WASHINGTON - Ideologues are a dime a dozen. What made people read Robert Novak’s columns — and sometimes fear them — was that his combative conservatism came laced with things they didn’t know and Washington didn’t want to tell.

Novak traced his impatience with “claptrap” to an episode in 1936, when he heard Franklin Roosevelt boast from a rail car in Joliet, Ill., that times were getting better. “You could have fooled them,” he said of the hard-luck crowd listening to the president. Novak was 5.

The irascible journalist, dead Tuesday at age 78, devoted a contentious career to the idea that people shouldn’t get fooled again. He thrived on “making life miserable for hypocritical, posturing politicians.”