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.