“The Selling of the President,” in contrast to the respectful “Making of the President” campaign books by the historian Theodore H. White, was redolent of iconoclasm and the countercultural attitude prevalent among his generation of reporters. He quoted Mr. Ailes as saying at the time: “Let’s face it, a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore,” adding, “They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a book bag. Who was 42 years old the day he was born.”

Image Mr. McGinniss’s subjects including Sarah Palin. Credit... Crown Publishers

The book was a mammoth best seller and a revelation to many readers, introducing them to what is well understood as a tenet of political campaigns today: that they are driven by manipulative intent. The New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described the book as “stinging, bitterly comic, a series of smartly turned out scenes from backstage at the 1968 Presidential turkey raffle.”

“How Mr. McGinniss got to witness these scenes I don’t know,” Mr. Lehmann-Haupt wrote, adding, “But what he saw and heard he has recorded artfully enough to simultaneously entertain us and make us fear for the future of the Republic.”

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Ailes said: “Joe McGinniss will be remembered as a talented man. He changed political writing forever in 1968. We differed on many things, but he had a good heart.”

Mr. McGinniss’s distaste for Nixon was evident in the book, and he was never loath to reveal his presence in his work. His other studies in contemporary politics were equally audacious in that way, if less critically successful. His 1993 biography, “The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy,” was replete with salacious details of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s family history and speculation about family members’ emotions and motivations, though it was short on sourcing and, to many critics, credibility.

The book was the object of a famously savage review by Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, who declared, “Not merely is it a textbook example of shoddy journalistic and publishing ethics; it is also a genuinely, unrelievedly rotten book, one without a single redeeming virtue, an embarrassment that should bring nothing except shame to everyone associated with it.”

And “The Rogue,” written when Ms. Palin was among the most scrutinized politicians in America, broke little new ground and was taken to task for of its “caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins,” as The Times’s critic Janet Maslin wrote.