Author of books on politics, murder trial
Joe McGinniss, the author who reported on political campaigns and murder cases in the books The Selling of the President and Fatal Vision, died Monday. He was 71.
His death was confirmed on his Facebook page, where over the past year he frequently posted updates about his treatment for terminal prostate cancer.
When McGinniss published The Selling of the President, his account of Richard Nixon’s television-centered campaign in 1969, he was only 26. The book went behind the scenes with Nixon’s consultants and became a model for political reporting.
His 1983 book Fatal Vision focused on the murder trial of Jeffrey MacDonald, an Army doctor and a Green Beret accused of killing his pregnant wife and two daughters. McGinniss lived with MacDonald’s defense team during the trial and eventually decided that the jury’s guilty verdict was correct.
More recently, McGinniss made headlines in 2010 when, for his next book, he moved in next door to Sarah Palin and her family in Wasilla, Alaska.
McGinniss said he was offended when conservative TV host Glenn Beck suggested that McGinniss was a Peeping Tom who wanted to peer into the Palin daughters’ bedrooms.
The book, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, included sensational personal details about the family, including the claim that Palin had taken drugs when she was young.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 03/12/2014