The journalist and author who moved in next door to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, prompting her to build a tall privacy fence, is dead. Joe McGinniss, 71, has succumbed to complications from prostate cancer, according to the Associated Press.
After his not-so-neighborly stint in Palin's hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, McGinniss went on to write an unauthorized biography about the former GOP vice-presidential candidate entitled "The Rogue."
Part of his research effort included making a big-money bid on an ebay auction to join Palin and her husband for dinner. McGinniss was hoping, he claimed, for a frank conversation with Palin. But it wasn't meant to be. Although he put in for more than $60,000, he lost.
McGinniss's decision to move in next to the Palins touched off a media firestorm, and one newspaper editor in Wasilla lost his job in the wake of an editorial which included a line reminding McGinniss that Alaskans have the right to use deadly force to protect their own property.
Palin didn't take kindly to having such an irritant so close to where she lives, and fired back with innuendos that McGinniss planned to stalk her or possibly spend his time leering at her children.
McGinniss's Palin missions were but one chapter in the life of a man who made a career of doing the unconventional, and who had a habit of making more enemies than friends while digging deep into a story.
"Few journalists of his time so intrepidly pursued a story, burned so many bridges or more memorably placed themselves in the narrative…," the AP reported Monday, noting that McGinniss made a name for himself in two genres -- campaign books and true crime. "The Selling of the President 1968" and "Fatal Vision" were standouts for which he was well known.
Before his Palin escapades, McGinniss was best known to Alaskans for having written "Going to Extremes," a 1980 book chronicling the madness and fast-dealing that gripped the Last Frontier during the 1970s oil-pipeline boom, a fantastic tale full of crusty characters like Halibut Cove czar Clem Tillion, then-oil flack and journalist Tom Brennan, and former Anchorage Daily News editor and McClatchy Co. executive Howard Weaver, then a young, idealistic journalist who was going to change the world with his weekly rag, the Alaska Advocate.