WASHINGTON — Robert Novak, the longtime syndicated columnist and television commentator who was at the center of a furor late in his career as the first journalist to disclose the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, died Tuesday. He was 78.
Novak died at his home in Washington after battling brain cancer, his wife, Geraldine, said. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in July 2008.
Novak was a conservative co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” and other politcal talk shows on the network, for years, and had been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for decades. Later, he was a contributor to Fox News.
He got his nickname “Prince of Darkness” from friend and fellow journalist John Lindsay of The Washington Post and Newsday, who was struck by Novak’s pessimistic view of the future of Western civilization.
Novak’s Plame column for July 14, 2003, set off a Washington storm in which White House officials, famous journalists and CIA sources became part of a courtroom spectacle that was played out in the world’s media.
Before it was over, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, and the controversy had exposed journalists’ coziness with official sources and tarnished the reputations of two key administration figures — political guru Karl Rove and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — who confessed to leaking Plame’s identity to reporters. President George W. Bush later commuted Libby’s 2 1/2-year sentence.
Even more telling, the controversy exposed the president’s men as so preoccupied with selling the war in Iraq that they were willing to compromise Plame’s position at the Central Intelligence Agency in an effort to discredit her husband, a former U.S. envoy to Baghdad who had become a critic of the war.
After taking a CIA- sponsored trip to Niger, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson concluded that the African nation had no “yellowcake” uranium, dousing administration claims — which Bush had mentioned in his 2003 State of the Union address — that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had been purchasing material from Niger to make weapons of mass destruction.
Eventually Plame left her job at the CIA, and she and her husband settled in Santa Fe, N.M. As for Novak, he kept on writing the newspaper column he had started with Rowland Evans in 1963.
“Judging it on the merits, I would still write the story,” Novak wrote in his 2007 memoir, “The Prince of Darkness.” Noting that there was no debate about the column’s news value or accuracy, he added, “I broke no law and endangered no intelligence operation. Mrs. Wilson was not a covert operative in 2003 but a desk-bound CIA analyst at Langley, Va.”
But given all the heat — and the tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees — that the case produced, Novak said that “I probably should have ignored what Armitage told me about Mrs. Wilson.”
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