The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

  McGinniss did not “know that.” In the course of the trial, he had become persuaded of MacDonald’s guilt and had found himself once again in the position—the one he had held with the Nixon advertising group—of enemy infiltrator. In July 1983, two months before the publication of Fatal Vision, Bob Keeler, a reporter from Newsday, who had also attended the criminal trial, interviewed McGinniss for an article he was writing for The Newsday Magazine and questioned him closely about the uncomfortableness of his situation in Raleigh. “There was nobody to talk to,” McGinniss told Keeler. “I couldn’t react. I couldn’t say to someone sitting next to me in the courtroom, ‘Hey, this doesn’t sound good.’ ”

  “What was your anticipation of the result when the jury went out to deliberate?” Keeler asked.

  “I was not convinced they were going to convict him. At the same time, I said to myself, ‘If I were a juror I would vote to convict.’ But I didn’t think that those twelve people were all going to come to the same conclusion I had come to. I didn’t know if it was going to be a hung jury or an acquittal. But I think I would have predicted either of those two results ahead of the conviction.”

  “O.K. So the day after the conviction you went down to Butner, and Jeff hugs you and says he hopes you’re going to be his friend forever. What were your feelings at the moment? Obviously, by that time you must have known the book was going to come out showing him to be a guilty guy. How did you feel at that moment?”

  “I felt terribly conflicted. I knew he had done it—no question—but I had just spent the summer with the guy, who on one level is a terribly easy person to like. But how can you like a guy who has killed his wife and kids? It was a very complex set of emotions I felt, and I was very happy to leave him behind in prison.”

  Later in the interview, Keeler asked McGinniss this blunt question: “One of the theories among the reporters at the trial was that you were going to write this Jeffrey MacDonald-the-tortured-innocent book. Another theory was that you were going to do to Jeffrey MacDonald what you’d done to Richard M. Nixon—that is to say, to be in his presence and in his confidence for a number of months and then run it up his butt sideways. And I’m wondering, since the latter has turned out to be the case, whether that’s going to provide a problem for you in the future. That is to say, is anybody ever going to trust you again?”

  “Well, they can trust me if they’re innocent,” McGinniss retorted.

  “You don’t feel that you in any sense betrayed Jeffrey or did him dirt or anything?”

  “My only obligation from the beginning was to the truth.”

  “How would you describe your feelings about Jeffrey MacDonald now? This is a complex question, obviously, but obviously you’re going to be asked this on talk shows, and you’re going to have thirty seconds or ten seconds to think about it. How would you describe it?”

  “Right now, I have a strange absence of feeling toward him. He has occupied so much of my consciousness and subconscious for so long that, with the book finally done, I find myself kind of numb in regard to him. I don’t have a feeling except the feeling that has been with me, which isn’t focussed so specifically on him but on the whole thing—a sadness that just doesn’t go away. It’s just sadness, sadness, sadness. Such a tragic, terrible waste, and such a dark and internally persecuted human being he is. He is so different from what he appears to be. I feel very sad that he didn’t turn out to be who he wanted me to think he was. Because that would have been a lot easier to handle.”

  • • •

  MACDONALD was transferred from the Butner prison to the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, near Long Beach, California—after a bus trip that spread over several weeks, during which he was kept in shackles—and in November McGinniss flew out to see him there and to continue his research for the book. Although he had glued himself to MacDonald in North Carolina, McGinniss had put off interviewing him about his life before the murders until the trial was over; now he would do this work. But at the prison McGinniss was prevented from bringing a tape recorder, or even a notebook and pencil, into the visiting room. So the men devised a scheme that would take the place of interviews: MacDonald would recollect his past into a tape recorder and mail the tapes (via his mother) to McGinniss. Over the next two years, MacDonald sent McGinniss a total of thirty tapes, which he made under somewhat mysterious circumstances (How did he get a tape recorder into his cell? Why was he never caught recording? Why was the tape recorder never found by guards? Why was his mother never caught smuggling the tapes out?), and from which McGinniss quoted excerpts in his book in chapters entitled “The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald,” alternating with the narrative proper. McGinniss stayed in California a week, and during his stay MacDonald put his empty condominium—a half hour’s drive from the prison—at McGinniss’s disposal. McGinniss slept in a guest room-office, and during the day (he visited MacDonald in the late afternoon) he would read in the massive files on the case that MacDonald kept there and had given him carte blanche to rifle. McGinniss found so much of interest in the files that he asked MacDonald if he might take some of the material back home with him; the ever-obliging MacDonald agreed, and even lent him a suitcase in which to cart the stuff. Among the documents McGinniss found in the apartment, the most exciting to him was an account MacDonald had handwritten for his attorneys at the Army hearing in 1970. In it (the document was later made public), he listed all his activities on the evening of the murders and mentioned a diet pill, Eskatrol—an amphetamine combined with a sedative—that he had been taking. McGinniss, baffled, like everyone else, as to what could have prompted MacDonald to kill his family, and in such a savage way, consulted various pharmaceutical texts and found that Eskatrol could induce psychosis when taken in high enough doses. (It was removed from the market in 1980.) MacDonald had written:

  We ate dinner together at 5:45 p.m. (all four). It is possible I had one diet pill at this time. I do not remember, and do not think I had one, but it is possible. I had been running a weight-control program for my unit, and I put my name at the top of the program to encourage participation. I had lost 12–15 lbs. in the prior 3–4 weeks, in the process using 3–5 capsules of Eskatrol Spansule. [Quoting this passage in Fatal Vision, McGinniss dropped the clause “and do not think I had one.”]

  Not implausibly, McGinniss interpreted “3–5 capsules” to mean three to five capsules a day, which is an overdose, and he went on to propose in Fatal Vision that MacDonald killed his wife and daughters in a fit of rage—a rage against the female sex that he had been repressing since early childhood and that the drug (in combination with stress, fatigue, and Colette MacDonald’s threatening “new insights into personality structure and behavioral patterns,” picked up at the psychology course she was taking and had just come home from) finally permitted him to vent. McGinniss based his theory of the crime on an uncritical reading of three moral tracts—Otto Kernberg’s Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, and Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity—in which the terms “psychopath” and “pathological narcissist” are confidently offered as the answer to the problem of evil (as if labelling were ever anything more than the restatement of a problem). In the MacDonald-McGinniss trial, to lend credence to McGinniss’s labelling of MacDonald as a pathological narcissist, Kornstein invited Kernberg himself to appear as an expert witness and apply to MacDonald the adjectives he applies to the patients in his book—“grandiose,” “cold,” “shallow,” “ruthless,” “exploitative,” “parasitic,” “haughty,” “envious,” “self-centered,” “lacking in emotional depth,” “deficient in genuine feelings of sadness”—who suffer from the malady he has invented. Kernberg prudently declined, and suggested a colleague of his, Michael Stone, for the role of moralist-in-shrink’s-clothing, which Stone accepted and played to the hilt.

  Another arresting find of McGinniss’s at the MacDonald apartment was a letter from Joseph Wambaugh, dated March 28, 1975,
spelling out the conditions under which he would consider writing a book about MacDonald. The letter’s tone is more like that of the charmless writing in small print on a baggage-claim check than like the communication of an author to a prospective subject. As he read, McGinniss must have marvelled at, and possibly envied, Wambaugh’s je m’en foutisme. But then Wambaugh was an ex-cop (he was once a detective on the Los Angeles police force), and, maybe even more to the point, he was one of America’s most successful popular writers, who apparently could afford to be blunt (as McGinniss, strapped for cash, apparently could not). “You should understand that I would not think of writing your story,” Wambaugh wrote, and he went on:

  It would be my story. Just as The Onion Field was my story and In Cold Blood was Capote’s story. We both had the living persons sign legal releases which authorized us to interpret, portray, and characterize them as we saw fit, trusting us implicitly to be honest and faithful to the truth as we saw it, not as they saw it.

  With this release you can readily see that you would have no recourse at law if you didn’t like my portrayal of you. Let’s face another ugly possibility: what if I, after spending months of research and interviewing dozens of people and listening to hours of court trials, did not believe you innocent?

  I suspect that you may want a writer who would tell your story, and indeed your version may very well be the truth as I would see it. But you’d have no guarantee, not with me. You’d have absolutely no editorial prerogative. You would not even see the book until publication.

  McGinniss quotes this letter in Fatal Vision, and also quotes from a note that MacDonald sent to Segal about the letter: “What do you think? He sounds awfully arrogant to me, but it will be an obvious best-seller if he writes the book.” McGinniss goes on, “Wambaugh, of course, had not written the book.… Now I was writing it.” He adds, assuming some of Wambaugh’s toughness, “As would have been the case with Wambaugh, MacDonald had absolutely no editorial prerogative. And the ‘ugly possibility’ to which Wambaugh referred had now become a reality.”

  But toward MacDonald himself McGinniss continued to behave with his customary ingratiation. For almost four years—during which he corresponded with MacDonald, spoke with him on the telephone, received his tapes, and, on two occasions, visited him—he successfully hid the fact that in the book under preparation he was portraying MacDonald as a psychopathic killer. In 1981, writing to his editor at Dell, Morgan Entrekan, about the book’s narrative strategy, he expressed his concern lest its protagonist seem “too loathsome too soon,” and proposed that the worst revelations about his character be “postponed until the end, when we draw closer and closer to him, seeing the layers of the mask melt away and gazing, at least obliquely, at the essence of the horror which lurks beneath.” He added—referring to his uneasy relations with the actual MacDonald—“The ice is getting thinner, and I’m still a long way from shore.” But he need not have worried; MacDonald never twigged to the ruse. Like the dupe in the Milgram deception, the naïve subject of a book becomes so caught up in the enterprise and so emotionally invested in it that he simply cannot conceive of it in any terms other than those the writer has set for it. As the Milgram subject imagined he was “helping” someone to learn, so MacDonald imagined he was “helping” McGinniss write a book exonerating him of the crime, and presenting him as a kind of kitsch hero (“loving father and husband,” “dedicated physician,” “overachiever”). When, instead, McGinniss wrote a book charging him with the crime, and presenting him as a kitsch villain (“publicity-seeker,” “womanizer,” “latent homosexual”), MacDonald was stunned. His dehoaxing took place in a particularly dramatic and cruel manner. McGinniss had steadfastly refused to let him see galleys or an advance copy of the book. In a letter of February 16, 1983, he had written sternly, “I understand your impatience, and it is to that that I will attribute the unpleasantness of your tone.… At no time was there ever any understanding that you would be given an advance look at the book six months prior to publication. As Joe Wambaugh told you in 1975, with him you would not even see a copy before it was published. Same with me. Same with any principled and responsible author.” MacDonald had accepted the rebuke, and had enthusiastically lent himself to the pre-publication publicity campaign for the book. His assignment was an appearance on the television show “60 Minutes,” and it was during the taping of the show in prison that the fact of McGinniss’s duplicity was brought home to him. As Mike Wallace—who had received an advance copy of Fatal Vision without difficulty or a lecture—read out loud to MacDonald passages in which he was portrayed as a psychopathic killer, the camera recorded his look of shock and utter discomposure.

  Milgram, in the chapter on methodology in Obedience to Authority, explains that he did not use Yale undergraduates as subjects because of the risk that word of the experiment might get out among the student population. But there is reason to think—extrapolating from the writer-subject experiment—that even subjects who had heard of the Milgram experiment would have fallen into its trap after only a slight alteration of its character. MacDonald, after all, had heard of people who were displeased with what was written about them (sometimes to the point of suing the writer), and still he behaved as if there were no possibility that his “own” book could be anything but flattering and gratifying. Perhaps even more striking is MacDonald’s continuing and, under the circumstances, crazy trust in the good intentions of journalists. To this day, after all that has happened to him, he continues to give interviews to journalists, continues to correspond with them, continues to send them material (through an out-of-prison information office run by a woman named Gail Boyce), and does everything he can to be helpful to them, just as he did with McGinniss. Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father. During our conversation in Williamstown, McGinniss quoted the following passage from an essay by Thomas Mann, which he had come upon in a book by another of his literary heroes, Joseph Campbell:

  The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as artist your daemon constrains you to “observe,” to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever.

  “This isn’t something that you can argue before a jury of people who don’t read books,” McGinniss said to me, “but it seems to me to get right to the heart of it.” He told me that he had “compartmentalized” his conflicting attitudes toward MacDonald. “The first letter I got from the guy, written eighteen hours after his conviction, brought tears to my eyes. I felt genuine sorrow. He wrote, ‘All I want to know is that you’re still my friend and you believe in me.’ So what’s the appropriate response? To send back a paragraph that says, ‘I reserve the right to my own opinions, and I remind you that I’m the author and you are the subject, and we have to keep things on that level’? Or do I write back and say, ‘You sound terrible, prison must be awful, I really feel bad for you’? All of which was an expression of genuine feeling at that time on my part. Not a lie. But I was compartmentalizing. I was suspending my critical
faculty long enough to allow me to write that letter.”

  The letter in question was written on September 11, 1979, twelve days after MacDonald’s first letter to McGinniss. It read, in part:

  Dear Jeff,

  Every morning for a week now, I’ve been waking up wondering where you are. A bus! Christ! It seems that the only function a ride across country in a prison bus might serve is to make your destination seem not quite as awful as it otherwise would have. On the other hand, I’m sure your destination seems awful. Is awful. Terminal Island. Pretty terrible name, on top of everything else.…

  I am glad to see that you are able to write—to describe and analyze both what happened to you and your own feelings about it. I have plenty of my own thoughts, which I’ll be getting to sooner or later, but mostly I am relieved to see that you are apparently able to function constructively despite the extreme limitations. Also, I’m glad you didn’t kill yourself, because that sure would have been a bummer for the book.…

  There could not be a worse nightmare than the one you are living through now—but it is only a phase. Total strangers can recognize within five minutes that you did not receive a fair trial.…

  Well, I’m sure when I see you we will have plenty of chance to talk about that as well as many other things. Bob Keeler, incidentally, told me he planned to spend quite a bit of time interviewing you at Terminal Island. Told me also he wants to write a book on the case & is talking to Doubleday about it. I would just as soon he did not write a book; & Delacorte will be announcing my book—and the full and exclusive access aspect of our relationship—this week to try and keep the field reasonably clear. Frankly, I am not sure what Keeler’s attitude toward you is. I’m not implying that he believes you are guilty—I just don’t know, but I think it would be better on many counts if you did nothing to encourage or to assist anyone else who might be planning to write about this.…