Ethics Feud Enters Into New Chapter

Soap opera aficionados, be advised: Two juicy new chapters have arrived in the tale of the strange triangle between murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, author Joe McGinniss, and New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm.

The latest last words in the long tale appear in a 25-page epilogue McGinniss has tacked on to the new release of his book, “Fatal Vision,” and in a cover story in the July-August issue of Columbia Journalism Review.

Both focus on the obligations between writer, reader and the person being written about. Taken together, they offer an illuminating behind-the-scenes look at the bitter squabbles and navel-gazing that have consumed journalists for months now.

The saga begins in 1970, when Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald’s wife and his two young daughters were brutally murdered in their North Carolina home. MacDonald, a Green Beret physician with all the right references, was convicted of the crime.

While appealing that decision, MacDonald agreed to cooperate with McGinniss (“The Selling of the President,” “Going to Extremes”) on a book, apparently believing that McGinniss would help prove his proclaimed innocence. McGinniss would get exclusive access to MacDonald; MacDonald would get a cut of the royalties.

McGinniss’ damning account of the case appeared in the best seller “Fatal Vision” and a subsequent television miniseries. Arguing that the author had betrayed a mutual trust, MacDonald sued McGinniss. The case landed in the Federal District Court in Los Angeles in 1987, and ended in a hung jury, a settlement and a lot of journalistic anxiety about the potential effect on the First Amendment.

Last March, the plot in the already convoluted yarn thickened again when the New Yorker published “Reflections: The Journalist and the Murderer,” a two-part article in which Malcolm analyzed the four-year relationship between McGinniss and MacDonald and the broader issue of the relationship between interviewers and the subjects.

Malcolm’s accusations that McGinniss “seduced” his subject were controversial; her observations on the nature of reporters, in general, incited verbal riots.

Confidence Man

By nature, the journalist is “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse,” she wrote. As the Journalism Review article states, “few articles on the subject of journalism have triggered more newsroom and cocktail-party debate, more belligerent editorializing, and more honest soul-searching. . . .”

In the new epilogue, McGinniss vents the outrage against Malcolm that has been building for four months. “. . . So numerous and egregious are her omissions, distortions and outright misstatements of fact, that I feel compelled to set the record straight,” he writes. He goes on to defend himself against many of Malcolm’s specific charges and addresses broader ethical issues by liberally quoting journalistic sources from Tom Wolfe to the New Yorker’s Lillian Ross.

In explaining how a reporter might have mixed feelings about his subject, he quotes journalist Marshall Frady, who has profiled numerous prominent figures in his career. “I like ‘em all when I’m with ‘em,” Frady said. “It’s only when I sit down at the typewriter that I realize what sons of bitches they really are.” To which McGinniss adds, that isn’t always the case.

“By the time of his conviction, I had come to like Jeffrey MacDonald enormously,” he writes. But McGinniss portrays MacDonald as a “pathological optimist” for failing to realize that talking to the author might well go against his best interests.

Malcolm, too, he hints, may have succumbed to MacDonald’s charismatic spell--but with different results.

In what is certain to be the most controversial section of the epilogue, McGinniss writes that “there are women who develop a fascination with men convicted of violent crimes--especially violent crimes against women.”

Malcolm’s descriptions of MacDonald as “handsome, tall, blond, athletic” with “preternatural equipoise,” and “physical grace” betray a deeper emotional attachment than she lets on, he suggests. In one passage, he draws attention to Malcolm’s description of the way MacDonald “handled a doughnut , for heaven’s sake, ‘breaking off pieces and unaccountably keeping the powdered sugar under control--with the delicate dexterity of a veterinarian fixing a broken wing.’ ”

“This,” McGinniss adds, “from a woman herself so delicate that she could not bring herself to look at some of the other things MacDonald had broken, like the arms and skull of his wife and the skull and face of his 5-year-old daughter.”

McGinniss also takes a swing at the New Yorker. “Neither I nor anyone else about whom Malcolm wrote and to whom I’ve subsequently spoken was ever contacted by a New Yorker fact checker,” he writes, later implying that this alleged journalistic sloppiness may owe something to the fact that Malcolm’s piece was edited by her husband--the stepson, McGinniss says, of the founding publisher of the New Yorker. He also raises the issue that Malcolm’s husband edited the piece and that she and New Yorker editor in chief Robert Gottlieb are “extremely close” friends.

Calls Idea Ludicrous

Through an intermediary, Gottlieb stood by an earlier statement that “we did all the checking we thought was appropriate,” and called the suggestion that friendship may have caused a slip in his magazine’s journalistic standards “ludicrous.”

The Columbia Journalism Review article makes no mention of McGinniss’ new epilogue, instead throwing the discussion open to the journalistic community, bringing together such diverse voices as columnist Ken Auletta; celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley; “60 Minutes” star Mike Wallace and journalist and novelist Dan Wakefield.

Several of those quoted, including tele-journalist Barbara Walters and Wendall Rawls Jr., former assistant managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, give decidedly unflattering views of their profession.

Nora Ephron, unless she has been misquoted or quoted out of context--a “standard operating procedure among the majority of journalists,” she says--glibly comes down on the side of Joan Didion’s old line: “Writers are always selling someone out.” Malcolm, she argues, has done people a service by teaching them to be wary of journalists.

A. M. Rosenthal, former executive editor and now columnist for the New York Times, on the other hand, wonders if Malcolm may not be projecting her own guilt onto others when she states that journalistic betrayal is inevitable. “It may very well be true about her, because--it’s a fascinating thing--I’ve found that very often when people talk or write about other people they are really talking or writing about themselves.”

To complicate things, author Joseph Wambaugh, who testified in the McGinniss-MacDonald suit and was a key character in Malcolm’s New Yorker stories, says in CJR: “I don’t think Malcolm quoted me fairly.” He also calls Malcolm’s observations on journalists utter nonsense.

‘Miniseries Journalism’

McGinniss doesn’t come out unbloodied in the debate. David Halberstam--a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of “The Best and the Brightest,” “The Powers That Be” and “The Amateurs”--writes that this particular discussion is not so much about traditional reportage as “miniseries journalism, where the journalist covers a murder in no small part because it has a potential miniseries in it.” His conclusion: “I think Joe should be ashamed of himself.”

And Malcolm, while vilified by some, also earns a healthy share of praise.

Rosenthal, for instance, applauds the light she sheds on the multilayered interviewer-interviewee relationship. Despite the inherent dangers in that process, Rosenthal concludes that he has an obligation to talk to reporters.

Which is more than can be said of Malcolm, who refused to talk on the record about any aspect of the debate that made her newsworthy.

McGinniss is talking, and he contends that the CJR discussion would have taken a much different tone if those interviewed had read his new epilogue.

“It strikes me that too many people are using her articles as the basis for debate without understanding how badly flawed and inherently dishonest the original pieces were,” McGinniss said. “All sorts of opiners and commentators are willing to say she is wacky and off-base when she’s talking about journalism in general, but that she seems to have some good points on Joe McGinniss. . . . She doesn’t. . . . It’s hard to comment intelligently on what surrounded the reporting in ‘Fatal Vision’ if all you have to go on is her account.”

Flawed or not, the CJR debate does--as do Malcolm’s articles, as does McGinniss’ book--raise complex and subtle issues about what happens between journalists and their subjects.

An anecdote, told by New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Weschler, illustrates this peculiar dynamic, with which any journalist who has done even the most innocuous interview is familiar--as is any reader with a talent for reading between lines.

In the article, Weschler was interviewing a Third World thug, who revealed that his men had a habit of questioning suspects “energetically.”

“Energetically?” Weschler asked.

“(The dictator) was silent for a moment, his smile steady,” Weschler writes. “For him, this was clearly a game of cat and mouse. His smile horrified me, but presently I realized I’d begun smiling back (it seemed clear the interview had reached a crisis: either I was going to smile back, showing that I was the sort of man who understood these things or the interview was going to be abruptly over). So I smiled, and now I was doubly horrified that I was smiling. I’m sure he realized this, because he now smiled all the more, precisely at the way he’d gotten me to smile and how obviously horrified I was to be doing so.

“He swallowed me whole,” Weschler concludes. Then he adds, “But of course, when I write, ‘He swallowed me whole,’ I swallow him whole. So I have the last word. I get to have the Cheshire-cat grin.”

Almost certainly, the last word in the MacDonald-McGinniss-Malcolm has yet to be written: 20 years from now, we still may be reading articles on rebuttals to afterwords.

So far, though, the best last word may be a question a reader wrote to McGinniss but which some readers may be tempted to apply more broadly. Why can’t society sue MacDonald, the letter writer wondered, “for lying to us, for misleading us, for hiding evidence, for endeavoring to drive society out of its mind?”

Meanwhile, McGinniss reports that New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb recently rented a house in Williamstown, Mass., for the summer, without knowing that it is the house where Malcolm conducted an aborted interview with McGinniss, the very house, in fact, “in which every word of ‘Fatal Vision’ was written.”