The brilliance orchestrated eight years later by the adman Harry Treleaven and the TV producer Roger Ailes turned Tricky Dick, the man from whom America would not buy a used car, into Nixon the likeable everyman-turned-statesman. Media was changing politics, as was evident from Nixon's failure in the televised debates with John Kennedy of 1960. The resulting book, The Selling of the President 1968, published the following year, marked a step-change in campaign journalism, away from the reassuring 'behind the scenes' work of Theodore White's Making of the President series. Intrigued, McGinniss sought access to the Humphrey campaign.Īfter being refused, he was surprised when campaign aide Leonard Garment allowed him full access to Richard Nixon's advisers. In 1968, while on a train to New York to interview the sportscaster Howard Cosell, McGinniss met an advertising executive who had landed the account for presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, and boasted that 'in six weeks we'll have him looking better than Abraham Lincoln'. Intrigued that candidates had advertising teams, McGinniss was inspired to write a book.McGinniss's career had got under way through a similar confidence game and his work returned constantly to the differences between presentation and reality of those in public life.

McGinniss was a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1968 when an advertising man told him he was joining Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. In both cases, he had become fascinated by the difference between public image and private reality. But he was best known for two works that became touchstones in their respective genres - campaign books (“The Selling of the President”) and true crime (“Fatal Vision”). The tall, talkative McGinniss had early dreams of becoming a sports reporter and wrote books about soccer, horse racing and travel. His attorney and longtime friend Dennis Holahan said he died at a hospital in Worcester, Mass. McGinniss, who announced last year that he had been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer, died from complications related to his disease. McGinniss, the newsmaking author and reporter who skewered the marketing of Richard Nixon in “The Selling of the President 1968” and tracked his personal journey from sympathizer to scourge of convicted killer Jeffrey MacDonald in the blockbuster “Fatal Vision,” died Monday at age 71. Whether insisting on the guilt of a murder suspect after seemingly befriending him or moving next door to Sarah Palin’s house for a most unauthorized biography, McGinniss was unique in his determination to get the most inside information, in how publicly he burned bridges with his subjects and how memorably he placed himself in the narrative. NEW YORK - Joe McGinniss wasn’t one to let a story tell itself.

Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss