On ‘A Wilderness of Error,’ by Errol Morris

Warner Herzog, the German film director, had promised an unknown filmmaker named Errol Morris that if he completed his first movie, a documentary about humans and their dead pets called “Gates of Heaven,” he would eat his own shoe. Mr. Morris did finish his movie. And Mr. Herzog, like Charlie Chaplin before him, made a meal of his footwear, after cooking it at Chez Panisse with the help of a young Alice Waters.

Errol Morris arrives now with “A Wilderness of Error,” a book about the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. Bristling with charts, graphs, illustrations, snatches of court transcripts and the author’s own Q. and A.’s with key players, it is the literary equivalent of one of his movies. It’s a rough-hewed documentary master class...

This case became, over time, a kind of rotating media Ferris wheel. Joe McGinniss’s book “Fatal Vision” (1983), written with Mr. MacDonald’s cooperation, turned the tables on its unwitting subject and posited that Mr. MacDonald was a psychopath, strung out on diet pills and plainly guilty. The book was a best seller. It spawned a much watched “60 Minutes” segment and a popular TV mini-series. Janet Malcolm would later publish “The Journalist and the Murderer” (1990), another book about this case, this one examining Mr. McGinniss’s bad faith in leading on Mr. MacDonald about his ostensible innocence. It contained what is probably the most famous first sentence of any nonfiction book in American literary history: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

[Morris] finds the premise of her famous first sentence to be ludicrous. His book is a 500-page refutation of its argument. He is here to demonstrate what morally defensible journalism looks like. He lays into “60 Minutes,” as well, for burying crucial evidence. A lot of carnage is strewed.