Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  MacDonald sent me the albums, unrequested, along with hundreds of pieces of fan mail he had accumulated over the years, I'm not sure why. I am also not sure what I should do with them, tfaybe I will put them in a safe place for a while.

  Under federal law—even having been sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison—Jeffrey MacDonald could

  become eligible for parole on April 5, 1991. He will be, then, forty-seven years old. The books are his. I don't imagine he would have much use for them in prison, but should he get out, he might like to have them back, as souvenirs.

  The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald

  What's the sense of all this? It's crazy. John Lennon gets shot. It's—it's—I mean there's no sense. I don't pray to "another god." Umm, you know, to a—a god in another world is what I mean.

  I—I just believe in life here. Uhh, I—we make our bed and we must lie in it, basically, and um, I think that, you know, man has the ability to create his own environment with, uh—heh!—certain mitigating features, uhh, natural and unnatural disasters.

  But there's just gotta be something else. It can't be that life is made up of a series of tragedies and travesties and, and, insanities. Ummm—this country is wacko and it doesn't know it. I—I—I love this country. I tried to fight for this country. They wouldn't let me. They kept me at Fort Bragg when I should have been in Vietnam. 'Cause I signed up for the Green Berets. But they weren't sending Green Berets to Vietnam, they were sending tanks to smash villages.

  I mean it's—the whole thing is crazy. I mean, good Lord, there has to be more meaning than these, these crazy episodes of life that I apparently have a—an overabundance of. [Pause.] [Sigh.] Anyway—it's all bullshit.

  But I'm gonna just list some of the good things so I don't leave you with that note. The up years were the high school years. Princeton was fabulous: getting back with Colette, and the hitchhiking back and forth to Skidmore, and the lovemaking in the hotel in Saratoga Springs, and being in her arms and getting letters from her and feeling that surge of love, that incredible, indescribable feeling when you're with her and wanting to see her and wanting to come home to see her, and wanting to come home from Columbia Presbyterian, and then fall asleep at the table. And wanting to take her and Kimmy and Kristy down to see the pony. Those are the great things that you remember. That's the greatest of all.

  Umm, I suppose I should also just tell you about my disappointments in life. There are three that I can easily remember right now, sitting here. A lot of little disappointments, like everyone, but I think I have three disappointments. One of horrendous magnitude, umm, two of a much lesser magnitude, but the only things that sort of nag at me now.

  Umm, number one of course is the inability of me to protect my family on February 17th. Umm, I'm not even going to get into that. I don't like to talk about that. Uhh, that's clearly my Achilles' heel, uh, but it is the major disappointment, uhh, of my life, I think, and, um, what I have to live with, umm, because, like it or not, the fact is had I protected them, then all four of us—all five of us, actually—would be here now, uhh, living some incredible great life, uhh, Colette and I still madly in love and going into New York to see occasional plays from our farm in Connecticut. So that's number one.

  The other two disappointments are basically goal-oriented problems, and they're not in the same severity. I don't mean to put them together; it's just that sitting down thinking, there's lots of little things that happened—-I wished I'd made a better tackle one time, things like that, I wish I played the instruments still, like clarinet or saxophone—but, um, the only other important, you know, more important thought processes occasionally recur to me: Number one, I wished I had my Princeton degree, and that sounds a little silly and sophomoric, and it may be, but I kind of wish, somehow, that I had my Princeton degree.

  Either that I was able to, um, go back somehow and get my degree even now as a physician by doing things or writing papers or examining, or having stayed an extra year then.

  Under the exigencies of the situation, uh, we couldn't. It was a financial and partly emotional decision, 'cause we were ready to move on. We were ready not for a senior year that we thought was going to be wasted writing a senior paper and socializing in New York and Philadelphia, but on to medical school and we had an up-and-coming family that we were worried about and wanted to please. But I'd like to have my Princeton degree. I know that sounds materialistic and, and, um, maybe even a little overbearing, but it's true.

  And the other thing is, um, in a kind of a strange sense, and um, kind of perverse way, I wished I had the experience of having served in Vietnam. And again, not from the viewpoint of seeing war, and, uh, the mutilation and whatnot, but I think the experience that our generation went through is so traumatic and so important and has shaped the country now for probably the next twenty years, uh, certainly these last ten . . . umm, and I actually grew up thinking that was part of growing up, being in the military, doing your share, carrying your load, umm, so that I wouldn't have minded at all, at all, going to Vietnam. Not in a pro-war fashion, but I would have served proudly and done my best.

  I would not have been a warmonger, I don't think, um, but I kind of wish somehow that I had been able to serve my twelve months over there. Um, in a sense a feeling that then I could say to anyone I want, oh, you're an asshole for supporting this next war or you're not an asshole for supporting the war, or vice versa. Any permutation of that.

  In other words I think that uh, uh, my perspective is relatively limited on the subject because I didn't go to war. Whereas a lot of people were over there in Vietnam. They did their thing and now they can say whatever they want. They can be for or against the war with a clear mind and a clear conscience.

  Of course the corollary of my silly feeling that I should have gone to Vietnam is the fact that a lot of people died in Vietnam and certainly we could have learned that experience without having a lot of able-bodied men and, as a matter of fact, whatever-bodied men, women, and children killed over there.

  So I know that's sort of a self-centered and maybe even overly patriotic way of viewing it, but I wish that I had served my country in a combat zone rather than on Fort Bragg.

  Of course, the corollary of that also is that maybe then Colette, Kim, and Kris, and uh, our little baby boy, um—Colette was pregnant with a baby boy, as you know— well, maybe you didn't know—um, would be with me today. Maybe I would have served the twelve months in a combat zone and come out a lot better than a half hour or whatever it was in, uh, 544 Castle Drive with at least four intruders.

  I still think about that night, you know. I remember Colette was late for class and dashing out the front door and I was already taking care of the kids and putting away the dishes—not putting away the dishes, but getting them into the kitchen and stuff—and she mentioned something about could she stop at the uh, at the uh, the little nearby dairy for milk and I said fine, we needed milk. And, um, it was cold and rainy and Colette ran to the car.

  When she got back from classes that night—maybe I've talked myself into it, but it honestly seems like we had a very small-talk type of conversation. It's possible—it is possible— that this night Colette said something about, or brought up the bit about Kristy's bed-wetting and asking about it in her child psychology class and I said, "Oh, and what did the professor say?"

  I know! I remember the conversation! We did have the conversation—I'm just not sure it was that night. But Colette smiled and—and then I added, "I bet he said just what I said he would say." And Colette smiled and said, "You bum, you're always right."

  Other than that, there's nothing I can recall about our conversation, uh, except the fact that Colette was tired that night. Umm, she was looking super and, you know, 1 was in a real—we were in our best time frame ever, and I was in the habit of trying to shore her up about her pregnancy, and I, you know, I was probably even actually saying that, you know, how nice she looked, and she said, "Oh, I just got in and I have rain in my ha
ir and I don't look good at all." She always- denigrated herself.

  Anyway, she went in and got changed into pj's because she had gotten a little wet in the rain and she sat around on the, uh, um, um, sofa, um, and I was reading for a little while and we talked about essentially nothing things. And we were sitting next to each other, actually touching each other, on the couch.

  And that's when she had her liqueur at eleven o'clock or so, and we watched the news and Johnny Carson, and she went to bed as Johnny Carson was coming on, saying she was a little tired.

  And the last thing that we ever did together was that I kissed her goodnight and, um, she went padding down the hallway into bed.

  She never really looked as pretty in a picture as she was. Colette was not photogenic for some reason, although she had a very fine bone structure and a nice nose. I could never figure out why she wasn't photogenic, because to me she was a brown-eyed beautiful blonde, um, who didn't have the greatest waistline and her legs were a little skinny, but to me she was incredibly beautiful.

  Colette wasn't a woman that walked into a room and stopped the room by any means. That was not her at all, or her style even. But she was the kind of woman that the more you looked at her the lovelier she became. Her warmth would come out and her big, brown luminous eyes would take on new meaning, and the little smile that when she was kidding or being cynical or funny, or, you know—her eyes would sparkle and she'd get this little smile, and it was such a beautiful, meaningful face. The only one I could compare her to would be Meryl Streep. She reminds me a great deal of Colette—that sort of quiet beauty about her.

  Colette, sort of in a sentence, was to me soft and feminine and beautiful, big brown eyes, very intelligent, quiet sense of humor, not very aggressive, but a magnificent woman. Without any question the neatest woman I ever met. I still see her as the epitome of womanhood.

  A fatal vision.

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  Norton & Company, Inc., 1978. Physicians' Desk Reference. Oradell, N.J.: Medical Economics

  Company, 1977. Wolfe, Sidney M., M.D., Christopher M. Coley, and the Health Research Group founded by Ralph Nader. Pills That Don't Work. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1981.