July 24, 2007
Confidential Sources Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:50 AM EST Last week I had the dubious privilege of attending a breakfast with Robert Novak, the septuagenarian journalist who writes the second-longest running column in America. He has a new memoir out, The Prince of Darkness, about his 50-year career in Washington. I can’t say I was planning to buy the book. I’m not a particular fan of Novak, and political memoirs are often just 500-page vehicles for justifying mistakes and settling old grievances. But at this event free copies of Novak’s book were in abundance, so I thought, what the heck, why not see what the old curmudgeon has to say? I started paging through the introduction as I waited for the Q&A with Novak to begin. Once Novak started talking, it didn’t take too long for me to learn what the book’s big, controversial revelation was, outside of its account of the Valerie Plame affair. Novak blows many of his confidential sources from over the years, and most notable among them is the anonymous senator who told him, in April of 1972, that “the people don’t known [George] McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot. Once middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular—finds this out, he’s dead.” Novak kept the identity of this quote’s author a secret for 35 years, even amid speculation that he had invented the comment for his own partisan purposes. In The Prince of Darkness,
Novak reveals that his source was the late Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who was briefly McGovern’s running mate in 1972. There’s an irony to this revelation. Eagleton is remembered mostly as the guy McGovern ditched when the going got tough, after revelations that the Missouri legislator had undergone psychiatric treatment in the past. It adds an odd twist to the story to learn that before McGovern ever humiliated his running mate, Eagleton had knifed his Senate colleague by way of Bob Novak’s column. What’s controversial about Novak’s new disclosure, however, is that he revealed Eagleton as his source in spite of the senator’s repeated instructions not to do so. Novak claims that Eagleton’s death released him from their confidentiality agreement and that the two of them will have to settle up in heaven (or, he added at breakfast, perhaps somewhere else). But his assumption that such an agreement ends at death is not a widely accepted one, and one has to question the ethics of publishing such surprising information about Eagleton when the man cannot defend himself. The whole affair makes me wonder how much information historians lose to confidentiality agreements like this one. The Eagleton-McGovern affair is ultimately a detail point in the 1972 election, but the identities of some of Novak’s other blown sources may, at some point, be valuable to historians. And Novak is not even one of the country’s most conscientious journalists. Wouldn’t it be useful for historians to know, for example, who Dana Priest’s sources were for the now-famous Washington Post story on secret CIA prisons? Wouldn’t a full portrait of the last seven years include information about which officials were dissenting from (dare I say undermining?) the President’s policies? And imagine how frustrated some would have been if Woodward and Bernstein had died before Mark Felt, and the identity of Deep Throat had never been resolved. Maybe in the future some journalists will decide to help out historians by revealing their sources in a more delicate way than Novak. Maybe journalists could put records of their research, including records of anonymous sources, in university libraries with instructions that they not be opened for 50 years. That way, their data can be preserved for the use of history scholars in a way that avoids Novak’s sensationalism. On the other hand, maybe the way things are now is the way they’ve got to be, in order to protect valuable, anonymous whistleblowers—people who might be worried about disclosing their identity even after half a century. Perhaps historians should continue to accept journalists’ confidential sources as unknowable. Either resolution is imperfect and unsatisfying. I wonder what my fellow bloggers think of Novak’s disclosures, and about how long a confidentiality agreement should last.
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