Joe McGinniss

Joseph Ralph McGinniss Sr. (December 9, 1942 – March 10, 2014) was an American non-fiction writer and novelist.

McGinniss attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains and graduated in 1964 from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

After his application to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was rejected, something he later pointed to with pride, he became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram.

He left within a year to become a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Bulletin before joining The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general interest columnist.

The author of twelve books, he first came to prominence with the best-selling The Selling of the President 1968 which described the marketing of then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon.

McGinniss's first book, The Selling of the President 1968, landed on The New York Times Best Seller list when he was 26 years old, making him the youngest living writer with that achievement.

The book described the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign.

The idea for the book came to McGinniss almost serendipitously:

"[He] stumbled across his book's topic while taking a train to New York. A fellow commuter had just landed the Hubert Humphrey account and was boasting that 'in six weeks we'll have him looking better than Abraham Lincoln.' McGinniss tried to get access to Humphrey's campaign first, but they turned him down. So he called up Nixon's, and they said yes."

The book was well received by critics and has been recognized as a "classic of campaign reporting that first introduced many readers to the stage-managed world of political theater."

Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, who served as a Richard Nixon campaign adviser and featured prominently in the book, said in a statement that McGinniss "changed political writing forever in 1968."

It "spent more than six months on best-sellers lists ... and McGinniss sold a lot of those books through television, appearing on the titular shows of Merv Griffin, David Frost, and Dick Cavett, among others."

Conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., "assumed McGinniss had relied on 'an elaborate deception which has brought joy and hope to the Nixon-haters.' But even Buckley liked the book."

After the success of his book in 1968, McGinniss left the Inquirer to write books full-time.

He next wrote a novel, The Dream Team.

It was followed by Heroes and Going to Extremes, a nonfiction account of his year exploring Alaska.

The book was on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for 31 weeks from October 1969 to May 1970.

In 1979, he became a writer-in-residence at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

He is popularly known for his trilogy of bestselling true crime books—Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt—which were adapted into TV miniseries in the 1980s and 90s.

In the 1980s and early '90s, McGinniss wrote a trilogy of bestselling true crime books, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt.

From 1982 to 1985, he taught creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont.

While at Bennington, his students included Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis.

At the time of his death, The New York Times described him as a "gregarious man who was generous with other writers."

His 1983 account of the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, Fatal Vision, became a sensation and has never been out of print.

All three books were made into television miniseries, with Fatal Vision (1984) and Blind Faith (1990) receiving Emmy Award nominations.

MacDonald sued McGinniss in 1984, alleging that McGinniss pretended to believe MacDonald innocent after he had already come to the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, in order to continue MacDonald's cooperation with him.

After a six-week civil trial in 1987 that resulted in a hung jury, his publisher's insurance company chose to settle out of court with MacDonald for a reported $325,000.

Cruel Doubt documents the 1988 murder of Lieth Von Stein and the attempted murder of his wife.

Blind Faith (published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1989) is based on the 1984 Marshall murder case in which American businessman Robert O. Marshall was charged with (and later convicted of) the contract killing of his wife, Maria.

In her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, based on her two-part 1989 The New Yorker piece, Janet Malcolm used the McGinniss-MacDonald trial to explore the problematic relationship between journalists and their subjects.

McGinniss responded to Malcolm in an epilogue included in later editions of Fatal Vision and on his website.

Described as "suspenseful and engrossing reading, with a courtroom drama that is cathartic as well as gripping" by Anne Rice in The New York Times, it was followed by Cruel Doubt (published by Simon and Schuster in 1991).

In 1995, Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost published Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders, arguing against the jury's guilty verdict of triple murder against MacDonald.

His last book was The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, an account of Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska who was the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee.

McGinniss was born in Manhattan, the only child of travel agent Joseph A. McGinniss and Mary (nee Leonard), a secretary at CBS.

He was raised in Forest Hills, Queens, and Rye, New York.

In his youth he was given a chance to pick a middle name and chose Ralph, after the baseball player Ralph Kiner.

After more than 20 years of silence on the subject of the MacDonald murders, McGinniss testified under subpoena, in a 2012 North Carolina hearing, on whether MacDonald should be granted a new trial.

He then wrote and published Final Vision, revisiting the case, with the online journalism site Byliner.com.

(MacDonald's appeal was denied on July 24, 2014, as McGinniss had predicted. )