Not Quite To Rest-In-Peace

Robert Novak is dead.

And the NYTimes leaves it to the very end of their obit to remind us that he was born Jewish:

Mr. Novak grew up Jewish and was in a Jewish fraternity in college, but, like Mr. Evans, he was critical of Israel. He prompted a firestorm when he said
the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 had been provoked in part by the United States’ closeness to Israel.

After largely ignoring religion and dabbling in Unitarianism, Mr. Novak, in 1998, at age 67, converted to Roman Catholicism. In a ceremony, Msgr. Peter Vaghi proclaimed that the “prince of darkness” had been transformed into a “child of light.”

Senator Daniel Moynihan of New York, who was in attendance, warned against jumping to conclusions. “Well, we’ve now made Bob a Catholic,” Mr. Moynihan said, according to Washingtonian magazine. “The question is, Can we make him a Christian?”

John Podhoretz's story:

Robert D. Novak, the controversialist whose combination of hard-line conservatism and hard-charging reporting made his column essential reading for nearly four decades, has died. Bob went to his grave a Catholic, though he had been born a Jew, and passed through mainline Protestantism on the way. He had, as they say, “issues” with his Jewish roots, expressed largely in a hostility to Israel that made little sense given the overall nature of his views on a wide range of subjects—he was, for instance, an intimate of and close friend to the late Jack Kemp and agreed with Kemp on nearly every particular, but Kemp was a supporter of Israel, and Novak an opponent of it.

In 1989, when I was an editor at the Washington Times, I assigned a reporter a profile on Richard Darman, then George H.W. Bush’s budget director. There had been rumors that Darman had been born a Jew, and I asked her to check them out in the pre-Internet days. She uncovered a news story in the Providence, Rhode Island, newspaper about Darman’s bar mitzvah, of all things. And when she asked him about it, Darman was deeply unsettled, asked her not to publish anything about it, said he would be her best source, said it would devastate his wife and children. She came back and reported this to me, and I said we would be sure to make it the lead of the piece. That weekend, on his CNN show, Bob Novak denounced the piece as the “Shame of the Week,” an act of injustice against Darman and his privacy and the sanctity of his family.

Debbie Schlussel:

He shamelessly announced on “Crossfire”: "There are many Americans who support HAMAS, and I am one of them".

(UPDATE: see here for this ---

NOVAK: I think—well, of course, the Israelis have been killing all kinds of leaders in the Palestinian movement. But I think . . .

O’BEIRNE: It was self-defense.

NOVAK: Oh, self-defense? It’s an attack...

But I am just amazed—I am always amazed how American conservatives can get involved in this absolutely mindless support of the transigent (ph) Israeli policy. And there’s one other thing . . .

...(CROSSTALK)

...CARLSON: The Palestinians throw bombs into pizza parlors and cafés and discos. They killed a civilian yesterday. The Israelis killed a senior official of Hamas. He is, himself, a terrorist.

NOVAK: Well, why do you call him a terrorist? I mean, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

CARLSON: No . . .

NOVAK: They’re trying to get their own land in the . . .

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: Bob, you’re the only people (sic)—you’re the only person who would call Hamas freedom fighters.

NOVAK: Oh, no; people all over the world do.

One more:

Matthew Cooper at the Atlantic (and found here):

Our lives were famously entangled. Shortly after Novak published the name of Valerie Wilson–or Valerie Plame as he identified her by her maiden name–I wrote a piece for Time called “A War of Wilson?” Novak had acted as a transmission belt for the malevolent leakers who sought to trash former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had the temerity to criticize the war and report that he had been to the African country of Niger at the behest of the CIA where his wife worked. My piece noted that the trashing of Wilson continued. My goal was not to serve as an open mike for the leakers–which Novak did–but to show them up.

The rest is First Amendment history. . . . While a slew of journalists–myself, Tim Russert, Judith Miller, Walter Pincus, Bob Woodward and others–would be caught up in the case, a constant refrain was What Happened to Novak?

Miller was jailed for 85 days until she divulged her source, Scooter Libby, who granted her permission to speak. I avoided prison because Libby and Karl Rove also gave me permission to talk. But all along Novak said nothing, for two years he maintained a Greta Garbo like silence. No one knew why he wasn’t in legal and mortal jeopardy until long after the case was over, when he revealed that he had cooperated with the prosecutor from day one.

The decision to become a government witness isn’t an easy one and in the end, every journalist involved in the case became one. So Novak’s sin wasn’t the cooperation but his total unwillingness to tell his readers, and those of us facing jail, what he had done. On one level, it’s amusing that Mr. Tough Guy caved without putting up any kind of fight. But on another it’s just disheartening that he could go for so long without answering the basic question about whether or not he was cooperating. According to Novak he chose to remain silent because the prosecutor had asked him to and because his lawyer advised such. But all of us in the case were asked by Patrick Fitzgerald to keep quiet and we were under no such obligations, which is why I wrote two first hand pieces about the case here and here. A prosecutor must keep grand jury testimony a secret. A participant need not. My lawyers thoroughly believed that our case would have been strengthened had we known whether Novak had testified. Novak chose not to share that little tidbit with his readers or the other journalists suffering through the case–the case, really, that he started by disclosing the name of a CIA operative. Throughout the case he pooh poohed the moral implications of what he had done, made it seem as though Plame was a clerk when, in fact, the CIA thought enough of her outing that they brought a criminal referral to the Department of Justice and denied that the CIA tried to wave him off writing about her. The case was demoralizing for everyone involved but it seemed worse because of Novak’s failure to disclose his role until it was all over.