Why I feel sympathy for Sarah Palin

The editorial writers of the Chicago Sun-Times took Palin’s side, repeatedly exclaiming, “What a creep.”

I’ve seen scores of stories about this dust-up, but I could almost count on one hand the reporters who mentioned the real reason Palin should be worried. In 1993 McGinniss — already famous for The Selling of the President, 1968, about Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, and for Fatal Vision (1983), about the trial of Green Beret physician Jeffrey MacDonald, charged with clubbing to death his pregnant wife and two daughters — published what is probably the most reviled biography of recent years: an unauthorized look at “the last brother,” Ted Kennedy. (Kennedy refused to talk to McGinniss.)

I spent part of Saturday afternoon rereading some of the news stories and reviews of that book. Earlier that year, 17 years ago, I had published an unauthorized biography of The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham. So I was extremely interested in the McGinniss bio and read it as soon as I could buy it in my local bookstore. My own book had stirred some controversy and public lashings from Graham’s friends and relatives, but any sympathy I might have felt for McGinniss evaporated when I read the book — full of made-up dialogue, omniscient narratives, invariably dramatic, of the characters’ inner thoughts, a dearth of legwork — he reportedly was far from a regular at the Kennedy Library — inadequate to nonexistent sourcing, recycled anecdotes and quotes from other Kennedy biographers. The latter was so egregious that he was slapped with the word “plagiarism” or, at the least, inappropriate borrowing (although he was never sued) by the likes of William Manchester, the author of The Death of a President (1967) and Kennedy family biographer (The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys) Doris Kearns Goodwin. (Years later, Goodwin, who complained back then vociferously and understandably about McGinniss’s use of her labor, would face her own charges of plagiarism.)

Reviews of The Last Brother were an author’s worst nightmare. The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani slammed McGinniss for mixing fact and fiction. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley steamed, “Not merely is The Last Brother a textbook example of shoddy journalistic and publishing ethics; it is also a genuinely, unrelievedly rotten book, one without a single redeeming virtue …. It is, by a wide margin, the worst book I have reviewed in nearly three decades; quite simply, there is not an honest page in it.”

It’s a fair bet, based on a 2009 magazine profile McGinniss wrote of Palin for the now-defunct Portfolio, as well as his recent appearance on “The Today Show,” in which he came close to labeling Palin a Nazi — he also correctly labeled Palin’s Facebook musings “ugly innuendo” — that the book will not be positive. But will it be fair and its assertions backed up by research and actual interviews?

It is often said about biographer Kitty Kelley (the author, most recently, of the best-selling unauthorized Oprah bio) that the definition of a ruined day for a celebrity is a call from Kelley with the news that he or she is Kelley’s next subject. “When can we get together?” The answer is almost always “Never.” Unlike McGinniss, Kelley is known for her meticulous sourcing and obsession with interviewing every person who might possibly have anything to add, even though Kelley will never interview the actual subject and certainly not move in next door.