'Retired' Robert Novak Will Continue to Write Occasional Columns

By: E&P Staff Robert Novak, who announced his retirement earlier this month after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, will still write occasional columns.

That was announced today on Creators Syndicate's Creators.com site in a note above Novak's first post-"retirement" column. That piece focuses on the opposition of many Republicans to the possibility that increasingly conservative "Independent Democrat" Joseph Lieberman might be one of John McCain's candidates for vice president.

"Lieberman surely doesn't know that much about Republican politics, but he has close Republican friends," Novak wrote. "One of them prevailed on Lieberman to tell McCain that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would be a disaster for all concerned, and especially for the GOP."

Novak was diagnosed with a brain tumor soon after being cited for a July hit-and-run accident involving a pedestrian on a Washington, D.C., street.

In recent years, he's best known for a 2003 column revealing the identity of then-CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose name was leaked by two Bush administration officials after her husband wrote a New York Times op-ed piece accusing the administration of twisting facts to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Novak joined the Chicago Sun-Times in 1966. His column, originally done with the late Rowland Evans, entered syndication three years earlier while with the old New York Herald-Tribune.