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‘Fatal Vision,’ ‘Selling of President’ author Joe McGinniss dies at 71

He was fascinated by public image vs. private reality

The Columbian
Published: March 11, 2014, 5:00pm

NEW YORK — Joe McGinniss wasn’t one to let a story tell itself.

Whether insisting on the guilt of a murder suspect after seemingly befriending him or moving next door to Sarah Palin’s house for a most unauthorized biography, McGinniss was unique in his determination to get the most inside information, in how publicly he burned bridges with his subjects and how memorably he placed himself in the narrative.

McGinniss, the newsmaking author and reporter who skewered the marketing of Richard Nixon in “The Selling of the President 1968” and tracked his personal journey from sympathizer to scourge of convicted killer Jeffrey MacDonald in the blockbuster “Fatal Vision,” died Monday at age 71.

McGinniss, who announced last year that he had been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer, died from complications related to his disease. His attorney and longtime friend Dennis Holahan said he died at a hospital in Worcester, Mass.

The tall, talkative McGinniss had early dreams of becoming a sports reporter and wrote books about soccer, horse racing and travel. But he was best known for two works that became touchstones in their respective genres — campaign books (“The Selling of the President”) and true crime (“Fatal Vision”). In both cases, he had become fascinated by the difference between public image and private reality.

McGinniss was a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1968 when an advertising man told him he was joining Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. Intrigued that candidates had advertising teams, McGinniss was inspired to write a book.

“The Selling of the President” was published in 1969, spent months on The New York Times’ best-seller list and made McGinniss an eager media star. He quit the Inquirer and followed more personal interests.

In 1979, he was a columnist for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner when an argument without end was born: McGinniss was approached by MacDonald, a fellow California resident, about a possible book on the 1970 killings for which the physician and former Green Beret was being charged.

“Fatal Vision,” published in 1983, became one of the most widely read and contested true crime books. McGinniss wrote not just of the case but of his own conclusions. He had at first found MacDonald charming and sincere but came to believe he was a sociopath who’d committed the killings while in a frenzied state brought on by diet pills.

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