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At 26, Joe McGinniss skyrocketed to celebrity as the author
of The Selling of the President 1968. The years since have
seen success and controversy, but the writer is still as
passionate
as ever.
By Steve Moore  Joe
McGinniss '64 never set out to become a writer.
"I didn't really have any sense of having an aptitude as a
writer," he says, "until I had to write some essay at the end
of 11th grade. The teacher said, 'There's one essay here that
stands out above all the rest, and I'm going to read it out
loud.' And it was mine."
This experience tipped him off to the idea
that, "maybe I had finally found
some realm of human activity in which I might have a modicum of talent." McGinniss
wrote for his high school newspaper and, at Holy Cross, he joined the staff
of The Crusader as a reporter and editor. Summers, he worked for
his hometown newspaper.
"When I went to work professionally for the Port Chester Daily Item the
first summer after my sophomore year," McGinniss explains, "I found out
rather quickly that I was fairly adept at getting the salient points down
straight and
writing a coherent story."
Soon after graduating from Holy Cross, McGinniss accepted the position of general
assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram. "It was the year in Worcester
that really convinced me that I had a talent worth pursuing," he says. "One
of the things that I really liked was going to work and not knowing what I
would be doing in an hour. By then I decided that newspapers were going to
be my thing."
His career as a journalist soon took off. After
a nine-month stint at the Telegram,
McGinniss worked as a sportswriter, first for The Philadelphia Bulletin and
then for its competitor, The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I was already
feeling hemmed in by sports," he says, "and the Inquirer contacted
me to see if I wanted to come over and write a sports column. I said 'yes,' but
what I really wanted was to write a regular column, not a sports column."
McGinniss became a columnist in the fall of 1966. Almost two years later, during
a two-week vacation in June of 1968, he stumbled over the story that became
his first book, The Selling of The President 1968.
While working on a profile of Howard Cosell for TV Guide, McGinniss
discovered that a member of Cosell's carpool had just landed the advertising account for
presidential hopeful Hubert Humphrey's campaign. "Suddenly this one book idea
sprang to mind," he says.
Humphrey's people would not cooperate with him, but Richard Nixon's organization
allowed him to observe first hand the process of "selling" a presidential candidate
to the public. "It was a fascinating thing to observe," McGinniss says. "The
book was a great success, and I felt that I didn't have to go back
to work at the Inquirer." As with his columns, he strove "to go someplace that
the reader couldn't go, but to give the reader the feeling of what it would
be like to be there. And, I think, that's been pretty consistently the goal
of my writing throughout."
Celebrity
The Selling of the President 1968 turned into a
phenomenon. McGinniss became the youngest living writer
to land a book at the top of The New York Times bestseller
list. Almost overnight, the handsome and congenial young
writer was catapulted into the celebrity life. He was asked
to appear on national television talk shows, and publishers
were eager for a follow-up book.
But the next time out, McGinniss wanted "to do something completely different.
As William Buckley would always say whenever we were in public together, I
committed one novel."
The Dream Team was the story of a successful
young novelist on a dizzying book tour who winds up unhinged
by his obsession with women, alcohol
and
horseracing. The novel's reception and sales were something of a letdown
in the wake of Selling's juggernaut.
The novel was followed by Heroes, in
which McGinniss mixed journalistic sections that looked into
the question of why "there didn't seem to be any
national heroes anymore" with "sections about my personal life. I thought of
it as being a fairly daring experiment. Everyone else thought of it as being
a piece of crap."
Upon publication, Heroes was treated
harshly by the critics, but, in retrospect, it reads as a
brutally honest and
painful quest for an understanding
of self. McGinniss alternates chapters of autobiography with visits
to larger-than-life media figures of the early '70s-people like Gen. William Westmoreland, George
McGovern and William Styron. Two individuals whom McGinniss tracks down in
his quest to find a definition of a modern hero have Holy Cross connections:
Vietnam veteran and prisoner of war Tim Sullivan '65 and Vietnam activist Rev.
Daniel Berrigan, S.J., the College's commencement speaker in 1973.
"By the time I finished Heroes, I was
really burnt out on myself," McGinniss
says. "I needed to go someplace. Someplace far outside the inside of my own head." That
place turned out to be Alaska, and the book that resulted from the
trip was Going
to Extremes.
"It was a great critical success," McGinnis says, "and it put me back on the
right track, I think."
Going to Extremes was one of the writer's most warmly received books.
McGinniss spent 18 months trekking around Alaska, meeting and making friends
with a succession of characters, all of whom were attempting to find refuge
in a frontier that is being rapidly undermined by civilization. More than one
critic has praised the book's lyrical prose, and scholar James N. Stull wrote
that McGinniss "transforms this culturally significant landscape into a metaphorical
and personally meaningful setting in which the author can once again pursue
his quest for the heroic self."
True Crime
On the heels of his triumph with Extremes, McGinniss
became
writer-in-residence at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner; it was there
that he met and subsequently wrote a column about Princeton-educated Green
Beret surgeon
Jeffrey MacDonald who was soon to go on trial for the murder of his pregnant
wife and two young daughters.
"I decided that this MacDonald thing simply
had to be a book," says McGinniss.
That book, Fatal Vision, became a runaway
bestseller. A massive and painstakingly researched roller
coaster ride of a story,
it continues to sell briskly 17 years
after its original publication. Fans of the book are often passionate.
One recent reader from Switzerland
was prompted to post, in an Amazon.com review, "Joe McGinniss is one of the two
or three greatest writers of the century."
Indeed, McGinniss does a remarkable job of
portraying MacDonald as both a keenly intelligent, All-American
charmer and a psychotic madman. This eerie characterization was likely
the result
of the fact that McGinniss became close friends with the murder suspect
while spending four years researching the case, then watched his
opinion regarding his friend's innocence change as the complicated
murder trial progressed.
Fatal Vision was followed by two more "true crime" books, Blind Faith and Cruel
Doubt. Taken together, all three books form a trilogy, a penetrating
study of familial dysfunction pushed to homicide. All three books
were eventually filmed as successful
television miniseries and McGinniss' status as dean of the true crime
bestseller was secure. But, true to form, the writer felt it was
time for another
change.
Following Cruel Doubt, McGinniss plunged
into research for The Last Brother, a biography of Ted Kennedy.
The book appeared in 1993 to a firestorm of controversy. Kennedy
loyalists were
outraged
at what they perceived to be an attack on the senator, while the
critical establishment raised ferocious objection to the writer's use
of fictional techniques-such as the creation of dialogue and interior monologue-in
a work of nonfiction. But McGinniss stood by his methods, writing that
he "tried to distill an essence . to convey to a reader what it might have been
like to be Teddy Kennedy."
Perception & Reality
When discussing qualities his books have in common McGinniss
says, "Well, I think, first of all it's the plunging of
myself into a whole new and different experience with new
and different people whom I've never met before and whom
I would never ever meet were it not for the fact that I
was writing a book about them. But beyond that, the difference
between the image and the reality has always fascinated
me. I'm not a cynic. I'm perpetually naive and always looking
out to believe the best and then constantly being somehow
disappointed. It's this gap between the perception and
the
reality. What's between the image, that's either consciously presented or at
least received, and the reality that underpins it, has always fascinated me.
I think that applies to the many different subject areas that I've
wandered into."
Speaking about his methodology, he explains, "Once I start on a project, my only
goal is to write the most compelling narrative I can. I set out simply to tell
the best possible story that
I can." What pleases him most about a book is "that it simply has quality. I
think it's the sort of private satisfaction that a good carpenter will get out
of making a quality piece of woodwork."
Looking back on Holy Cross
McGinniss looks back on his years at Holy Cross with mixed
emotions. He went to Holy Cross because "it was the path
of least resistance, really. I think if I had been a more
dedicated student and had sought out more guidance and
assistance, it would have been available, but the atmosphere
just wasn't conducive to that. . You had no freedoms. After
having the freedom of being able to live with some responsibility
as a senior in high school to suddenly being reduced to
this childhood level again, it was very demeaning, and
I resisted it all the way through. So it certainly fostered
an outlaw spirit in me which had not been there before."
In 1969, when The Selling of the President 1968 was
on the bestseller list, McGinniss returned to give a speech at Holy Cross. "I had a great time
because it was so close to the four years that I had been there," he says. "Other
than being delighted to see some of the changes, the whole place was more humane-I
just privately felt like this was some kind of a triumph. To go back and be
treated with respect by some of the same people who had treated me like a character
out of Kafka for four years was enjoyable. I was really happy to see that the
place had made such extraordinary strides and progress in five years. By '69
the place was on the right track and, I think, has stayed there ever since."
The Desire to be Free
McGinniss' books seem to have grown out of a desire to be
free and independent while living a life of constant discovery
and searching for
new worlds. "I was an only child and raised by parents who were, to put it mildly,
over protective," he says, "and while I made my own freedoms in high school,
basically it was still kind of a sheltered life. I think that through the years
of adolescence and continuing through Holy Cross, the desire really to be free,
to be independent, just to break out to be really on my own, free from these
eyes looking over my shoulder, was a very strong one. The newspaper work gave
me a lot of that and then books provided the perfect solution in that respect
because I could be totally independent. I could do whatever I wanted. It was
independence and freedom,
I think, that I was after from an early age."
The best example of this need to discover
new worlds is his most recent book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro which
follows the adventures of a minor league soccer team in a remote part of Italy.
McGinniss is extremely proud of this book and feels that it is one of his best.
The critics agree.
"I succeeded in writing about Italy in an
entirely fresh and original way," McGinniss says. "When I went over there
in '96, I was 53 years old, and I'm reading my (Holy Cross) class letters and
a lot of people 53 years old, they're being pushed into early retirement
or they're thinking things are sort of winding down now, the kids have been put
through school, their careers have peaked, and you can get this sort of sense
of creeping twilight coming in."
"Italy and soccer are two huge new loves that have entered
my life at the age of 50," he says. "I think by that time
a lot of people's capacity for new love and adventure is
sort of dwindling,
if it's not entirely withered and died. You may ask if the book writing career
keeps this alive in me or if this capacity in me keeps me involved in the book
writing career. It's a chicken or egg thing. Somehow that sets
me apart-and I don't mean in a qualitative better or worse way-but just in a
different way from the majority of my 1964 classmates who, even at that time,
were primarily looking for security. I believe, for most of the people in my
class, adventure was the furthest thing from their minds; security and consistency
and knowing what life would be like five or 10 years down the road was about
their highest priority. Whereas for me, it
wasn't a priority at all. I would've shuddered to think that I might have known
what life would have been like five or 10 years down the road. So that set me
apart certainly from the majority of people in the Holy Cross
Class of '64. I was different. There's just no other way to say it. I was different
from most of the people around me."
"I guess if I weren't," he says, "I wouldn't
be a writer."
Media Adaptations:
The Selling of the President 1968 was
adapted for stage by Stuart Hample.
Fatal Vision was filmed as a television
miniseries that aired Nov. 18, 1984.
Blind Faith was filmed as a television
miniseries that aired Feb. 11, 1990.
Cruel Doubt was filmed as a television
miniseries that aired May 17, 1992.
Steve
Moore is a free-lance writer from Concord, Mass.
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