Read The Journalist and the Murderer Online
Authors: Janet Malcolm
M
C
G
INNISS
is forty-eight years old and has published six books, the most recent being
Blind Faith
, of 1989. The first,
The Selling of the President, 1968
, written when he was twenty-six, brought him immediate fame and acclaim. In the 1968 Nixon-Humphrey campaign, he had penetrated the inner councils of the advertising agency hired by Nixon, and in his book he revealed the techniques by which Nixon had been made to appear less awful on television. This was in the early days of television’s use in politics, and McGinniss’s revelations (today very tame) seemed startling and ominous. The defeated Humphrey was quoted on the book jacket as having said, “The biggest mistake in my political life was not to learn how to use television,” and “I’m fighting packaged politics. It’s an abomination for a man to place himself completely in the hands of the technicians, the ghost writers, the experts, the pollsters and come out only as an attractive package.”
During our talk, McGinniss spoke of how he had come to write
The Selling of the President
, and surprised me when he said that he had first taken his idea of reporting a Presidential-advertising campaign to the Humphrey camp. “Humphrey’s people said, ‘Are you crazy? This is all secret. The public shouldn’t know about this. No way.’ Humphrey’s advertising agency was Doyle Dane Bernbach, a very sophisticated group who recognized right up front that a book calling attention to the process would not be in their best interest, so they wouldn’t give me any access at all. Nixon’s people were almost touchingly naïve. They said, ‘Oh, gosh, really—a book? Yeah, sure.’ These were people who had had very little experience of being written about.” Then, as if the ghost of Bostwick had just appeared at his side, McGinniss added, “But I hardly felt the obligation to say when I arrived at their offices every
morning, ‘Gentlemen, I must again remind you that I’m a registered Democrat who plans to vote against Mr. Nixon, and that I think what you’re doing—which is trying to fool the American people—is sinister and malevolent, and that I intend to portray you in terms that you are not going to find flattering.’ I felt no obligation to make that statement. And when they were talking about what they were doing and turned to me and said ‘What do you think of that?’ I’d say ‘Yeah, that looks good’ if I thought it was done effectively. I was trying to make myself as unobtrusive a presence as possible. And when the book was published, they reacted with outrage or wry amusement, depending on their sense of humor or their degree of passion as Nixonians. But in no case did anyone think he could sue because he had been defrauded into believing I was going to do something other than what I did.”
McGinniss’s next book was a novel,
The Dream Team
, which was a critical and commercial failure. Then, in 1976, he published a curious book called
Heroes
. It is a confessional work that—like many such exercises—confesses something different from what the confessor thinks he is confessing; by making himself into a subject, the autobiographer sets himself up for a betrayal no less profound than that invited by the subject of someone else’s writing.
Heroes
juxtaposes chapters about (among other personal matters) McGinniss’s inability to be nice to his girlfriend, Nancy Doherty (now his second wife), because of the guilt he feels over leaving his wife and three children, with chapters about meetings with public figures such as Eugene McCarthy, Ted Kennedy, Daniel Berrigan, George McGovern, William Westmoreland, and William Styron, who disappoint him, and confirm him in his notion that there are no heroes left in the world. Before
his meeting with McCarthy, over lunch at Toots Shor’s, McGinniss rehearses his lines:
What I wanted to say to him was: “Look. Once you were at the center of things. Everything revolved around you. You had squeezed your whole universe into a ball and had held it in your hands and no one could touch it. Now it’s gone. The moment has passed. It won’t be back.” I wanted to say also that once I had been at the center of things: at twenty-six I had written a book which had become the best-selling nonfiction book in America. It had got good reviews almost everywhere. It was deemed important, and, as its author, so was I. The youngest person ever (I was told) to have written a book that became number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list. Not counting Anne Frank. Then the moment had passed. In many ways, as McCarthy had seemed to, I had tried to make it pass. Part of him had needed to not win. Part of me had needed to not succeed.… Now, I wanted to ask Eugene McCarthy,
What happens next? Where is the center of things? Why didn’t we stay there? Will we ever be there again?
McCarthy disappoints McGinniss by being reserved and opaque. He is “not a man inclined toward quick intimacy,” McGinniss reports, and, to avoid a drinking expedition that McGinniss organizes when Howard Cosell turns up at the restaurant, McCarthy slips away while McGinniss is in the men’s room. Ted Kennedy is similarly elusive. In Berrigan, McGinniss finds the expansive interlocutor he has been seeking, but the morning after their boozy late-night conversation McGinniss opens the notebook in which he inscribed Berrigan’s aperçus, and instead of “the disciplined, accurate notes of a trained professional” he finds only illegible scrawls and the punch line of
a coarse joke. With one striking exception, the stories McGinniss tells on himself in
Heroes
are pretty unsurprising. The exception is an extraordinary incident that takes place at ten-thirty in the morning in the kitchen of William Styron’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, where McGinniss has spent the night—most of it sitting up and drinking with Styron, whose book
Lie Down in Darkness
he has read four times. McGinniss writes:
I woke up at ten-thirty, if not still drunk, then not yet quite sober. The morning was murky and wet. Styron was still sleeping. I went down to the kitchen looking for something to eat. I opened the refrigerator. The first thing I saw was the can of fresh, vacuum-packed crabmeat, which had been shipped up from Georgia. He had told me about this crabmeat in some detail the night before. It was the only canned crabmeat in America, he had said, which tasted like fresh crab. This was due to the vacuum-packing, he had explained. It was very expensive crabmeat and extremely hard to get, and it was one of his favorite things to eat. He had been saving this can for a special occasion, because it was the last he would be able to get until the following summer.
I opened it. It made a hissing sound, like a can of peanuts, or tennis balls. I ate a piece. It was delicious. Moving quickly to his pantry I took out some flour. Then some Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce. Then I took eggs, milk, heavy cream, butter, and green peppers from the refrigerator. Then I made bread crumbs. I had to move fast. I had to get this done before he woke up. I mixed, rolled, measured, stirred, and poured, for twenty minutes. Then I put the whole business in the oven. It would be crabmeat pie: an original recipe. It would be delicious. How could it miss? I had used the whole big can of crabmeat.
Styron appears in his bathrobe, and when he learns what McGinniss has done he is unbelieving, then outraged. “You used
that
crabmeat?” Styron says, and McGinniss goes on, “It was as if he had come upon me making love to his wife. ‘I didn’t expect you to do this,’ he said.” The story ends happily—Styron regains his good humor and geniality when he eats the crabmeat pie and finds it delicious—and lamely. For what the incident is about, what lies below its light surface, is the dire theme of Promethean theft, of transgression in the service of creativity, of stealing as the foundation of making. That McGinniss is rewarded, rather than punished, for his theft confuses the issue. Yes, a subject may occasionally grudgingly concede that what has been written about him isn’t bad, but this doesn’t make the writer any less a thief. The rare, succulent crabmeat, picked out of the shell, packed, sealed, refrigerated, jealously hoarded, is like the fragile essence of a person’s being, which the journalist makes away with and turns into some horrid mess of his own while the subject sleeps. (“That crabmeat has a very delicate flavor,” poor Styron whimpers on hearing of McGinniss’s Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce and bread crumbs and heavy cream.) When McGinniss wrote this chapter, he could hardly have known that someday he would be in a courtroom in California having his liver ravaged by a pitiless lawyer. Or did he write those letters to MacDonald to make sure that such a fate would be his?
M
C
G
INNISS
met MacDonald in June 1979, in Huntington Beach, California. McGinniss had just finished
Going to Extremes
, a work of reportage about Alaska that was to restore to him the reputation he had lost with
The
Dream Team
and
Heroes
, and establish him as a humorist of no inconsiderable gifts. He was in California as a visiting columnist for the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
, writing a column of light, sharp commentary. However, the meeting with MacDonald put a halt to McGinniss’s traffic with comedy, and brought him to a genre—the “true-crime novel”—in which he had never worked. Fortunately for him, the books of this genre published in America today apparently need to fulfill only one requirement—that they be interminably long—and when
Fatal Vision
, the true-crime novel McGinniss eventually wrote, weighed in at six hundred and sixty-three pages it insured for itself the place on the best-seller list that its publishers had anticipated when they gave him a three-hundred-thousand-dollar advance.
McGinniss was led to his subject by an item he read while scanning the Los Angeles newspapers for topics for his column: the Long Beach Police Officers Association was sponsoring a dinner dance to raise funds for the legal defense of Jeffrey MacDonald, a local physician, who was about to be tried for murder. McGinniss remembered the crime, which had occurred nine years earlier. On February 17, 1970, MacDonald’s pregnant wife, Colette, aged twenty-six, and his two daughters, Kimberly and Kristen, aged five and two and a half, were bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the family’s apartment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where MacDonald was serving as a doctor in a Green Beret unit. MacDonald was charged with the murders and then cleared by an Army tribunal. But his story about waking up to the screams of his wife and older daughter and about seeing four intruders—three men holding clubs and knives and a woman with long hair holding a candle and chanting “Acid is groovy” and “Kill
the pigs”—led to no arrests, and continued to raise the question of why no traces of the intruders had been found in the apartment, and why MacDonald had been merely knocked unconscious and slightly cut up when his wife and children were savagely done to death. In response to pressure from Alfred Kassab, the stepfather of the murdered woman, the Justice Department revived the investigation in 1971 and, over a period of years, built up a compelling enough case against MacDonald to bring him to trial. In the intervening eight years, MacDonald had moved to California, and had made a life for himself that appeared to be shadowed neither by the loss of his family nor by the cloud of suspicion that had hung over him from the day of the murders. He had not remarried and was leading a pleasant, blameless life in the California style. He was a hardworking, successful physician—he had become director of emergency at St. Mary’s Hospital, in Long Beach—and he lived in a small condominium apartment on the water, to which he liked to bring friends and girlfriends, often entertaining them with rides in his thirty-four-foot boat named (what else?) the
Recovery Room
. He was a handsome, tall, blond, athletic man of thirty-five, who had grown up in a lower-middle-class household in Patchogue, Long Island, the second of three children, and had always had about him a kind of preternatural equipoise, an atmosphere of being at home in the world.
MacDonald went to Princeton on a scholarship in 1961, then to Northwestern University Medical School, and then to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, in New York, for his internship. In the summer following his sophomore year at Princeton and her sophomore year at Skidmore, MacDonald’s girlfriend, Colette Stevenson, became
pregnant. The couple decided against abortion and were married in the fall of 1963. Colette left Skidmore, and Kimberly was born in Princeton; Kristen was born in Illinois. Photographs show Colette to have been a pretty, blond girl with a soft, rounded face; all accounts of her stress her reserve, her quietness, her kindliness, and her conventional femininity. At the time of her death, she was taking an evening course in psychology at the North Carolina State University extension at Fort Bragg.
A few days before the fund-raising dinner dance, McGinniss went to see MacDonald at his apartment and interviewed him for his column. Near the end of the interview, MacDonald asked McGinniss if he would like to attend the murder trial—in Raleigh, North Carolina—and write a book about the case from the perspective of the defense team, with whom he would live, and to all of whose plans, strategies, and deliberations he would be privy. This proposal had a special appeal for McGinniss. The situation that MacDonald outlined resembled McGinniss’s situation with the Nixon advertising people, which had had such a successful result. Although none of us ever completely outgrows the voyeurism of childhood, in some of us it lives on more strongly than in others—thus the avid interest of some of us in being “insiders” or in getting the “inside” view of things. In my talk with McGinniss in Williamstown, he used an arresting image: “MacDonald was clearly trying to manipulate me, and I was aware of it from the beginning. But did I have an obligation to say, ‘Wait a minute. I think you are manipulating me, and I have to call your attention to the fact that I’m aware of this, just so you’ll understand you are not succeeding’? Do little bells have to go off at a certain point? This has never
been the case before. This could inhibit any but the most superficial reporting. We could all be reduced to standing in the street interviewing the survivors of fires.”