WASHINGTON - Jack W. Germond, 85, the portly, cantankerous columnist and pundit who covered 10 presidential elections and sparred with colleagues on TV's The McLaughlin Group, died Wednesday, "peacefully and quickly," his wife, Alice, said.
The Baltimore Sun, where Mr. Germond worked for many years, said he died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at his home in Charles Town, W. Va.
Mr. Germond had recently finished his first novel, A Small Story for Page Three, about a reporter investigating political intrigue, being published Friday.
"He went peacefully and quickly after just completing this novel, a tale he had pondered while writing columns, campaign books, a memoir and covering our politics and politicians," his wife said in a note to his colleagues. She said he "was fortunate to spend his life working at a job he would have done for free during some halcyon times in the newspaper business."
With Jules Witcover, Mr. Germond cowrote five syndicated columns a week for nearly 25 years, most of that time spent at Baltimore's Evening Sun until it went out of business and then at the Sun. He was in many ways emblematic of his generation of Washington journalists: He was friendly with the politicians he covered, and he cultivated relationships with political insiders during late-night poker games and whiskey-fueled bull sessions.
"Jack was a truly dedicated reporter and had an old-fashioned relationship with politicians," Witcover told the Sun. "He liked them, but that did not prevent him from being critical when they did bad things and behaved badly."
The pair were among the "Boys on the Bus" of Timothy Crouse's account of reporters in the 1972 presidential election.
Later in his career, he became arguably the best known of the "Boys," thanks to The McLaughlin Group, where he was a liberal alternative to conservatives John McLaughlin and Robert D. Novak.
Their dustups were even parodied on Saturday Night Live, with Chris Farley as Mr. Germond.
He quit the real show in 1996 after a series of disputes with McLaughlin, sending the host a terse fax that read: "Bye-bye."
Mr. Germond and Witcover's column, "Politics Today," appeared in about 140 newspapers at its peak. The pair launched the column in 1977 for the Washington Star and moved to the Evening Sun four years later when the Star folded.
"He was the guy you went to when you were a junior reporter," said Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief for USA Today.
Mr. Germond and Witcover also chronicled the dumbing down of presidential campaigns and the growing cynicism of the electorate in a series of books with such titles as Wake Us When It's Over and Mad as Hell.
He wrote two memoirs, Fat Man in a Middle Seat (1999) and Fat Man Fed Up (2004). He retired from writing columns after the 2000 presidential election, disgusted with politics.
"I really found this campaign odious. I just couldn't get up for it," he told the Washington Post. ". . . I didn't know how to explain to my granddaughter that I was spending my dotage writing about Al Gore and George W. Bush."
In addition to his wife of 18 years, he is survived by a daughter, stepdaughter, and stepson. A daughter died in 1977 from leukemia at age 14.