokaw, and composer-pianist Marvin Hamlisch (who wrote a ditty called The Novak Zone, which he played and sang to conclude our interview at the Kennedy Center).

Kovach used me as a participant as well as interviewer on some Zone programs. At the U.S. Naval Academy, I steered a training boat down the Severn River. At the Kennedy Center Opera House, I was a supernumerary in white tie and tails in La Traviata, cuddling a prostitute in the bordello scene.

My signature piece on The Novak Zone came in the summer of 2003 when Kovach sought an interview with the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachute jump team. Their public information officer told Kovach that they would be delighted, then asked: Would Mr. Novak like to jump with us? I had fantasized about jumping out of airplanes as I had fantasized about many things, but I thought such an adventure was far behind me at age seventy-two.

Afraid to be exposed as the coward I was, I agreed to jump when the Golden Knights came to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington for an annual air show. I did not mention it to Geraldine until after the fact. When I visited Dr. Abrams for my annual physical soon after the jump, he asked why a seventy-two-year-old with multiple infirmities did not ask his doctor’s permission. “Because you would have said no,” I answered. He replied that was quite correct.

The army’s prejump briefing for me at Andrews featured a video in which an officer sternly advised that the waiver I was about to sign relieved the U.S. government of any liability for injury or death even if the army was clearly negligent. That was not reassuring, but I did not explore in my own mind the possibility of backing out until I was flying over the drop zone. It was just like the movies with paratroopers seated on long benches on either side of the plane. But my fellow jumpers all were about fifty years younger than I. Then the jump master announced that Mr. Novak would be jumping first. It seemed like the last mile as I walked to a huge opening in the side of the plane. Although my army partner was attached to me as we jumped in tandem, it was up to me to screw up the courage to actually leap out the door. The jump was followed by a free fall during which I was instructed to maneuver acrobatically while scared stiff. Only then did my parachute open. People invariably asked me if the landing was tough, but it was a piece of cake compared with jumping out of the plane into free fall.

The jump took a lot out of an unathletic old man. I simply could not stand up after I landed, and we had to do the post-jump interview with me on the ground. I had a one-word answer—“No!”—when asked whether I would ever jump again. The interview was recorded for The Novak Zone, as was the actual jump (taped by an army cameraman who jumped at the same time).

My jumping tape was repeated on Crossfire, Capital Gang, and other CNN programs and got some press attention as well. Tucker Carlson, who until then had not joined my fan club, left a flattering message on my voice mail informing me how “cool” it was to have performed this stunt. The same adjective was used by Jane Sanders Caldwell, my mother’s namesake and the eldest of my seven grandchildren. “You’re cool, Grandpa!” exclaimed Jane, aged seven.

Except for the parachute jump, CNN brass ignored the program. The Zone was aired at eleven forty a.m. Saturdays, not the choice time Walter Isaacson originally promised. I often suggested that the seven-minute program be used several times on the all-news, twenty-four-hour network during a slow news weekend, just as undistinguished news packages were repeated. Nobody rejected my requests. They just ignored them, as well as my pleas to include The Novak Zone among the plethora of promotional spots mandated for each CNN program. I believe Isaacson was a supporter of my programs and me but he was busy, overwhelmed as a print journalist trying to revive a cable network losing its competitive struggle with Fox. The Novak Zone went off the air in July 2005 after a vigorous life of a little more than two and one-half years.

         

GEORGE W. BUSH was to deliver his second State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 28, 2003. The day before the speech I and four other conservative journalists were invited to the White House for a special briefing. The briefer—whose words could be attributed only to a mysterious “senior administration official”—was none other than George W. Bush.

Of the five journalists, four were hawks on Iraq, and I was a dove. After U.S. military strikes on Afghanistan began on Sunday, October 8, 2001, I hurriedly wrote a substitute column for the next morning reporting “a strong viewpoint inside the Pentagon that the second target—after Afghanistan—has to be Iraq. Even the most hawkish officials privately admit that no evidence links Baghdad to the Sept. 11 attacks, but they want to conclude the unfinished task of a decade ago anyway.” I predicted quick military victory in Afghanistan, after which Bush “will have an open mandate to press on against Saddam Hussein. That temptation will test Bush’s prudence and wisdom.”

More than a year later, I wrote in the column published Monday, January 27, 2003—the day of my White House briefing—that “prospects for war are…probable but not inevitable.” I described unnamed critics as “apprehensive about the diplomatic fallout…of the Anglo-Americans going it alone.”

I suspected I was included with the hawkish journalists because the White House wanted to send me a message. At the briefing, the president described himself as undecided “on whether or not to use troops, because this issue can be resolved peacefully.” After a few minutes, he repeated himself and may have been referring to my column that morning: “Novak thinks I have made up my mind on troops. I want to make it clear. I haven’t made up my mind on troops.” Yet, in the next breath, Bush implied eventually he would send those troops against Saddam Hussein: “This speech is the beginning of a series of speeches…. One of these days there will be an ‘Iraq-only’ speech.”

In my Thursday column, I quoted the “senior administration official” at length, turning his first person into third person when referring to the president. I thought any knowledgeable reader would know that I actually was quoting Bush, showing how futile were the White House ground rules. Not so. After the column was published, I asked two politicians and two journalists to identify the “senior administration official.” None named Bush, and I certainly did not identify him. The White House cover was effective, though its purpose eluded me.

If including me in the presidential briefing was to convince me Bush had not really made up his mind, it failed. I did not want to make an overt accusation that the president was deceptive, but my Thursday column gave that impression nonetheless:

Emotionally and eloquently, George W. Bush in his second State of the Union sounded like a war president. Yet hours before the address, the White House at the highest level [that was Bush himself ] stressed that the President had made no final decision on using U.S. arms to remove Saddam Hussein from power….

That can be interpreted in two ways. One is that the President, in sending America’s military might to the Persian Gulf, has made war inevitable and will declare it in a forthcoming second speech to the nation. The alternative interpretation is that Bush still feels Hussein can be forced from power short of war, unlikely though that seems….

[T]he President holds out the possibility of a peaceful solution. How? Clearly, he has no faith in the [weapons] inspection process. That leaves only removal of Saddam Hussein by internal forces in Baghdad. If not, the next Bush speech will end any doubts about his being a war president.

Going to war is entering a dark tunnel with unknown perils and potential calamities ahead, and I was sure Bush had decided to make that journey. My interpretation did not suit the White House. I was invited to no more private briefings, and that was the last I saw of George W. Bush except for Christmas party handshakes.

         

THE IRAQ-ONLY BUSH speech was delivered over live television from the Red Room of the White House on March 17, 2003. His ultimatum to Saddam Hussein: Get out of Iraq in forty-eight hours or U.S. military forces will come in. I knew the Bush administration and perhaps the country never would be the same. I listened to Bush in a state of shock, stemming not from the president’s speech but from a cover story in National Review published that day.

The timing could not have been better for the magazine. “Unpatriotic Conservatives: A War Against America” was written by the Canadian journalist David Frum, who had resigned as a presidential speechwriter to write a memoir of his thirteen months at the White House. Frum began by declaring that “some of the leading figures” in what he called the “movement” against the war on terror “call themselves ‘conservatives.’” He continued:

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world—the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine—in favor of a fearful policy ignoring threats and appeasing enemies….

You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis and Taki Theodoracopulos.

Frum had put me in strange company. Buchanan and Wanniski were the only people mentioned who were my friends though I was an acquaintance of McConnell, who once had edited my copy at the New York Post. I had never heard of Raimondo, Reese, or Margolis. Fleming was a historian whose brilliant critique of U.S. participation in World War I (The Illusion of Victory) I had reviewed favorably, but I had never met him or read his forty-odd other books. I knew of Taki but thought of him as a millionaire jet-setter and clever essayist. I had met Francis and Sobran once or twice and never had met Rockwell at all; I considered those three to be ideological extremists whose views I did not embrace. A couple of members of this assemblage—and I am not talking about Buchanan—embraced anti-Semitic views that I abhorred.

I thought Frum’s tendentious attack on “paleoconservatives” unworthy of National Review. His conclusion was most poisonous in assailing antiwar conservatives (including me): “They are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure if it happens. They began by hating the neo-conservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.”

Frum identified me as a “paleo,” which must have been a shock to the real “paleos,” considering my support of free trade, a global economy, and liberal immigration. From his immense research, Frum managed to extract only three citations to document my paleo credentials. He first cited a December 26, 2002, column in which I stated the Hezbollah organization’s terror campaign was focused against Israel, not the United States as Bush administration officials suggested it was. He next turned to my September 17, 2001, column quoting congressional sources as saying the CIA was incapable of finding Osama bin Laden (which turned out to be true). Finally and predictably, he cited my September 13, 2001, column, which had so enraged Norman Podhoretz. That comprised slim evidence for stigmatizing me as somebody who wanted his country to lose in war.

Frum had been after Buchanan for years, attempting to drive him from the acceptable political mainstream by unfairly imprinting an anti-Semitic brand on him. Frum’s attitude toward me was more complicated. We had patched up a stormy beginning, accepting mutual invitations to social occasions. While serving as a member of the American Spectator’s governing board, I had defended, unsuccessfully, Conrad Black’s attempt to make Frum editor of the magazine. When Frum became a Bush speechwriter in March 2001, I called to invite him for lunch. He told me that all press contacts had to be cleared with higher authority and that ruled out lunch.

The White House rules eased enough so that Frum agreed to lunch with me at the Hay Adams on September 19, 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks. I had hoped I would leave the table with something usable for the column. But I did not know Frum was saving the good stuff for his memoir, which also was kept secret from the president and his White House colleagues. During a pleasant lunch, he dispensed no news and few insights. Toward the end, however, he told me he was restless as low man on the Bush speechwriting totem pole, was discouraged when he saw his prose discarded and admitted he missed his days as a newspaperman. I thought Frum was signaling he was not long for the White House, but that was not exactly a scoop.

The lunch was so unproductive that I did not contact Frum again or even think about him for the next four months. While friends were having dinner with me shortly after Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, they told me of an e-mail they had received from Frum’s wife, Danielle. She had sent that same e-mail to so many people that it leaked out before I could write about it. But I called White House sources for a new angle on the story, and it made the lead item of my Sunday column of February 10, 2002. The best way to describe this bizarre incident is to repeat the whole three-paragraph item:

Presidential speechwriter David Frum, embarrassed by his wife’s bragging to friends that he authorized the “axis of evil” phrase in President Bush’s State of the Union address, did not exactly write these words.

According to White House sources, Frum proposed “axis of hate” to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Chief speechwriter Michael Gerson changed “hate” to “evil,” these aides said. Frum’s wife, Danielle Crittenden, sent e-mails to friends saying, “my husband is responsible for the phrase” and expressing “hope you’ll indulge my wifely pride.”

High-level presidential aides said Frum was not in trouble. But self-identification of language by a presidential ghost is strictly forbidden. “I’d be mortified if I were him,” said one aide. Another staffer described Frum as “very embarrassed.”

Two weeks later on February 26 (my seventy-first birthday), I got a tip from the White House that Frum had just resigned. The news would not hold for my column, and I broke the story on CNN’s Inside Politics that day. While I reported there was “suspicion he’s been kicked out,” I quoted both Frum and presidential aides as saying the move was voluntary. Implausibly Frum declared publicly that I had libeled him and claimed he savored a libel suit to “finance my children’s education” (ridiculous but also disingenuous because Frum was a man of inherited wealth who lived in a Georgetown mansion).

I reviewed Frum’s The Right Man in the American Conservative, a new magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and Taki. I suggested Frum had gone to work at the White House for the express purpose of writing this best seller. “For much of this book,” I wrote, “Frum seems disengaged from Bush’s policies.” I said that “an aide just off the payroll and hungry for fame might be expected to ‘kiss and tell,’ but the truth is that Frum did precious little kissing there to tell about.” His memoir, I contended, “becomes a brief for [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon’s Israeli policy.”

The National Review article in March was payback time for Frum, but I suspected from the start that his article conveyed more than merely one man’s pique. On an impulse, I put in a call to my friend Bill Kristol, who as editor of the Weekly Standard and a Fox commentator was the most authentic voice of the neoconservatives. When I asked Bill what he thought of Frum’s article, he replied he had heard nothing about it. I found that hard to believe, coming from somebody who prided himself on knowing everything before anybody else. I asked him to look into it, and he said he would call me right back. He never did.

In fact, March 17, 2003, marked the last telephone conversation between Bill Kristol and me. For years, we had been constant telephone communicants and frequent companions for lunch (which also came to an end). Bill had supplied a steady stream of news tips to me, even after he crossed over from newsmaker to journalist. No more. Sometimes silence is more eloquent than anything that can be said. In due time, Kristol would vocally demonstrate the change in our relationship.

Frum’s article drew a dividing line in the conservative movement. David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, was no less an advocate of the Iraqi intervention than was Kristol. But after the Frum article, Keene defended me and wrote that I had been “opposing the nation’s enemies before Frum was even born.” Keene said I was wrong about Iraq. “But to suggest, as does Frum,” he continued, “that his disagreement with Bush’s Iraq policy stems from a hatred of the President and the country is scandalously and irresponsibly absurd.”

What do you do when a supposedly responsible journalist of David Frum’s stature prints hateful lies about you? I wrote a column published on March 24, a week after the attack on Iraq and Frum’s article:

I feel constrained to identify myself as a Korean War-vintage Army officer (non-combat) who has always supported our troops and prayed for their success during many wars. This war is no exception.

Dealing with statements about me even so calumnious as Frum’s might seem petty in time of war. But broader issues are at stake. Frum represents a body of conservative opinion that wants to delegitimize criticism from the Right of policy that has led to war against Iraq.

I noted in the column that Frum could not “find anything I ever have said to indicate hatred toward George W. Bush, much less my country.” Frum’s citations of me asserting that U.S. policy was too closely bound to Israel’s led me to write: “Implicitly, William F. Buckley’s prestigious and influential magazine is saying, that is unacceptable criticism from a conservative.”

That was the only mention in my March 24 column of National Review, and I said not a word to anyone of what I felt. But it was burning a hole in my heart. While I did not care what anybody as disreputable as Frum said of me, National Review’s complicity deeply grieved me. This was Bill Buckley’s vehicle that created the modern conservative movement. I had been reading the magazine since its inception in 1955, had been writing for it for more than thirty years and (with Geraldine) had traveled on two of its fund-raising cruises. But on the second cruise (to New England and Canada) just a month after the 9/11 attacks, I felt like odd man out with National Review staffers who sharply disagreed with my hesitancy to go to war against Islam.

Not everybody connected with National Review approved of the Frum article. Neal Freeman, long an important figure in the conservative movement and a close associate of Buckley, was a member of the magazine’s board of directors and unsuccessfully sought a public apology to me from NR. Bill Buckley himself sent me a nice e-mail: “You have to know how deeply I admire you. I’ve said it often enough in public.” He added: “We disagree on the animating spirit and strategic analysis in the matter of Gulf Storm 2, which has nothing to do with my public estimate of you as a great conservative figure.” That was closer to an apology than anything else from the magazine’s staff even though he said he agreed with Frum’s “larger points.”

I heard that Buckley and Rich Lowry, the thirty-one-year-old editor of National Review, had tried but failed to amend Frum’s article to separate me from the paleos. That was credible in the case of Buckley, who no longer micromanaged National Review. But I cannot imagine Lowry did not have the power to do anything he desired with the article. Unlike Buckley, Lowry sent me no commendation after publishing the Frum attack. I appeared with Buckley on a panel in the afternoon at National Review’s fiftieth anniversary celebration in 2005, but Lowry said nothing to me there or at the dinner that evening. Although there were no more articles in the magazine attacking me, NR staffers sniped at me via National Review Online.

I think the prevailing attitude at National Review was reflected in a column by William Rusher, the magazine’s retired publisher. Unlike Buckley he did not separate me from the paleos, whom he said had “started this fight” by claiming the neoconservatives had “hijacked the conservative movement.” Frum’s article, Rusher continued, “signals a firm alliance of the original [Buckleyite] conservatives and the neoconservatives against so-called paleoconservatism.” Rusher rejoiced that “this will make it a lot harder for such TV shows as ‘The McLaughlin Group’ and ‘The Capital Gang’ to peddle Buchanan and Novak, respectively, as representative generic conservatives on their panels. They are no such thing.” Rusher was reading us out of the conservative movement, with an implicit comment of “good riddance!”

As the NR Washington bureau chief, Kate O’Beirne must have known well in advance about the cover story. Kate was my Catholic godmother and I thought my friend. But I knew she disapproved mightily about my reluctance to go to war. On the Saturday night after Frum’s attack on me was published, before we went on the air for Capital Gang I asked Kate what she thought of Frum’s article. “Oh, Bob,” she said in her best New York theatrical style, “it’s so hard when two friends are fighting each other.” I cannot imagine an answer more distressing to me than to put me on the same level with a cheat and a liar. I never again raised the issue with Kate, for the sake of our professional relationship.

Neal Freeman was the only person at the magazine that I know of who publicly defended my position. He argued that I “had made a plausible case [on Iraq] and a wholly responsible contribution to the public conversation. The historical record has now confirmed that judgment” (as he wrote in the June 2006 issue of the American Spectator).

Freeman sought a brief apology for Frum’s article from National Review. Instead, after some weeks, the magazine published a mixed collection of comments about me. “The impression created by the ‘collection,’” Freeman wrote in 2006, “was that Novak was a controversial and deeply divisive figure within the community. The reality was that he was, after only WFB [William F. Buckley] himself, the most admired and influential conservative journalist in the country.”

Frum continues to write regularly for National Review Online, while Freeman left the magazine’s board when Buckley withdrew as the magazine’s proprietor. My three decades of writing book reviews, articles, and even cover stories for National Review came to an abrupt, unannounced conclusion.

         

THE PARACHUTE JUMP was my most publicized venture into the realm of Walter Mitty, but not the most difficult. I spent three days, April 9–11, 2003, at the Sebring, Florida, International Speedway trying to learn to drive racing cars.

I always loved driving cars fast. To start my junior year in college, my father bought me a used ’47 Mercury convertible, the first of eighteen convertibles I drove over a span of sixty years. In 1961, I bought a Corvette for $5,000 (about $34,000 in 2007 money), when my Wall Street Journal salary was $10,000 a year. The subsequent years were filled with fender benders and many, many speeding tickets. As an adult in Washington, my driver’s license was suspended twice for exceeding the point limit for speeding, and I had to join sullen teenagers in driver’s education class each time.

Although both my skills and my prudence as a driver were questionable, I long had fantasized about racing autos and once thought about driving my Corvette in amateur sport car races. But at age seventy-one thoughts of such competition were in the distant past when on July 18, 2002, Geraldine and I attended a black-tie spina bifida charity dinner at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington sponsored by Al Hunt and Judy Woodruff. The fund-raiser was held in conjunction with the first annual D.C. Grand Prix that coming weekend with world-class Formula One drivers competing on a course around RFK Stadium. A preliminary event would match celebrity drivers, including the actor William Shatner. One item on the live auction was a guaranteed spot in the second annual D.C. Grand Prix celebrity race, preceded by instruction at Sebring. I got caught up in a bidding contest with another nut, and won the prize for five thousand dollars, as Geraldine looked on in exasperation.

Washington, D.C., being Washington, D.C., the second annual Grand Prix never took place because citizens living near RFK Stadium objected to the roar of racing engines. I said I still wanted to get something for my five grand and insisted on taking my driver’s course even though now I would not be driving in a race.

At Sebring in April 2003, I was more than twenty-five years older than the next oldest student in the class of a dozen men and fifty-four years older than one of them. I also was, without argument, the worst driver in the class. I asked an instructor whether I was the worst driver he had ever taught. “No,” he said, “William Shatner was worse.”

But I improved. By the afternoon of the second day, all of us were driving solo on the raceway without an instructor in the second seat. To get through the three-and-one-half-mile Sebring raceway and its seventeen turns, I had to learn how to shift the six gears up and down. It was hard work just to drive one lap. In poor physical shape, I was exhausted at the end of the day after circling the track twenty times or more. Nobody could tell me race-car drivers were not athletes.

         

MAY 15, 2002, marked the fortieth anniversary of my column, an eternity for a column to endure. In four decades, I had collected enemies like barnacles and the conclusion of my May 15 column was a little defensive:

[T]his column has been called, before and after Evans retired, redbaiter, Arabist, Communist China (and U.S. corporate) apologist, labor-baiter, homophobe, warmonger, isolationist—and most recently, unpatriotic conservative. All these are base canards, but they reflect the tensions of our era. The truth is that in every 650-word column, we were reporters.

I had alerted the Sun-Times about the coming milestone, but nothing was laid on as the weeks went by. Finally, I was told publisher David Radler had such a busy schedule that he could not come to Washington to host a party until June 18. A reception and sit-down dinner at the Army and Navy Club did not compare with the gala twenty-fifth anniversary party at the Willard hosted by the Sun-Times’s previous publisher Bob Page. But it was a nice affair, well attended by the political and journalistic communities.

The party could have been held on the actual anniversary date of May 15, however, because David Radler did not show. Part of the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by Radler at the expense of the Sun-Times while gutting the paper’s newsgathering capabilities was his private executive jet. Radler had a habit of delaying until the last minute before heading for the airport. He was told June 18 that bad weather was coming to Chicago and he ought to get an early start, but he delayed until it was too late. I did not miss him, and I don’t think he was desperately unhappy to miss me.

Karl Rove was there, as he regularly accepted my invitations. He pinned on one of the large campaign-style buttons proclaiming “I’m a source not a target” that were distributed at the party and was photographed, wearing the button, with me. That produced a picture I am sure he would have preferred never to have been taken but was published repeatedly after the CIA leak story broke.

The speakers that evening mostly poked fun at me, and they included Fred Hiatt, one of the five editorial page editors of the Washington Post for whom I have written. But Fred made one serious remark. He revealed that when he took over the Post’s editorial page in 2000 at age forty-five, he wondered whether it was worth continuing to publish this old right-wing columnist. After reading the column more closely, Hiatt said, he found it was worthwhile because it was based on reporting and always contained something new. I thought it was just about the nicest professional compliment ever paid me. I soon would be entering a stage of my long career where compliments would be in short supply.