Hot On The Trail Of The Novak-Rove Connection
by Joe Gandelman
Don't you get the sensation now that the coming months may not be happy ones for White House political bigwig and world-class hiker Robert Novak when they open the newspapers and see the fruits of journalistic enterprise reporting like in today's New York Times?
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - These hot months here will be remembered as the summer of the leak, a time when the political class obsessed on a central question: did Karl Rove, President Bush's powerful adviser, commit a crime when he spoke about a C.I.A. officer with the columnist Robert D. Novak?
Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove, brace yourselves:
Whatever a federal grand jury investigating the case decides, a small political subgroup is experiencing the odd sensation that this leak has sprung before. In 1992 in an incident well known in Texas, Mr. Rove was fired from the state campaign to re-elect the first President Bush on suspicions that Mr. Rove had leaked damaging information to Mr. Novak about Robert Mosbacher Jr., the campaign manager and the son of a former commerce secretary.
Since then, Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove was the source, even as Mr. Mosbacher, who no longer talks on the record about the incident, has never changed his original assertion that Mr. Rove was the culprit.
"It's history," Mr. Mosbacher said last week in a brief telephone interview. "I commented on it at the time, and I have nothing to add."
But the episode, part of the bad-boy lore of Mr. Rove, is a telling chapter in the 20-year friendship between the presidential adviser and the columnist. The story of that relationship, a bond of mutual self-interest of a kind that is long familiar in Washington, does not answer the question of who might have leaked the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, to reporters, potentially a crime.
The self-interest point is a valid one that indeed goes beyond Rove/Novak. In journalism school they always hammered home the message: "A reporter is only as good as his sources." And a reporter's pride and joy was the big, fat Rolodex (TMV had a double one crammed with home and office names). These names and relationships of trust are what made newespaper careers. So Novak having a journalistic relationship by itself is not an issue; it's what may have done with that relationship. MORE:
But it does give a clue to Mr. Rove's frequent and complimentary mentions over the years in Mr. Novak's column, and to the importance of Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak to each other's ambitions.
Yes. Good sources often find they get good treatment. Some of it is intentional. Some of it is almost subliminal.
"They've known each for a long time, but they are not close friends," said a person who knows both men and who asked not to be named because of the investigation into a conversation by Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove in July 2003 about Ms. Wilson, part of a case that has put a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, in jail for refusing to testify to the grand jury.
The two men share a love of history and policy, as well as reputations as aggressive partisans and hotheads.
Bob Novak?? Karl Rove? Pshaw!
People who have been officially briefed on the case have said Mr. Rove was the second of two senior administration officials cited by Mr. Novak in his column of July 14, 2003, that identified Ms. Wilson by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and said she was a C.I.A. operative.
The larger question has been whether Mr. Rove might have been using the columnist to confirm Ms. Plame's identity to punish or undermine her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had accused the Bush administration of leading the nation to war with Iraq on false pretenses.
And so on. The fact that they've had a relationship for so long would suggest that if indeed Rove and Novak overstepped legalities in anyway they'll both be on the same wavelength to protect each other. Of course, as we've cautioned before, we really won't know the facts until the Special Prosecutor's work is done.
But the Novak/Rove relationship is not an unusual one for successful journalists; in fact, these kinds of close relationships are more often the rule than not. It's just what HAPPENS with them that could turn out to be unusual here...
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