By Wlady Pleszczynski on 2.5.02 @ 4:22PM
No one likes to get caught, but some handle it better than others, especially if George McGovern is on their side.
BOMBS AWAY: An overlooked must read in the
New York Times is its letters to the editor section. From
time to time a voice of sanity might be included among a half dozen
or so (well-edited) missives blasting Bush-Enron or Enron-Bush.
But my favorite sort of Times letter is one from a
well-known figure snuck in among the less recognizable names. For
example, that's how Mikhail Gorbachev last fall let everyone know
he was standing in solidarity with America and New York
post-September 11. It's not clear if anyone noticed.
Similarly, it's not known if anyone picked up on George
McGovern's letter
last week defending his hagiographer Stephen Ambrose against
charges of plagiarism. But by any standard it was a breathtaking
bit of bilge. As the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes
demonstrated in breaking the Ambrose scandal, Ambrose even
attributed one of his stolen passages to McGovern. Nonetheless,
McGovern calls Ambrose "a brilliant author," "a superb historian,"
and a patriot who has donated millions to "environmental and
educational causes."
Too bad he didn't address one of Ambrose's more fatuous, but no
doubt honestly derived, claims that McGovern should have played up
his war record in 1972. Right, the candidate of an antiwar movement
that equated the U.S. military with Nazi evil would have been free
and eager to pass himself off as Bomber George. Isn't a historian
supposed to remember the history he lived through?
FEEL MY PAIN BEAUSE I WORK SO HARD DEPARTMENT:
To Stephen Ambrose's credit, when caught using "borrowed passages,"
as the New York Times put it, he attempted no convoluted
defenses of his own. Not so Dame Doris Kearns Goodwin, whom the
Weekly Standard also caught having cavalierly presented
another historian's work as her own. Her defense is a thing of
beauty. Writing in Time,
she describes how immense a project the book in question was: "900
page[s]," "3,500 footnotes," "150 cartons of materials,"
"handwritten notes on perhaps 300 books," all notes "arranged
chronologically" in "dozens of folders in 25 banker's boxes."
Scrupulous to a fault, after finishing her manuscript, which she
wrote "[i]mmersed in a flood of papers," she "went back to all
these sources to check the accuracy of attributions." Then come two
sentences perhaps lifted from Bill Clinton: "As a final protection,
I revisited the 300 books themselves." (Protection? Such a nineties
word.) Then the clincher: "Somehow in this process, a few of the
books were not fully rechecked." The passive voice is a thing of
beauty in tight spots.
By the end of her apologia she's stretching beyond recognition.
Giving in to technology in her notetaking from books, she writes
that she "now rel[ies] on a scanner, which reproduces the passages
I want to cite." A scanner? Despite the errors it's bound to
introduce? Now she's really asking for trouble. No matter. If ever
another error of attribution comes up, she'll fix it as soon as
possible, "for my own sake and the sake of history." But not,
apparently, for the sake of the cheated historian.
topics:
Education, Bill Clinton, Environment, Books, Military
