One did not get the sense, from the 2008 presidential campaign, that Sarah Palin was much of a reader. Imagine our surprise, then, to find her ebullient review of Errol Morris' new book, "A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald," which the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate posted on the conservative website breitbart.com earlier this week.
"Wilderness" is the noted documentarian's rebuttal to Joe McGinniss' "Fatal Vision," which argued persuasively that MacDonald, a Princeton-educated Army doctor, killed his wife and two daughters on Feb. 17, 1970 in Fort Bragg, N.C. MacDonald claimed that hippies had committed the crime.
After a tortuous legal battle that, at one point, had him bantering about the case on "The Dick Cavett Show," MacDonald was found guilty in 1979 and remains in prison to this day, emphatic about his own innocence.
Palin begins her review of "Wilderness" by noting that "I don’t normally read 'true crime' books, and I’ve certainly never written a review of one." And though she effusively praises Morris' meticulously reasoned explanation of why he thinks MacDonald did not commit the crime for which he has been imprisoned, she has here a motive of her own: to take a couple of swings at McGinniss, who authored 2011's "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin." He researched that book by moving next door to the Palins' home in Wasilla, Ak.
McGinniss
famously wrote 1983's "Fatal Vision" with MacDonald's full complicity –
the two even lived together during the murder trial. Little did
MacDonald suspect that McGinniss would turn against him, portraying him
as an unfaithful egomaniac who may have been strung out on diet pills at
the time of the murders.Palin gleefully repeats Morris' charge that McGinniss is "a craven and sloppy journalist who confabulated, lied, and betrayed while ostensibly telling a story about a man who confabulated, lied, and betrayed.” She says that his pursuit of gossip about her own life in Alaska was "sick and vicious."
Writes Palin:
I sympathize with MacDonald and his defense team because I saw firsthand the twisted way McGinniss operates. Before he moved in right next door to spy on us, he stalked us for months, making creepy unwelcomed “visits” to our house, as he tried to manipulatively win our trust the same way he won the trust of MacDonald and his defense team – all so that he could betray us just as he betrayed them.Among the rumors McGinniss proffered in his book on Palin is that she had a fetish for African-American men, snorted cocaine off an oil drum with her husband Todd and did not really give birth to her youngest son, Trig.
Palin concludes her review by hoping that McGinniss "will understand justice someday, in this life or the next."
Morris, meanwhile, continues his quest to have MacDonald retried. Currently, a Delaware federal judge is in the midst of hearing evidence that MacDonald maintains should earn him a new trial. He has always said that intruders resembling the Manson Family killed his wife and daughters, though material evidence for that claim has been, it must be admitted, rather scant.
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