The celebrated popular historian and Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose was exposed by Fred Barnes in these pages a few years back (“Stephen Ambrose, Copycat,” January 14, 2002) for having lifted chunks of his 2001 bestseller The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany from Thomas Childers’s well-received 1995 history, Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II. As Barnes wrote at the time:
Whole passages in The Wild Blue are barely distinguishable from those in Wings of Morning. Sentences in Ambrose’s book are identical to sentences in Childers’s. Key phrases from Wings of Morning, such as “glittering like mica” and “up, up, up,” are repeated verbatim in The Wild Blue. None of these—the passages, sentences, phrases—is put in quotation marks and ascribed to Childers. The only attribution Childers gets in The Wild Blue is a mention in the bibliography and four footnotes. And the footnotes give no indication that an entire passage has been lifted with only a few alterations from Wings of Morning or that a Childers sentence has been copied word-for-word.
Ambrose shortly issued what seemed like a sincere apology—“I made a mistake for which I am sorry; it will be corrected in future editions of the book”—but this turned out to be an obfuscation. He was guilty of far more than “a mistake.”
Forbes contributor Mark Lewis found illicit borrowing by Ambrose in his 1975 book Crazy Horse and Custer, in his 2000 history of the transcontinental railroad, Nothing Like It in the World, as well as in Citizen Soldiers and Undaunted Courage. (The Scrapbook may be missing a title or two here; Ambrose was a prolific plagiarizer.) And to cap it all off, his 1963 doctoral dissertation exhibited the same pattern of passing off the words of others as his own.
Ambrose’s final word on the subject, as he was dying of lung cancer in 2002: “Screw it. If they decide I’m a fraud, I’m a fraud.”
Given all this, we can’t say we were shocked by Richard Rayner’s revelation in the New Yorker last week that Ambrose made up a nonexistent relationship with Eisenhower. The heart of Rayner’s report:
Records show that Eisenhower saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours. The two men were never alone together. The footnotes to Ambrose’s first big Eisenhower book, The Supreme Commander, published in 1970, cite nine interview dates; seven of these conflict with the record.
Ambrose’s claim to have spent “hundreds and hundreds of hours” -interviewing Eisenhower was sheer invention.
The Scrapbook has two small morals to offer as a coda to this sad tale. First, in our experience, every plagiarist is a repeat offender. Second, Ambrose was a graceful writer, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a fraud, to use his word. Just as shoplifting is a kind of sociopathy that has nothing to do with poverty, the plagiarist’s character flaw has nothing to do with talent. ♦
The Dignity of Height
When journalists grab a cliché, they do more than give it a shove or bite it on the ankles. They clutch it around the waist, shake it insensible, and then wrestle it to the ground in a rhetorical death-struggle.
This was demonstrated, in textbook style, when 98-year-old Dorothy I. Height died last week in Washington. Miss Height, the longtime head of the National Council of Negro Women, had been, at best, a peripheral figure in the senior ranks of the civil rights movement; and in recent decades, between the marginal significance of the Council and her own great age, had served—between her trademark hats and stately bearing—as a largely symbolic presence in the nation’s capital. This earned her the inevitable obituary tributes as an “icon” and “legend” of a bygone era, and in some instances, recognition as a “national treasure.”
Nevertheless, because there was some measurable distance between Miss Height’s legendary/iconic status and actual accomplishments, -reporters and columnists were obliged to settle on some quality that would transcend the comparatively modest facts at their disposal. And the quality they settled on was dignity. Accordingly, throughout American journalism, electronic and print, no reference to, or description of, the late Dorothy I. Height seemed complete last week without a tribute, within a paragraph or two, to the reigning cliché of the moment.
The Washington Post was especially fulsome. Its obituary editorial began with the obligatory hackneyed references—“Dorothy I. Height was hailed a hero, the grande dame of the civil rights movement, an icon”—before informing readers that “words fail to capture what was so remarkable about this woman who fought for so long, and with such tenacity, dignity . . .”—and so on. Reporter Hamil R. Harris declared that “Height fought racism with dignity,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Colbert I. King allowed that “dignified is the word that comes to mind” when thinking of Dorothy I. Height.
The Post, by the way, was scarcely alone in its appreciation of dignity. The historic voice of the American left, the Nation, paid tribute to Height’s “dignity, poise, and exceptional style,” and the Huffington Post, harbinger of a new kind of journalism, instructed readers that “Height’s style was punctuated by her hats, articulation, dignity and grace.”
Far be it from The Scrapbook to suggest that when the Huffington Post compliments a 98-year-old African-American woman with a master’s degree in psychology from New York University on her “hats, articulation, dignity and grace,” it might strike some readers as a cringe-inducing form of condescension. Nor would it occur to The Scrapbook to infer that the Washington Post’s compulsive use of the word “dignity” in this instance suggests some institutional uncertainty about what to say, or a lack of imagination—or, perhaps, the patronizing instinct that is known to infect the newspaper business.
The Scrapbook would never say that; it wouldn’t be dignified. ♦
‘Archie’ Diversified
Over at Riverdale High School, where Archie and the gang attend class, a new student will soon be arriving. His name is Kevin Keller and he’s a dream! In no time, Veronica develops a serious crush on him, but Kevin just doesn’t seem to be interested in her. Is it her complicated past with Archie? Her profligate spending? As it turns out, Kevin isn’t interested in women at all because he is gay.
In an interview with the website feastoffun.com, Archie Comics writer and artist Dan Parent revealed that Kevin will be making his grand debut in Veronica Comics later this year—in an issue titled “Isn’t It Bromantic?” This of course has prompted speculation as to who else might be coming out of the comic closet: Jughead? Moose? Principal Weatherbee?
Parent assures readers that “the regular characters at Riverdale are not going to be coming out.” There won’t be any salacious subplots or anything too overt. After all, Parent reminds us, “the main readership is still 8- to 12-year-old kids.”
Instead, Kevin’s enrollment is a statement on diversity. (Archie, in fact, is currently in an interracial relationship with Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats.) Still, will the new plotline make some readers—or the parents of those readers—uncomfortable? Could there be a boycott? What will they say over at the Chocklit Shoppe? The Scrapbook will keep you posted.
More disconcerting, however, was the recent issue of Veronica Comics, in which the entire class met with President Obama at the White House. According to the press release, “The president’s plan for job creation inspires super rich Veronica Lodge to do her part.” But wait—does such a job creation plan really exist? Alas, we are once again reminded it’s only a comic book. ♦
Goldman in the Dock
The Scrapbook is agnostic on the merits of the SEC’s civil suit against Goldman Sachs. We read the SEC’s complaint and were livid at Goldman; we then read Goldman’s response and were livid at the SEC. The Scrapbook, sadly, is putty in the hands of a smart lawyer.
It does seem likely that the Goldman career of the young Frenchman Fabrice Tourre is over, and that he will spend many years living down his gloating January 2007 email, reproduced in the SEC complaint:
The whole building [subprime lending] is about to collapse anytime now. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab . . . standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!! [sic]
In the early days of email, 20-some years ago, The Scrapbook advised an embarassed colleague that he should assume every email he wrote would end up published on the newsroom bulletin board—especially the viciously gossipy ones. Still good advice, it seems, although now the newsroom bulletin board has become the Internet.
Michael Lewis reached what strikes us as a judicious conclusion in his Bloomberg column:
The social effects of the SEC’s action will almost certainly be greater than the narrow legal ones. Just as there was a time when people could smoke on airplanes, or drive drunk without guilt, there was a time when a Wall Street bond trader could work with a short seller to create a bond to fail, trick and bribe the ratings companies into blessing the bond, then sell the bond to a slow-witted German without having to worry if anyone would ever know, or care, what he’d just done. That just changed. ♦
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
‘The overhyped Tea Party phenomenon is more about symbolism and screaming than anything else. A ‘movement’ that encompasses gun nuts, tax protesters, devotees of the gold standard, Sarah Palin, insurance company lobbyists, ‘constitutionalists’ who have not read the Constitution, Medicare recipients who opposed government-run health care, crazy “birthers” who claim President Obama was born in another country, a contingent of outright racists (come on, people, let’s be real) and a bunch of fat-cat professional politicians pretending to be ‘outsiders’ is not a coherent intellectual or political force. But even people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Tea Party rally have lost trust in powerful institutions that . . . ” (Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, April 20). ♦