The Prince of Darkness/33 Questions about American History

by Robert Novak/Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Robert Novak has been embroiled for several years now in the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal, but decades before anyone had ever heard of Plame, Novak had established himself as one of the leading political reporters in America -- and among those most likely to spark controversy. Now, in this massive, brutally honest and gripping memoir, Novak tells all not only about his role in the Plame affair, but about his decades of revealing encounters with some of the most powerful people in the world. In The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Reporting in Washington, Novak tells the whole captivating story of his remarkable life and career. Novak offers an adventure-packed half-century of stories, scandals, and personal encounters with Washington's most powerful and colorful people.

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	Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter
	The Late Great U.S.A. by Jerome Corsi
	The Heritage Guide to the Constitution by Edwin Meese, ed.
	The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History by Thomas Woods

Now that years have gone by and long-ago controversies have cooled, Novak opens up, telling the stories behind the stories. He vividly recalls encounters with the Kennedys (angry meetings with Bobby, a scary ride home in Jack's convertible), his unusual relationship with Lyndon Johnson (who hosted Novak's wedding reception and who, "drunk as a loon," had to be carried out of a bar by the young newsman), and his first meetings with George W. Bush -- at which the veteran journalist seriously underestimated the future president. He introduces numerous other fascinating characters as well, from George Wallace (who confided in Novak his dismay and disappointment in his running mate during his 1968 presidential bid) and Tip O'Neill (who routinely greeted Novak with a friendly cuff on the head) to Ronald Reagan (who stunned Novak and his partner Rowland Evans during an interview by citing obscure philosophers and decades-old budget statistics from memory), Alexander Haig (who threatened to sue Novak for five million dollars) and Dan Quayle (who misspelled Novak's name on a photo he inscribed for him).

With refreshing candor, Novak reveals how politics and journalism really operate at the highest levels, both publicly and behind closed doors. He is also frank about his personal experience, writing forthrightly about the days when his drinking matched the boozy culture of Washington. He reflects also on his political journey to the right, and on his spiritual journey, from his early life as a secular Jew to his conversion to Catholicism at the age of sixty-seven.

Packed with riveting, never-before-told stories, The Prince of Darkness is a hugely entertaining and equally perceptive view of fifty years in the life of Washington and the people who cover it.

Novak remembers:

• Bill Clinton admiring a woman's legs at a party: "In the midst of the Monica turmoil, Clinton was instinctively attracted by a woman with beautiful legs"

• Clinton's cabinet choices: "I believe Clinton put a lower premium on talent in his cabinet-making than any predecessor in my experience"

• Clinton's politics: "Clinton was a man of the Left who disguised himself as a man of the center...Combining this with his personal misadventures meant the nineties would prove a dreadful decade for the Democrats"

• George H.W. Bush: "An unhappy president. He could not come to grips with the prevailing Republican opinion on taxes, abortion, racial quotas, and other social and economic issues"

• Jimmy Carter: "A habitual liar who modified the truth to suit his own purposes"

• Ronald Reagan: "Clever - and more devious - than most people imagined...the first truly successful president since Franklin Roosevelt"

• Reagan's rhetoric: he "used conservative speechwriters to flourish as the Great Communicator...[his former aides] Baker and Darman never appreciated what a weapon the spoken word could be for a president"

• The secret of Reagan's success: he "kept his gaze on big goals" and displayed "implacable calm in the face of adversity"

• Boris Yeltsin: "Gracious, enthusiastic - and sober - during the two hours he spent with me"

• Deng Xiaoping: "Though surely no democrat...one of the few great men with whom I ever had come into contact"

• Gerald Ford: "Of the ten presidents I covered, only Ford was a believer in congressional supremacy" and the minimizing of presidential power

• Richard Nixon: "A poor president and a bad man who inflicted grave damage on his party and his country"

• George McGovern: "A Great Plains radical droning on with outrageous formulations in his nasal regional monotone"

• Hubert Humphrey: "As both a thinker and leader, he struck me as well meaning and weak"

• Bobby Kennedy: "His biggest impact was to guarantee the presidency of Richard M. Nixon by helping divide the Democratic Party"

• Kennedy and Johnson: "While John F. Kennedy was a failed president, Lyndon B. Johnson was a disaster"

• Newt Gingrich in 1994: "He has exhibited an overweening ego that many fear may be his Achilles' heel"

• Pat Buchanan in 1996: "Buchanan had a legitimate chance to...withstand the monolithic assault on him to keep him from being nominated...It was almost as though he did not want to be the nominee for president"

• Rudolph Giuliani: "No conservative and hardly a Republican (starting out as a George McGovern Democrat)"

"Novak's insider perspective, vitriolic pen and damn-the-torpedoes frankness make it a lively and eye-opening account of big-foot journalism." -- Publishers Weekly

"Expresses no regrets." -- Booklist

In fact, probably a great deal of what you were led to believe was true about American history is actually politically motivated myth, served up by Leftists to advance their agenda. The teaching of American history today is riddled with misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and flat-out lies about the people and events that have shaped the nation. But now Thomas E. Woods, Jr., the New York Times bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, sets the record straight on key issues where most liberal histories present politically motivated pseudo-history as established fact, in 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask.

Ranging from the Founding Fathers' intentions in framing the Constitution to the real reasons why Bill Clinton's presidency was such a disaster, Woods's eye-opening tour of American history reveals just how thoroughly liberal historians have whitewashed the historical record, overlooking key events and skewing others beyond recognition in order to advance their political agenda for today.

Can you guess the answers to these questions?

• Were the American Indians really the proto-environmentalists that they are routinely characterized as having been?

• Did Indian wisdom really help the Pilgrims grow corn, thus saving European settlement in the New World?

• What really happened in the Whiskey Rebellion, and why will neither your textbook nor George Washington tell you?

• Did the Founding Fathers really look to the American Indians - specifically, the Iroquois League -- as the model for the U.S. political system?

• Did the Founding Fathers support the unrestricted immigration we see today?

• Did the Founding Fathers believe juries could refuse to enforce unjust laws?

• Was the U.S. Constitution meant to be a "living, breathing" document -- and does it grant the federal government wide latitude to operate as it pleases?

• The Civil War -- all about slavery, right?

• Herbert Hoover: when the Great Depression devastated the country, he sat back and did nothing, didn't he?

• Did desegregation of schools significantly narrow the black-white achievement gap?

• Did Martin Luther King, Jr., support affirmative action?

• Did Bill Clinton actually stop a genocide in Kosovo, as his sycophantic followers insist?

A sampling of what you'll learn:

• How the Civil War dealt a mortal blow to the last check on the unlimited power of the federal government

• The money spent to wage Lincoln's war: it could have purchased the freedom of every single slave and given them all forty acres and a mule

• The British democracy advocate who saw Southern secession as the only hope for the "redemption of Democracy"

• Social Security: what the American people have been told for seventy years about how it works is actually false - and how, every time Social Security experiences a crisis, the mythology about the program dominates the public debate

• Why, according to the Constitution, the President cannot on his own authority send troops anywhere in the world he wants - and why the Framers granted the authority to declare war to the Legislative, not the Executive branch

• Why the many examples of the President sending troops into battle without Congressional authorization do not prove that he has Constitutional authority to do so

• Why the casual assumption that discrimination necessarily leads to poverty cannot withstand serious scrutiny

• An extraordinary example of the evolution of private, voluntary mechanisms that successfully carried out the very functions of which the private sector is routinely assumed to be incapable: defining and enforcing property rights, adjudicating disputes, and protecting people against crime

• Theodore Roosevelt: how he transformed American government and ran roughshod over key Constitutional safeguards against Big Government

• Woodrow Wilson: how historians continually ignore his catastrophic errors and foreign-policy disasters, and rank him high among the Presidents

• The peaceful and ultimately successful campaign of popular resistance to an oppressive tax that has virtually vanished from the history books

• The Constitution on the government's authority to provide for the "general welfare": how the broad reading of this clause, which has been used to justify Big Government and is taken for granted by lawmakers today, makes no logical sense and contradicts the stated intentions of the Framers

• The "civil rights" establishment's massive shakedowns of banks that they believe have not granted enough black loans

• How wealth redistribution by the government directly harms the long-term interests of workers, as well as those of society as a whole - and how government intervention in the economy, not the free market, is responsible for economic downturns

• How government meddling only prolonged, rather than alleviated, the Great Depression - under Hoover as well as FDR - and ultimately crippled American capitalism

• The real Clinton legacy in Kosovo: thousands of Serbian homes looted and vandalized, and 150 Christian churches and monasteries destroyed

• Why the state's official version of history should always be regarded with skepticism - or our survival as a free people is at stake

"A marvelous read. Every chapter taught me something new and unexpected." -- Tom Bethell, senior editor, The American Spectator

"Demolishes the historical myths that mislead too many Americans into supporting big government. I strongly recommend Woods's work." -- The Honorable Ron Paul, U.S. House of Representatives

"Woods, among the most talented of young American historians, asks (and answers) the right questions about the Constitution, the Depression, presidential war-making, and other important things. In so doing, he continues the mission that he began with his Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which is to bring well-deserved destruction to many of the convenient and misleading commonplaces of the American history class." --Clyde N. Wilson, Professor of History emeritus, University of South Carolina, Editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun

"Woods takes on some of the most coveted of the politically correct sacred cows and shreds them the old-fashioned way--with incontrovertible evidence and sound reasoning. A provocative and fun romp through American history." -- Roger D. McGrath, author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes

"A comprehensive antidote to much of the leftist propaganda that is drummed into today's high school and college students by their teachers and textbooks in the guise of education. This book deserves to be assigned in economics courses as well as in American history courses." --- George Reisman, author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics and Professor Emeritus of Economics, Pepperdine University

"Bold maverick Thomas Woods's latest bestseller is provocative and controversial about issues of enduring importance." --Jim Powell, author of FDR's Folly and Bully Boy