HNN Poll: Do Historians Caught in a Scandal Deserve a Second Chance?
With the exception of Stephen Ambrose, who died, and one or two others, the historians who became enmeshed in scandal over the past two years have begun making comebacks. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is finishing a book on Abraham Lincoln, was celebrated recently in a letter to the editor of the New York Times by a distinguished group of historians topped off by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Joseph Ellis has returned to the prestigious pages of the New York Times Book Review. Brian VanDeMark, the historian recently found guilty of plagiarism, has been allowed to retain his job at the Naval Academy (though he took a cut in pay and lost tenure). And this week, to the surprise of some, Michael Bellesiles, who has a contract with Oxford to produce a new book next year about American violence, surfaced with an op ed about Iraq. (A revised edition of his much-debated book on guns, Arming America, is due out shortly.)
Our question this week: Should Bellesiles and the others be welcomed back with open arms?
Food for Thought
About Michael Bellesiles
Michael Bellesiles's op ed is being syndicated by the History News Service (HNS). Asked to explain why HNS agreed to distribute Bellesiles's piece, co-director James Banner told History News Network:
Whatever Michael Bellesisles did and was held responsible for doing, he remains a historian. The History News Service is a syndicate of professional historians--not just of academic historians but of all those who can by any decent definition of the term be considered historians. This certainly includes Mr. Bellesisles. Like all op-ed essays HNS distributes, his original text came to HNS unbidden. When he submitted that text (which, like all submitted to HNS, went through a rather rigorous editing process after we had accepted it), we found it entirely acceptable as history and well within the conventional boundaries of op-ed essays and of the additional requirements that all HNS pieces possess--that they deal with current issues in historical terms. Those and those alone were our considerations. In distributing Mr. Bellesisles article, we take no position on any of his past acts. If our decision, not one difficult for us to arrive at, is seen by some as aiding in Mr. Bellesisles's rehabilitation as a practicing historian, we see nothing wrong with that. There is no reason why there should be no second acts in America. It is up to Mr. Bellesisles to achieve his Second Act as he wishes and can and, we believe, up to each of us to judge of his success as he makes that no doubt taxing effort.
Disclosure: The editor of History News Network, Rick Shenkman, sits on the steering committee of HNS. He had no role in the decision to syndicate the article by Michael Bellesiles.
About Doris Kearns Goodwin
The NYT letter in support of Ms. Goodwin:
To the Editor:
We write as historians to attest to our high regard for the scholarship and integrity of Doris Kearns Goodwin and to protest vigorously your article "Are More People Cheating?" (Arts & Ideas, Oct. 4), with the photograph of Ms. Goodwin displayed in the company of some of the most notorious scoundrels in America.
Cheating is a deliberate intent to deceive or defraud. Plagiarism is a deliberate intent to purloin the words of another and to represent them as one's own.
Ms. Goodwin did not intentionally pass off someone else's words as her own. Her sources in her 1987 book, "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," were elaborately credited and footnoted. Her errors resulted from inadvertence, not intent.
She did not, she does not, cheat or plagiarize. In fact, her character and work symbolize the highest standards of moral integrity.
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
ROBERT DALLEK
DAVID HALBERSTAM
New York, Oct. 9, 2003
After the Schlesinger letter was published, HNN contributing editor Philip Nobile wrote the Times to object. His letter was not published:
To the Editor:
Despite the defense plea of Arthur Schlesinger, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and David Halberstam, there is no innocent explanation for Doris Kearns Goodwin's massive (and still covered up) plagiarism (Letter to the Editor, Oct. 25, 2003). The historians who saluted Ms. Goodwin's "scholarship and integrity" and described her copying in "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys" as "errors result[ing] from inadvertence" have not done their homework.
First, regarding scholarship: quite apart from infamous looting of Lynne McTaggert's "Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times," Ms. Goodwin has admitted to reproducing dozens of passages without proper attribution from additional books in her Kennedy work (NYT, Feb. 23, 2002). How many passages from how many books? She won't say, despite telling your paper that she had instructed her assistants to comb her biography for unattributed material in view of publishing a corrected version of "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," a volume yet to appear. At the least, it is impossible to believe that a writer as sharp as Goodwin could accidentally copy ninety-one passages from McTaggert without noticing the difference between McTaggert's words and her own (Associated Press, March 23, 2002).
Second, Ms. Goodwin forfeited her integrity in 1987 when she (a) paid McTaggert a large sum to keep quiet about the plagiarism and then (b) successfully papered over her acknowledged theft by backdating a new preface to "The Kennedy and the Fitzgeralds" that granted McTaggert extra credit. Having bought her way out of disgrace, this former Harvard scholar did not do the next intellectually honest thing: in subsequent editions of her book she did not bother to put quotes around all of the McTaggert passages. "I made the corrections [McTaggert] requested," she waffled in TIME (Jan. 27, 2002), as if this private concesssion satisfied her obligation to history and the truth.
Until Ms. Goodwin makes full disclosure, that is, until she releases her research notes for "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," the original manuscripts, the investigation by her assistants, and the legal settlement with McTaggert, including the amount of hush money, no historian dare claim that she is not a plagiarist, especially in light of the known evidence.