Undaunted Fraud . . . Or, What Is History? Pt 3

Stephen E. Ambrose

This isn't news.  When Stephen Ambrose was accused of citing numerous works nearly verbatim without proper attribution, it was in the middle of the another plagiarism scandal involving Doris Kearns Goodwin.  You might know her from Team of Rivals, the book which laid the foundation for Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln. 

Back in 2002, ferreting out plagiarism in popular history seemed all the rage as journalists and amateur historians began noticing errors and discrepancies in Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue.  According to Fred Barnes over at The Weekly Standard, Ambrose lifted substantial sections from Thomas Childers's book Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II.  Childers, a University of Pennsylvania history professor, was attributed in footnotes, but his words remained largely unchanged in Ambrose's book.

At the same time that this was brewing, The Daily Standard turned its attention to Doris Goodwin and noted that much of her work on The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys pulled material from Lynne McTaggart's book, Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times.  As with Ambrose, Goodwin was charged with lifting whole sentences and failing to attribute them properly.  In essence, she claimed another's work as her own.

A bookshop.  Cuz, you know, that's where real history happens.

In work that relies to a considerable extent on the work of others, plagiarism is always a looming danger.  Most academics rely on the research of others; indeed, modern research is more like adding a single pebble to an edifice than in laying foundations or erecting the framework.  We rely on the work of others to reinforce our work, or to support our conclusions.  The interpretation is often unique, and the work is genuine, but it relies on the work of others.  Clearly delineating what is your own from the another's work is necessary to build credibility and reproducibility. 

Because historians rely so heavily on sources, it's often difficult to reproduce certain conclusions.  The necessary documents are sometimes hidden in archives.  Those archives are more often than not on the other side of the country and can be accessed only with difficulty and expense.  So we trust that others have done a good job; that trust is built on an unshakable foundation of historical ethics.  And plagiarism undermines that foundation. 

To her credit, when Goodwin was called on her plagiarism, she responded by acknowledging her error and strove to correct it.  Though many charge that her correctives were insufficient, she nonetheless seemed to respond in a more forthright manner than Ambrose. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin

But his errors were more grievous.  He'd long been in arrears with veterans groups for his sometimes unflattering portrayal of soldiers in the second world war.  Their charges are serious, but far from condemnatory, since historians often make unflattering claims against revered figures and individual experience may differ from the broad summary which historians try to make.  More serious are accusations that Ambrose distorted the historical record or inflated his sources. 

In 2001, after the publication of his book Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 describing the building of the Pacific Railroad, a group of railroad historians compiled a paper detailing the numerous factual errors it contained.  Writing for the Journal of American History, reviewer Walter Nugent was driven to exasperation by the frequent factual errors.

What initially brought this whole controversy to my attention, however, was the revelation by Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center that Ambrose grossly distorted his relationship with the former President.  As Ambrose told it, Eisenhower approached him to write his biography after the former President read Ambrose's biography of Henry Halleck.  No such thing happened.  In fact it was the other way around, and Rives had the letter to show that Ambrose approached Eisenhower. 

Henry Halleck

When Ambrose's two volume biography was finally published, he cited the hundreds of hours of interviews he had had with the President as the source of many of his conclusions.  Once again, Eisenhower's exhaustive schedule told another story.  It showed Ambrose speaking with Eisenhower three times for a grand total of less than half a dozen hours.  Furthermore, Rives goes on to assert that interview times that Ambros claims in his book Supreme Commander just don't jive with Eisenhower's personal schedule. 

Basically, he made it up. 

This is ridiculously frustrating for a profession that already deals with the lay perception that "you just make stuff up."  The rigors of historical research and writing require that historians adhere to a level of ethical conduct just as strenuous as physical researchers. 

Undaunted Fraud . . . Or, What Is History? Pt 2

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey

Welcome back to my discussion on what history is and what it is not.  I suppose I ought to once again define my terms.  History is everything that came before now; it is the sum of all the moments that came before this one.  The study of history, which unless I specify otherwise is what I mean in this article, is something a bit more specific. 

The study of history is the attempt to create a narrative which approximates as closely as possible the experience of living those moments.  Experience is a loose term, but it requires that someone be around to live those moments.  It's also really helpful (though not always necessary) for them to write down their experience.

But it's impossible to fully recreate the experience of whole peoples, eras, civilizations, societies, et cetera.  It's impossible to even adequately summarize a single life -- even if you were to fill a library with dense volumes. 

Winston as a boy

Think about William Manchester's remarkable biography of the life of Winston Churchill.  At three volumes, each spanning nearly a thousand pages (or more), the biography seems incontrovertible.  A life read about in (let's assume) twenty hours, however, is hardly an adequate approximation of a life which spanned 90 years.  Sufficient, perhaps, but still inadequate. 

Volumes of this size also hide the vast repository of material from which each volume is gleaned.  Personal letters, official correspondence, personal recollections, government papers, diaries, journals, ledgers, tax reports, a myriad of sources are concealed by the authoritative presentation of those three volumes.

And that brings me around to a few short remarks about what a historian actually does.  When I tell people about the research I'm helping my professor do, I usually explain that the historian crafts a narrative from sources.  The comment I get back is, "So you make stuff up."

No, because a historian is beholden to the sources.  Let's look at something I'm researching as an example.  A public figure like President Eisenhower has his day minutely scheduled and it seems easy to trace this historical narrative.  On January 7, 1954, he delivered his State of the Union Address to Congress, in which he explained for the first time the New Look of the American military.  It emphasized a reliance on nuclear weapons to offset the austerity-level defense budget he advocated.  Notably (though not many people took much note) it articulated "massive retaliation" for the first time. 

The Library of Congress

Though he advocated that the United States was stronger with allies than standing alone, President Eisenhower admitted that "while determined to use atomic power to serve the usages of peace, we take into full account our great and growing number of nuclear weapons and the most effective means of using them against an aggressor if they are needed to preserve our freedom."  Importantly, though the United States would refrain from aggression, "we and our allies have and will maintain a massive capability to strike back" [emphasis my own].  (Take a look at the whole thing here.)

Historically, however, we attribute massive retaliation to John Foster Dulles, who was much more belligerent in a speech given to the Council on Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954.  You could (and historians have) make the argument that Dulles's belligerence informed President Eisenhower's later statements; that it was a case of the Secretary of State's tail wagging the President's foreign policy dog.  (Wow, that was a tortured metaphor.)

You can figure this one out.

This debate is entirely academic.  Who articulated massive retaliation first (and I've seen it attributed to others in the Republican Party as far back as 1951) matters if we want to understand where it originate, how it changed, and how the idea influenced Americans -- from the general public to policy makers.  More broadly, it helps vindicate Eisenhower, who was criticized for seeming to golf the presidency away; instead, it reinforces a picture of a man deftly manipulating the levers of state.

When historians are not true to their sources, however, the picture shifts and the events as they occurred are misrepresented.  Misrepresentation leads to being misunderstood, and the value of historical research is cheapened.

A historian must be true to his sources. 

With that said, tomorrow we'll finally get around to talking about plagiarism and the "Imbroglio Ambrose."*

*How the Ambrose Story Developed