A Defense of Joe McGinnis
Posted on March 16th, 2014 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
In the Washington Post, Gene Weingarten writes this nice defense of the late Joe McGinnis, whose career was permanently tainted by New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, who always seemed a bit creepy to me.
One of the main reasons that there is still doubt about Jeffrey MacDonald’s guilt – 44 years after the crime — is the degree to which “Fatal Vision” was unfairly pilloried by Janet Malcolm, and in a tsk-ing generation of journalistic self-righteousness that followed. It was a great book. It was a fair book. It is Joe McGinniss’s masterpiece. If you are a writer, and you want a clinic in muscular storytelling — how it can and should be done — read “Fatal Vision.”
I have not read Fatal Vision; this makes me want to add it to the pile of unread books that is steadily growing on my bedside table.
5 Responses
3/16/2014 12:31 pm
It has been pointed out (by Fred Barnes) that the thesis of The Selling of the President, 1968 was discredited before the book hit the stores. For all of Mr. Treleyvan’s sophisticated marketing and all of Mr. Jones careful attention to production values, and for all the candidate’s discipline, the Nixon crew nearly blew the election. We’ve had 17 presidential elections since the advent of valid social survey research, 34 major party candidacies, and a half-dozen 3d party candidacies of note. Few have made campaign mistakes of demonstrable consequence (Dewey in 1948, McGovern in 1972, Carter in 1976, and Dukakis in 1988 the exceptions); that’s Nixon’s company.
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You’re neglecting McGinnis most recent effort, a disgusting hatchet job on the former Governor of Alaska, the manufacture of which included something genuinely warped: renting the house next door to her’s with a view of her back yard. He was a man of bad character.
3/17/2014 11:27 am
And Malcolm’s work is serious, thoughtful, and sobering, hardly a mere “tsk-ing” as Weingarten pretends.
3/19/2014 10:26 am
Art Deco: Did you actually read Weingarten’s column? He acknowledges—as do I—that the way McGinnis went about writing the Palin book was a serious mistake. Whether the book was a hatchet job, I tend to doubt. There’s not a lot of good stuff to say about Sarah Palin.
Anon, I don’t think that Malcolm’s work–at least, this work—is all that serious.
3/23/2014 12:14 am
Whether the book was a hatchet job, I tend to doubt. There’s not a lot of good stuff to say about Sarah Palin.
It included, among other things, anonymous bilge about the Governor’s marital spats, sex life, child-rearing methods, &c. That’s not a hatchet job? You’re attempting perhaps to demonstrate to me that magazine journalists are now completely denuded of decency.
Gov. Palin is a lapsed radio reporter who went into local politics in 1992. She was mayor of Wasilla, Ak. for a number of years, a state bureau chief for a number of years, and then Governor of Alaska for two years and change. The Murkowski clan dislikes her, but she’s been a persistent thorn in their side in regard to the patronage mill around them. There’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary about her. Is it your contention that all Republican politicians should have unscrupulous reporters stalking them and trading in seedy gossip (if not concocting crap out of whole cloth)?
3/25/2014 1:57 pm
I recently read Errol Morris’s enormous Wilderness of Error. Incredible book-particularly for a film director by trade-and he certainly took Malcolm’s work as very serious (he agrees and disagrees with her). As for Fatal Vision, Morris makes a great deal many seemingly valid criticisms of McGinnis, with compelling detail/close readings/etc.