What It Will Mean if Sarah Palin Sues Her Biographer

If Sarah Palin goes through with her threat to sue Joe McGinniss over all the salacious slander that apparently made its way into his new book, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, she’ll be building on a history that got started way back when Palin herself was an infant just three or four years old. That’s when McGinniss, in spite of his well-documented liberal sympathies (good thing for him, they didn’t have Google back then), got inside Nixon’s ’68 campaign and started reporting the hell out of what those guys were selling, and how they were selling it, and who was doing the selling.

Who it was was Leonard Garment, Frank Shakespeare, Harry Treleaven, and Roger Ailes. The only one of those names anyone cares about anymore is Ailes, who is now Palin’s boss, in a manner of speaking, over at Fox News, and that’s how the cycle goes.

But the cycle still had to work its way around—it didn’t travel all that way going straight from Ailes to Palin, from The Selling of the President 1968 (1969) to The Rogue. McGinniss wrote a neglected masterpiece that went neglected even in its own time. In ours, it might as well not even exist. It’s a crazy quest narrative called Heroes (1976) in which McGinniss goes stumbling around in search of a hero only to find the very concept a sham. One of the first places he looks, naturally enough, is Ted Kennedy, because he had admired Ted’s brother Robert and reported mournfully on the night Robert had died.

But Ted is no Robert, as McGinniss learns as soon as he gets close enough. That he got that close at all is some kind of miracle, not just because of the book McGinniss had written on Nixon but because of a magazine profile he’d written on George McGovern. This was another hero McGinniss had become disillusioned with, when McGovern got to talking all kinds of smack about his shock-treated ex-running mate, Thomas Eagleton, but then denied having said any of it once McGinniss’s story ran. One of Ted Kennedy’s handlers references this story in calling McGinniss a one-shot artist and denying McGinniss access. But finally she relents, reluctantly, whereupon McGinniss screws over Ted, too, another hero down.

It was shortly after this that McGinniss became buddy-buddy with an Army surgeon accused of killing his own wife and daughters, who trusted McGinniss enough to let his guard down. McGinniss genuinely believed Jeffrey MacDonald innocent, at first, but the thing about being a journalist is you don’t always know what the story is until you’ve gotten it. In Fatal Vision (1983), maybe the single greatest true-crime book ever written, McGinniss vividly describes the moment he realized MacDonald was guilty, well into his friendship and the reporting of the book. He runs from his bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night, with a nose gone bloody from the sheer cranial pressure this realization has exerted on him.

It’s a good thing McGinniss didn’t know how much MacDonald was going to sue him for, or how much it would cost in legal fees, or how much he would end up settling for. If he had, McGinniss probably would have let all his brains bleed out that night.

Then Janet Malcolm wrote a book about McGinniss writing a book about MacDonald (The Journalist and the Murderer [1990]), and it was finally McGinniss’s turn to assume the role of victimized subject. After that, there were more true-crime books, more lawsuits thrown McGinniss’s way, but he kept on doing his sleuthing-author thing. He even wrote a book, in 1993, about Ted Kennedy, who had not become anymore of a hero to McGinniss since the ‘70s.

Now Palin wants to make him pay again. There’s even one clever Palin supporter, with more comic wit than common sense, who wants to start an a priori defense fund for when Todd Palin “pounds that scurvy worm into a bloody pulp.”

McGinniss in The Rogue gossips about Palin snorting up all the snow in Alaska, fucking Glen Rice long before the Los Angeles Lakers did (and afterwards expressing horror that she had had sex with a black man), bullying her neighbors, exulting in violent religious rapture, screwing Todd’s old co-worker from the snowmobile store, not knowing how to cook for shit (“She’d burn water,” says one anonymous source), not attending her son’s hockey games (but cheering, when she did, at the way he hit his opponent with a stick)….

It’s that kind of book, and it has left every liberal this side of Garry Trudeau ruing that Palin hadn’t been slaughtered by an author with greater standards for thoroughness and sourcing. McGinniss would have to have been snowblind, to not see this coming from the moment he hit Alaska. He’s known this routine for years, and he is fully congnizant of every ramification of what he is doing. So sue him if you want to, beat the shit out of him if you have to, but Joe McGinniss is long past the days when this stuff was written off as anything other than the cost of doing business.

Hell, it’s probably all tax-deductible, by now.