The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

  “We were very political. We worked in political campaigns, talked politics at dinner, and became involved in causes we felt were worthy of the investment of our energies. My mother and father emphasized the importance of social commitment and of righting wrongs—all those clichés spouted by others but dismissed when it comes to effort. So when I saw the wrong of the Vietnam War, as my mother and father had, it was natural for me to proceed from simply talking about it to writing about it and marching in demonstrations. It is the same with racism, sexism, et cetera. I now teach at a predominantly black university. I have had offers to teach at prestigious institutions. But I feel it is important to use whatever talents I have to try to build certain kinds of bridges. I try to be the kind of person who demonstrates—more through my actions than through my words—that not all whites are any one thing. That’s what I choose to do, as opposed to the need to teach at Harvard or Yale, or other places where they don’t particularly need me, where lots of professors are more than willing to go.”

  Beginning to feel about this paragon as Kornstein must have felt, I couldn’t resist asking an unpleasant question: “Have you had offers from Harvard or Yale?”

  “I never applied,” Elliot said, and added, “I get routine offers from various schools.”

  I asked another leading question: “You talked about the decadent life style of the East Coast literati and their leisure-time activities. Do you yourself have any leisure?”

  “What I do, what I derive the greatest pleasure from, is clearly my work. If I were to win a trip to Hawaii—seven days in the sand at the beach—it would be a sentence. Not long ago, I was invited to a party at the home of the then richest man in the world, Adnan Khashoggi, who had just purchased his fifty-seventh home in California. I was then doing a book on an Indian guru—a guru to the stars and to Khashoggi. I was told that Elizabeth Taylor would be at the party, and Cary Grant and Michael York. I flew there, and I was surrounded by multimillionaires and, in some cases, multibillionaires. It was an interesting experience, but not greatly so. Most of the people I spoke to were somewhat vacuous. They talked about their latest purchases or their favorite restaurants or their yachts or their latest deals. These are not the sort of things that motivate me. I don’t identify with them, and I resent the decadence they represent, knowing that a third of the country lives in poverty, and that kids are dying in Ethiopia. I identify more with working-class people, who struggle to make ends meet, who are good to their families, and work hard to change things that need to be changed.

  “MacDonald is not my role model. I don’t intend to live my life according to the values he espouses. But whether I like him or dislike him is irrelevant in terms of why I pursue the case. I feel the case has implications well beyond him. If in fact the government can lie and send an innocent man to prison, then it can do the same thing to people who are less powerful and less influential and less wealthy than Dr. MacDonald.”

  Elliot went on to say that the piece of hubris that he—like McGinniss and others—believed responsible for MacDonald’s downfall was an appearance he made on the Dick Cavett show in the fall of 1970, shortly after he had been cleared by the Army. On the show, he attacked the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division for bungling its investigation of the crime and accusing him of it. (McGinniss, who had seen a tape of the show, told me how appalled he had been by MacDonald’s performance: “The guy is sitting there laughing, making jokes on national television with Dick Cavett. He’s sitting there talking about the murder of his wife and children—using this as a vehicle for celebrity. This was something that bothered me from the start. Why was he not just not reluctant to talk about it but desperate to capitalize on this tragedy and use it as a springboard to fame?”) Elliot said, “When he went on the Cavett show, and named names and talked about how incompetent and stupid and bungling those Army people were, it galvanized them to move, to reopen the investigation. It was that show that led the Army to say, ‘Do you mean to say that after we acquit him he goes after us?’ MacDonald was his own worst enemy on that show. He was his own worst enemy in hiring Joe McGinniss, he was his own worst enemy in not insisting on seeing a draft of the book, he was his own worst enemy when he made McGinniss part of the defense team and gave him everything, just sort of hoping, on the basis of blind faith and McGinniss’s letters, that McGinniss would do the right thing.”

  “McGinniss interprets this not as naïveté but as a kind of arrogance,” I said. “He sees it as part of the pathology of narcissism.”

  “The simpler explanation is that this guy had no experience of authors,” Elliot said. “He desperately wanted his story told, and here was this young, somewhat dashing—not to me—somewhat charismatic, well-known journalist coming to him. There’s no question but that he was caught up in the glamour of the press and TV and that he welcomed the opportunity to go on the Dick Cavett show and stick it to the people who had stuck it to him. But he was so unpolished and so unsophisticated that he never realized that people watching the show would say, ‘He doesn’t sound very devastated for somebody who has just lost his wife and kids—all he’s talking about is what happened to him.’ It made people think he was cold and self-centered.”

  “That he should have been interested in appearing on the Cavett show at all, and that he didn’t appear to be upset by the loss of his family—it does give one pause,” I said.

  “We can’t conclude that he committed murder because he’s not a very likable person. People are looking for perfection in him, and they’re looking for qualities they think he ought to have had. It may well be that he doesn’t possess the tenderness, sensitivity, judgment, warmth that we might wish he had. But that doesn’t mean he committed three murders.”

  • • •

  ON AN overcast day a few weeks later, I drove out on Long Island to see Bob Keeler in his office at Newsday. He is a fast-talking man in his mid-forties, with slightly receding hair and a slightly soft outline, who has an air of bracing directness and unpretentiousness. He told me that he had covered the MacDonald case for Newsday since 1973 and, a year or so before the criminal trial, had decided to write a book about it—“a sort of evenhanded book, not dealing exclusively with one side or the other, but a journalist’s book, a balanced book.” By the time of the trial, Keeler had submitted an outline and sample chapters to Doubleday, which held off giving him a contract until after the trial. Unfortunately for Keeler, when McGinniss entered the arena the publisher with whom he signed a contract was Dell, a subsidiary of Doubleday, and that finished Keeler’s chances.

  “You had bad luck there,” I said. “If McGinniss hadn’t come along—”

  “No, something else would have happened,” Keeler broke in. “When it comes to money, I have lousy luck. I’m not rich. I have my salary, and I make out, and I have a nice house. But I’m not the kind of person who is ever going to get rich.” He continued, “Anyway, I decided I would go ahead and write my book and try to find another publisher. At the time, I thought Joe was going to write a book about Jeffrey the Tortured Innocent, and I didn’t think that this should be the only book about the case, because I didn’t think Jeffrey was innocent. But as time wore on I realized that my book was not going to get published—that all this effort, the dozens and dozens of hours I had put into the project, had been in vain. And when I became aware that McGinniss didn’t think Jeffrey was innocent either, I began to give Joe material I had gathered on Long Island. I wanted to help out in whatever way I could, so that—I guess egotistically—I’d have some sense of participation in the book, even though it wasn’t mine.”

  “That was very generous of you,” I said.

  “Well, by that time I didn’t have anything to lose. I had all this information I had gathered for a purpose that no longer existed. So what was I going to do? Let it die someplace in a drawer? If the guy was writing a book that was going to be truthful, and I could help him in some small way, no big deal. Then there came a time when MacDonald, or one of MacDo
nald’s henchpersons, sent me a bunch of McGinniss’s letters to him. That’s when I began to get a little ticked off at Joe. You saw what he said in the letters: ‘Don’t talk to Keeler.’ I thought that was excessive. It was like the football Giants beating up on the Peewee football team. There was no chance I was going to get this book published. There was another thing about the letters, too—all those maudlin sentiments about ‘Oh, how terrible it is that you’re away, and it’s such a terrible injustice.’ I think McGinniss went beyond what most journalists would do in not telling Jeffrey the truth about his feelings. We could have a whole philosophical discussion here. McGinniss could say to me, ‘You never told Jeffrey about your feelings, either.’ That’s true, I never did. In fact, one of the things about my coverage of this case that I feel good about is that I was on it for a decade and I don’t think Jeffrey MacDonald ever figured out that I thought he was guilty from the first day I started writing about it. To me, that says I was writing evenhandedly and fairly. He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that’s the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That’s daily journalism. Now, Joe was in a different situation with MacDonald: In addition to being source-and-reporter, they were business partners. So one can ask, philosophically, ‘Does that change Joe’s obligations to Jeffrey in terms of truth?’ I don’t know. I personally don’t think Joe should have deceived Jeffrey.”

  As Keeler spoke, I could not but reflect on my own situation. As McGinniss’s relationship to MacDonald had differed from the usual journalist-subject relationship in having a profit-sharing aspect, so my relationship to McGinniss was untypical because of the breach that had taken place between us so early in our acquaintance. But in all other respects—the most fundamental respects—McGinniss’s enterprise with MacDonald and my enterprise with McGinniss were like all the other problematic associations of writers and subjects from which long works of nonfiction, and sometimes lawsuits, derive. In both cases, a writer had refused to accept the subject’s point of view, adopting, instead, the point of view of the subject’s adversaries: as McGinniss had come to see MacDonald with the eyes of the government prosecutors, so I, as I proceeded with my researches, had come to regard McGinniss with the eyes of Bostwick and his staff. I was more fortunate than McGinniss precisely because of his refusal to speak with me: by banishing me, he had freed me from the guilt I would otherwise have felt. You can’t betray someone you barely know; you can only irritate and anger him and make him wish he had never made himself known to you. However, in another respect—a literary rather than a personal one—I was just as unfortunate as McGinniss. Like him, I had drawn a subject for whom I had no love and out of whom, consequently, it would be hard to fashion a literary character. I noted earlier that MacDonald was not one of the “naturals” of nonfiction who, like Perry Smith and Joe Gould, do a lot of the writer’s work for him through their own special self-invention; but I omitted a crucial element of the transformation from life to literature that the masters of the nonfiction genre achieve. This is the writer’s identification with and affection for the subject, without which the transformation cannot take place. The Joe Goulds and the Perry Smiths of life tend to be windy bores and pathetic nut cases; only in literature, after they have got under the skin of a writer, do they achieve the ambition of fantastic interestingness that in actuality they only grotesquely gesture toward. MacDonald had no such ambition. He insisted, and continues to insist, on his ordinariness: “I’m just this nice guy caught in a nightmare of the law, fighting for my innocence.” McGinniss, if he had believed him and had written about him as innocent, would have created a more convincing, if still not deeply fascinating, character, rather than the incoherently unevil murderer he had to settle for. Similarly, if I believed in McGinniss’s side of the lawsuit and could write about him as the victim of a vicious act of vengeance on the part of a disgruntled subject, I, too, could create a better character. Like McGinniss’s MacDonald, my McGinniss doesn’t quite add up.

  “Did you feel bad about giving up the book?” I asked Keeler.

  “I was disappointed. It was the first time in my life that I had a subject for a book—I felt competent, I knew the subject inside out. I honestly don’t know whether my book would have sold as well as Joe’s. My book would have probably been a more balanced, journalistic book, not necessarily coming to any conclusion, though I probably would have had to do that in the end. You can’t dodge that bullet.”

  “Do you have a theory about the motive?”

  “I don’t think it was any one thing, but it’s clear from everything Jeffrey has said, and from everything I know and from everything Joe knows, that Jeffrey’s penis should go to the Smithsonian Institution when he dies. I mean, this man was extremely active sexually, extremely promiscuous, and it’s not clear whether Colette became aware of that or not.” Keeler went on to criticize McGinniss for not probing more deeply into MacDonald’s past on Long Island, where, Keeler felt, the answer to the enigma of the man’s personality lay, gleaming and waiting to be plucked. “He should have spent months there, talking to people,” Keeler said. “I didn’t have a chance to do that kind of reporting. I was then working eighteen hours a day as Newsday’s bureau chief in Albany, and could work on the book only on weekends. In fact, to be honest about it, I don’t understand what Joe did with those four years he was writing the book. If you’re going to be a reporter, you have to practice the craft. You have to go out and talk to people. You have to track things down. You have to talk to dozens and dozens of people.” He paused, and then said, “I don’t want this to sound like total sour grapes—that I’m saying all these terrible things about Joe as a journalist, and about his moral choices, just because he got his book written and I didn’t. The fact is, I’m sort of bemused by the whole thing. It’s typical of my luck. Here was a chance for me to make some money, and I wasn’t much surprised when it didn’t work out; I sort of felt in my bones that it wasn’t going to work out.”

  As I was saying goodbye, Keeler, with his irrepressible desire to be helpful, thrust upon me a large blue loose-leaf book containing the transcripts of his interviews with MacDonald, McGinniss, and others for the article “Convict and Writer,” which appeared in The Newsday Magazine on September 11, 1983. The transcripts were methodically arranged and labelled according to subject matter (“Jeff Origins,” “Joe Reporting,” “Joe Trial”), and were prefaced by lists of the questions Keeler planned to ask, and an outline of the text. When I got home, I leafed through the book and put it aside. I had not asked for it, and I felt there was something almost illicit about having it in my possession. To read Keeler’s interviews would be like eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation, and to use anything from them would be like stealing. Above all—and cutting much deeper than any concern about eavesdropping and stealing—was the affront to my pride. An interview, after all, is only as good as the journalist who conducts it, and I felt—to put it bluntly—that Keeler, with his prepared questions and his newspaper-reporter’s directness, would not get from his subjects the kind of authentic responses that I try to elicit from mine with a more Japanese technique. When I finally read Keeler’s transcripts, however, I was in for a surprise and an illumination. MacDonald and McGinniss had said exactly the same things to the unsubtle Keeler that they had said to me. It hadn’t made the slightest difference that Keeler had read from a list of prepared questions and I had acted as if I were passing the time of day. From Keeler’s blue book I learned the same truth about subjects that the analyst learns about patients: they will tell their story to anyone who will listen to it, and the story will not be affected by the behavior or personality of the listener; just as (“good enough”) analysts are interchangeable, so are journalists. My McGinniss and Keeler’s McGinniss were the same person, and so were my MacDonald and Keeler’s MacDonald and McGinniss’s MacDonald. The subject, like the patient, dominates the relations
hip and calls the shots. The journalist cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients. A few weeks after the settlement of the McGinniss lawsuit, MacDonald sent out a jubilant message to his followers in the MacDonald Defense Update, an irregularly published newsletter put out by MacDonald’s out-of-prison “liaison” volunteer worker, Gail Boyce, in which he exhibited the very quality—a sort of reflexive and unremitting bogusness—that he most sought to repudiate in McGinniss’s characterization. The message read, in part:

  The trial proved to all neutral observers that Fatal Vision is a fiction book masquerading as non-fiction.… Since we have proven his lies, since we have the truth now in the transcripts of a Federal Court proceeding, and since he was desperate enough to settle to offer the amount that was finally accepted, I felt it was proper to accept this victory and move on.…

  Truthfully, working so intensely in and around the sordid lies of McGinniss’s book and hearing his pathetic attempts at justifying his actions by calling in highly paid witnesses to make outrageous statements, is simply an awful experience. Not only did I personally feel it was best to move on to more positive and meaningful projects, but my family, all the attorneys involved in the defense, and our excellent defense team all agreed it was an opportune time to return to the criminal investigation itself and the procedures we are undertaking to eventually win my vindication.

  In my talks and correspondence with MacDonald I glimpsed some of the more appealing facets of his personality—for example, his stoicism in the face of the very harsh conditions of solitary confinement—and I came to allow for the vapidity of his speech and writing, as one allows for a handicap. But the MacDonald of Fatal Vision was also there. McGinniss betrayed him and devastated him and possibly misjudged him, but he didn’t invent him.