(UPDATE: Great minds continue to think alike, and I published this post unaware of my colleague Robert Nedelkoff’s just-prior notice of this unhappy turn of events.)
One reads today’s typically insightful Bob Novak column with the knowledge that he was rushed to a Boston hospital yesterday and diagnosed with a brain tumor.
He issued a statement: “I will be suspending my journalist work for an indefinite but, God willing, not too lengthy period.”
For decades Bob Novak has been the man liberals love to hate — at least partly because he’s so damned good at what he does. No one who wants to know what is going on behind the scenes in Washington can fail to read him.
Less well known are the many stories —all admiring and some even affectionate— from liberal reporters who respect his continuing dedication to the old fashioned school of shoe leather on the ground reporting, and who have benefited from his encouragement and help as long as they were working to uncover a fact rather than grind an ax.
The superbly-sourced insider book he wrote with Roland Evans about the first years of the Nixon administration —Nixon in the White House: The Frustration of Power— is an excellent example of contemporary books by journalists as the second drafts of history.
His recently-published informative and entertaining memoir The Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years of Reporting in Washington— will be published in paperback in September.