Fat Man and Flu Man
Jack Germond, famously known for his girth,is a political columnist for the Baltimore Sun and formerly for the defunct Washington Star. His two favorite passtimes are dulling his senses with alcohol and handicapping horse races. He thus has all the skill necessary for the grungy job of covering political campaigns.
In his book, Fat Man in the Middle Seat, Germond chronicles his forty years as a journalist, apparently spending far too much time in the middle seat in coach class. If you are interested in gaining political insight or acquiring a fuller understanding of the political process, this book will be a disappointment. If you are seeking to be entertained with anecdotes that reporters probably regale each other with over a bottle of gin, this book deserves your attention. Germond is nothing, if not an engrossing bar companion.
Germond is an old time Liberal, but he seems the politician he enjoyed covering most was George Wallace. Wallace was not really as dedicated a racist as he portrayed himself to be. Perhaps worst he deliberately played on the bigotry of others for political gain. The funniest story Germond tells about Wallace is the time a female hanger-on stomped from Wallace's hotel room complaining that Wallace did not even have the decency to take his shoes off. Germond regrets the loss of such colorful politicians. The present crop is too poll-controlled and too similarly bland for Germond's appetite.
Surprisingly, Germond does not devote many pages to Ronald Reagan. Reagan never really took press coverage personally. As a consequence, there were fewer stories to tell. For some reason, Germond and former President George Bush seem to suffer from terminal animosity. Germond tries to explain why, but his descriptions of encounters with Bush do not seem out of the ordinary. To protect himself or Bush, Germond is not telling the entire story.
Germond finds President Clinton to be the most personally selfish politician he has ever known. Interestingly, he reports that there had been so much evidence of womanizing that by the time the Genifer Flowers episode exploded in the 1992 pre-convention political campaign, Germond was sure that Flowers was telling the truth.
He did not pursue the issue because in his news judgment the extracurricular activities of politicians, so long as they did not intrude on public business, are irrelevant. Where Germond's judgment failed was not in ignoring the Flowers sex story, but in ignoring the campaign's zealous trashing of Flowers. The fact that Clinton's troops lied about the issue and tried to personally destroy Flowers, is a legitimate and important political story. The fact the Clinton plays politics as a blood sport was missed. Germond even misses his oversight in retrospect.
Latest Articles