Eric Alterman wrote an interesting column in 1992 on the political sources, changing ideological commitments, and the political effects of the Evans and Novak columns over the years. Makes for interesting reading today.
msnbc.com
Part I: The Rest and the Rightest:
It is impossible to determine whether the pundits provided the cannon shots that softened up the underbelly of respectable Centrism or the cavalry that broke through the final line to victory. Certainly no soldier in the conflict was given a more prominent position from which to declare victory. And none seemed to relish the fight more than the Mutt n’ Jeff combination of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
The dynamic duo had begun writing their column back in 1963 as strictly a news-gathering enterprise. Evans, a Main-Line Philadelphian who wears custom-made suits and throws Alsop-like dinner parties, took care of the diplomatic beat. Novak, a beer-bellied tough-guy who buys his suits off the rack, wore out the shoe leather in the Capitol. The column was ideologically balanced, treating insider politics the way Popular Mechanics treats cars and Stereo Review treats tape decks. Novak may have slugged a New York Times reporter at the 1964 Republican convention, but he also slugged a Goldwater Republican for balance.
As with the Neocons, the duo’s flight to the hard right was a reaction to the incipient leftward forces which they termed “McGovernism.” In the three months just before the 1972 election, 37 of their 93 pre-election columns assaulted either McGovern or his political views, accusing him, among other things, of consorting with “zealots with long hair, bizarre costumes and peace signs.” This strategy coincided perfectly with the political direction mapped out personally by Nixon to destroy the McGovern campaign, by associating him with, “Abby [sic] Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Angela Davis, among others,” whose support of McGovern “should be widely publicized and used at every point.”
Owing to their excellent sourcing inside the political establishments of both parties, the columnists’ anti-McGovern rampages had a considerable effect on the coverage, of the 1972 election. In one of the most influential columns ever to be written during a presidential election, Evans and Novak helped coin the famous phrase, “acid, amnesty and abortion,” to describe McGovern’s political positions. The quote was attributed to “a liberal senator whose voting record differs little from McGovern.” The speaker warned that “Once middle America—Catholic middle America in particular—finds this out, he’s dead.” The “Triple As” slogan, as it came to be called, was picked up by Reston and given much wider circulation as a slogan for McGovern opponents. With the McGovern campaign, Evans and Novak leaped over the line that allegedly distinguished straight reporting from avowed partisanship. In the admiring words of the Communist Alexander Cockburn, the journalists took Mao’s advice and “put politics in command.”
The same tendencies that marked helped create the “Triple A” political firestorm were also at work in a column that would have an equally important effect on the Carter-Ford presidential election of 1976. In this case, the authors wrote a blistering attack on an Kissinger aide named Helmut Sonnenfeldt. According to an Evans and Novak report of March 22, “Intense debate was set off when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s right-hand man declared in a secret briefing that permanent ‘organic’ union between the Soviet Union and Western Europe is necessary to avoid World War III.” The column, based on a leak of Sonnenfeldt’s speech to a group of US diplomats in London, set off a political crisis for Kissinger both in Congress and inside the ethnic communities that Ford needed to sway to win the 1976 election. “Of all my columns,” Novak insists thirteen years later, “that is the one I am most proud of. It really showed the hypocrisy of the Kissinger State Department and it really nailed them.”
As Sonnenfeldt would later explain to a Congressional panel called to discuss the matter, however, his concept of an “organic relationship” was diametrically opposed the notion that the columnists sought to portray with the phrase, “permanent ‘organic’ union”—a phrase he never used. The speech implied a greater Soviet tolerance for diversity in Eastern Europe, rather than reliance upon the use of force.
As a result of the column, Sonnenfeldt and his patrons Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were ceaselessly attacked in the Eastern European ethnic media, and the KGB even picked it up to try to show the Roumanians and the Poles that the United States supported their subjugation. Candidate Ronald Reagan attacked Ford relentlessly for his support of Eastern Europe’s “permanent enslavement.” Finally, Ford was asked at his second debate with Jimmy Carter if he accepted the permanent domination of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” replied the soon-to-be ex-President.
Aside from its arguable electoral impact, the defection of Evans and Novak to the far-Right end of the spectrum was crucial in the shaping of insider political dialogue for a number of reasons. The fact that they were so powerfully wired into the main currents of the Republican party and the national security bureaucracy made their column impossible to ignore for inside dope purposes. Its appearance three times a week on the Washington Post op-ed page gave its far-Right ideological interpretations the establishment seal of approval. Moreover their breathless, Pearson-like prose, coupled with Novak’s well-rehearsed Joe Sixpack television persona, gave Washington insiders the impression that Evans and Novak spoke for (and with) that elusive silent majority for whom everyone in Washington always seemed to be looking. This fusion had the effect of softening up the Right-Wing borders of polite insider society, and creating an opening for their intellectual betters to exploit and expand.
Part II. Attack of the McLaughlinites:
Unlike McLaughlin, Novak was well-liked by his peers and it was generally understood that politics aside, he was a pretty harmless fellow. On the tube, however, the only clear difference between “Robert Novak” and Archie Bunker was that the former got more air time. Despite—or perhaps because of its bellicosity—The Novak character seemed to go over well in the heartland, earning Novak in the area of $7,500 a lecture. But the reason insiders continued to read his column was not the television shtick but his continued devotion to the kind of inside dope that political junkies mainline.
The Evans and Novak column played a crucial role in helping to form and execute what it called the “Reagan revolution.” As “pragmatist” battled “ideologue” for the limited attention span of the president, the column worked as a kind of tribal drum for the warrior faction. From David Stockman to Ollie North, important administration principals could read the column in the Post three mornings a week and determine their own standing in the grand struggle. Stockman told stories of posting notices on what he called the “Bob Novak Bulletin Board” in order to manufacture the appearance of a “David Stockman for OMB Director” movement. “At the time Mr. Novak wrote it, it was a movement of 3 or 4 people, if you include the minority of my staff that favored the idea,” wrote Stockman. By the time it was over, Stockman had the job and went on to become the most influential member of the Reagan cabinet.
Congressional bomb-throwers like Phil Graham, Malcolm Wallop, Jack Kemp and Newt Gringrich received millions worth of free public relations from the column. Barely a week went by without some “brave,” “tough,” “canny,” or “strong” action by one of these men, usually accompanied by some previously unrevealed tidbit designed to portray them in as favorable light as was humanly conceivable. Among the most historically significant of these morality plays was a column published in May, 1986, in which a hitherto unknown “star player in the long, hard fight to keep alive the Nicaraguan contras” found himself endangered by “the gray and faceless officials” of the Reagan National Security Council staff. Oliver North, about to be re-assigned back to the marine corps by his gray, faceless and certainly luckless, boss, John Poindexter, managed to retain his job in large measure as a result of the Evans and Novak column (along with another by Suzanne Garment of the Wall Street Journal). There, he could continue his sideline business of selling arms to the Ayatollah and funnelling the profits to the Nicaraguan contras undisturbed.
In most cases, Novak and his partner went to the trouble of getting most of their facts down right, only to explode them in a wildly imaginative interpretation. But they could be mighty careless at times. An unsuspecting reader who accepted everything Evans and Novak have reported in recent years would find himself believing, as Michael Massing once demonstrated, in the reality of a “direct Soviet intervention in Poland” during the 1981 Solidarity crisis; an “imminent move by the Soviets from Afghanistan into Pakistan” in September, 1984; and the sad fact that as of January, 1985, “Mikhail Gorbachev is no longer considered the heir apparent” in the Kremlin. Somehow, Novak’s popularity and influence only seemed to increase with the outlandishness of his views and reporting. |
