Robert David Sanders Novak was an American syndicated columnist, journalist, television personality, author, and conservative political commentator.
84 Facts About Robert Novak
2.
Robert Novak teamed up with Rowland Evans in 1963 to start Inside Report, which became the longest running syndicated political column in US history and ran in hundreds of papers.
3.
Robert Novak wrote for numerous other publications such as Reader's Digest.
4.
Robert Novak succumbed to the disease on August 18,2009, after having returned home to spend his last days with his family.
5.
Robert Novak's colleagues nicknamed Novak the "Prince of Darkness", a description that he embraced and later used as a title for his autobiography.
6.
Robert Novak started out with moderate or liberal views, but these shifted right-ward over time.
7.
Robert Novak broke several major stories in his career, and he played a role in media events such as the Plame affair.
8.
Robert Novak was born on February 26,1931, in Joliet, Illinois, the son of Jane Sanders and Maurice Robert Novak, a chemical engineer.
9.
Robert Novak's parents were secular Jews who had little interaction with their local Jewish community and rarely attended religious services.
10.
Robert Novak suffered from chronic bronchitis through his early childhood, which led his mother to drive him to and from school instead of letting him walk.
11.
Robert Novak loved to tease, offend, and shock his family from an early age, and he later compared himself to French rebel Bertran de Born.
12.
Robert Novak's father had attended the college, and he later remarked that "I was an Illini from birth".
13.
Robert Novak became a brother of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, at the time a mostly Jewish college fraternity, while attending the University of Illinois.
14.
Robert Novak continued gaining journalism experience as a sports writer for the Daily Illini, the college's student newspaper.
15.
In 1993 a college Dean determined that four mandatory physical education classes that Robert Novak had gone through for no credit should constitute enough credit hours, and Robert Novak received his bachelor's degree.
16.
Robert Novak later stated that he had fully expected to die in the service.
17.
Robert Novak was transferred to Lincoln, Nebraska, and then to Indianapolis, Indiana, covering the two state legislatures in his reporting.
18.
In 1957, Robert Novak was transferred to Washington, DC, where he reported on Congress.
19.
Robert Novak left the AP to join the DC bureau of The Wall Street Journal in 1958, covering the Senate.
20.
Robert Novak rose to the rank of chief congressional correspondent in 1961.
21.
Robert Novak generally did his work without using a tape recordings or paper notes, relying just on his detailed memory.
22.
In 1963 Robert Novak teamed up with Rowland Evans, a former Congressional correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, to create the Inside Report, a newspaper column published six times a week.
23.
Robert Novak's experience covering the Six-Day War in the field influenced his beliefs towards Evans' pro-Palestinian sympathies.
24.
Robert Novak continued the column after Evans's departure on May 15,1993.
25.
On February 4,2009, Robert Novak announced he was ending ENPR's publication.
26.
Robert Novak became a regular panel member of the syndicated show The McLaughlin Group in 1982, starring alongside McLaughlin as well as Robert Novak's friend Jack Germond.
27.
Robert Novak sparred frequently with McLaughlin despite the fact that they both held similar political views.
28.
Robert Novak established a public image as a combative debater on the program.
29.
Robert Novak later became the executive producer of Capital Gang on CNN, which featured him as a panelist on the show and included his friends Al Hunt and Mark Shields.
30.
Robert Novak took over as host of Crossfire from Pat Buchanan.
31.
Critics later charged that Robert Novak had done so to avoid discussing recent developments in the Valerie Plame affair on-air.
32.
Fox News had confirmed one week earlier that Robert Novak had signed a contract to do unspecified work for the network.
33.
Robert Novak's memoirs, entitled Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years Reporting in Washington, were published in July 2007 by Crown Forum, a division of Random House.
34.
At his height, Robert Novak was one of the five most read columnists in the US Throughout his career, Robert Novak wrote for numerous other publications, serving notably as a contributing editor for Reader's Digest.
35.
Robert Novak appeared on NBC's program Meet the Press over 200 times.
36.
Robert Novak served as a longtime CNN television personality, and he appeared intermittently on Fox News after his August 2005 departure from CNN.
37.
Robert Novak played a role among many other reporters in Timothy Crouse's seminal nonfiction book The Boys on the Bus that described reporters covering the lead-up to the 1972 Presidential election.
38.
Robert Novak frequently visited his alma mater and interacted with students, establishing a scholarship in his name to support English and rhetoric majors in 1992.
39.
Robert Novak was the 2001 winner of the National Press Club's 'Fourth Estate Award' for lifetime achievement in journalism as well.
40.
Robert Novak thought my weakness was that if I could get an exclusive story, I would jump at it, bite at it and not be as careful as I should be.
41.
Robert Novak was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln by the governor of Illinois in 1999 in the area of communications.
42.
Robert Novak made himself more of a target than he had to be by refusing to be a source.
43.
Robert Novak broke the story in his column, which resulted in a government scandal.
44.
Later, when in 2001 FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested and revealed to have been working for first the Soviets and then the Russians for 22 years, betraying American agents to their deaths, Novak admitted that Hanssen had been a primary source for some of those accusations.
45.
On July 12,2006, Robert Novak published a column at Human Events stating:.
46.
In 2008 an unrepentant Robert Novak said in an interview with Barbara Matusow from the Nation Ledger:.
47.
Robert Novak took on a pro-Palestinian stance in the conflict, often criticizing Israel.
48.
Robert Novak has met with several Palestinian Authority officials, including former Education Minister and Hamas leader Nasser al-Shaer.
49.
Robert Novak praised former president Jimmy Carter for likening Israeli policy toward the Palestinians to "apartheid" in Israel.
50.
Robert Novak once said that his opinions on Israel caused the greatest amount of his hate mail.
51.
Robert Novak viewed this as understandable, saying "Israel is so important to Jewish people and its preservation is so vital".
52.
Robert Novak has claimed that, to rebut this criticism, he took the senator to lunch after the campaign and had asked whether he could identify him as the source, but the senator said he would not allow his identity to be revealed.
53.
On July 15,2007, Robert Novak disclosed on Meet the Press that the unnamed senator was Thomas Eagleton.
54.
Robert Novak was a registered Democrat, despite his conservative political views.
55.
Robert Novak held more centrist views in his early career, and he supported the Democratic presidential candidacies of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, of whom he was a friend.
56.
Robert Novak later stated that reading Whittaker Chambers' book Witness changed his views from moderate-to-liberal to a strident anticommunism.
57.
Robert Novak's views turned further rightward through the 1970s, but Robert Novak remained strongly critical toward Ronald Reagan and his supply side economics in the early 1980s.
58.
Robert Novak changed his mind after debating economics with Reagan face to face, and he later wrote that Reagan was one of the very few politicians that he ever respected.
59.
Robert Novak strongly supported wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Grenada, but he took an anti-interventionist stance after that.
60.
Robert Novak was a hard-line social conservative as well, holding anti-abortion and anti-divorce views.
61.
Robert Novak generally tended toward low-tax, small-government libertarian views, but he did not always agree with mainstream Republicans; in particular, he opposed the Iraq War.
62.
The Daily Telegraph stated that Robert Novak felt "glee" at starting interparty fighting.
63.
In July 2007, Robert Novak expressed support for Ron Paul's bid for the presidency.
64.
Robert Novak's statement prompted a rejoinder from Novak and defenses by other commentators.
65.
Robert Novak briefly attended Unitarian and then Methodist services at the behest of his first and second wives, but he was not interested in either faith.
66.
Robert Novak was introduced to Catholic Christianity in the early 1980s when his friend Jeffrey Bell, a Republican political consultant and former Reagan aide, gave him some books on the Catholic faith.
67.
At that time, Robert Novak had nearly died from spinal meningitis.
68.
Robert Novak then started to go to Mass regularly and decided to convert a few years later.
69.
Robert Novak asked her if she was Catholic and she asked him the same.
70.
Robert Novak said he had been going to Mass each Sunday for the last four years, but had not converted.
71.
In May 1998 Robert Novak was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 67 and became a Traditionalist Catholic.
72.
Andrew Sullivan claimed that Robert Novak was a member of Opus Dei.
73.
On July 23,2008, Robert Novak received a police citation for failing to yield a right of way to an 86-year-old pedestrian, Don Clifford Liljenquist, who was struck by Robert Novak's 2003 Corvette in slow-moving traffic and taken to a hospital, where he was treated for minor injuries.
74.
Robert Novak drove approximately one block from the scene before being flagged down by a cyclist who had witnessed the accident and then called police.
75.
Robert Novak said that he was unaware that a collision had occurred until being informed by eyewitnesses.
76.
On July 27,2008, four days after the car accident, Robert Novak was admitted to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
77.
Robert Novak tendered his resignation from his column on August 4,2008, after revealing that the prognosis on his tumor was considered "dire".
78.
On February 4,2009, Robert Novak announced in his newsletter, the Evans-Robert Novak Political Report, that the biweekly newsletter would be coming to an end due to his illness.
79.
Robert Novak converted to Catholicism in May 1998 after his wife, Geraldine, did so.
80.
Robert Novak had two children, a daughter and a son.
81.
Robert Novak participated in a charity car race in Sebring, Florida, which he won.
82.
Robert Novak was a member of the Terrapins Club booster organization.
83.
Robert Novak died on August 18,2009, at the age of 78, due to complications from a brain tumor.
84.
Robert Novak was interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring, Maryland.