The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

Author:Janet Malcolm [ Malcolm, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79787-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

ON AN overcast day a few weeks later, I drove out on Long Island to see Bob Keeler in his office at Newsday. He is a fast-talking man in his mid-forties, with slightly receding hair and a slightly soft outline, who has an air of bracing directness and unpretentiousness. He told me that he had covered the MacDonald case for Newsday since 1973 and, a year or so before the criminal trial, had decided to write a book about it—“a sort of evenhanded book, not dealing exclusively with one side or the other, but a journalist’s book, a balanced book.” By the time of the trial, Keeler had submitted an outline and sample chapters to Doubleday, which held off giving him a contract until after the trial. Unfortunately for Keeler, when McGinniss entered the arena the publisher with whom he signed a contract was Dell, a subsidiary of Doubleday, and that finished Keeler’s chances.

“You had bad luck there,” I said. “If McGinniss hadn’t come along—”

“No, something else would have happened,” Keeler broke in. “When it comes to money, I have lousy luck. I’m not rich. I have my salary, and I make out, and I have a nice house. But I’m not the kind of person who is ever going to get rich.” He continued, “Anyway, I decided I would go ahead and write my book and try to find another publisher. At the time, I thought Joe was going to write a book about Jeffrey the Tortured Innocent, and I didn’t think that this should be the only book about the case, because I didn’t think Jeffrey was innocent. But as time wore on I realized that my book was not going to get published—that all this effort, the dozens and dozens of hours I had put into the project, had been in vain. And when I became aware that McGinniss didn’t think Jeffrey was innocent either, I began to give Joe material I had gathered on Long Island. I wanted to help out in whatever way I could, so that—I guess egotistically—I’d have some sense of participation in the book, even though it wasn’t mine.”

“That was very generous of you,” I said.

“Well, by that time I didn’t have anything to lose. I had all this information I had gathered for a purpose that no longer existed. So what was I going to do? Let it die someplace in a drawer? If the guy was writing a book that was going to be truthful, and I could help him in some small way, no big deal. Then there came a time when MacDonald, or one of MacDonald’s henchpersons, sent me a bunch of McGinniss’s letters to him. That’s when I began to get a little ticked off at Joe. You saw what he said in the letters: ‘Don’t talk to Keeler.’ I thought that was excessive. It was like the football Giants beating up on the Peewee football team. There was no chance I was going to get this book published.

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