The best story that Bob Novak broke during Watergate was about the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on a tape, and he got it the same way he got many of his scoops in those days. He met a friendly source at the fashionable Sans Souci restaurant, had a couple of drinks and a meal, and then walked back to his office and wrote what he’d been told. Novak wasn’t the sort of reporter who ambushed targets returning to their apartments at midnight or who met with sources in underground parking garages. He had a deserved reputation for very hard work, but his idea of clandestine reporting was to reserve a table at a second-rate restaurant where he wasn’t likely to run into any of his friends.

It was John Lindsay of Newsweek who dubbed him “The Prince of Darkness,” and it had less to do with his pugnacious conservatism than with his gloomy pessimism about what he considered the sorry state of the country. It also was Lindsay who joked that the buzzing noise on the tape Novak wrote about wasn’t an attempt to scramble the evidence but just Nixon running around the Oval Office in his bumblebee suit. That’s a story not repeated in this book, which would have benefited from a little more levity.

Novak says that he did “fastidious” reporting on Watergate, and that the notion that he and Rowland Evans, his longtime partner in the “Evans & Novak” column, were apologists for Nixon is a liberal canard. In fact, they wrote almost nothing at all about Watergate between the time of the break-in and the start of the congressional hearings a year later. Novak’s biggest scoop came seventeen months after the burglars were caught. It wasn’t until he was told by another trusted source in another fashionable restaurant...

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