Whatever Happened to ... 1993 : Revisiting some of View’s most talked-about stories, we find progress for anxious parents and neon signs, second thoughts about a controversial sect - and pregnant women still craving “magic” salad. : Joe McGinniss Gets ‘Swift Clip’ Trophy

Simon & Schuster might have enjoyed a better seller had they reprinted a 70th anniversary edition of “Mein Kampf.”

Joe McGinniss would have suffered less emotional mutilation had he written a revisionist study of the free market integrity of Al Capone.

But publisher and author decided on “The Last Brother,” a psychic look at the beginning, multiple and midlife crises of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). The book produced nothing but murderous, consentaneous and intransigent criticism of McGinniss.

The first slam was a New York magazine article claiming the work borrowed freely from earlier material about Kennedy. Then the pack pounced on McGinniss’ caveat that he had enhanced dialogue, added unsubstantiated interpretations, injected personal ruminations--and had not interviewed the senator.

The Times’ interview with McGinniss (“Sound and Fury,” View, July 30, 1993) found the tall, rumpled New Yorker dazed but unbowed by critics’ gorings that described his work as slimy, probably actionable, certainly dishonest, meretricious, shoddy, plagiaristic and unrelievably rotten.

There has been little softening.

This month, the Chicago Sun Times awarded McGinniss its “Swift Clip Job Trophy.” The New Republic has added to the lexicon of publishing by defining the book as an “odiography.”

Publishers are never reluctant to announce numbers if a book goes boffo. Simon & Schuster declined to release final figures for “The Last Brother.” Therein the indicator that it has been a disaster. (Industry rumors claim fewer than 50,000 books sold from a 265,000 printing.)

But plans stay alive to present the book as a television miniseries. And it hovered in the mid-teens for three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Cold comfort, however, to McGinniss who lamented at the time: “The bottom half of the list in August is frankly not a hotbed of competition.”

In recent months, McGinniss has maintained a low profile close to home in Williamstown, Mass.

He does not return media calls. He leaves that chore to wife Nora Doherty, who issued this statement for him:

“I think it is perhaps the best book I have ever written. I remain shocked and saddened by the media lynch-mob response to it.”