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Mr. Novak is a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a commentator for CNN. His new book, Completing the Revolution, will be published in January.

Fat Man in a Middle Seat: Forty Years of Covering Politics, by Jack W. Germond (Random House, 288 pp., $25)

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 knee-jerk, 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."

Such exertions often put Germond (and his partner, Jules Witcover) well ahead of the pack, as when he forecast the rise of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in favorable columns that he now flinches at recalling-particularly a 1978 "outrageous puff piece" (his own words) about the 31-year-old attorney general of Arkansas. Clinton "had faked me out of my shoes," Germond admits. "He had learned he could con the national press just like the locals." As for his discovery of Carter, "I have never been more mistaken than I was about [his] potential as president."

Such candor is vintage Germond. Calling himself "a garden-variety liberal inclined toward the Democrats," he confesses that his political beliefs occasionally interfered with accurate handicapping-especially when race was involved. In 1969, he mistakenly predicted the victory of Tom Bradley over Sam Yorty for mayor of Los Angeles because "I had allowed my political judgment to be skewed by my personal distaste for Yorty and hopes for a black man to succeed. It was the kind of mistake reporters must fight repeatedly, if they are to play in a fast league."

In the '80s, he reveals, "we didn't cover [Jesse] Jackson as critically as we did the other candidates." Why? For fear "of being called a racist." To my surprise, Germond also can be a pushover when a politician turns on the waterworks. He relishes a 1988 conversation with Michael Dukakis, "his face wet with tears," on the night that Dukakis's cousin, the actress Olympia Dukakis, won an Academy Award.

Usually, however, Germond can be relied on to pick out the phonies. Thus he calls Averell Harriman a penny-pinching fraud with an "inflated reputation" who "had little or no interest in doing the job of governor [of New York]." He calls Clinton the "most selfish and egocentric politician I have ever seen in decades of close association with so many leaders who are egocentric and selfish." George Bush (the elder) is indicted as a "totally amoral campaigner." Germond correctly concludes about George Wallace that even as he demagogued his way to national notoriety he "really didn't give a damn about race."

But ideological blinders may have kept Germond from appreciating the most successful politician and American leader of the past 40 years: Ronald Reagan, who never could remember Germond's name until he began to appear frequently on television. (This was exactly my own experience with the Gipper.) "We had to wonder how the country made it through eight years with someone in the White House as vague and detached as Reagan always seemed to be," writes Germond, who ought to be embarrassed to say he would have preferred Howard Baker in the Oval Office.

The book's most delicious chapter recounts Germond's long but dysfunctional television marriage with John McLaughlin. Why did he not walk away from the megalomaniacal, overbearing moderator of The McLaughlin Group long before he did so in 1996, eight years after I myself left the program? Germond is typically candid: "The real reason was selfish. Appearing on television permitted me to enjoy the luxury of being a newspaper reporter without having to live on a newspaper reporter's salary. I could get an editor's pay without doing the work."