Grim Reader, Aug. 21, 2009: Robert Novak, Don Hewitt and Kim Dae Jung
by Michael Schaffer
AUGUST 21, 2009 TAGS:
The Grim Reaper this week visited one of journalism’s angels, 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, as well as one of its devils — the self-described “Prince of Darkness,” syndicated columnist Robert Novak. Guess who earns the bigger obits?
A veteran conservative columnist, TV snarler, and three-piece-suited Beltway establishmentarian, Novak has a compelling story precisely because it involves so many roles. Reacting to his death, the Obitosphere balances analysis of his rise as a shoe-leather reporter, his status as an agenda-setting D.C. insider, his Dickensian public image and his involuntary late-life move from being a writer of news columns to being a subject of them. With stops in the vanishing world of political newsletters (Novak and reporting partner Rowland Evans wrote one of the most prominent such journals) and the earliest days of cable news (he was at CNN almost since its inception), not to mention the modern-day political freak show (he left the network after storming off the set during the Valerie Plame affair), Novak’s journalistic CV alone makes for interesting reading — especially for the journalists who decide which obits get the biggest play.
But Novak’s work as a reporter also draws criticism that makes for interesting reading. Novak’s obits are crowded with quotes from government bigwigs about the columnist’s reporting chops: In the Chicago Sun-Times’ obit, everyone, from the House Republican leader to Barack Obama’s chief of staff, testifies to his excellence. Those sorts of quotes will only add to the evidence for those, like Washington Post press critic Howard Kurtz, who say Novak was a congenital Beltway back-scratcher. “Novak regularly vacuumed up scraps and scoops from deep within the Republican Party,” Kurtz writes. “But his half-century career was also a monument to Washington insiderdom, to carrying coded messages for the sources he so assiduously courted.”
Then there’s the persona Novak cultivated. Novak “took great pleasure in playing the bad guy, the heavy, like guys in pro wrestling who come out all dressed in black,” Columbia University Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann tells Washington Post obituary writer Adam Bernstein. “It works with the medium to have a bad guy, and most journalists don’t want to do that.” And while the obits feature quotes from colleagues testifying to Novak’s generosity, Bernstein notes that the scowling caricature was “not too wide off the mark.” Online, a number of folks who’ve tussled with Novak offered their own evidence. “Novak was, to be perfectly honest about it, the least pleasant person I’ve ever interviewed,” writes Conor Clarke, who once profiled the columnist.
One thing Grim Reader would have liked to know more about: Novak’s conversion, at age 67, to Catholicism, one in a string of recent conversions by prominent conservatives. Most major-media obits mention it in passing; the Catholic News Agency has a longer piece.
Oddly, Novak’s obituarists are all over the place on how he got his Prince of Darkness nickname. The Los Angeles Times’ Johanna Neuman says the moniker was coined by a friend “who was struck by Mr. Novak’s pessimistic view of the future of Western civilization.” The Guardian’s Harold Jackson says it’s because Novak, with his long list of anonymous sources, was so skilled at keeping their identities in the dark. The Times of London digs up old quotes where Novak acknowledges being “dark complexioned and sinister looking” and having “something of the night” about him. (The New Republic, meanwhile, republishes a 22-year-old profile that links the term to Novak’s sourpuss political-debating persona.)
By contrast, it’s hard to get anyone to say anything especially bad about Hewitt, who invented the TV-magazine format and spawned countless imitators. “Even if you hadn’t read a book or a newspaper all week, if you saw ‘60 Minutes,’ the next morning at the water cooler, you could say, ‘I am informed,’” a former staffer with a rival program tells the Los Angeles Times. “It really became kind of a visceral attraction that people couldn’t miss.”
Over the years, Hewitt’s minions freed wrongfully jailed prisoners, busted politicians, and humanized celebrities. And though most obits cite its more notorious misses — everyone mentions the CBS decision to kill a 1995 story on a tobacco scandal, a wimp-out that inspired the Russell Crowe film The Insider — an appraisal by the New York Times’ Mike Hale says his success is more important: “What draws people to the show isn’t the sensationalism to which it has occasionally fallen victim but its stability.” Of course, that success may have led to Hewitt’s most troubling legacy: By demonstrating that a non-scripted show could be a ratings juggernaut, he paved the way for the current age of infotainment and reality TV.
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The death of former Korean President Kim Dae Jung gets a significant share of the Obitosphere’s attention this week. It was Kim’s “Sunshine policy” of reaching out to North Korea that first broke the ice between the peninsula’s two warring states. The policy, reversed after Kim left office and conservative successors tired of getting little in exchange for the trade and aid they were directing northward, seems to be undergoing a revival — an irony noted by the Economist, which dedicates its single weekly obit to Kim. “He wears the hint of a smile,” the magazine writes of the flower-bedecked portrait at Kim’s funeral. “As he might.”
American write-ups mainly focus on Kim’s role in inter-Korean statecraft. But the United Kingdom’s Guardian has the longest description of his emergence as a political dissident who survived torture and attempted assassination by South Korea’s former military regime, as well as his rise to become the first opposition candidate, and the first outsider to Seoul’s elite, elected the nation’s president. (The paper also doesn’t skimp on the corruption and blunders that characterized much of his rule.) Still, Grim Reader’s favorite Kim obit is the terse — but not hostile — notice from the Korean Central News Agency, official organ of the Communist Pyongyang regime. “Kim Dae Jung, ex-president of south Korea, regretfully passed away on Tuesday,” it says, leaving “south” uncapitalized. In a separate piece, Kim Jong Il expresses his regrets to Kim Dae Jung’s widow.
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There are a few nice write-ups about the life of Rose Friedman, an economist who co-authored two books with her husband, legendary conservative economist Milton Friedman. Devoted to one another, the Friedmans didn’t disagree about any major issues until the 2003 Iraq invasion, which happened shortly before Milton’s death: He opposed it, while the more strident Rose supported it, according to the New York Times. The Times’ headline writers, though, run into some vocabulary trouble in describing her role as her husband’s professional partner: “Rose Friedman, Economist and Collaborator, Dies at 98,” the topper reads, making it sound like the free marketer was also secretly working with some foreign occupying army. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the San Francisco Chronicle has a piece about left-wing lawyer Doris Walker, known for representing radical figure Angela Davis. Favorite detail: The former Communist Party member held 49ers season tickets for 50 years.
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In the world of music, the week’s biggest death was that of Les Paul — a guitarist less known for his own work than for building instruments that made him “the most influential rock guitarist ever,” according to Rolling Stone. A jazz musician, Paul invented the solid-body electric guitar, turning what had been a background instrument into one that made stars out of Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, and Slash, among other Les Paul devotees. (The magazine has a round-up of tributes from guitar heroes.) A Los Angeles Times obit notes high up that Paul’s invention of multi-track recording may have been even more important than his instruments in making rock into the soundtrack of the late 20th century.
Elsewhere in entertainment: Jazz drummer Rashied Ali is given the classic session-man send-off: All the obits list his most prominent accomplishment as steering fellow Philadelphian John Coltrane towards free jazz in the 1960s. ... The Memphis Commercial Appeal remembers legendary “Memphis sound” producer Jim Dickinson with a dramatically over-the-top lead: “The North Mississippi Allstars have lost their father, Bob Dylan has lost a ‘brother,’ rock and roll has lost one of its great cult heroes and Memphis has lost a musical icon with the death of Jim Dickinson.”… And, in the category of how to remember people famous for only one small thing, consider the obits for Ed Reimers, the actor known for telling commercial viewers that “You’re in good hands with Allstate,” then cupping his hands for emphasis. The Los Angeles Times makes a stab at describing his pre-Allstate career, but the numbers say it all: Two of the three people quoted are employees of the insurance firm. Headline writers, unsurprisingly, highlighted his “reassuring voice.”
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The Washington Post and the New York Times both remember Kenneth Bacon, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who became Pentagon spokesman under Bill Clinton before leading the advocacy group Refugees International. Though both pieces are largely laudatory, the Post does describe the one significant blemish on his career: During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bacon approved the release of negative information from the personnel file of scandal figure Linda Tripp, a Pentagon employee; he was later admonished by the Defense Secretary. The Times leaves the incident out of its obit.
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Grim Reader’s favorite obits of the week, though, came from further afield. The Chicago Tribune has a fun write-up on market-researcher Daryl Gilbert, who masterminded “team shopping” techniques that let her listen to women talk as they went about their shopping. One memorable Gilbert find: Interviewing nuns on behalf of a firm that wanted to get into the business of producing habits, she learned that they enjoyed sewing their own outfits. The project was scuttled.
There’s also a great piece in the Houston Chronicle about Sherwood Cryer, inventor of the mechanical bull and proprietor of Gilley’s, the honky-tonk featured in the John Travolta movie Urban Cowboy. Predictably, Cryer’s millions didn’t last. And neither did his friendship with partner Mickey Gilley. “The movie made Gilley’s a tourist attraction and Cryer sold mechanical bulls to bars across the country,” the piece reads. “The hype ruined the club for Gilley’s regulars and started a rift between Cryer and Gilley. The club closed after the two broke up their partnership and an arson fire later destroyed the huge structure in 1989.”
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
A veteran conservative columnist, TV snarler, and three-piece-suited Beltway establishmentarian, Novak has a compelling story precisely because it involves so many roles. Reacting to his death, the Obitosphere balances analysis of his rise as a shoe-leather reporter, his status as an agenda-setting D.C. insider, his Dickensian public image and his involuntary late-life move from being a writer of news columns to being a subject of them. With stops in the vanishing world of political newsletters (Novak and reporting partner Rowland Evans wrote one of the most prominent such journals) and the earliest days of cable news (he was at CNN almost since its inception), not to mention the modern-day political freak show (he left the network after storming off the set during the Valerie Plame affair), Novak’s journalistic CV alone makes for interesting reading — especially for the journalists who decide which obits get the biggest play. But Novak’s work as a reporter also draws criticism that makes for interesting reading. Novak’s obits are crowded with quotes from government bigwigs about the columnist’s reporting chops: In the Chicago Sun-Times’ obit, everyone, from the House Republican leader to Barack Obama’s chief of staff, testifies to his excellence. Those sorts of quotes will only add to the evidence for those, like Washington Post press critic Howard Kurtz, who say Novak was a congenital Beltway back-scratcher. “Novak regularly vacuumed up scraps and scoops from deep within the Republican Party,” Kurtz writes. “But his half-century career was also a monument to Washington insiderdom, to carrying coded messages for the sources he so assiduously courted.”
Then there’s the persona Novak cultivated. Novak “took great pleasure in playing the bad guy, the heavy, like guys in pro wrestling who come out all dressed in black,” Columbia University Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann tells Washington Post obituary writer Adam Bernstein. “It works with the medium to have a bad guy, and most journalists don’t want to do that.” And while the obits feature quotes from colleagues testifying to Novak’s generosity, Bernstein notes that the scowling caricature was “not too wide off the mark.” Online, a number of folks who’ve tussled with Novak offered their own evidence. “Novak was, to be perfectly honest about it, the least pleasant person I’ve ever interviewed,” writes Conor Clarke, who once profiled the columnist.
One thing Grim Reader would have liked to know more about: Novak’s conversion, at age 67, to Catholicism, one in a string of recent conversions by prominent conservatives. Most major-media obits mention it in passing; the Catholic News Agency has a longer piece.
Oddly, Novak’s obituarists are all over the place on how he got his Prince of Darkness nickname. The Los Angeles Times’ Johanna Neuman says the moniker was coined by a friend “who was struck by Mr. Novak’s pessimistic view of the future of Western civilization.” The Guardian’s Harold Jackson says it’s because Novak, with his long list of anonymous sources, was so skilled at keeping their identities in the dark. The Times of London digs up old quotes where Novak acknowledges being “dark complexioned and sinister looking” and having “something of the night” about him. (The New Republic, meanwhile, republishes a 22-year-old profile that links the term to Novak’s sourpuss political-debating persona.)
By contrast, it’s hard to get anyone to say anything especially bad about Hewitt, who invented the TV-magazine format and spawned countless imitators. “Even if you hadn’t read a book or a newspaper all week, if you saw ‘60 Minutes,’ the next morning at the water cooler, you could say, ‘I am informed,’” a former staffer with a rival program tells the Los Angeles Times. “It really became kind of a visceral attraction that people couldn’t miss.”
Over the years, Hewitt’s minions freed wrongfully jailed prisoners, busted politicians, and humanized celebrities. And though most obits cite its more notorious misses — everyone mentions the CBS decision to kill a 1995 story on a tobacco scandal, a wimp-out that inspired the Russell Crowe film The Insider — an appraisal by the New York Times’ Mike Hale says his success is more important: “What draws people to the show isn’t the sensationalism to which it has occasionally fallen victim but its stability.” Of course, that success may have led to Hewitt’s most troubling legacy: By demonstrating that a non-scripted show could be a ratings juggernaut, he paved the way for the current age of infotainment and reality TV.
--
The death of former Korean President Kim Dae Jung gets a significant share of the Obitosphere’s attention this week. It was Kim’s “Sunshine policy” of reaching out to North Korea that first broke the ice between the peninsula’s two warring states. The policy, reversed after Kim left office and conservative successors tired of getting little in exchange for the trade and aid they were directing northward, seems to be undergoing a revival — an irony noted by the Economist, which dedicates its single weekly obit to Kim. “He wears the hint of a smile,” the magazine writes of the flower-bedecked portrait at Kim’s funeral. “As he might.” American write-ups mainly focus on Kim’s role in inter-Korean statecraft. But the United Kingdom’s Guardian has the longest description of his emergence as a political dissident who survived torture and attempted assassination by South Korea’s former military regime, as well as his rise to become the first opposition candidate, and the first outsider to Seoul’s elite, elected the nation’s president. (The paper also doesn’t skimp on the corruption and blunders that characterized much of his rule.) Still, Grim Reader’s favorite Kim obit is the terse — but not hostile — notice from the Korean Central News Agency, official organ of the Communist Pyongyang regime. “Kim Dae Jung, ex-president of south Korea, regretfully passed away on Tuesday,” it says, leaving “south” uncapitalized. In a separate piece, Kim Jong Il expresses his regrets to Kim Dae Jung’s widow.
--
There are a few nice write-ups about the life of Rose Friedman, an economist who co-authored two books with her husband, legendary conservative economist Milton Friedman. Devoted to one another, the Friedmans didn’t disagree about any major issues until the 2003 Iraq invasion, which happened shortly before Milton’s death: He opposed it, while the more strident Rose supported it, according to the New York Times. The Times’ headline writers, though, run into some vocabulary trouble in describing her role as her husband’s professional partner: “Rose Friedman, Economist and Collaborator, Dies at 98,” the topper reads, making it sound like the free marketer was also secretly working with some foreign occupying army. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the San Francisco Chronicle has a piece about left-wing lawyer Doris Walker, known for representing radical figure Angela Davis. Favorite detail: The former Communist Party member held 49ers season tickets for 50 years.
--
In the world of music, the week’s biggest death was that of Les Paul — a guitarist less known for his own work than for building instruments that made him “the most influential rock guitarist ever,” according to Rolling Stone. A jazz musician, Paul invented the solid-body electric guitar, turning what had been a background instrument into one that made stars out of Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, and Slash, among other Les Paul devotees. (The magazine has a round-up of tributes from guitar heroes.) A Los Angeles Times obit notes high up that Paul’s invention of multi-track recording may have been even more important than his instruments in making rock into the soundtrack of the late 20th century.Elsewhere in entertainment: Jazz drummer Rashied Ali is given the classic session-man send-off: All the obits list his most prominent accomplishment as steering fellow Philadelphian John Coltrane towards free jazz in the 1960s. ... The Memphis Commercial Appeal remembers legendary “Memphis sound” producer Jim Dickinson with a dramatically over-the-top lead: “The North Mississippi Allstars have lost their father, Bob Dylan has lost a ‘brother,’ rock and roll has lost one of its great cult heroes and Memphis has lost a musical icon with the death of Jim Dickinson.”… And, in the category of how to remember people famous for only one small thing, consider the obits for Ed Reimers, the actor known for telling commercial viewers that “You’re in good hands with Allstate,” then cupping his hands for emphasis. The Los Angeles Times makes a stab at describing his pre-Allstate career, but the numbers say it all: Two of the three people quoted are employees of the insurance firm. Headline writers, unsurprisingly, highlighted his “reassuring voice.”
--
The Washington Post and the New York Times both remember Kenneth Bacon, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who became Pentagon spokesman under Bill Clinton before leading the advocacy group Refugees International. Though both pieces are largely laudatory, the Post does describe the one significant blemish on his career: During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bacon approved the release of negative information from the personnel file of scandal figure Linda Tripp, a Pentagon employee; he was later admonished by the Defense Secretary. The Times leaves the incident out of its obit.
--
Grim Reader’s favorite obits of the week, though, came from further afield. The Chicago Tribune has a fun write-up on market-researcher Daryl Gilbert, who masterminded “team shopping” techniques that let her listen to women talk as they went about their shopping. One memorable Gilbert find: Interviewing nuns on behalf of a firm that wanted to get into the business of producing habits, she learned that they enjoyed sewing their own outfits. The project was scuttled.
There’s also a great piece in the Houston Chronicle about Sherwood Cryer, inventor of the mechanical bull and proprietor of Gilley’s, the honky-tonk featured in the John Travolta movie Urban Cowboy. Predictably, Cryer’s millions didn’t last. And neither did his friendship with partner Mickey Gilley. “The movie made Gilley’s a tourist attraction and Cryer sold mechanical bulls to bars across the country,” the piece reads. “The hype ruined the club for Gilley’s regulars and started a rift between Cryer and Gilley. The club closed after the two broke up their partnership and an arson fire later destroyed the huge structure in 1989.”
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
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