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I FIRST met Jack Germond in 1959. We were covering newly elected New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who was barnstorming the country to test the presidential waters for 1960. Germond was a 31-year-old reporter for the Gannett newspapers, I a 28-year-old reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The whisky-drinking, cigarette-smoking, poker-playing Germond of 1959 loved the great game of politics, but made fun of politicians, worried not about his girth or cholesterol level, and belonged to the slightly cynical “aw, nuts!” rather than the ever-bedazzled “gee whiz!” school of journalism. The Germond of 1999 is pretty much unchanged.

Reading Fat Man in a Middle Seat is like sitting in a bar with Germond long after midnight, downing shots of brandy too numerous to remember after a dinner too heavy to digest, and hearing irreverent stories of a life spent chronicling the pretentious men who aspire to lead us. “I didn’t become a reporter because I felt a commitment to public service,” he tells us in revealing why he turned down a dream job with Rockefeller in 1959. “I had no illusions about changing the world and no particular interest in doing so. I didn’t go around wringing my hands about the people’s right to know. I was a reporter because it was fun.” Germond became familiar to America starting in 1981 on The McLaughlin Group as a man of the Left, and in this memoir he often comes off as a kneejerk, even bleeding-heart liberal. Yet he is also the country’s best practitioner of “horse-race journalism,” the kind that specializes in handicapping the prospects of politicians as they chase one another around the electoral track. That endeavor has for four decades consigned Germond to the road, where for every good story, he says, “you spend two or three rainy Friday nights at the airport in Atlanta trying to fly standby and ending up as the fat man in the middle seat.

RD

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Robert D. Novak

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I FIRST met Jack Germond in 1959. We were covering newly elected New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who was barnstorming the country to test the presidential waters for 1960. Germond was a 31-year-old reporter for the Gannett newspapers, I a 28-year-old reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The whisky-drinking, cigarette-smoking, poker-playing Germond of 1959 loved the great game of politics, but made fun of politicians, worried not about his girth or cholesterol level, and belonged to the slightly cynical “aw, nuts!” rather than the ever-bedazzled “gee whiz!” school of journalism. The Germond of 1999 is pretty much unchanged.

Reading Fat Man in a Middle Seat is like sitting in a bar with Germond long after midnight, downing shots of brandy too numerous to remember after a dinner too heavy to digest, and hearing irreverent stories of a life spent chronicling the pretentious men who aspire to lead us. “I didn’t become a reporter because I felt a commitment to public service,” he tells us in revealing why he turned down a dream job with Rockefeller in 1959. “I had no illusions about changing the world and no particular interest in doing so. I didn’t go around wringing my hands about the people’s right to know. I was a reporter because it was fun.” Germond became familiar to America starting in 1981 on The McLaughlin Group as a man of the Left, and in this memoir he often comes off as a kneejerk, even bleeding-heart liberal. Yet he is also the country’s best practitioner of “horse-race journalism,” the kind that specializes in handicapping the prospects of politicians as they chase one another around the electoral track. That endeavor has for four decades consigned Germond to the road, where for every good story, he says, “you spend two or three rainy Friday nights at the airport in Atlanta trying to fly standby and ending up as the fat man in the middle seat.