Financial News

Bob Novak, a fixture in Washington print and television political journalism for nearly half a century, died on Tuesday from the consequences of a brain tumour at the age of 78. Prior to announcing his retirement in July last year when his illness was diagnosed, he had been the longest-running regular political columnist in the business, spanning 45 years.

His best work was always in mining the inner seams of the Republican Party, with which he was ideologically aligned after an upbringing as a conservative Democrat. He was particularly adept at picking up murmurings of discontent from right-wing rank and file members of Congress, demonstrating old shoe-leather reporting skills that far outweighed his limited talents as an often abrasive TV commentator.

His penultimate brush with fame was as the journalist who revealed to the world in 2004 the identity of Valerie Plame, the once-covert CIA (Milan: CIA.MI - news) employee married to Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who publicly questioned the rationale for going to war in Iraq. That tangled skein eventually led to the criminal conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to vice-president Dick Cheney.

His final notoriety was more mundane and sad. In July last year, he knocked over wit h his car and broke the shoulder of a pedestrian, a homeless person, at an intersection in Washington. He claimed no knowledge of the accident, for which he was issued a minor citation, and days later revealed his brain tumour.

Robert David Sanders Novak, sometimes known as the Prince of Darkness, as was Richard Perle, his neo-conservative foreign policy contemporary, was born in Joliet, Illinois, on February 26, 1931, into a Jewish family (he converted to Catholicism in the 1960s).

He attended the University of Illinois but graduated one credit short of a degree (a deficit the University made up 40 years later). He joined the Associated Press in its Indianapolis bureau, was transferred to Washington and moved to the Wall Street Journal as chief congressional correspondent.

In 1963 he founded, with Rowland Evans, Inside Report, a political gossip tip-sheet. It went through various titular modifications over the years and when Evans (EVAN.PK - news) retired in 1993 he became the solo partner, writing under his own byline. The column was syndicated by the Chicago Sun-Times (1832.HK - news) , which became his journalistic home, but it appeared in newspapers all over the country, most prominently in the Washington Post (NYSE: WPO - news) .

Already a frequent performer on the weekend TV political shows, the advent of 24 hour cable television news in the 1980s widened his horizons and for years he was a co-host on CNN's weeknight Crossfire, which set notionally liberal journalists against conservatives, often Mr Novak, in faux-confrontational argument. In 2005, CNN suspended him for swearing and then walking off the set on another show and he signed with the Fox network, more his ideological home.

Although television provided him with a megaphone, he was most at home, and most regarded, in Washington, with its many, often peculiar, political circles and salons. When he strayed beyond the patch he knew best, the conservative movement, he often got things wrong, most recently in July when he reported that John McCain would announce the choice of a running mate when Barack Obama was on an overseas trip. He confessed to being misled, a rare admission.