Robert Novak: "No Friends -- Just Sources and Targets."
Robert Novak, the legendary Washington reporter who died today, was often credited with the aphorism: “I have no friends. I have only sources and targets.” I was one of those targets. I have written about that experience elsewhere, and today is not the day to recapitulate it. Robert Novak was respected and liked by many, and their memories of him are the memories that deserve hearing today.
But there is one thing about Robert Novak that I have had in mind for some time, and today seems the appropriate moment to say it.
Novak was one of the people I discussed in a still-controversial 2003 article for National Review, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.”
That piece analyzed a group of conservatives so radically alienated from their country that not even the events of 9/11 could rally them to her cause. It was very grimly ironic that so many conservatives would denounce the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for preaching “the chickens have come home to roost” after the terrorist attack. The man who would later become the first editor of Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine wrote exactly those words on September 14, 2001.
I stand by that article to this day, and I stand by the specific passages about Robert Novak. But in one respect the article did him an injustice, and today is as good a time as any to correct it.
Robert Novak for all his faults was never an unpatriotic American. I didn’t call him that in the article, but the title included him by understandable and inescapable implication. That was unjust, and the subtitle of the piece – “A War Against America” – which I didn’t see until it was too late to alter – was even more unfair to Novak. I have regretted for some time not being more precise in my criticism of him, and it’s no excuse for my fault that he never regretted being imprecise or worse in his criticisms of others.