The Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy survived the fall of its biggest financial benefactor, now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It kept going after its president, Italia Federici, was subpoenaed in the Abramoff Senate probe. It even kept going after she was notified she was a target in the criminal investigation.

When we heard that syndicated columnist and TV pundit Robert Novak’s 638-page memoir was set to be called The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Reporting in Washington, we couldn’t wait to read about how he has no reflection in the mirror and fears garlic.

So imagine our disappointment when we realized that the journalist who was at the center of the Valerie Plame/CIA leak case was being ironic. Unlike the hard-nosed conservative curmudgeon of his public persona, Novak draws himself as a thoughtful, hard-working, fair-minded, compassionate, vulnerable, right-leaning but at times self-doubting observer of the political process. Sigh.

While chronicling his own role as the journalistic equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which holds that the very act of observing a physical (political) phenomenon alters that phenomenon, the 76-year-old Novak also gives a full account of his role in the leak case; discusses his turbulent relationship with the late Rowland Evans, co-author of their syndicated column; and writes about his conversion from Judaism to the Catholic faith.

Still, our poolside reading was somewhat rewarded when we got to the part about his salary. Novak made about as much as seven and a half members of Congress in 2004 (that comes to $1.2 million).

“That may be less than some people thought I was making,” he writes, “but it was vastly more money than an old newspaperman could conceive.”

The Senate’s chief Democratic fundraiser took a night off from the money chase to show his kids, ages 18 and 22, a little culture last weekend.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) took them to Woodstock, N.Y., 38 years after the historic free concert there, to take in a performance by Bob Dylan. Neither Dylan nor Schumer made it to the 1969 Woodstock Festival that made the now-rebuilt venue famous, but the senior senator from New York is a big fan of the prolific songwriter.

“When I would wax nostalgic about Bob Dylan my kids didn’t know what I was talking about, so I thought I’d show them,” Schumer said.

True to his longstanding style, Dylan addressed the audience only once, according to a New York Times review of the concert.

Schumer, we suspect, would have been a bit more loquacious.

The wife of Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) dropped a cool $2.175 million on a one-bedroom apartment last month overlooking the Museum of Modern Art, where she serves as a trustee.

The New York Observer, which keeps a close eye on who’s buying what where and for how much in the Big Apple, quotes Sharon Percy Rockefeller as saying that she bought the 1,417-square-foot Museum Tower apartment partly because she’s been hearing about the building from her mother-in-law, who was president of MoMA when it was built in 1984.

Rockefeller is CEO of Washington’s public TV station WETA, and her father is former Sen. Chuck Percy (R-Ill.).

The Percy-Rockefellers also have homes in Washington and Charleston, W.Va. But neither of them has a view, as her new apartment does, of a sculpture garden named for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Jay’s grandmother.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough can’t say what he’s up to now, or how one might try to top a best-selling biography of John Adams and an equally best-selling book about the battle for American independence, 1776.

Still, McCullough insisted Saturday from his home on Martha’s Vineyard that he was not resting on his laurels after a couple tastes of success. He can say that he’s just finished narrating a forthcoming HBO documentary on how he reconstructed the life of our second president, and he did publish an article in last weekend’s issue of the Wall Street Journal pointing out that the John Trumbull painting in the Capitol Rotunda, “The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776,” is historically misleading, since none of the five Founding Fathers ever participated in such a ceremony. But that’s it. Beyond that, his lips are sealed.

McCullough, 74, has written eight acclaimed books, ranging from biographies of Adams and Harry Truman to accounts of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal.

His top-secret project, though, “is going to be very different from anything I’ve done before. It’s something I’ve been writing in my head for much of life, and I’m very excited about it.”