The Journalist and the Murderer (7 page)

The debacle of Buckley’s and Wambaugh’s testimony illustrates a truth that many of us learn as children: the invariable inefficacy of the “Don’t blame me—everybody does it” defense. Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure. When Buckley and Wambaugh said bluntly that it’s all right to deceive subjects, they breached the contract whereby you never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don’t get caught, because if you are caught no one—or no one who has any sense—will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself. When Kornstein, in his closing statement, said, “Buckley and Wambaugh testified that the task is to get the story, and that you do what is necessary to get the story,” he was simply inviting the crushing lecture on decency that Bostwick was all too pleased to read him in
his
final argument. “What you heard here this morning was truly outrageous,” Bostwick said, and went on:

O
N
N
OVEMBER
23, 1987, three months after the end of the trial, an agreement to settle the suit was reached, whereby McGinniss, conceding no wrong, pledged to give MacDonald three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, to be paid by an anonymous party, presumably the insurance company of McGinniss’s publisher. As it happened, I was in California on the day of the settlement, for my first meeting with Bostwick—actually, I was in his office in Santa Monica, reading court documents while waiting for him to return from the settlement negotiations. Since the day that McGinniss called from Williamstown to break off our talks, I had been in a state of odd uncertainty about how to proceed. Odd, because in the past reporting had been something I did instinctively and easily: it was like going to the store before dinner to gather
the ingredients for what you were going to cook. But with this project nothing was instinctive or easy. The store, which hitherto had been a vast, glutted American supermarket, had shrunk to a bare little grocery in a Third World country. I couldn’t get my hands on anything. McGinniss had broken off relations with me, Kornstein never answered my telephone calls, McGinniss’s friends wouldn’t speak with me, and even the court stenographer from whom I had ordered a transcript of the trial seemed to be part of what I began to think of as a conspiracy of fate; she was never in her office, and the transcript didn’t come and didn’t come. As I waited for it, back in New York, I would sometimes walk over to the building where Kornstein had his office (it happened to be two blocks from where I lived) and peer wistfully into the lobby. As I fretted, I also ruminated about what had happened between me and McGinniss. What had I done to cause the man to think of me as another persecutor, rather than simply as a colleague who had come to discuss issues of common interest raised by his lawsuit? I realized that I had been unimaginative. When one is feeling as beleaguered as McGinniss must have been feeling, anything short of utter, empathic agreement will seem hostile and unfeeling. When one is in pain, one wants sympathy and reassurance, not abstract argument. And when one has maintained—as McGinniss and Kornstein and Buckley and Wambaugh had maintained—that the whole future of journalism may depend on the writer’s freedom to dissemble, because otherwise the subject will flee, then one is fairly obliged to flee from a writer who doesn’t seem all that convinced of the rightness of one’s position. For McGinniss to have continued our interviews in the face of my skepticism would have been to repudiate his own position.
It was logically imperative that he break off our interviews and leave me as empty-handed as he believed he would have been left if he had told MacDonald his true thoughts.

Now, in Bostwick’s office, I felt the familiar stir of something I hadn’t felt since my dismissal by McGinniss—something I recognized with delight, like the return of appetite after an illness. This was the feeling of gratified vanity that American journalism all but guarantees its practitioners when they are out reporting. In our society, the journalist ranks with the philanthropist as a person who has something extremely valuable to dispense (his currency is the strangely intoxicating substance called publicity), and who is consequently treated with a deference quite out of proportion to his merits as a person. There are very few people in this country who do not regard with rapture the prospect of being written about or being interviewed on a radio or television program. Even someone as smart and self-possessed as Bostwick said yes to me when I telephoned him from New York to ask if I could interview him and his client. His first step in the minuet was to say that his side of the lawsuit had not been fairly represented in the press, and that he hoped I would be more fair-minded. My first step, since I did not want to lose him and MacDonald as I had lost Kornstein and McGinniss, was to say that fairness was an ideal rather than something one could give or withhold at will—and anyway it was not a quality that writers had a very big stake in cultivating. He then murmured his appreciation of this “honest” answer—with which, of course, I had simply taken ingratiation to a higher level. Throughout my stay in California, I maintained the posture of the bluntly honest reporter who says what she thinks and
never tells a Wambaughian untruth. I believe that the meaning (or meaninglessness) of this posture was completely understood by Bostwick and his associates, and, later, by MacDonald and his various friends and followers. I think that by the time I arrived on the scene everyone involved in the MacDonald-McGinniss lawsuit had become thoroughly familiar with the deepest structures of the journalist-subject encounter, and was under no illusions about a new journalist with a new cover story. But how many of us with no illusions left about the nature of romantic love will for that reason turn down a plausible lover when one comes along? Don’t a rare few affairs
not
turn out badly? And isn’t the latest lover invariably different in kind from all the previous ones?

In Bostwick’s office, I knew it wasn’t only the fine California climate that was giving me such a feeling of well-being. The metaphor of the love affair applies to both sides of the journalist-subject equation, and the journalist is no less susceptible than the subject to its pleasures and excitements. In our talk and in the transcript of the trial, McGinniss had made a point of distinguishing between the reporting and the writing phases of the journalistic enterprise, speaking of them almost as if the one had nothing to do with the other, and as if the reporting and the writing were done by two different people. While this confession of doubleness was McGinniss’s undoing at the trial—the contradiction between the nice guy who had lived in the fraternity house with MacDonald and had written to him in prison and the coldhearted “best-selling author” of
Fatal Vision
was simply too grotesque—it is in fact an accurate description of the general journalistic case. An abyss lies between the journalist’s experience of being out in the world talking to people and his experience of
being alone in a room writing. When the interviews are over and the journalist first faces the labor of writing, he feels no less resentful than the subject will feel when he reads the finished text. Sometimes the labor seems particularly hard. In 1985, in answer to an interrogatory by the plaintiff, McGinniss wrote of “too many sleepless nights, too many terrible dreams, too many blank, dull, empty mornings spent staring out the back window of my house, cold coffee in hand, postponing for another minute, another five, another ten, the dreadful task of going back upstairs and again confronting the chilling realization which, against my will, was forming itself.…” The realization was that MacDonald had murdered his wife and children; but no writer can read this passage without recognizing in it the feeling of not wanting to get to work on something that may not come out well—and McGinniss had special reason to feel anxious about how
Fatal Vision
would come out.

But now, as I waited for Bostwick, the problem of writing was for me, as it had been for McGinniss in the early days of his encounter with MacDonald, like the problem of death: it did not interfere with the pleasures of the present. From Bostwick’s repeated references to his mother in the trial transcript and from the sound of his friendly, Plains States voice on the telephone, I had formed an image of him as a distinctly salt-of-the-earth type, and had imagined his office as being fittingly unpretentious: a couple of amiably seedy rooms, say, over a diving-equipment-rental shop on a commercial drag. The actual Bostwick office, in a building at the westernmost end of Wilshire Boulevard, was a place of the most advanced and sleekly expensive design. Beyond a reception room where Mozart was playing on a tape deck and an
elegantly dressed receptionist sat at a light-gray counter, a conference room furnished with a lacquer table and ten chairs of a vaguely Oriental design was visible through a glass wall, and beyond that was a breathtaking view of the Pacific, which looked as if it, too, had come from an authoritative postmodern design firm.

Bostwick had put a room at my disposal, where I could peruse a looseleaf book of trial exhibits, which were not yet in the public domain, and had assigned an assistant to look after me. Toward noon, he called in to say that the case was settled. That evening, Bostwick, his wife, Janette (a pretty, delicately boned, soft-spoken woman, who is a Gestalt therapist), and I went out to dinner together at a restaurant near the office. The occasion had a light, celebratory atmosphere. Bostwick reminisced about the early days of the case. “When MacDonald first came to us, we told him that his libel case was worthless because he was libel-proof,” he said. “How can you damage the reputation of someone who has been convicted of murder? But when MacDonald gave us his letters from McGinniss, immediately on reading them—since we already had the news articles in which McGinniss told reporters he had decided MacDonald was guilty during the trial—we said, ‘This is a classic case of fraud.’ I took a deposition from McGinniss in 1985, and after an hour in the room with him I knew we had him. I just rubbed my hands with glee from that day forward, because I knew what I could do on cross-examination. It wouldn’t even have to be a very good cross-examination.

“That first deposition was in New York,” Bostwick went on, “and then, a year later, I followed it up with another, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which is close to Williamstown. McGinniss had refused to come to New
York for the second part of his deposition. He said, ‘Last time, I was courteous to you and came to New York. This time, you’re going to have to do it in Massachusetts.’ The law says that you can’t drag a person too far from his home, so I went. As it turned out, it was a great trip. It was late October, just after the Mets had won the World Series. My flight went right up the Hudson to Albany, and it was the most beautiful plane ride I’ve ever had. It was a crystal-clear day. From Albany I drove to Pittsfield. Kornstein had a much harder time getting there. He left Manhattan about the same time I left Los Angeles. It was more trouble for him that it was for me.” Bostwick laughed. “Can you imagine lawyers posturing over this sort of thing—‘Well, they won a victory on that one, making us go to Massachusetts’? That happens so much in this business you’d be shocked. People fight bitterly over these things, and then find themselves waist-deep in mud and asking themselves, ‘How did I get here? What happened?’ You acted like an ass, that’s what happened. Sometimes I wonder about being a lawyer. I wasn’t always one—I was a Peace Corps volunteer and a translator and an engineer and an Army officer first.”

Bostwick traded his empty plate for his wife’s half-full one, and as he took an appreciative forkful of blackened catfish he said, “McGinniss said he owed it to Colette and to the kids to write the book, but—as I said in my closing argument—it wasn’t them he owed, it was the Bank of New England. If you read those letters to MacDonald, you’ll see that he was in financial trouble the whole time. That’s why he had to keep deceiving MacDonald into cooperating with him until he could write his best-seller. He had taken the publisher’s advance and spent it. He wasn’t free to tell MacDonald the truth.”

I was interested to see that, even though the lawsuit was settled, Bostwick was still in the grip of the dislike and contempt for the defendant which had informed his work in the courtroom. Evidently, to be a good trial lawyer you have to be a good hater. A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.

I asked if Bostwick didn’t think it possible that McGinniss
had
been telling the truth in his letters to MacDonald—that he had loved him as well as hated him.