William F. Buckley Testifies for ‘Fatal Visions’ Author

Testifying on behalf of the writer of a book that accuses a respected Army physician of the murder of his wife and children, author William F. Buckley Jr. on Wednesday described writers as “investigative artists” who may woo their subjects into revealing their worst secrets.

“I wouldn’t lie about my own beliefs,” Buckley said, but the columnist and talk show host said it was “elementary technique” for a writer to conceal his own opinions to keep an interviewee talking.

“If you were writing about somebody who was a renowned philanderer and he said, ‘Don’t you think my wife is impossible?’ You might say, ‘Yes, she is rather hard to get along with,’ simply for the purpose of lubricating the discussion,” Buckley suggested.

“The priorities are to encourage the person you’re writing about to tell you everything, and if that takes going down to a bar and having a beer with him, you go down to the bar and have a beer with him. . . . It’s part of the ordeal of being a writer.”

At issue in the Los Angeles federal court trial of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald’s $15-million lawsuit against Joe McGinniss, author of the book “Fatal Vision,” is whether the writer won MacDonald’s full cooperation by deceiving him into thinking he believed in his innocence.

A former Army physician and Green Beret captain, MacDonald has maintained it was a band of drug-crazed hippies that broke into his Ft. Bragg, N.C., home in 1970 and murdered his pregnant wife and two children.

MacDonald claims McGinniss breached their agreement to develop a book about the case by failing to preserve the “essential integrity” of his life story and by continuing to gain intimate access to the physician and his defense long after McGinniss had become convinced of his guilt.

McGinniss, whom Buckley described as “ferociously honest,” claims he had no obligation to write a book declaring MacDonald innocent, though he says he was not convinced of the former Long Beach physician’s guilt until sometime after his 1979 conviction for the murders.

Buckley’s testimony, in which he appeared as an expert witness on McGinniss’ behalf, erupted at points into a verbal jousting match with MacDonald’s attorney over a writer’s obligation to his subjects and the meaning of a lie.

He resisted attempts by lawyer Gary Bostwick, representing MacDonald, to ascertain whether an author is entitled to lie to a subject in order to win his cooperation, insisting that the definition of a lie is “not that easy.”

But Buckley, founder of the conservative magazine National Review and host of a PBS television program, “Firing Line,” insisted that a writer has no obligation to tell his interview subject when he disagrees with him.

“A writer is an artist, and he wants to encourage the subject to reveal himself,” Buckley said. “I shouldn’t think an author ought to take on the job of passing moral judgment on a subject.”

Buckley spoke strongly in support of a writer’s “absolute, total discretion . . . subject to libel” in portraying an interview subject, arguing that threats against such discretion “would destroy the profession.”

“I don’t think that people would ever read, or would have any appetite for reading, books that were merely mechanical applications of formulae that were arrived at before the books were ever written,” he said.