The Journalist and the Murderer Read Online Free PDF Page B

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”), MacDonaldwas 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 nopossibility 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