Joe McGinniss
Encyclopedia
Joe McGinniss is an American author of nonfiction and novels. He first came to prominence with the best-selling The Selling of the President, 1968 which described the marketing of then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon
, and has authored 11 works since that time. His latest book is The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin
.
in 1964 and became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram in Worcester, Massachusetts
. Within a year he left to become a sportswriter for The Philadelphia Bulletin. He then moved to The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general interest columnist.
, landed on The New York Times
bestseller list when he was 26 years old, making him the youngest living writer with that achievement. The book described the marketing of Richard Nixon
during the 1968 presidential campaign
. McGinniss stumbled across his book’s topic while taking a train to New York. A fellow commuter had just landed the Hubert Humphrey
account and was boasting that 'in six weeks we’ll have him looking better than Abraham Lincoln
.' McGinniss tried to get access to Humphrey’s campaign first, but they turned him down. So he called up Nixon’s, and they said yes."
The book was well received by both critics and the public, and has been recognized as a "classic of campaign reporting that first introduced many readers to the stage-managed world of political theater." It "spent more than six months on best-sellers lists, and McGinniss sold a lot of those books through television, appearing on the titular shows of Merv Griffin
, David Frost
and Dick Cavett
, among others." Conservative writer William F. Buckley "assumed McGinniss had relied on 'an elaborate deception which has brought joy and hope to the Nixon-haters.' But even Buckley liked the book."
, a nonfiction account of his year exploring Alaska
.
In 1979 he became a writer-in-residence at the L.A. Herald Examiner. Next came the McGinniss trilogy of true crime books, Fatal Vision
, Blind Faith
and Cruel Doubt
. All three books were made into TV miniseries. His 1983 account of the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, Fatal Vision, was a best-seller. MacDonald sued McGinniss in 1984, alleging that McGinniss pretended to believe MacDonald innocent after he came to the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, in order to continue MacDonald's cooperation with him. After a six-week civil trial that resulted in a hung jury
, McGinniss's publisher's insurance company chose to settle out of court with MacDonald for an undisclosed amount. Given the victims' rights laws in force, however, the convicted murderer received no actual money. In her book The Journalist and the Murderer
, Janet Malcolm
used the McGinniss-MacDonald trial to explore the problematic relationship between journalists and their subjects.
The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy was published in 1993. The highly speculative volume was widely panned; The New York Times
called it "half-baked" and "awful".
In 1995, McGinniss sat through the O. J. Simpson murder case
trial, expecting to write a book about it, but returned the $1 million advance after Simpson was acquitted, saying the trial had been "a farce." His next book, the critically acclaimed The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, followed the fortunes of an Italian soccer team from a tiny town
during one dramatic season in the big leagues
.
The Big Horse was published in 2004. In his next book, Never Enough, McGinniss returned to his study of the dark side of the American family with a nonfiction account of the murder of investment banker Robert Kissel by his wife Nancy in Hong Kong.
's business magazine Portfolio about then-governor Palin's promotion of a $26 billion plan to construct a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope
of Alaska to a pipeline hub in Canada. In 2009, McGinniss signed a contract to write an unauthorized biography about Palin and began research which took him to Alaska that fall and again in the spring of 2010. In late May he rented a house next door to Palin's home on Lake Lucille
in Wasilla. On her Facebook
page, Palin warned him to stay away from her children and stated: "Wonder what kind of material he'll gather while overlooking Piper's bedroom, my little garden, and the family's swimming hole?" causing a brief media frenzy and, according to The Washington Post, "fury from Palin fans". McGinniss responded that there was no view of anyone's bedroom from the rental house and suggested that Palin should have simply come over with a plate of cookies and had a civil discussion with him.
McGinniss left Alaska in September 2010 to write his book on the Palin phenomenon. Broadway Books, a division of Random House, published The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin on September 20, 2011. According to advance reviews, the book alleges premarital sex and drug use. The book is reportedly heavy on innuendo, including conjecture that Sarah Palin is not the biological mother of her son, Trig Palin. Early reviews by the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times criticized The Rogue for its use of unnamed sources and for having an obvious anti-Palin agenda.
On September 26, 2011, ABC News
reported that Palin's attorney John Tiemessen had written a letter to the book's author and publisher, saying that Palin might sue them "for knowingly publishing false statements."
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
, and has authored 11 works since that time. His latest book is The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin
Sarah Louise Palin is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice-presidency.She was...
.
Biography
McGinniss graduated from the College of the Holy CrossCollege of the Holy Cross
The College of the Holy Cross is an undergraduate Roman Catholic liberal arts college located in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA...
in 1964 and became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram in Worcester, Massachusetts
Worcester, Massachusetts
Worcester is a city and the county seat of Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. Named after Worcester, England, as of the 2010 Census the city's population is 181,045, making it the second largest city in New England after Boston....
. Within a year he left to become a sportswriter for The Philadelphia Bulletin. He then moved to The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general interest columnist.
The Selling of the President
McGinniss became an overnight success when his first book, The Selling of the President 1968The Selling of the President 1968
The Selling of the President 1968 is a non-fiction book written by American author Joe McGinniss and published by Trident Press in October, 1969.The book describes the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign...
, landed on The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
bestseller list when he was 26 years old, making him the youngest living writer with that achievement. The book described the marketing of Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
during the 1968 presidential campaign
United States presidential election, 1968
The United States presidential election of 1968 was the 46th quadrennial United States presidential election. Coming four years after Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson won in a historic landslide, it saw Johnson forced out of the race and Republican Richard Nixon elected...
. McGinniss stumbled across his book’s topic while taking a train to New York. A fellow commuter had just landed the Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. , served under President Lyndon B. Johnson as the 38th Vice President of the United States. Humphrey twice served as a United States Senator from Minnesota, and served as Democratic Majority Whip. He was a founder of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and...
account and was boasting that 'in six weeks we’ll have him looking better than Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
.' McGinniss tried to get access to Humphrey’s campaign first, but they turned him down. So he called up Nixon’s, and they said yes."
The book was well received by both critics and the public, and has been recognized as a "classic of campaign reporting that first introduced many readers to the stage-managed world of political theater." It "spent more than six months on best-sellers lists, and McGinniss sold a lot of those books through television, appearing on the titular shows of Merv Griffin
Merv Griffin
Mervyn Edward "Merv" Griffin, Jr. was an American television host, musician, actor, and media mogul. He began his career as a radio and big band singer who went on to appear in movies and on Broadway. From 1965 to 1986 Griffin hosted his own talk show, The Merv Griffin Show on Group W Broadcasting...
, David Frost
David Frost
Sir David Frost is a British broadcaster.David Frost may also refer to:*David Frost , South African golfer*David Frost , classical record producer*David Frost *Dave Frost, baseball pitcher...
and Dick Cavett
Dick Cavett
Richard Alva "Dick" Cavett is a former American television talk show host known for his conversational style and in-depth discussion of issues...
, among others." Conservative writer William F. Buckley "assumed McGinniss had relied on 'an elaborate deception which has brought joy and hope to the Nixon-haters.' But even Buckley liked the book."
Other works
After the success of his book in 1968, McGinniss left the Inquirer to write books full-time. He next wrote a novel, The Dream Team. It was followed by Heroes, and Going to ExtremesGoing to Extremes (book)
Going to Extremes is a non-fiction book by Joe McGinniss. It was first published in 1980. The book is about McGinniss' travels through Alaska for a year. The book became a best-seller.The Los Angeles Times called it a "vivid memoir."...
, a nonfiction account of his year exploring Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
.
In 1979 he became a writer-in-residence at the L.A. Herald Examiner. Next came the McGinniss trilogy of true crime books, Fatal Vision
Fatal Vision
Fatal Vision is a best-selling true crime book published in 1983 by journalist and author Joe McGinniss. The following year it was made into an NBC television miniseries under the same name. Fatal Vision is the real-life story of Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, M.D., who in 1979 was convicted of the...
, Blind Faith
Blind Faith (book)
Blind Faith is a bestselling 1989 true crime novel by Joe McGinniss, based on the 1984 case in which American businessman Robert O. Marshall was charged with the contract killing of his wife, Maria...
and Cruel Doubt
Cruel Doubt
Cruel Doubt is a 1992 television movie starring Blythe Danner and Matt McGrath. The film was first broadcast as a two-part miniseries on NBC in the United States and CTV in Canada on May 17 and May 19, 1992....
. All three books were made into TV miniseries. His 1983 account of the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, Fatal Vision, was a best-seller. MacDonald sued McGinniss in 1984, alleging that McGinniss pretended to believe MacDonald innocent after he came to the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, in order to continue MacDonald's cooperation with him. After a six-week civil trial that resulted in a hung jury
Hung jury
A hung jury or deadlocked jury is a jury that cannot, by the required voting threshold, agree upon a verdict after an extended period of deliberation and is unable to change its votes due to severe differences of opinion.- England and Wales :...
, McGinniss's publisher's insurance company chose to settle out of court with MacDonald for an undisclosed amount. Given the victims' rights laws in force, however, the convicted murderer received no actual money. In her book The Journalist and the Murderer
The Journalist and the Murderer
The Journalist and the Murderer is a 1990 study by Janet Malcolm about the ethics of journalism published by Alfred A. Knopf/Random House. Attracting heavy criticism upon first publication, it is now regarded as a "seminal" work, and ranks ninety-seventh on Random House's The Modern Library's list...
, Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession , In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer ....
used the McGinniss-MacDonald trial to explore the problematic relationship between journalists and their subjects.
The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy was published in 1993. The highly speculative volume was widely panned; The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
called it "half-baked" and "awful".
In 1995, McGinniss sat through the O. J. Simpson murder case
O. J. Simpson murder case
The O. J. Simpson murder case was a criminal trial held in Los Angeles County, California Superior Court from January 29 to October 3, 1995. Former American football star and actor O. J...
trial, expecting to write a book about it, but returned the $1 million advance after Simpson was acquitted, saying the trial had been "a farce." His next book, the critically acclaimed The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, followed the fortunes of an Italian soccer team from a tiny town
Castel di Sangro
Castel di Sangro is a city and comune of 6,109 people in the Province of L'Aquila, in Abruzzo, southern Italy. It is the central city of the Alto Sangro e Altopiano delle Cinque Miglia.-Geography:...
during one dramatic season in the big leagues
Serie B
Serie B, currently named Serie bwin due to sponsorship reasons, is the second-highest division in the Italian football league system after the Serie A. It is contested by 22 teams and organized by the Lega Serie B since July 2010, after the split of Lega Calcio that previously took care of both the...
.
The Big Horse was published in 2004. In his next book, Never Enough, McGinniss returned to his study of the dark side of the American family with a nonfiction account of the murder of investment banker Robert Kissel by his wife Nancy in Hong Kong.
The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin
McGinniss returned to Alaska in 2008 to research an article for Conde NastCondé Nast Publications
Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a magazine publisher. In the U.S., it produces 18 consumer magazines, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 50 apps...
's business magazine Portfolio about then-governor Palin's promotion of a $26 billion plan to construct a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope
North Slope
North Slope can refer to:* Alaska North Slope* North Slope Borough, Alaska* North Slope, Tacoma, Washington* North Slope, an Inupiaq language dialect...
of Alaska to a pipeline hub in Canada. In 2009, McGinniss signed a contract to write an unauthorized biography about Palin and began research which took him to Alaska that fall and again in the spring of 2010. In late May he rented a house next door to Palin's home on Lake Lucille
Lake Lucille
Lake Lucille is a lake within the municipal limits of Wasilla, Alaska, located at .Most of the lake shoreline is private property ,...
in Wasilla. On her Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
page, Palin warned him to stay away from her children and stated: "Wonder what kind of material he'll gather while overlooking Piper's bedroom, my little garden, and the family's swimming hole?" causing a brief media frenzy and, according to The Washington Post, "fury from Palin fans". McGinniss responded that there was no view of anyone's bedroom from the rental house and suggested that Palin should have simply come over with a plate of cookies and had a civil discussion with him.
McGinniss left Alaska in September 2010 to write his book on the Palin phenomenon. Broadway Books, a division of Random House, published The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin on September 20, 2011. According to advance reviews, the book alleges premarital sex and drug use. The book is reportedly heavy on innuendo, including conjecture that Sarah Palin is not the biological mother of her son, Trig Palin. Early reviews by the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times criticized The Rogue for its use of unnamed sources and for having an obvious anti-Palin agenda.
On September 26, 2011, ABC News
ABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...
reported that Palin's attorney John Tiemessen had written a letter to the book's author and publisher, saying that Palin might sue them "for knowingly publishing false statements."