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 had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in July 2008.
Novak's Plame column for July 14, 2003, set off one of those perfect Washington storms, 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.
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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 CIA 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 purchased 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 column he had started with partner Rowland Evans in 1963.
Evans was a fellow journalist who was as patrician as Novak was hardscrabble, as much a part of the Washington establishment as Novak was not. Evans, then 41, played the gentleman reporter while Novak, 32, was the scruffy rookie. They worked a yin-and-yang combination that won them syndication in many major newspapers.
They began with CNN when the network launched in 1980, hosting "Evans and Novak." Derided by liberal critics as "Errors and No Facts," they were actually more reporters than commentators and had their share of scoops over the years.
After Evans retired in 1993, Novak continued the column and was a regular on several CNN shows.
