O.C. COMMENTARY : TV’s ‘New’ Reviews of MacDonald : The celebrated ‘Fatal Vision’ murder case is rehashed by ABC and NBC. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has much to do with the renewal of interest.

The case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald continues to exert a tenacious hold on the American media, particularly television. When Barbara Walters observed recently on ABC’s “20/20” that the Green Beret, convicted of the 1970 bludgeoning deaths of his pregnant wife and two small children, “has fascinated us for years and years,” she was not exaggerating.

MacDonald, a former Huntington Beach resident now serving three consecutive life sentences at Terminal Island federal penitentiary, was the subject of another report--this one on NBC’s Nightly News--earlier the same night, as well as a localized rehash of the lengthy “20/20” report on KABC later. The case was profiled on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” on a syndicated documentary and in a top-rated and rebroadcast NBC miniseries based on Joe McGinniss’ bestseller, “Fatal Vision.”

An independent production company, Paragon, has announced plans for yet another miniseries, this one to raise questions about MacDonald’s guilt, using some of the same material presented by “20/20” and NBC.

A motion for a new trial was filed in North Carolina on the day of the ABC and NBC reports, citing notes from a federal investigator that synthetic blond hairs were found at the murder scene in Ft. Bragg, N.C., information that the defense says was not made available at the trial.

But what is really “new” about the MacDonald case is not the evidence. Much of what this is about, I suspect, is a recent entry from yet another medium. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, riding a crest of celluloid celebrity resulting from his portrayal in “Reversal of Fortune,” is now representing MacDonald.

Defending another haughty, arrogant husband, this one convicted of killing his wife, may seem like a tempting challenge after his success with Claus von Bulow. With his customary hyperbole, Dershowitz said on the ABC report that MacDonald may be “one of the most victimized men in American legal history.”

Alan Dershowitz is a very good lawyer and “Reversal of Fortune” is a very good movie, albeit one that borders on hagiography. But don’t count on any reversal--in court or on the screen--in this case.

The McGinniss book, written with MacDonald’s cooperation, led to an infamous, on-camera juxtaposition on “60 Minutes,” wherein a stunned MacDonald first learned of McGinniss’ conclusion: that he was guilty of killing his family, most likely as a result of a sleep-deprived, drug-induced psychotic episode.

Highly publicized civil litigation followed in Los Angeles between the two men--settled out of court--which in turn led to a series of articles in the New Yorker magazine by Janet Malcolm. Malcolm, who is involved in unrelated litigation regarding her own reporting, spun the denunciation of McGinniss into a blanket indictment of the journalistic profession, alleging that McGinniss seduced and abandoned MacDonald, whom she described favorably. McGinniss replied to Malcolm’s series in an epilogue to a new edition of “Fatal Vision” and in a cover story in the Columbia Journalism Review.

I’ve been following and covering the MacDonald case for nearly 20 years. I lived in North Carolina at the time of the killings and covered the 1979 murder trial in Raleigh--and subsequent appeals--for publications including the New York Times and the Boston Globe. A curious thing I have noticed is the difference in coastal perspectives: In general, people on the East Coast seem to have accepted the jury’s findings, while many on the West Coast have not.

Reporters in the West first came to know MacDonald in his pre-conviction incarnation as a charming, dedicated emergency room surgeon at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach and friend of local police in Huntington Beach, where he moved to a waterside condo after the Army initially decided not to try him. The reason it may have been so difficult for them to accept Jeffrey MacDonald as a killer is simple: He is a handsome, white, middle-class doctor and Princeton graduate, not the sort of person we customarily associate with homicide.

It was during this period that McGinniss, an Easterner working as a guest columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, met MacDonald and came to question his guilt. This doubt, voiced in a column, led to a meeting with MacDonald and the book deal.

In his opening remarks to the jury, Assistant U.S. Atty. James Blackburn addressed the difficult point of reconciling the image of Jeffrey MacDonald, and his otherwise-clean record, with the horrific act he was accused of committing, a dilemma that reverberates today.

Subsequently, though, under cross-examination, those in the courtroom saw a very different Jeffrey MacDonald, a cold, sinister, almost menacing presence. What became clear during the courtroom questioning was that he was a braggart, a liar and a womanizer, a classic Nietzschean tough guy. None of these is an indictable offense, certainly, but they did provide the jury with insight into MacDonald’s character and credibility.

This was difficult to report in a daily newspaper--because some of it is subjective observation and the rest appeared in bits and pieces of testimony--and almost impossible to convey on television at the time. The single exception was Gary Cole’s chilling portrayal of the doctor in “Fatal Vision.”

MacDonald, who still offers a telegenic presence and continues to cut a sympathetic figure, shrewdly zeroed in on the miniseries (and the novelistic but well-documented book) as his greatest enemy. “I am not that monster” on the screen, he told “20/20” correspondent Stone Phillips. “I can never overcome ‘Fatal Vision.’ ”

But maybe he can. MacDonald’s accusers and prosecutors decided not to help retry the case on television for NBC and ABC and refused to appear, leaving him pretty much of a clear field. For those of you who came in late and are left wondering by these new reports, however, let me offer some perspective.

The material presented last week, purporting to offer “new evidence” favorable to MacDonald, was very little of the sort. Both broadcasts focused on the testimony of a now-dead witness who had confessed, altered and retracted versions of her involvement before the trial.

After listening to her testimony with the jury out of the room, U.S. District Judge Franklin Dupree found that since no evidence connected her with the murder scene, the jury would not hear what she had to say. But it was clear to most in the courtroom that she was so addled by drugs and inconsistent that she was barely coherent, much less credible--something not at all clear from the edited interviews aired on the two networks. Most of the other living witnesses featured on the television reports testified during the trial, and the jury was evidently not persuaded.

The jury, the trial judge and appellate judges who sifted through the overwhelming mass of physical evidence knew what they were doing when they found Jeffrey MacDonald guilty of murder. And if they were right, he is also guilty of concocting a story that pandered to prejudices rampant in North Carolina. At the time of the slayings, MacDonald was a clean-cut, gung-ho young soldier who strongly supported the Vietnam War. Ever the law-and-order advocate, he cynically alleged that the brutal killings were the work of a drug-using, longhaired, multiracial band--touching all the hot buttons. As a result, in the days after the killings, many crash pads and “hippie houses” around the state were rousted by law enforcement officials.

Despite Dershowitz’s protests about “Reversal of Fortune,” that he is not a “hired gun”--and his ongoing concern with two poor, black clients on Death Row--that is essentially what he is. With Jeffrey MacDonald, he is faced with a situation similar to that of Claus von Bulow, and he must take the same approach he outlines to his skeptical law students in the film. That is, in order to safeguard his image as a defender of civil liberties, he not only needs to prove some technical or procedural flaws to an appellate court, he must demonstrate to the public at large--now convinced that his client is guilty--that his client is innocent.

Even as skilled and convincing an advocate (and as tireless a self-promoter) as Dershowitz will have a tough time with MacDonald on this score.