The Fat Man Sings

Germond is best known, of course, for his stint as the house curmudgeon on The McLaughlin Group. But as a print reporter he’s been covering politics for more than forty years, the last twenty or so with his partner Jules Witcover. Their reporting brought them in frequent contact with George Wallace, who somehow acquired the idea that Witcover is Jewish. Witcover is Roman Catholic, but never mind. Whenever Witcover would drop in on the governor for an interview, Wallace would try to jolly up the alien with some small talk. “I saw old Dave Silverman the other day,” Wallace would inevitably begin. What a coincidence! Silverman was a Jewish shopkeeper in downtown Montgomery. “Wallace,” Germond writes, “seemed to think all Jews know one another.” Over the years, Witcover gave up trying to set Wallace straight, and would simply send his best wishes to old Dave.

And as long as we’re on the subject of Wallace, let me pass along one more story (Fat Man in a Middle Seat is that kind of book). According to Germond, Wallace had only one interest aside from rousing the rabble, and this was, no surprise, women. One afternoon, Germond was passing the time in a hotel lobby with Wallace’s press secretary when an elevator door opened and a blond country singer who warmed up crowds at Wallace campaign rallies bolted out. She marched over to us and plunked herself down with an emphatic flounce of skirts and legs. “That damned George Wallace,” she announced. “He didn’t even take his shoes off.”

Wallace may have been a bad guy — Germond certainly thinks he was — but it’s also true that they don’t make them like him anymore, and as a consequence American politics is a much less entertaining spectacle than it once was. Nowadays national politicians, with one or two exceptions, all seem to have been pulped and pressed and rolled out from the same vat of mush, so that Al Trent Lamar John Gore Lott Alexander Kerry is indistinguishable from Chuck Don Tom Evan Hagel Nickles Harkin Bayh, or any other politician who might aspire to their lofty perch. Even in the subgenus Southern Demagogue, the best that contemporary politics can offer up is David Duke, a creepy little pretty boy so starved for respectability that he’s submitted to cosmetic surgery and campaigns with a blow drier in his car. Governor Wallace, needless to say, was a Brylcreem man.

Jack Germond laments the change, not only in the quality of our pols but in the character of the journalists who cover them. Politicians get the reporters they deserve. Germond’s generation of hacks, when covering a campaign, followed a rigorous schedule: a long day of reporting, a late afternoon and early evening spent filing the story, then a bloody, carnivorous dinner (napkin spread over the tie) followed by several hours in the hotel bar swapping lies and gossip with colleagues.

No longer. Germond says, generously and perhaps not accurately, that today’s generation of political reporters is every bit as skilled as his own. “But their lifestyles are more disciplined. They tend to drink white wine or beer rather than Irish whiskey . . . and a lot of them eat salads from room service, believe it or not.” Judging from my own, more limited experience, I do believe it, and the transformation has long been in train. The first time I covered the New Hampshire primary, in 1988, I headed for the legendary bar at the Wayfarer Hotel in Manchester, a neophyte hoping to knock back a few stiff ones with the big dogs after a tough day trailing (if I remember correctly) the electrifying candidacy of Paul Simon. Germond was in the bar, and one or two others, but every one else was in the hotel gym, queuing up for the StairMaster.

Germond is not a convert to the StairMaster, as you may have noticed, but neither is he a sentimentalist posting his memoir as a Valentine to the irretrievable past. The Germond persona, familiar to watchers of The McLaughlin Group, doesn’t allow for much romantic self-reflection. Worldwise, skeptical, unshockable, he makes for amiable and disarming company. Without apology he announces himself a practitioner of “horse-race journalism” — reporting that dwells on who’s winning and who’s losing a political race to the exclusion of Deep Thinking About the Issues. The lack of apology is refreshing, since it is currently an article of faith among political reporters — who pride themselves on their capacity for self-flagellation — that their reporting is woefully superficial, too obsessed with who’s up and who’s down, criminally negligent of The Larger Meaning, and so on. To the contrary, says Germond, “I have always argued that newspapers should not have any civic purpose beyond telling readers what is happening. . . . A reporter who doesn’t quickly tell readers what they most want to know — the score — won’t last long. Better he should teach political science.”

So it’s no surprise that the great issues of the last forty years make only glancing appearances in Fat Man in a Middle Seat. Like so many political reporters, particularly of the “horse-race” variety, Germond began his career with an ambition to cover sports. (Scratch a really good political reporter and most likely you’ll find a sports nut: The fascination with winning and losing, with definitive outcomes and numerical data, translates easily from one field to the other.) He quickly tired of it: “There are only so many ways you can report a baseball game.” Investigative journalism left him similarly unmoved. “My indignation threshold was too high to sustain me,” he writes. “I couldn’t get worked up about the mayor getting his driveway paved with public asphalt.”

Which left politics. “I loved politics and, I confess, I enjoyed politicians immensely.” Some of them he enjoyed more than others, however. Like most liberal reporters, he had a special fondness for liberal (nowadays called “moderate”) Republicans: Nelson Rocke-feller, Oregon governor Tom McCall, Jacob Javits, and other ideological cross-dressers who were expert in the art of letting Democrats have their way. Predictably enough, he revered Bobby Kennedy and despised Richard Nixon; less predictably, he dislikes Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton (“the most selfish and egocentric politician I have ever seen”). For reasons he is unable to express, he holds a bitter contempt for George Bush, an awkward and uneven political performer, as Germond notes, but also a superior human being, which Germond misses.

Billed as a memoir, Fat Man in a Middle Seat is thus a book about politics, more specifically about the men who practice politics, and it will entrance anyone with an interest in the public life of the past forty years. But it is only incidentally a book about Jack Germond. His silence regarding personal matters is another generational marker. We learn a good deal about his jobs and colleagues in various newsrooms, a bit about his early family life, next to nothing about his first marriage or his second. With his first wife he had two daughters; the elder died of leukemia in the late 1970s. We learn this by-the-by, in a chapter otherwise devoted to Jimmy Carter.

These dignified and heartbreaking sentences take us as far as we’re going to go into Jack Germond’s inner life, and we should be grateful, in this day of compulsive self-exposure, for his reticence. And of course the sad story has a small compensation, a lovely twist at once funny and horrifying, altogether characteristic of this hugely enjoyable book. After his daughter’s death, many politicians went out of their way to offer sympathy; Germond, after all, was a powerful columnist, with some sway over the course of their careers.

“One of them, a midwestern senator, both called and wrote to express his sympathy at great length. Then, at a dinner two months later, he asked me: ‘How’s that daughter of yours getting along?”