Word: mcginniss
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...MCGINNISS...
...When McGinniss does focus on him, it is only to say obvious things with superficial evidence: that he carried the burden of having bigger-than-life brothers (one sign: his face twitched when McGinniss broached the subject years ago), that he felt left out of the family, and that he had a lousy childhood and marriage. The book seems obsessed with debunking the Kennedy myth, as if it needed debunking. And nowhere does it explain Ted's fundamental paradox: that a man so self-destructive stuck so willingly to the daily tilling of the legislative field and left such...
...stir was triggered by 2,000 advance copies of the first 123 pages of McGinniss's book, which Simon & Schuster had been distributing to whet booksellers' interest. They contained a statement about McGinniss's extensive research, adding, "Some thoughts and dialogue attributed to figures in this narrative were created by the author, based on such research and his knowledge of the relevant people, places and events." When questioned, McGinniss admits that his subject granted him no interviews for the book; he also allows that he regularly inferred in his narrative what Kennedy might have been thinking. "I absolutely did that...
There is a name for writers who claim privileged access to the inner workings of people they describe. The name is novelist. And it is impossible to read the released portion of McGinniss's book without feeling set adrift in a muddled and decidedly fictional realm. The introductory chunk purports to follow Ted Kennedy from the assassination of his brother John, on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, through the President's funeral and burial the following Monday. The events of these four days were exhaustively rehearsed in William Manchester's The Death of a President (1967); McGinniss acknowledges his indebtedness...
...beyond draping his story across Manchester's framework, McGinniss poses as an all-knowing narrator who jumps in and out of people's heads -- usually, but not always, Teddy's -- according to his mood of the moment, and plausibility be damned. Here is the account of Teddy's thoughts as he meets young Caroline Kennedy in the White House on Friday afternoon: "She did not yet know that her Daddy was dead and that her mother, even then, was flying back to Washington wearing a dress still stained with his blood and with flecks of tissue from his brain...