Joe McGinniss

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Joe McGinniss (born 1942) is an American writer. He became an overnight success when his first book, The Selling of the President, landed on The New York Times bestseller list when he was 26 years old, making him the youngest living writer with that achievement.

The book described the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign. McGinniss followed up with several other best-sellers, including his 1983 account of the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, Fatal Vision, and 1993's The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy. In 1995, McGinniss sat through the O.J. Simpson trial, expecting to write a book about it, but he ended up waiving the $1 million advance after Simpson was acquitted, saying the trial was "a farce." His next book was The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, about the the members and coach of an Italian soccer team. He was also sued in 1987 by Jeffrey MacDonald for the publication of Fatal Vision and the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money. He was sued a second time by the Kennedys for the flasities in "The Last Brother", again for an undisclosed amoumt of money. He stated the trial of O.J. Simpson was a farce because he was refused access to Simpson for interviews and was threatened by Simpson's lawyers with a lawsuit if he attempted to write a story about the trial if there were mis-statements in the book. McGinnis also critizied the prosecution's handling of the O.J. Simpson case by stating that the district attorneys were so over confident of a conviction that they looked like they were trying the case "blindfolded," never anticipating that Simpson's lawyers would actually go on the offensive and tear apart the prosecution's case so greatly that McGinninss himself believed that he also would have aquited Simpson had be heen on the jury during the trial.

McGinniss graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1964 and became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram, in Worcester, MA. Within a year he left that paper and became a sportswriter for The Philadelphia Bulletin and, later, The Philadelphia Inquirer. After the success of his book in 1968, McGinniss left the newspaper and turned to book-writing. His next attempt was a novel, The Dream Team. He wrote another few books, including the warmly-received Going to Extremes, about an Alaskan trek, and became a writer-in-residence at the L.A. Herald Examiner. Next came McGinniss' personal trilogy of true crime books, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt. All three of the books were made into TV miniseries.

His most recent book is The Big Horse (2004).