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"  The obituaries for the brash and intrepid Joe McGinniss, who died last night, split along a few different biographical lines from his decades-long career as a writer and reporter. But if there&amp;#039;s one thread connecting them all, it&amp;#039;s that McGinniss wasn&amp;#039;t afraid to be a dick. First, there was The Selling of the President 1968, McGinniss&amp;#039; 1969 book which he wrote while embedded with the Nixon campaign. The book itself was something of a middle finger to Theodore White&amp;#039;s widely celebrated Making of the President. Where White&amp;#039;s book heroically chronicled John F. Kennedy&amp;#039;s 1960 run and launched a thousand story arcs for The West Wing, McGinniss&amp;#039; book more resembled House of Cards with Nixon scrambling to appear vaguely human before the cameras, acting a little bit racist, and cracking wise about the shortcomings of Spiro Agnew, his own vice president-to-be. The book was also brilliant. Of Nixon, he wrote: He was afraid of television. He knew his soul was hard to find. Beyond that, he considered it a gimmick; its use in politics offended him. It had not been part of the game when he had learned to play, he could see no reason to bring it in now. He half-suspected it was an Eastern liberal trick: one more way to make him look silly. It offended his sense of dignity, one of the truest senses he had. The book made him the youngest living New York Times bestseller ever. An excerpt of it was included in Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson&amp;#039;s manifesto-anthology The New Journalism alongside such august names as Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and, of course, Wolfe himself. Tweeting about McGinniss&amp;#039; death, Andrea Mitchell mused that the book &amp;quot;alone is a literary epitaph enough.&amp;quot; What Mitchell politely leaves out are the controversies that later engulfed McGinniss&amp;#039; career. A number of other obits for McGinniss led with his book Fatal Vision, which came out in 1983. For the book, McGinniss got unfettered access to former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald as MacDonald prepared for a murder trial in which he would be convicted for brutally killing his pregnant wife and two children.  Presenting himself as a supportive friend, McGinniss became convinced early on that MacDonald had done it. Nevertheless, he kept up the charade, reported the trial out, and then buried MacDonald in the book, laying out his own elaborate theory about MacDonald&amp;#039;s guilt. McGinniss was later sued by MacDonald and settled out of court for $325,000. For Fatal Vision, McGinniss remains the b\u00EAte noire for journalism teachers trying to teach their debt-ridden pupils to be ethical. Less than two years ago, McGinniss testified against MacDonald at a federal hearing where MacDonald was seeking a new trial. Even McGinniss&amp;#039; smaller controversies were fascinating. In 1993, McGinniss&amp;#039; unauthorized biography of Sen. Ted Kennedy, The Last Brother, was widely panned for using imagined dialogue to express Kennedy&amp;#039;s thoughts as crucial moments in his life. Washington Post reviewer Jonathan Yardley called it &amp;quot;a genuinely, unrelievedly rotten book, one without a single redeeming virtue, an embarrassment that should bring nothing except shame to everyone associated with it.&amp;quot; Shortly thereafter, McGinniss returned a million-dollar book advance after publicly concluding that the O.J. Simpson trial was a farce. McGinniss was last in the news in 2010 while writing his book The Rogue about former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. To research the book McGinniss infamously not only flew to Alaska for the summer, but rented the house literally right next door to Palin. In a classic Facebook post, Palin expressed her displeasure: ...we&amp;#039;re sure to have a doozey to look forward to with this treasure he&amp;#039;s penning. Wonder what kind of material he&amp;#039;ll gather while overlooking Piper&amp;#039;s bedroom, my little garden, and the family&amp;#039;s swimming hole? He didn&amp;#039;t skimp on the sensation, alleging that Palin had an affair with former NBA star Glen Rice, smoked pot, and snorted cocaine in her youth. All this after she brought him some blueberry pie. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a27659/joe-mcginniss-obituary/>