Naomi G. Nover was one of the more venerable members of the White
House press corps, but she was not a sweet old lady.
Once in the White House briefing room during the Carter
administration, Nover, who died Saturday at 84, took offense at Carl
Leubsdorf's snickering. So she swung her massive purse repeatedly at the
then-Baltimore Sun correspondent while chasing him into the lower press
office, where he barricaded himself.
On another occasion, during the Reagan years, she encountered Los
Angeles Times photographer Bernie Boston crouching in front of her as
Mother Teresa posed with the president. Stooped, white-haired and well
under five feet tall -- some claimed she resembled George Washington --
Nover was having difficulty with her low-tech camera.
"So," Boston recounts, "she proceeded to beat me over the head with
her umbrella as President Reagan and Mother Teresa looked on in total
amazement. . . . Once the arrival ceremony was over I took Naomi aside
in the press room and said, You may be a little old lady. But if you
ever beat me again, I will deck you.' "
In 1984, Nover accompanied Ronald and Nancy Reagan to the
People's Republic of China, where they visited an archaeological dig in
Xian. As was her custom, she pushed her way to the front, dragging her
ever-present luggage cart and wielding her umbrella, while the Reagans
stood below inspecting life-size terra-cotta figures. When a Chinese
guard blocked her path, she began making a fuss, bitterly complaining in
her thin, bleating voice. The guard raised his rifle menacingly, and
Gary Schuster of the Detroit News came to her aid. "Verrry important
person in our country," Schuster told the guard, and held up a dollar
bill to point first at Washington's portrait, then at Nover. The guard,
eyes widening, dropped his rifle and let her through.
When she died, Nover left behind a rich legacy of anecdotes
concerning her eccentric, irritating and just plain impossible ways
among the journalistic elite: her habit of not taking notes at news
conferences but instead demanding that colleagues tell her what was
happening at the very moment something important was being said; her
custom of declaiming into her small tape recorder such observations as
"The president is moving to the front of the room, he is bending over,
he is straightening up, he is wearing a blue suit"; and her penchant for
cursing and sobbing madly, to say nothing of throwing her purse, at
whoever was denying her access to whatever grand event she was desperate
to attend.
Her demeanor veered suddenly from demure to lethal, and people still
marvel at the time she loudly prayed to God that He strike dead her desk
mate in the Senate press gallery, the Baltimore Sun's Nancy Schwerzler.
(Schwerzler's hair was apparently bothering her.) She'd been a
not-always-welcome presence there and at the White House since the Nixon
years on behalf of her tiny, mysterious Nover News Service, which in the
last decade had no known clients.
But she also left behind a coterie of fierce detractors and
grudging admirers -- and the certainty that reporters in hotel bars will
be trading stories about her for a long time to come.
"Thinking of Naomi is almost a class reunion' experience," says
Marlin Fitzwater, White House press secretary under Reagan and George
Bush. "The facts and the characters get all mixed up, but she's like a
bookmark for those of us who've passed through the presidency over the
last 40 years."
"I like to think I've lived a full life," says National Public
Radio honcho Bruce Drake. "I covered the White House for seven years
{for the New York Daily News}. And if I had to list, in order of
importance, the two people who had the most impact, the first would be
Ronald Reagan and the second would be Naomi Nover. When I'm regaling
people about my White House years, most of my stories are about Naomi."
"I loved her never-give-up spirit," says the redoubtable Helen
Thomas of United Press International. "She had a tremendous intellectual
curiosity. . . . Maybe the younger generation didn't quite understand
why she was still around. But people like me and Sarah McClendon liked
her, we all did, because we were trying to stick around ourselves."
"I've spent 30 years as a working journalist in Washington," says
Andrew Glass of Cox Newspapers, "and there was always in the White House
press room a tolerance for the oddball, for people who were not in the
mainstream but added to the flavor and put some spice into the stew.
Naomi was such a person. The war stories and zany experiences that Naomi
provided, particularly on the foreign trips, leavened the long periods
of terrific boredom, when all these exalted and overpaid people in the
White House press corps were just twiddling their thumbs. But toward the
end the tolerance level fell -- to the detriment of the organization."
"She'd be furious to know we were talking about her," says Ann
McFeatters of Scripps Howard News Service. "Just furious!"
In the end she was legendary -- even in death: She collapsed in the
Dirksen Senate Office Building while attempting to renew her
congressional press pass, dying a week later. President Clinton, the
last of 10 presidents to know her personally or by reputation, issued a
statement this week praising "Naomi's years of dedication to her craft"
and calling her "a lesson to us all in hard work and the persistence of
the human spirit."
"Persistence," yes -- she certainly had that. But "craft" seems far
too poor a word for Nover's sheer genius at drawing attention to
herself.
She was born Naomi Goll in Buffalo on Christmas Day, 1910, attended
the University of Buffalo and New York State Teachers College, married
Buffalo News columnist Barnet Nover in 1934, and two years later moved
to Washington, where her husband joined The Washington Post as a foreign
policy columnist. Barnet Nover, and by extension his wife, were figures
of consequence in the Washington of the 1930s and 1940s. They counted
among their friends presidents, senators and Supreme Court justices, as
well as Post publisher-to-be Philip Graham and his young bride,
Katharine.
"When Phil and I were first married, before the war," recalls
Katharine Graham, "Naomi was so appalled at how little I knew about
housekeeping that she used to take me to the market. She taught me how
to market and how to plan meals and how to, well, not quite how to cook.
She really taught me how to keep house. . . . She was sweet and kind of
lovely."
In 1947 Barnet Nover left the Grahams' employ to become bureau
chief of the Denver Post, a position he held for 24 years. On retiring
in 1971 he started the Nover News Service but died two years later. His
widow was keeper of the flame, changing the formal name of the company
to the Barnet Nover News Service and trying to service her dwindling
accounts of client newspapers.
She had little hard journalism experience, although she had tried
her hand at column writing and even at music criticism. Her lengthy
entry in Who's Who, which is largely taken up by an exhaustive itinerary
of her trips around the world with various presidents, notes that she
attended the Goethe Music Festival in Aspen, Colo. Nover had received a
master of arts degree from George Washington University, but her
principal job experience had been as a teacher in the Washington, D.C.,
public schools. A newspaper clipping from September 1960 reveals that
she retired as a sixth grade teacher at the Murch Elementary School
after a group of parents demanded that she be transferred "from any
position of direct teaching contact with children." The parents
complained that she had "injected a climate of suspicion, unrest and
distrust into the classroom."
"She had the same effect upon the children in the White House press
corps on occasion," says Jody Powell, who was President Carter's press
secretary. "I always thought of Naomi as
an only in America' kind of thing. Here is this woman whose whole life
clearly revolved around the White House press room, and as far as I knew
there wasn't much else to her life. Even the people who had to put up
with the difficulties -- and she could be very difficult -- came to
realize that too."
Because he thought it would kill her, Powell, along with every
other White House press secretary who dealt with Nover, declined to
revoke her credentials, despite various reporters' repeated attempts to
eject her from the press room. But ABC's Sam Donaldson, among others,
was one of her stout defenders.
"I always liked Naomi," says Donaldson, who covered the Carter and
Reagan White Houses. So much so, say numerous witnesses, that on foreign
trips -- for which Nover typically paid cash in advance -- Donaldson
often flirted outrageously with her. "OH NAOMI, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU FOR HOURS!" Donaldson would usually boom at
her on the press plane during Carter trips. She would blush and giggle,
which only encouraged Donaldson to plead: "Ah, Naomi, Naomi, show me
your creamy white thighs!" At which Nover would shriek and attempt to
escape. Once, Donaldson chased her up and down the aisles, until she
locked herself in a bathroom. Former Carter press aide Paul Costello
remembers hearing her plaintive question from behind the bathroom door:
"Is Sam Donaldson still out there?"
As time went on, Nover's behavior grew increasingly, well,
unusual. She always wore one of two dresses -- the first navy blue with
white piping on a V-neck collar, the second royal blue, ditto. Afraid of
catching a disease from foreign cuisine, she insisted on carrying her
own food, usually grapefruits and cans of tuna fish. During a stopover
in Honolulu on the Reagan trip to China, Bruce Drake recalls peering out
his hotel window to see Nover by the swimming pool, her food-stuffed
suitcases at her feet, taking a hula-dancing lesson.
"At my first White House Christmas party for the press in 1981,"
recalls former Reagan image-meister Mike Deaver, "I remember this woman
grabbing me by the arm and telling me, Mr. Deaver, I was just hit by a
car in front of the White House and dragged six blocks!' I didn't know
what to say, except, How awful!' That was my introduction to the White
House press corps."
