Novak: No Ground Rules, No Notes

From a journalistic perspective, there were two eyebrow-raisers in Robert Novak's column today on Richard Armitage's acknowledgment that he was Novak's source for a 2003 column revealing that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA:

• First, Novak writes that he "sat down with Armitage in his State Department office the afternoon of July 8 with tacit rather than explicit ground rules: deep background with nothing said attributed to Armitage or even to an anonymous State Department official." Really? He both conducted an interview and refused to reveal his source when the ground rules for the interview didn't explicitly specify how, or whether, the source would be identified?
• Then, Novak acknowledges that during the hour-long interview, "neither of us took notes, and nobody else was present." Novak says this makes the account in his column, which relied on recalling the conversation the same week it occurred, more credible than Armitage's reconstruction for prosecutors months later. But it's hard to see how either of them can lay claim to a great degree of accuracy in their recollections, since neither made any effort to record the substance of their conversation.