The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

  At the time of the dinner—in April 1988—I was in correspondence with MacDonald, and in my next letter I took the occasion of the meeting with Malley to delicately broach the subject of his speech and ask if he himself had any sense of it as a problem. MacDonald’s reply ran to fourteen pages. He wrote, in part:

  Your comments re: me being vivid in person but not so in letters and transcripts surprises me only a little.… If I come across as guarded, surely the major factor must be the fact that I’m wrongly accused and convicted. And every sentence I’ve said in my defense, or didn’t say in my defense, has been exhaustively analyzed. My gestures, my words, my letters, my dreams, my memory—all have been dissected publicly and privately, and I began to feel nothing but tiny portions of my memory are sacred anymore.…

  I personally feel the hair on the back of my neck rise when you ask this question, because (to me) inherent in the question is a defense of Joe McGinniss’s outrageous intentional mis-portrayal. What the question seems to say is “Jeff is partially responsible for Joe’s admittedly not-too-accurate portrayal.” I think that is pure bunk, a total cop-out for his complete & utter failure to be truthful and accurate.… McGinniss should have to answer for his lies, his deceit, his fraudulent actions, his misreporting.… Surely writers rarely, if ever, have had greater access to a subject, excepting husband/wife teams. Not only did we meet, dine, talk, correspond, interact over four years—but we lived together, he had access to an entire lifetime of correspondence, and he had total access to every single friend & acquaintance of any importance at all in my life. In addition, he acted as part of my defense team, for God’s sake, a situation where every conceivable vulnerability is dissected over & over ad nauseam. In addition, he saw me under extreme stress, and had total access to many others who lived or worked with me under other conditions of stress.

  So McGinnis has no excuse for his false portrayal. He wasn’t watching a distant subject through a haze—he was deeply involved, as “best friend,” for four years—and still managed to miss the entire core of my being.

  I did not press MacDonald further on the subject of his speech. Later, on rereading the transcript of the McGinniss trial, I came across a section of testimony that, had I remembered it, would have made me think twice before suggesting to MacDonald that there was something funny about his speech. This was the testimony of the psychiatrist Michael Stone, who had been hired by Kornstein to confirm the truth of McGinniss’s theory, expressed in Fatal Vision, that MacDonald suffered from the Kernbergian complaint of pathological narcissism. (In his cross-examination, Bostwick was able to point out that pathological narcissism does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association—which, however, doesn’t mean that the disorders that do appear are any less questionable; our standard psychiatric diagnostic nomenclature has all the explanatory power of the nomenclature of medieval physiology involving the four humors.) Although Stone, a graduate of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute and a professor of clinical psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, had never examined (or even met) MacDonald, he was in no doubt, after reading the six-hundred-page transcript of the tape recordings MacDonald had made for McGinniss, that the man suffered from something even worse than pathological narcissism—namely, “malignant narcissism, which is … like pathological narcissism-plus.” Stone told the jury that he had made a concordance of the “various abnormal traits and qualities and examples” he had found in the transcript, but that “the most impressive bit of evidence vis-à-vis pathological narcissism … is not what is on any given page but what is not in any of the pages.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Kornstein inquired.

  Stone replied, “In all of this, there is nothing that touches one as genuine about either [MacDonald] or anybody else, with the possible exception of his own peevishness and propensity to anger when his will is thwarted. But, apart from that, no one comes alive for the reader. I read this material twice. I have, as I say, made a concordance tool. I couldn’t tell you what Colette was really like; I couldn’t tell you what Kimmy was really like.… None of them come alive; they’re all stiff figures. And that is an amazing thing to experience when reading six hundred pages of autobiographical material.”

  In writing to MacDonald that “less comes through about you in your writing and in transcripts of your speech than is usual,” I had made the same error that Stone made in marvelling at MacDonald’s incapacity for rendering Tolstoyan portraits of himself and his family. MacDonald’s bland dullness on tape seemed unusual to me and to Stone (and also to McGinniss, who had told me how he groaned whenever a new tape arrived from the prison) because of its contrast to the excitingly dire character of the crime for which he stood convicted: a murderer shouldn’t sound like an accountant. But in fact—as every journalist will confirm—MacDonald’s uninterestingness is not unusual at all. In Philip Roth’s experimental novel The Counterlife, the novelist-narrator Zuckerman observes:

  People don’t turn themselves over to writers as fullblown literary characters—generally they give you very little to go on and, after the impact of the initial impression, are barely any help at all. Most people (beginning with the novelist—himself, his family, just about everyone he knows) are absolutely unoriginal, and his job is to make them appear otherwise. It’s not easy. If Henry was ever going to turn out to be interesting, I was going to have to do it.

  However, when a journalist fetches up against someone like Henry (“naïve and uninteresting” and “perfectly ordinary” is Zuckerman’s description of him), all he can do—since his job is to report, not to invent—is flee from him and hope that a more suitable subject will turn up soon. For while the novelist, when casting about for a hero or a heroine, has all of human nature to choose from, the journalist must limit his protagonists to a small group of people of a certain rare, exhibitionistic, self-fabulizing nature, who have already done the work on themselves that the novelist does on his imaginary characters—who, in short, present themselves as ready-made literary figures. In the MacDonald-McGinniss case we have an instance of a journalist who apparently found out too late (or let himself find out too late) that the subject of his book was not up to scratch—not suitable for a work of nonfiction, not a member of the wonderful race of auto-fictionalizers, like Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould and Truman Capote’s Perry Smith, on whom the New Journalism and the “nonfiction novel” depend for their life. MacDonald was simply a guy like the rest of us, with nothing to offer but a tedious and improbable story about his innocence of a bad crime. In the normal course of things, McGinniss would probably have quickly recognized MacDonald’s ordinariness, abandoned the project of writing about him, and once again taken up the search for the larger-than-life subject that is as crucial to a journalist’s work as the quest for a rare image is crucial to the photographer’s art. But, for various reasons, McGinniss chose not to see what was staring him in the face. One reason, it may be assumed, was his old weakness for being “inside”; the offer of being privy to conversations that no other outsider could hear, of having “access” to MacDonald that would be withheld from others, was no doubt irresistible to him. Another was the pressure of MacDonald’s desire to be written about. As my reading of the transcript of MacDonald’s prison tapes has shown me what poor McGinniss was up against in trying to fashion a Raskolnikov out of a Jeffrey MacDonald, so have my relations with MacDonald himself permitted me to feel some of the man’s seductiveness and to understand why McGinniss would have succumbed to its force. By the time McGinniss was fully aware that MacDonald would not work out as a character—and one of the leitmotivs of McGinniss’s letters to MacDonald in prison is his constant attempt to prod him into being interesting, even to the point of trying to stir him up by revealing a number of sexual indiscretions of his own (which Bostwick took great pleasure in reading out loud in the courtroom)—he was too deeply implicated in the process whereby a piece of writing is transformed in
to a commodity, and also too heavily in personal debt. (His money problems—his need for a mortgage and a new furnace and so on—are another leitmotiv of the correspondence.)

  The solution McGinniss arrived at for dealing with MacDonald’s characterlessness was not a satisfactory one, but it had to do. At the criminal trial, the prosecution had argued that it did not have to show that MacDonald was the kind of person who could have committed the crimes—it had only to show that he had indeed committed them—but this was precisely what McGinniss, the nonfiction novelist, did have to show. The means he adopted was to quote long descriptions by Kernberg and Lasch of their vivid characters, the pathological narcissists, his idea evidently being that some of the aura of those characters would come off on MacDonald—that, by extension, their interesting horribleness would become his. When Kernberg (in a passage quoted by McGinniss) speaks of pathological narcissists’ “grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and remarkable absence of interest and empathy for others, in spite of the fact that they are so very eager to obtain admiration and approval,” and adds,

  They feel that they have the right to control and possess others and to exploit them without guilt feelings, and, behind a surface which very often is charming and engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness,

  he could be talking about the sinister Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda and Osmond in Portrait of a Lady. Unfortunately for McGinniss’s project, however, there is nothing in the preceding six hundred pages of Fatal Vision to suggest that Kernberg was talking about Jeffrey MacDonald; nor does McGinniss’s quotation from Lasch on the narcissist’s “boundless rage against the female sex,” based on his “fear of the devouring mother of the pre-Oedipal fantasy,” connect with anything McGinniss could show MacDonald to have done.

  Hervey Cleckley’s psychopath worked a little better for McGinniss. The Mask of Sanity, first published in 1941, is an extremely odd book, which begins (to give an idea of its period flavor) with an attack on Finnegans Wake and includes among its vignettes of anti-social behavior the case of an “intelligent and in some respects distinguished young man” who was discovered having sex with four black “unwashed laborers” in a tourist cabin in the South. For some reason, this quaint and rather mad book continues to exert its hold on the imaginations of American psychiatrists; it appeared in a fifth edition as recently as 1976, and is still used as a textbook in medical schools throughout the country. The book’s thesis, which is buried among masses of the sort of thing cited above, is that there is a kind of evildoer called a psychopath, who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from “a grave psychiatric disorder,” whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind “the mask of sanity” there is not a real human being but a mere simulacrum of one. Cleckley writes:

  We are dealing here not with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. This smoothly operating psychic apparatus not only reproduces consistently specimens of good human reasoning but also appropriate simulations of normal human emotion in response to nearly all the varied stimuli of life. So perfect is this reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him can point out in scientific or objective terms why he is not real. And yet one knows or feels he knows that reality, in the sense of full, healthy experiencing of life, is not here.

  Cleckley’s “grave psychiatric disorder” is, of course, the same disorder that afflicted Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a host of other wonderful literary creations. The attempt to solve the problem of evil and perpetuate the Romantic myth of the innate goodness of man through the fanciful notion that the people who commit evil acts are lacking in the usual human equipment—are not “real” human beings at all but soulless monsters—is a familiar topos of Victorian Romantic literature. That Cleckley’s book remains to this day a serious psychiatric text is a testament to the strength of this fantasy among psychiatrists. To McGinniss, the concept of the psychopath did not so much offer a solution to his literary problem of making MacDonald a believable murderer as give him permission to evade the problem—just as the concept itself evades the problem it purports to solve. To say that people who do bad things don’t seem bad is to say something we all already know: no one flaunts bad behavior, everyone tries to hide it, every villain wears a mask of goodness. The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force. For McGinniss, the Cleckley tautology must also have offered a way out of his moral dilemma in regard to MacDonald. If MacDonald only seemed to be a fellow human being, and was actually a “subtly constructed reflex machine” (wearing a mask? Cleckley never quite got the bugs out of his figural machinery), then McGinniss owed him nothing, and could betray him with impunity, since he was betraying not “him” but only some sort of unholy “it.”

  When I returned to New York from California, I telephoned Dr. Stone. At the trial, he had attempted to fuse Cleckley’s Dracula with Kernberg’s Grandcourt in his diagnostic portrait of MacDonald, achieving rather odd results. Now, on the phone, he said he welcomed the opportunity to enlarge on his testimony—he had a great deal to tell me, he said—and a few days later I opened the door to his office, on the ground floor of an apartment building on Central Park West. The office was like a Victorian parlor—or perhaps like a stage set for one—furnished with a grand piano, velvet draperies, Persian rugs, brocaded sofas and chairs, ornate inlaid tables, books in old leather bindings, and dimly glowing lamps. Stone, a tall, loosely built man in his middle fifties, with a kindly, soft, rosy face and white hair, motioned for me to sit on one of the brocaded sofas in front of a low marble-topped table, and seated himself nearby in a bentwood rocker.

  Stone’s eagerness to talk to me had been preceded by his eagerness to testify for the defense. At the trial, under Bostwick’s cross-examination, he had had to concede that in his first telephone conversation with Kornstein—before he had seen any of the transcripts on which he based his testimony—he had all but agreed to testify. In reply to a question about his fee as an expert witness, he told Bostwick he had not yet determined the fee, because “I have spent upwards of nineteen hundred hours, and I feel that some of that has been out of a special interest on my part,” and that “no one asked me to make a concordance of six hundred pages of material. I did that myself to help orient things in my own mind, and I feel that I will charge a lower amount as a result.” Now, in his office, Stone said, “I had read Fatal Vision years before, and it was pretty clear that Jeff MacDonald was a very pathological person.”

  “You thought that from reading the book?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure. The man was at the very least a pathological liar, and since he was also a killer, that made him a very ugly and obnoxious person—a threat to the body social, and clearly a very sick personality. However, I had not paid too much attention to this when I read the book—it was just another interesting book. By the time they asked me to look into the matter as a personality-disorder expert, I had become a—if you will—murderologist, as a hobby. I had amassed a large collection of psychobiographies of murderers, and I was much more familiar with the famous killers of the past twenty or thirty years than I had been when I read the book. The whole subject had become very intriguing to me, so I was very enthusiastic about participating in the trial. They sent me a transcription of the thirty tapes of Jeff MacDonald talking while in jail—his pseudo-autobiography. It was all fake.”

  “Fake?”

  “Well, the whole thing was a tissue of hyperbole and outright lies and deceit. I made an index of the examples of lying, self-aggrandizement, boasting, et cetera, page by page, so I would be better prepared at the trial to cite chapter and verse for anyt
hing they might ask me. It is a remarkable exercise in lying. Now, knowing full well that I couldn’t admit this into evidence—the law is adversarial in structure, and thus antithetical to scientific method—I nevertheless conducted a little experiment, just to see if I was on the right track. After reading the hundreds and hundreds of pages of the transcript, I took four pages at random and had my secretary Xerox a dozen copies, which I gave to the class at Cornell that I teach on personality disorders. The students are Ph.D. psychologists and young psychiatrists. I didn’t tell them anything except ‘Here are four pages from a tape recording that somebody made about his life. Here is a list of the DSM-III standard diagnostic personality disorders. Please scribble down whether you think the person’s words convey any evidence pertaining to the presence of one or several of these disorders.’ And everyone picked up that he was narcissistic, and most that he was anti-social—just from the four pages! And my wife picked it up from one page, because I had the stuff lying on the bed one evening, and she glanced at it and said, ‘My God, who is this narcissistic son of a bitch?’ Ha, ha! Just like that! Of course, at the trial they asked me, ‘How can you diagnose a person you haven’t examined?’ Often, you can’t, but with personality disorders you can sometimes do a better job when you haven’t examined the person than when you have, because the subject is going to lie through his teeth. Kernberg’s concept of pathological narcissism is nothing more than the confluence of narcissistic traits—poor empathy, self-aggrandizement, manipulative and exploitive use of others—with anti-social qualities like ruthlessness, conning people, hurting others, taking liberties with the rules by which society regulates itself. So it was not surprising that my wife and my dozen students could make the diagnosis at the snap of a finger. However, I couldn’t introduce my experiment into evidence, because it was hearsay. It bothered the hell out of me. Here was a man who by the best scientific standards was exactly what Joe McGinniss said he was, and yet I couldn’t introduce that evidence into court.”