This past week was so sad. I learned that my good friend Joe
McGinniss had passed away on Monday, March 10. It was not unexpected - he had
been battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer and died from complications
from it. Even though we knew it was inevitable, it was still very, very sad.
Joe was one of the last of the truly honest
journalists. He wrote from the heart but he also wrote the truth. And those
truths made him a target of many critics. His very first book was The Selling
of the President 1968, published when he was 26 years old and it was an instant
best seller. It was a revealing look into the behind-the-scenes tactics used in
Richard Nixon’s campaign which won him the presidency. In full disclosure, I hadn’t
read the book until I met Joe many years later. The Selling of the President
foretold what was to become the future pattern of all later political
campaigns. It is still an appropriate look at the PR packaging of candidates.
I met Joe and his wife Nancy in 1976 when I was
working on my first Alaska book, Alaska: Wilderness
Frontier. Along with two national park service planners Joe and I made a 13 day
backpacking across the remote and beautiful Brooks Range in northern Alaska. The area
would
become Gates of the Arctic
National Park a few years
afterward. We also spent time in
the soon-to-become Wrangell-St. Elias
National Park as well.
Joe was just finishing a two-year
stint in Alaska working on his book, Going to
Extremes, published in 1980. This book is one of the finest ever written about
the culture and politics of Alaska.
There are parts of it that are laugh-out-loud funny and parts that are serious
and insightful about the raw beauty of places like the Brooks
Range.
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| Joe in the upper Itkillik River Valley |
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| Approaching Oolah Pass |
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| Joe In McCarthy, Wrangell Mountains |
Joe’s most famous and most controversial book was
Fatal Vision, about Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret doctor accused of
murdering his pregnant wife and two children. The book, published six years
after MacDonald was found guilty by a jury, was a huge success and received
critical acclaim for its handling of the very complex body of evidence. Fatal
Vision became an NBC miniseries which also received acclaim.
I was privy to some of what went into the book. In
the summer of 1977 I invited Joe and Nancy to join me at a ranch in Wyoming where I was
running one of my week-long photography workshops. Joe brought with him one of
MacDonald’s lawyers. Jeff MacDonald was also supposed to attend, as a
participant in my workshop (he wanted to learn more about photography), but he
had just been convicted by the jury and was in prison. Somewhere I still have
the check MacDonald sent for the workshop fee.
There were some private conversations that week about
the case. Originally Joe had been convinced that MacDonald was wrongly accused.
At the ranch he was having doubts. A year or so later I was in New York and Joe and Nancy
invited me to visit and stay at their home in Flemington, New Jersey.
There were a couple of evenings over a bottle of Bombay gin with Joe discussing much of the
evidence in the case. He was clearly agonizing over the fact that the man he
originally thought was innocent was guilty as hell. There were photos and
statements that Joe read to see if I agreed with his conclusions. It was so
complex that I could not see how he could possibly make all this clear in his
writing. But he did. And there was no doubt that MacDonald was guilty.
I suppose it was inevitable that some journalists,
perhaps hoping to ride on the tide of the book’s success, came to the defense
of MacDonald. Some claimed that Joe had conned the doctor, keeping him convinced
that he (Joe) believed in his innocence in order to get more information from
him. But Joe later wrote that he himself had been conned by this very
charismatic man into believing him innocent. Fatal Vision still remains the
best and most complete evidence that Jeffrey MacDonald was guilty of the
murders. The book was published in early 1983.
Near the end of 1983 I received a phone call from
Joe. Excitedly he described a new book he had just received an advance to do.
Entitled Forbidden City, it would be about the life and times of Los Alamos during the years of the Manhattan Project. Joe
knew that I had spent nine years as a nuclear physicist studying reactor safety
for the Atomic Energy Commission at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho. Would I help him
as a consultant on the project? I told him I’d be delighted to do just that.
And so in early 1984 we traveled to Los Alamos and later to Berkeley to interview many of the key figures
in the Manhattan Project who were still living. I don’t know how many notebooks
Joe filled, but it was a chance to see him in action as a thorough journalist.
Even though he did not have a technical background, his preliminary research
was so good that he knew the right questions to ask. And he analyzed carefully
the answers. Joe was always cordial and the breadth of his knowledge convinced
the interviewees that he was not some hack journalist trying for a sensational
story. His interest in the subject was deep and sincere.
I guess it was sometime in 1985 that Joe learned of a
new book coming out within a year. It was entitled The Making of the Atomic
Bomb. The author, Richard Rhodes, was a fine, well-respected writer and a good
researcher. Joe realized that by the time Forbidden City would come out in a
year or two the subject would have been thoroughly covered by Rhodes.
The project was dropped. I was disappointed, of course. But in 1986 when it was
published, and I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I realized it had been a
good decision. Rhodes’ book is still the
finest and most complete work on the Manhattan Project.
Joe published two more books on murder cases, Blind
Faith (1989) and Cruel Doubt (1991). In the early 1990s I was traveling
extensively into the boondocks of the world - to Borneo, Siberia, South
America, and Africa - documenting threatened
wildlife and places. We did not communicate much in that period. Then, in 1995
Joe told me a publisher had given a huge advance to have him do a book on the
O.J. Simpson trial. He got the only permanent journalists’ seat at the trial
and day after day sat through it all. At the end, when O.J. was acquitted, he
paid the $1 million dollar advance back to the publisher because he was so
disgusted at the outcome of the trial. He could not write the book, he said,
because the man was obviously guilty and what more could he say? I wonder how
many other writers would have done the same.
I think it was sometime in the mid 1990s when I got
another excited call from Joe. He had been looking around for a new project and
Nancy suggested
me! As Joe explained on the phone, I was the only person to have blown up a
nuclear reactor deliberately, as a test, and gone on to save wilderness and
wildlife as a photographer and writer. I was flattered, of course. But I was
fearful. Joe could be brutally honest in his writings and who of us does not
have something in our background that could be embarrassing if revealed? His
second book, Heroes, was brutally honest about himself. It covered, in
sometimes painful-to-read detail, the breakup of his first marriage after
meeting Nancy.
And there were other things about his private life that I could not have
written about myself. And so I suggested to him that his doing a book about me
might strain our good friendship. And besides, I argued, I’m not that
interesting a subject.
After that I lost track of Joe. I was still traveling
a lot. I learned later, via some long and detailed emails, that he went through
a very bad bout of depression. But he also produced another book, The Miracle
of Castel de Sangro, about an Italian soccer team from a small town that went
from the very bottom of rankings to the top of the highest rankings and beat
some of those superior teams. The book was mishandled in this country by his
publisher and agent. But one European reviewer called it one of the finest
books written on the sport. It gained popularity in many European countries.
I learned of Joe’s cancer last year when he emailed
me. At first there seemed to be hope when he met an amazing doctor at the Mayo
Clinic who had had success in treating a number of cases. But Joe wasn’t so
lucky. The cancer won out.
We will miss
you my friend. There are not many good, honest writers/journalists left. You
were one of the best.
