CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Conservative columnist and former CNN "Crossfire" co-host Robert Novak has died after a year-long battle with cancer, his family announced Tuesday. He was 78.

Novak died at home, just over a year after doctors diagnosed him with a malignant brain tumor in August 2008. He was a veteran columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a regular commentator for CNN for 25 years, beginning when the network launched in 1980.

For most of that time, he was a co-host of the political debate program "Crossfire." But he also hosted a show with his longtime column co-author, Rowland Evans, and appeared as a panelist on shows like "The Capital Gang" and on PBS' "The McLaughlin Group."

He was dubbed "The Prince of Darkness" by friends for his pessimistic persona, and he used the nickname as the title of his 2007 memoir.

Novak got his first newspaper job in 1948, when he was still in high school. He served in the Army during the Korean War before turning to the news business, eventually starting his column with Evans at the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune in 1963.

In 2003, he found himself at the center of the scandal over the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, when he published a column revealing her CIA status days after her husband challenged a key Bush administration justification for the invasion of Iraq. The scandal ultimately led to the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators probing the leak.

Novak cooperated with a special prosecutor and was not charged in the case.

Novak published a column revealing Valerie Plame's CIA status.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Conservative columnist and former CNN host Robert Novak announced his immediate retirement Monday to focus on treatment of a malignant brain tumor.

The long-time Chicago Sun-Times commentator told the newspaper that his prognosis is "dire."
"The details are being worked out with the doctors this week, but the tentative plan is for radiation and chemotherapy," he said.

Earlier: Novak diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor

Novak's widely syndicated "Inside Report" began in 1963 at the New York Herald-Tribune. The column was co-written by Novak and long-time collaborator Rowland Evans until Evans' retirement in 1993.

"Inside Report" appeared four times a week in the Herald-Tribune and other publications of the Publishers Newspaper Syndicate for three years until the paper folded and the Sun-Times became its home newspaper.

The two also launched "The Evans-Novak Political Report," a twice-monthly newsletter that Novak continued after Evans' death in 2001.

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Novak is interviewed after the accident.

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Journalist Robert Novak hit a pedestrian with his car in the nation's capital Wednesday morning, Washington police Lt. Michael Lockerman said.

Novak continued driving, unaware he had hit the man, he told told reporters for WJLA-TV and the Web site Politico as he got out of a police car.

"I didn't know I hit anybody," he said near the scene of the incident at 17th and K streets in northwest Washington. "A bicycle rider stopped me and said I had hit someone."

Watch: Robert Novak says he 'did know' he hit anybody

Novak said he was cited for failure to yield right of way.

"I feel terrible," said the journalist, a long-time Washington insider who works as a syndicated columnist.

"It was a slight clipping. The pedestrian hurt his shoulder. It was a slight injury, nothing serious," the police spokesman said.

The pedestrian was taken to George Washington University Hospital, and was expected to be treated and released later Wednesday, a fire department spokesman told CNN.