Just last year, the investigation was a laughing matter for Novak. He appeared onstage at the annual dinner at the Gridiron Club, the exclusive inner circle of the Washington press corps, of which he is a long-standing member. As a gag, Novak was attired as former diplomat Wilson, wearing top hat and cutaway coat, singing to the tune of "Once I Had a Secret Love": "Novak had a secret source who lived within the great White House ... so he outed a girl spy the way princes of darkness do ... Now John Ashcroft asks Bob who and how, could be headed to the old hoosegow." He belted out his last line with panache: "Cross the right wing you may try, Bob Novak's coming after you." The press corps hooted and clapped. They loved that Bob.

Novak began in one era of journalism and helped pioneer another. His career spanned the transformation of the Washington correspondent into media star, from front-page grub to buck-raking showboat. Novak came to Washington from the hinterlands in 1956 as a young man to report on the Associated Press' congressional beat. The Wall Street Journal snatched him up as its Senate reporter, drawing the eye of Rowland Evans, a writer on the New York Herald-Tribune. Evans was looking for a partner, what journalists call a "legman," to produce a syndicated column. Novak, the wire service machine, fit the bill.

Evans and Novak's column was highly successful, and together they coauthored valuable books on the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. (Their later book on Ronald Reagan was a rush job that was not of the same quality, as Evans freely admitted to me.) The polished, Yale-educated Evans was a smooth social presence within the Georgetown set. Novak was someone he worked with every day but rarely, if ever, saw in the evening. The two men were an odd couple, not because of any divergence of political perspective, but of class.

Novak did not truly come into his own until the advent of cable television altered the character of the Washington press corps. Once the archetype of the old-fashioned shoe-leather reporter and political inside dopester, Novak's identity changed overnight when he appeared on CNN on its opening week in 1980. The raw no-name network saw in Novak a symbol of credibility and authority. In addition to his frequent appearances on news programs, he and Evans were given a weekly interview show. Two years later, Novak became a regular on "The McLaughlin Group," which broke the mold of TV talk shows. It was not a calm, modulated, informative round table of polite reporters but a food fight. Novak thrived in the format, emerging as a vituperative, dismissive and mean-spirited bully, a cartoonlike character who attracted and repelled viewers. CNN promptly rewarded him with another show, "Crossfire," after the initial conservative host, Pat Buchanan, left. The liberal side of the program was filled with a shifting cast, while Novak was its constant centerpiece.

Although both Novak and McLaughlin were conservatives, they had an abrasive relationship. In the final analysis, Novak was jealous that McLaughlin was the sole proprietor of the program and reaped the profits. So he pulled aside the other figures on the show -- his friends Al Hunt, then bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, and Mark Shields, the columnist -- and made them an offer to join a new talk show. Novak cut a deal with CNN that made him the executive producer and star of "The Capital Gang."

Novak had now become a cottage industry. Evans retired, but Novak's column remained syndicated to more than 300 newspapers, including the Washington Post. The Evans and Novak show turned into "The Novak Zone." Novak was ubiquitous on CNN. "He's Novak -- he can do what he wants," a CNN source told me. He was also a frequent guest on the political panel of NBC's "Meet the Press." He continued the political newsletter he had begun with Evans, an important stream of income. He charged high fees to business executives to attend his retreats, which featured leading politicians who appeared at Novak's beck and call. They understood the implicit exchange for positive coverage.

Novak's columns always play favorites, ranging from neoconservative Richard Perle to supply-sider Richard Gilder. Gilder, who has run the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee, also happens to be Novak's investment advisor, in charge of his financial portfolio. Twice, Karl Rove was dismissed from George H.W. Bush's campaign, in 1980 and 1992, respectively, for leaking to Novak. Those who agree to serve as sources for him receive protection from his wrath and an outlet when their interests and Novak's coincide. "Look, I'm not David Broder," Novak told Amy Sullivan of the Washington Monthly. "I'm not one of the real good guys. They try to make things nicer. That's not my deal."

Novak lives and breathes the nuts and bolts of politics, so it was somewhat startling when he held a public conversion to Catholicism from Judaism in 1998. He was raised as a Jew in Joliet, Ill., but his columns have been almost uniformly hostile to Israel. No one had ever seen his spiritual side before. His conversion ceremony at St. Patrick's in Washington was packed with invited guests, liberals and conservatives alike, with whom he has appeared on talk shows, from Fred Barnes to Margaret Carlson.

Novak's conversion was more than met the eye, as he became a member of the tightly knit far-right Catholic coterie clustered in Washington. Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Catholic writer, observed: "Perhaps the least-known aspect of Robert Novak's public persona is that he is a convert not just to Catholicism but to its most hard-line sect, Opus Dei. It helps explain Novak's occasional, weird digressions into defenses of the most far-right social causes, and also why those columns appear, without this context, to be, well, slightly unhinged."

Just as the children of many notables in Washington land jobs in politics or government, so Novak's son Alex surfaced as the marketing director of Regnery Publishing, the conservative book imprint. Since Alex has held his position, his father has promoted four Regnery books in his columns and on TV shows. During the 2004 campaign, Novak went all-out to hype Regnery's big product of the season, "Unfit for Command," a smear job of John Kerry's war record, by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Regnery's owner, Tom Phillips, also owns Eagle Publishing, which is the distributor of Novak's newsletter.

For years, Novak has used his various platforms to promote whatever causes and individuals he deems fit. Along the way, he has fostered any number of false assertions, accusations and innuendoes without any consequences to his standing in Washington. In 1989, he published a malicious rumor promoted by operatives at the Republican National Committee about the supposed sexual orientation of then House Majority Leader Tom Foley, referring to "the alleged homosexuality of one Democrat who might move up the succession ladder." Foley felt prompted to declare: "I am, of course, not a homosexual."

After the death of I.F. Stone, the iconoclastic, independent journalist of the left, Novak said on CNN that Stone had been a paid agent of the KGB. Author Eric Alterman, a columnist for the Nation and a friend of Stone's, wrote, "Since Stone was dead by this time, however, Novak was free to make his McCarthyite accusation without fear of a libel suit. I wrote to the president of CNN shortly thereafter to ask for a correction, but received no response."

Throughout 1997, Novak relied upon a source who had in fact been in the pay of the KGB, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was apprehended and convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Novak used Hanssen as his principal source for stories attempting to prove that Attorney General Janet Reno was covering up Clinton campaign finance scandals. The innuendo that Novak published turned out to be a flow of disinformation. In 2002, he wrote a column divulging his dependence on the spy. "To be honest to my readers, I must reveal it."

But none of this caused any disquiet at the newspaper that syndicates his column, the Chicago Sun-Times; at CNN; or at his most important outlet, the Washington Post. His friends and acquaintances continued their celebration of Novak the celebrity. In 2001, he was the honored guest at one of Washington's major charity roasts. When the media stars had finished their mild ribs, he took the stage. Above all, he said, he had learned one primary lesson from his long Washington experience: "There are two kinds of people in this town -- sources ... and targets, and you better make up your mind which you are."

For Novak, the Plame leak was business as usual. The only extraordinary wrinkle was the appointment of a special prosecutor. But immediately after Patrick Fitzgerald was named to the post, Novak's colleagues rallied to the defense of his reputation. Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchor, declared: "All of us who know Bob Novak know he's one of the best reporters in the business and has been for nearly half a century." The editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, Steve Huntley, reminded everyone that Novak remains "one of the best reporters in this country." But no testimonial, Gridiron Club dinner or charity roast had the power to lift the pressure that prompted Novak to walk off the set of his beloved CNN last week.

As Novak now attempts to fend off his pursuers, he resorts to his old bullying; he brandishes his status, invents new stories, and tries to bargain with the truth. With each failed effort, he has become more frantic, racing from pillar to post, from television talk show to syndicated column, tossing off ever more illogical and tortured alibis that only heighten suspicion of him. By plying more tricks of the trade, his patented tidbits of disinformation, he confirms the impression of petty squalor. Instead of escaping through the fog of his distortions, he rivets searchlights on his desperate flight.

The self-described "prince of darkness" appears blinded by the light. He cannot see himself as everyone else does. He has called so much attention to himself that he casts no shadow at all. He is completely exposed. He has become a fugitive who cannot find a safe house in the town that he thought was his bailiwick. His craven torment and wild flailing at his inability to halt his self-destruction might cast him as a Dostoevskian figure. But his absence of doubt deprives him of the depth of existential crisis. Bob Novak now resembles Gypo Nolan, the Judas of John Ford's classic 1935 movie, "The Informer," an IRA traitor on the run, used to the comfort of matey sycophants, but whom no one will shield and who unwittingly betrays himself in the end.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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