[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 44 (Thursday, March 29, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Page S3149]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       IN MEMORY OF ROWLAND EVANS

 Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, the best example of the free 
press was Rowland Evans and the best brief on this outstanding 
journalist was from his partner, Robert D. Novak, in the Washington 
Post, Thursday, March 29. I ask consent that the brief be included in 
the Record for his friends that knew him and for the millions more that 
were informed by his writing.
  The brief follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Mar. 29, 2001]

                        Rowland Evans, Reporter

                          (By Robert D. Novak)

       On Monday morning, Dec. 17, 1962, I returned from my 
     honeymoon and found multiple phone messages from Rowly Evans 
     on my desk in the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau. 
     Evans, a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune, asked me 
     at a subsequent lunch to collaborate with him in a daily 
     newspaper column.
       The goal was a product short on ideology, long on 
     reporting. Our column first appeared on May 15, 1963, and ran 
     in this space under our double byline until Evans retired 
     from the column 30 years later. Over the years, I fear, we 
     became more ideological. But we promised ourselves that every 
     column would contain some information, major or minuscule, 
     never previously reported.
       We kept that promise, thanks to Evan's energies. Several 
     obituaries noting the death of Rowland Evans from cancer on 
     March 23 described him as a conservative. More appropriately, 
     he should be remembered as a reporter and a patriot.
       His model was the column written by the Alsop brothers--
     Joseph and Stewart--who combined dogged reporting with a 
     passion for the security of the United States. Like Joe 
     Alsop, Evans belonged to the Washington of black-tie dinner 
     parties, still flourishing when our column began.
       Rowly snagged stories on the Georgetown party circuit, 
     including an exclusive on U.S. plans for an electronic wall 
     to protect south Vietnam. But he relied mostly on old-
     fashioned reporting, featuring relentless interrogation of 
     sources. Senators, Cabinet members and anonymous staffers 
     lured to lunch or breakfast at the Metropolitan Club found 
     themselves facing a questioner who insisted on answers. He 
     traveled everywhere for stories, covering the Vietnam, Six-
     Day and Gulf wars, often at great physical risk.
       Readers who thought they could spot the principal author of 
     our columns would be surprised to learn that I was not 
     responsible for ``Reassessing Goldwater,'' published on April 
     9, 1964. Since at that time I had close contact with Sen. 
     Barry Goldwater, it was assumed that I had written the column 
     disputing the conventional wisdom that Mr. Conservative was 
     dead for the Republican presidential nomination. After much 
     shoeleather reporting, Evans came to the conclusion that 
     Goldwater quite likely would be the nominee.
       He flourished when reporting on national security, using a 
     melange of sources both prominent and shadowy. He was ahead 
     of everybody in forecasting the breakdown of Soviet satellite 
     rule in Poland and Czechoslovakia. In 1979, one Evans column 
     after another exposed Soviet cheating on arms control 
     agreements that U.S. officials tried to ignore. Evans 
     considered that work the high point of his long career.
       Nothing he did ever caused more trouble than his tough 
     reporting on Israeli intransigence. Evans was not anti-Israel 
     and certainly not antisemitic. He went to Lebanon in 1982 to 
     cover an Israeli invasion of Lebanon that he deployed. But he 
     found Palestinian atrocities in Sidon, Lebanon, that 
     suggested ``the PLO has become permeated by thugs and 
     adventurers.'' Although the late Yitzhak Rabin was his 
     friend, he did not feel that the United States should be tied 
     to the decisions of the Israeli government.
       Our column encountered the most criticism when he 
     investigated, years after the event, the Israeli attack that 
     sank the U.S. Navy communications intelligence ship Liberty 
     during the Six-Day War. It was not anti-Israeli bias that 
     caused Evans to probe an incident that both governments 
     wanted to hide. Rather, it was outrage--born of patriotic 
     fervor--over the needless death of 34 U.S. Naval personnel 
     that he laid at the feet of Israeli defense forces.
       That same outrage had led Evans as a Yale freshman on Dec. 
     8, 1941, to protest the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor by 
     enlisting in the Marine Corps, taking him to combat on 
     Guadalcanal.
       American security was his guiding star. It led him to 
     support U.S. efforts to save Vietnam from communist 
     oppression, though that stance eventually put him in 
     opposition to his friend Robert F. Kennedy. It led him away 
     from his family's ties with Democrats and toward the Reagan 
     Revolution.
       He was the life of every party be attended. But behind the 
     charm of a Philadelphia society boy was a tough Marine who 
     loved his country and never wavered in seeking the 
     truth.

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