The memoir offers a glimpse of the burdens a family must bear living with a Washington power player, particularly the burden of his wife, Geraldine, whose patience and forbearance made his career possible. When he learned that his wife was pregnant with their first child at the midpoint of a four-week reporting trip to South America, he was undecided about what to do. She had suffered one miscarriage and he thought it wise for them to return home, but he still had two weeks of scheduled appointments ahead. She preferred to stay with him despite acute morning sickness and questionable available medical care. He recognizes her incredibly generous gesture as emblematic of their relationship: He was "selfish"; she was "self-sacrificing."
Of the daughter born months later, who grew up to share his obsession with politics, he says, "I like to think she was influenced by her prenatal travels through South America, a riot in Buenos Aires, and the thin air of the Bolivian Andes." The mellower Novak, now 76, says with a grandfather's knowing grin: "My children love me and my grandchildren really love me."
Mr. Novak read deeply as an undergraduate, and it shows. He identifies with a character in Dante's "Inferno." Bertrans de Born was a medieval nobleman who raided and burned castles and generally wreaked havoc and ruin. In death, Dante consigns him to stand sentry at the gates of Purgatory, his severed head in hand, commemorating his life as a stirrer of strife: "Stirring up strife seemed to me a proper role for a journalist."
This is a self-centered, self-serving memoir, as memoirs inevitably are, often no kinder to himself than to the men he has written about for 50 years. It can be read as a caution to future power seekers, warning that they will have to weigh the price of strife, success and influence in Washington against love, friendship and the consolations of family. Buyer, beware.