Doherty met her eventual husband, the writer Joe McGinniss, at a celebrity-studded book party at the Warwick Hotel in January 1970. That connection gave her entrée to many places, including Vietnam, where she spent four weeks in 1971 working as a photographer, a deeply affecting experience. “We were ‘in country,’ not in immediate combat, but there was always a sense of danger from snipers and landmines,” she recalled. The wrongness of the war became obvious to her on a gut level. “I looked around, and everything American, from Coke cans to bomb craters, looked completely wrong and out of place.”
She and McGinniss settled in New Jersey in 1970. After a stint freelancing, she began writing features and taking accompanying photographs for the Philadelphia Bulletin. “I got to spend time with a lot of prominent folks—from Senators Bob Dole and Joe Biden to famed cook James Beard to humorist Art Buchwald. It was great fun.” When McGinniss got a contract to write about Alaska in 1976, they spent a year in Anchorage, where she wrote for the Anchorage Daily News.
She won the American Bar Association Gavel Award and the American Trial Lawyer Association First Prize in 1977 for a series of pieces she wrote about an Alaskan pipeline worker who died in jail. Returning to New Jersey, the couple married, and Doherty took a job as managing editor for New Jersey Monthly. In 1980 they moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts. Doherty continued writing and editing, started a portrait photography business, read manuscripts for Book-of-the-Month Club, and did community work. But her own work took a backseat to her roles as mother of two boys and as wife to a controversial writer.
Joe McGinniss is the author of ten previous books. He has five children and seven grandchildren. He lives in Massachusetts with the writer and editor Nancy Doherty
She looks and seems rather unattractively normal for an over-achiever. I have to wonder what she thinks about his unhealthy obsession with Sarah.