The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

  Keeler had then called up the mother and said, “I wonder if you could tell me, first of all, did those things occur the way McGinniss wrote them in the book.”

  “Yes, they did,” the mother replied. “The first incident was more in jest. The second one I didn’t like at all, though I didn’t realize my son was so frightened.”

  “But as far as the passage in the book goes, does that sound like an accurate representation of what you told Joe when you talked to him?”

  “Yes. The two incidents happened, though I don’t think that made a killer of Jeff, and I wasn’t so frightened that I thought My God! I just thought—like you would if you were staying in somebody’s house and they gave you a very unpleasant answer—We’ve been here too long, it’s time to go home. It was no more than that, but apparently my son was alarmed by it.”

  At the depositions of McGinniss and MacDonald taken by opposing counsel, each lawyer worried the boy-in-the-boat incident and searched it for an advantage to his side; and each finally decided to pretty much leave it alone at trial. The incident is another illustration of the difficulty of knowing the truth about anything. One could spend years studying it, as investigators spent years working over the MacDonald murders, and end up with no certain answer to the question of what “really” happened. In this case, however, the question is not who committed the crime but whether a crime was committed at all. As Dr. Stone’s lively imagination invested the features of a man he had glimpsed in a courtroom with the look of monstrous evil, so might the boy’s nervous fancy (he knew that MacDonald had been accused of killing children) have invested an innocent rebuke with murderous intent. On the other hand, the boy might have sensed something actually dangerous in MacDonald. Only if MacDonald should confess to the murders, or if someone else should be revealed as the murderer, will we come any closer to being able to judge what happened in the boat.

  THE dinner I had with Michael Malley in the spring of 1988 had come about at MacDonald’s urging. Malley had been an excellent plaintiff’s witness at the McGinniss trial, testifying about relations between McGinniss and MacDonald at the Kappa Alpha house in Raleigh in a most lucid and evenhanded-sounding matter. “How many hours a day would you estimate you saw them together?” Bostwick asked him.

  A: I would say on a typical day it was an hour in the morning, before court, and three or four hours in the evening. Not always exclusively, but Joe was around. He was always around Jeff; not always but most of the time he was around Jeff.

  Q: Did it concern you that he was spending too much time with Dr. MacDonald?

  A: No.

  Q: Did it relieve you?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Why?

  A: Well, at some point I didn’t want to be the only reservoir of sympathy that Jeff had. At Fort Bragg [at the Army hearing], sometimes—because Bernie wasn’t there, and Jim Douthat, the other military lawyer, went home at night—sometimes I spent two or three hours an evening with Jeff. And while it certainly tightened our friendship, it was also very, very hard on me. And I didn’t want to go through that again in North Carolina—that he would have only me to talk to. And Joe filled the bill nicely. I mean, he and Jeff wound up, from my observation, being as close as Jeff and I were at Fort Bragg. So they had each other to talk to, and I could concentrate on what I was trying to do. I mean, I didn’t back off from Jeff, but I wasn’t there to be a friend.

  Later, Bostwick asked Malley, “You still consider yourself a friend of Dr. MacDonald?”

  A: Yes.

  Q: Do you still consider yourself a friend of Mr. McGinniss?

  A: Today?

  Q: Yes.

  A: It’s a very hard question to answer. You know, Joe has never done anything to me personally, so I can’t say that he has ever personally offended me; but I certainly was absolutely outraged at the book. I consider that to be a real detriment to our friendship.

  Q: Well, what was it about the book that you considered, let us say, outrageous?

  A: Primarily two things. One is his portrait of Jeff, which I believe to be wrong. I mean, just Jeff’s personality. And the other is the putting forward of a motive or a method by which Jeff would have done this—this drug-induced craziness, which, from everything I know, is so contrary to what the facts really are. To me, it’s just made up. And I consider that to be a serious, serious impediment to friendship.

  Malley did equally well under Kornstein’s cross-examination:

  Q: Now, you are a lawyer, Mr. Malley. When you went to the Harvard Law School, they still taught about the First Amendment, didn’t they?

  A: Do they not anymore? Yes, sir, they did.…

  Q: Mr. Malley, isn’t this attempt by the plaintiff, to punish an author for writing a book, the equivalent of book burning?

  A: No, sir, it is not.

  MALLEY is an attractive, fit, bearded man of forty-seven with a very charming smile and an atmosphere of obscure difficulty, unease, and unhappiness about him. When, near the end of the evening, he told me that Conrad was his favorite writer, I realized that Malley himself, in his mysterious desperation, was a character out of Conrad. He had written an extraordinary review of Fatal Vision in 1984 for the Princeton Alumni Weekly, in which he asked, and tried to answer, the question of “how McGinniss came to detest Jeff enough to write this book.” Malley concluded:

  What McGinniss finally does not like is Jeff’s unthinking acceptance of middle-class values and middle-class contradictions in morality, sexuality, friendship, finances—the flawed vision of the good life as McGinniss (and Jeff, too) sees it. It is a life which does not lend itself to the heroes McGinniss says he wants. It is a life he feels free to condemn and betray, just as in all his books he condemns and betrays the friends who gave him their confidences and their lives. Yet he is uneasy in doing this dirty work, because he wants there to be a higher reason for, a meaning in, what he is doing. He wants, ultimately, a forgiveness not for the subjects of his book but for himself.

  The irony is that McGinniss’s resolution of Jeff’s case is relentlessly prosaic, middle-class, and banal—all the things McGinniss seems to detest … [It] boils down to the pedestrian “discovery” that Jeff swallowed one too many diet pills and therefore offed his family. In the end, McGinniss’s vision is of a middle-class, unerotic pornography. It is as if Marlow discovered in Lord Jim the final truth that Jim’s sin was both unexceptional and unredeemable, and Jim was destined and doomed to be a file-clerk prisoner in an obscure shipping office.

  Now, in the dimly lit restaurant, like Marlow speaking of Jim to an interlocutor on a starlit tropical veranda, Malley spoke to me of MacDonald. He said, “If you marshal the government’s evidence and if you marshal our evidence, it is not clear what happened. Jeff has his story, but he doesn’t have all the details, by his own admission. What it comes down to is that he is the only eyewitness, and he looks you in the eye and says, ‘I didn’t do it.’ I believe him. I wound up believing him the way Joe wound up not believing him. Jeff convinced me he was telling the truth in 1970, when the case was fresh and new and didn’t have twenty years of lawyers’ argument and regurgitation and refinement. In 1970, I was in a position to know whatever there was to know, and there isn’t much new evidence. In 1970, it was fresh and new to me, and I had to make up my mind. I decided the evidence didn’t point to Jeff. It didn’t point away from him, either. But he was believable, and I trusted him, and I still do. My own guess is that the Army’s decision to drop charges was also based on trusting what somebody said. That’s how I made up my mind, and I have never had any particular reason to change it.”

  Malley talked about the people who have taken up MacDonald as a cause. “It’s easy to have a cause when the cause is so likable—it’s sort of like being for homeless puppies. Jeff has changed a lot, to my way of thinking. Partly, I’ve changed a lot, too. But Jeff used to be much more likable. He didn’t have the sort of persona he now almost consciously puts on. He used to be a pretty naïve guy. This experience has
taught him a lot, and it’s not for the better, though you can’t blame him.”

  “What is worse about him?”

  “What’s worse about him is that he’s become not only a real, a physical, prisoner but a prisoner of his case and of his image and of what people expect of him. And he’s become a prisoner of the publicity—which is, most of all, McGinniss’s book. Jeff now judges his words and his actions by what people who have read the book will think of him, and what he can do to undo that impression. It’s not spontaneous. Jeff is not an open, friendly person anymore. And he used to be. We were not particular friends in college—we became close only after I got into the case—because I’ve never been that way myself. I like people like that, but I myself have never been open and friendly and talked to people on the street and made friends easily. He always did, and after a while you get to like that. Now he’s much more—‘guarded’ isn’t the right word, but it’s close. Many people don’t realize that. They think he’s still open and friendly and outgoing. But now there is a method to it. I think it’s very conscious. It has to be. He can’t do anything for himself, so he has to manipulate the people around him. He’s not able to be a spontaneous guy anymore. He’s very thoughtful about what he says and does. In one sense, that’s a good thing. It’s maturity. But in terms of old-time friendship it’s also a little disconcerting to see that happen.

  “I still count Jeff as one of my best friends, but Jeff knows that I don’t need him and that he needs me. It didn’t use to be that way. It used to be that neither of us needed the other. Now it’s pretty clear that he needs me for certain things, and that he has no control over whether I do them or not. When I visit him, I am always struck—and maybe it’s because I’m in this little, small room, and they bring him in in handcuffs—by how our role-playing situation has changed. When Jeff used to take me out on his boat, he was in charge—he drove the boat, and I had the beer in my hand. It’s much different now, and he plays it much differently. I don’t blame him. But it’s also not very pleasant. I’ve never liked relationships where someone wanted something from me. I like relationships that are two-sided. And this isn’t two-sided anymore. Jeff doesn’t have anything to offer me—besides his friendship. I think there’s a sincere liking for me on Jeff’s part, and it’s certainly reciprocated, but liking isn’t enough anymore. Jeff doesn’t need people to like him—he needs people to like him and do something for him. That’s one of the problems of being a lawyer—and, I suppose, a writer. You’re one of the people that Jeff makes a pitch to. Jeff made a pitch to Joe. He probably made a pitch to you—not just to like him but to do something for him.”

  As Malley talked, he sounded, chillingly, like a man talking about a woman he once loved but now finds pathetic. Why was he telling me this?

  I said, “Why do people let journalists write about them?”

  Malley said, “In Jeff’s case, there was the obvious self-serving motive: he wanted a book that would tell the world he was innocent and a nice guy. But at some point the world’s opinion became secondary, and the real audience for Jeff’s ego became Joe. Jeff really liked Joe, and he really trusted Joe. And that’s why it was such an incredible betrayal. If the book had said, ‘I reluctantly came to the conclusion that this nice guy, whom I really liked, killed his wife and children,’ that would have been one thing. But the book says, ‘This guy is a cold-blooded killer, a cold-blooded manipulator, a cold-blooded liar, and only I, Joe McGinniss, saw through it from the very beginning, but I had to be sure.’ I always knew that Joe had the option of not believing Jeff, and Jeff knew that, too, but what I didn’t know was that Joe had the option of disliking Jeff. And Joe not only never gave a hint that this was the way he felt but did just the opposite: he gave every indication that he liked Jeff. He was this little macho buddy of Jeff’s. They ran together, they swapped girl stories together, they did all this macho stuff together.”

  A little later, Malley said, “On some level, I sympathize with Joe. I don’t think Joe cynically said to himself, ‘I believe he is innocent, but that won’t sell my book, so I’ll say he’s guilty.’ I don’t believe that; I’ve never believed that.”

  “The flaw in McGinniss’s character may be that he doesn’t know how to be anything but ingratiating.”

  “That’s right. I think Joe, more than anything else in life, wants to be liked. In that sense, he’s very much like Jeff. But, unlike Jeff, Joe also wants to pass judgment on everything. Joe is a very judgmental guy, though it’s not obvious when you talk to him, because he has this attitude of eternal tolerance.”

  “If Joe had said, ‘Look, Jeff, I have come to believe that you did it,’ would Jeff have gone on talking to him?”

  “Yes, I think he would have. He would have refused to believe that Joe was not persuadable.”

  Malley spoke of MacDonald’s adaptability: “He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in mourning or in hunting the killers. Now he accepts prison as he accepted the murders.”

  “It’s a ruined life.”

  “Yes, it is. Jeff’s life has been dominated by this since he was twenty-six, and unless something dramatic happens he won’t get out of prison until the end of the century. It’s unlikely that he will get a new trial. The system has run its course.”

  I CORRESPONDED with MacDonald between January and November of 1988. He wrote me long letters on lined legal-pad sheets, and I wrote him short typewritten letters. A correspondence is a kind of love affair. It takes place in a small, closed, private space—a sheet of paper within an envelope is its vehicle and emblem—and it is tinged by a subtle but palpable eroticism. When we write to someone regularly, we begin to look forward to his letters and to feel increasing emotion at the sight of the familiar envelope. But if we are honest with ourselves we will acknowledge that the chief pleasure of the correspondence lies in its responsive aspect rather than in its receptive one. It is with our own epistolary persona that we fall in love, rather than with that of our pen pal; what makes the arrival of a letter a momentous event is the occasion it affords for writing rather than for reading. Some of the mystery of McGinniss’s letters to MacDonald lifted for me when I stepped into McGinniss’s shoes and, as it were, retrod the terrain of his fatal correspondence. Of course, I avoided the obvious pitfalls that had caused him so much misery in court—I promised MacDonald nothing, and I wrote nothing about myself that I would mind anyone else’s knowing—but as I now peruse the Xeroxes I made of my letters to MacDonald I see that I was no less enamored of the sound of my voice than McGinniss had been of his. As McGinniss had played the dual role of celebrity author and macho buddy to MacDonald, so I enacted the part of a sort of Lady Bountiful of journalism, writing to this poor convict and letting him understand how fortunate he was to know me and to be reading my aperçus about the writer-subject relationship. In their way, I find my letters as unpleasant as McGinniss’s. It is not so much what they say that bothers me as their self-satisfied tone and their fundamental falseness—the falseness that is built into the writer-subject relationship, and about which nothing can be done. Only when a subject breaks off relations with the writer—as McGinniss broke off relations with me—is the journalist in a completely uncompromised position. Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy. This is what Buckley and Wambaugh were trying to say in court, and if they had put it less arrogantly and more apologetically—if they had put it as a baffling and unfortunate occupational hazard rather than as a virtuous necessity—they might not have antagonized the jury as they did.

  The subject’s side of the equation is not without its moral problems, either. In their way, MacDonald’s letters to me
were as false as mine to him. He was making his pitch to me just as Malley had described it, and was no less intent on “using” me than I was intent on “using” him. Although I tried not to trifle with his hopes, I could see that he never let go of his fantasy that I would write the “decent man in prison” narrative that McGinniss had not written; his twenty- or thirty-page letters were all directed toward that purpose, and were like sledgehammer strokes in their relentless, repetitive, bombastic self-justification. When a letter came, I would put off reading it—the writing was unrelievedly windy—but when I finally read it something unexpected would happen. I would find myself shaken and moved, sometimes to the point of tears. A terrible starkness and bottom-of-life direness permeated these unutterably boring letters that was like the obliterating reality of the paintings of Francis Bacon. Nevertheless, once I began writing this chronicle, I lost my desire to correspond with MacDonald. He had (once again) become a character in a text, and his existence as a real person grew dim for me (as it had grown dim for McGinniss, until MacDonald’s lawsuit brought it back into glaring incandescence). A long letter from him lies unanswered on my desk. It tells me about developments in his criminal case—“extraordinarily powerful new evidence,” which he is “not yet free to make public,” but which he will send me if I want it. I do not want it. If MacDonald has nothing to lose anymore from his encounters with writers, a writer has little to gain from him. The story of the murders has been told—by Joe McGinniss—and it has acquired the aura of a definitive narrative. Should MacDonald actually get a new trial, and even turn out to be innocent, he will be able to rebuild his life, but he will not be able to efface McGinniss’s story—any more than “powerful new evidence” of Raskolnikov’s innocence would efface Dostoevsky’s fable. (Jeffrey Elliot recently abandoned his book about the MacDonald case—no publisher would touch it.) It is all too natural for people who have been wronged or humiliated—or feel they have been—to harbor the fantasy that a writer will come along on a white steed and put everything to rights. As MacDonald v. McGinniss illustrates, the writer who comes along is apt to only make things worse. What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists. If the lesson of MacDonald v. McGinniss were taken to heart by prospective subjects, it could indeed, as Kornstein maintained, be the end of journalism. Fortunately for readers and writers alike (as Kornstein’s own fantasy-laden letter demonstrates), human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses—the days of the interviews—are over. And still they say yes whan a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.