The Fat Man Sings

...I saw old Dave Silverman the other day," Wallace would inevitably begin...

...His silence regarding personal matters is another generational marker...

...the elder died of leukemia in the late 1970s...

...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...

...Wallace," Germond writes, "seemed to think all Jews know one another...

...Judging from my own, more limited experience, I do believe it, and the transformation has long been in train...

...Even in the sub-genus 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...

...Whenever Witcover would drop in on the governor for an interview, Wallace would try to jolly up the alien with some small talk...

...After his daughter's death, many politicians went out of their way to offer sympathy...

...She marched over to us and plunked herself down with an emphatic flounce of skirts and legs...

...I couldn't get worked up about the mayor getting his driveway paved with public asphalt...

...Like so many political reporters, particularly of the "horserace" variety, Germond began his career with an ambition to cover sports...

...With his first wife he had two daughters...

...I loved politics and, I confess, I enjoyed politicians immensely...

...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...

...What a coincidence...

...Politicians get the reporters they deserve...

...And as long as we're on the subject of Wallace, let me pass along one more stoAndrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Without apology he announces himself a practitioner of "horse-race journal-ism"—reporting that dwells on who's winning and who's losing a political race to the exclusion of Deep Thinking About the Issues...

...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...

...Better he should teach political science...

...Politicians might tell me something was terribly important, but I knew that, whatever it was, it didn't really matter to me...

...Germond says, generously and perhaps not accurately, that today's generation of political reporters is every bit as skilled as his own...

...Their reporting brought them in frequent contact with George Wallace, who somehow acquired the idea that Witcover is Jewish...

...No longer...

...Some of them he enjoyed more than others, however...

...Wit-cover is Roman Catholic, but never mind...

...He didn't even take his shoes off...

...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...

...But their lifestyles are more disciplined...

...Over the years, Witcover gave up trying to set Wallace straight, and would simply send his best wishes to old Dave...

...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...

...Germond, after all, was a powerful columnist, with some sway over the course of their careers...

...World-wise, skeptical, unshockable, he makes for amiable and disarming company...

...The Germond persona, familiar to watchers of The McLaughlin Group, doesn't allow for much romantic self-reflection...

...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...

...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...

...Which left politics...

...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...

...BY ANDREW FERGUSON Everyone who reads this marvelous memoir—and it deserves to have many, many J readers—^will have a favorite anecdote among the countless tales that Jack Germond piles up, so I might as well begin this review with mine...

...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...

...ry (Fat Man in a Middle Seat is that kind of book...

...Mandy's death at fourteen, after five brave years of dealing with her illness with unfailing hope, was, of course, a signal event in my life as well as in that of her mother, Barbara, and her sister, Jessica, who was eleven...

...In my case it seemed to reinforce the detachment I felt from things going on around me...

...One of them, a midwestern senator, both called and wrote to express his sympathy at great length...

...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...

...Predictably enough, he revered Bobby Kennedy and despised Richard Nixon...

...Then, at a dinner two months later, he asked me: 'How's that daughter of yours getting along...

...Governor Wallace, needless to say, was a Brylcreem man...

...He quickly tired of it: "There are only so many ways you can report a baseball game...

...Silverman was a Jewish shopkeeper in downtown Montgomery...

...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...

...Investigative journalism left him similarly unmoved...

...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...

...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...

...We learn this by-the-by, in a chapter otherwise devoted to Jimmy Carter...

...That damned George Wallace," she announced...

...A reporter who doesn't quickly tell readers what they most want to know—the score—^won't last long...

...But it is only incidentally a book about Jack Ger-mond...

...Jack Germond laments the change, not only in the quality of our pols but in the character of the journalists who cover them...

...Germond is best known, of course, for his stint as the house curmudgeon on The McL^-ughlin Group...

...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...

...The loss of a child causes a pain that has no dimension and cannot be described to those who have not shared the experience...

...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...

...To the contrary, says Germond, "I have always argued that newspapers should not have any civic purpose beyond telling readers what is happening...

...Germond was in the bar, and one or two others, but every one else was in the hotel gym, queuing up for the StairMaster...

...Like most liberal reporters, he had a special fondness for liberal (nowadays called "moderate") Republicans: Nelson Rockefeller, Oregon governor Tom McCall, Jacob Javits, and other ideological cross-dressers who were expert in the art of letting Democrats have their way...

...According to Germond, Wallace had only one interest aside from rousing the rabble, and this was, no surprise, women...

...less predictably, he dislikes Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton ("the most selfish and egocentric politician I have ever seen...

...My indignation threshold was too high to sustain me," he writes...