A year in reading

I always look forward to Tevi Troy’s annual summary of his year in reading. This year’s edition is here.

Tevi has read 80 books since the onset of the pandemic, which puts me to shame. Among his favorites are Amity Shlaes’s Great Society, about the miscalculations and misguided ideas behind the War on Poverty in the 1960s; Craig Fehrman’s Author in Chief, about our presidents as writers, but also a history of the evolution of the written word in American life; and America in the World, Robert Zoellick’s history of American foreign policy. On the baseball front, there’s Jon Pessah’s Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask.

Tevi’s book Fight House ranks very high on my list of 2020 favorites. It’s a history of White House infighting from the Truman administration through Obama’s. I reviewed it here.

Another favorite, Robert Novak’s The Prince of Darkness, covers some of the same territory. I received a free copy of the book at an event in which Novak and I participated more than a decade ago. I never intended to read it because Novak was not my cup of tea. His “you’re a source or you’re a target” journalism left too much collateral damage and too much room for distortion.

But this year, it was difficult for me to get my hands on books, given the pandemic and my unwillingness to buy from Amazon. So I turned to books that had been sitting unread on my bookshelves for years.

I’m glad I read Novak’s autobiography. Novak might have been a bad guy, but bad guys often have good insights, especially if they are around as long as Novak was, and work as hard.

Novak’s insights into the presidents he covered — from JFK to Obama — are well supported by the first-hand evidence he supplies. Only Ronald Reagan comes off well. Jimmy Carter comes off worst.

Novak has plenty to say about his fellow D.C. journalists, too. Here, we must allow for the possibility of score settling and perhaps even jealousy. Again, though, Novak seems to be mostly on the mark, at least directionally. John McLaughlin probably comes off worst among the media personalities he discusses.

In the end, Novak’s book tends to confirm Michael Barone’s hierarchy of the integrity of the three professions he has worked in: lawyer, political consultant, and journalist in that descending order.

Bad guys tend not to be insightful when discussing themselves, but that’s not really the case in Novak’s autobiography. A seriously flawed man, Novak confesses to some his shortcomings and weaknesses in the book. Others can easily be inferred.

This means that Novak’s book works not only as a kind of political history of 50 years, but also as an autobiography.