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Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower

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It seems, according to Wiener, that the most famous historians of all, Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, were actually the worst offenders. Goodwin, a former associate of Lyndon Johnson, used passages from another woman's book, a woman who had made a specialty of the life of Kathleen Kennedy (JFK's sister who died young and beautiful). When she has nabbed (by the other woman), instead of coinfessing all she made a secret pact with the author, telling her, keep this quiet and I will give you lots of money, and do whatever else you like. The cover-up was worse than the original offense! As far as Ambrose goes, well, poor guy was probably sick when he began his career of mass plagiarizing, but Wiener suggests that the sheer number of books he signed contracts to write left him with little time to do the research himself, so he just began copying books like crazy and ladling on whatever pages he needed, thinking no one would notice. However, FORBES magazine had his number and called him on it, whereupon he said he would write no more books. Death took him away from us, he who did so much for the "Greatest Generation." I hope his "D-Day Museum" in New Orleans is okay. It stood as a tribute to Ambrose's genius and, to a lesser degree, as a reminder that if you're famous enough, you can get away with things for which a lesser historian would have had his ass handed to him.

You can see that happening again and again in Wiener's book. I like the book quite a bit, but I did notice that when a right-wing historian makes a mistake, and pays for it with his career and/or obloquy from the press, Wiener finds this right and just, but when it happens to someone like Michael Bellesiles, author of ARMING AMERICA, or to Mike Davis, author of ECOLOGY OF FEAR, he calls it a witch hunt pure and simple. I say, you can't have it both ways. And please, whatever Dino Cinel did or didn't do, how do his sexual offenses measure up to the sorts of trickery the other historians profiled in the book pull? If Cinel, the professor at CUNY who had been a priest and got booted out because he made sex tapes of himself with young men (some who looked underage, though none of this was ever proven) has committed some intellectual fraud that would be one thing, but the way Wiener cuts him up one side and down the other, not even trying to interview him as though he were such scum it would contaminate you to talk with him, well, to me it just rings of professional homophobia. After all, the only other sexual references in the book are to the sexual harassment charges brought against Elizabeth Fox-Genovese by another woman. And Wiener despises Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, I wonder why.

Happily, the book reaches a higher plateau when Wiener begins to speculate-after reviewing case after case of horrifying greed and stupidity-that perhaps something in the discipline of history itself encourages fraud-or that perhaps historians as a breed have something wrong with their moral fiber. I don't know, could be!

Weiner's book is not so much a survey of fraud among historians so much as it is a tu quoque defense of Michael Bellisle and others who share Weiner's particular predjudices. Yes, Doris Kearns Goodwin plagerized, as did Stephen Ambrose, and both should be (and were) condemned for that. But somehow Weiner turnes this into an argument that Bellisles, who fabricated evidence and lied in support of a false hypothesis, was unjustly pilloried. Somehow, I don't see the connection.

Disclaimer: Jon is a colleague of mine at The Nation magazine. The book is a great read, period. Jon has taken a collection of potentially stultifying subjects (mudfights among academics) and turned into a crackling, amusing and ultimately readable piece of first rate journalism. The disparate treatment handed out to different cheating or flawed historians will raise your eyebrows.. and your blood pressure. I particularly liked his account of the scandal around Doris Kearns Goodwin and the way she bought and spun her way back to legitmacy. In all, genuinely fine book on the juicy subject of academic corruption and fecklessness.

The treatment given the subject of plagiarism and fraud in historical studies deserves a more thorough treatment than given by Mr Wiener. In the episodes I have some familiarity with, those of Bellesiles and the Vesey conspiracy, Mr Wiener protests the outcome using using the same idealogical approach as he decries in the original participants in the exposure of the fraud, i.e., he does not give a complete presentation of the evidence. On the other hand, it is somehow comforting to know that the professorial ranks are subject to the same petty jealousies that everyone else experiences in everyday life, and the descriptions of the Goodwin and Ambrose cases are entertaining.

I didn't know anything about the people discussed in this book before reading it. So everything, I know about any of these situations comes from "Historians in Trouble".

Jon Wiener makes reading about plagiarism enjoyable. But, in doing so, he sacrifices credibility. With all the colorful slants, it doesn't take a high school education to figure whose side Mr. Wiener is on. While by itself this isn't a problem, combined with the fact that the portrayal of most historians in the book is so one-sided even the most naive will wonder if relevant facts are missing.

I have a couple problems with the way this book comes to its conclusion. First, it is a case study of only a dozen people. Therefore, they all could have been cherry picked. Meaning the conclusion lead the facts and not the other way around. Second, he reduced his data set from twelve to one within a couple sentences. It seems to me extrapolating on one person is pure speculation. A nice theory, but more comprehensive research is needed to determine if there is any merit to it. Finally, the Conclusion chapter is poorly organized, and throws in theories not even mentioned earlier in the book. Compared to the thoughtfulness put into the rest of the book, it was a total hack job.

Professor Wiener provides a one-sided view of events which he has not sufficiently researched. Claiming to have received ground-breaking information from an anonymous source, Wiener rescues Bellisles from the right-wing conspiracy which cost him his job. Nevermind all of Bellisles's fantastic lies; forget his blatant dissmebling and the mountain of evidence that he is guilty of fraud, not just sloppy research: Jon Wiener has uncovered a right-wing plot (since when does the left defend plagiarism in the academy?). If he digs a bit deeper, perhaps he can link it back to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. He'd obviously love to, because his chapter on her appears to be more of a personal attack rather than an indictment of her professional capabilities. All said and done, Wiener's book is a tabloid-piece on historians he doesn't like. His claims are often poorly grounded, sloppily researched (no wonder he defends Bellisles), and at best the ravings of a conspiracy theorist. He's probably cursing Charlton Heston, George Bush, and William Bennett(none of whom i admire, but a fella's gotta make a buck) for bribing me to write this review.

Jon Wiener has done an enormous amount of detective work and provides us with rich research and dazzling conclusions. This tour-de-force challenges us

to rethink our comfortable assumptions about what does and does not go on

in the historical profession---

For everyone entering an archive, contemplating publication, facing a classroom, or

scratching heads in disbelief--this book should be required reading.

For anyone trying to figure out recent meltdowns and fireworks within the historical profession, Wiener's book is compelling, compact, and don't be afraid to dive into the endnotes.

Who says historians are boring? This is a look at controversies involving American historians and why some who get in trouble are excoriated and others escape. There are the familiar cases of Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin and the issue of plagiarism and Joseph Ellis and his lying to his students about his Vietnam War exploits. There is the not so well known tales of historian Edward Pearson and a new theory on the Denmark Vesey Uprising and David Abraham whose thesis challenged powerful professors and as a result his career was finished. Author Jon Weiner posits that historian Michael Bellesiles was sanctioned not so much for his questionable research methods as much as for his devising a theory that went against the NRA's vision of an American gun culture. Legendary historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was sued for sexual harassment and discrimination(the case was settled out of court for a rumored cool one million) and because of her ideological views was given a humanities award by President George W. Bush. The author cites diverse stories of historians in trouble and the situations are often completely different although his ultimate conclusion is that in a hand full of cases, particularly that of Bellesines, the role of right wing advocacy groups was decisive in getting strict penalties on the accused academic. Weiner is often quite harsh(and rightly so) on the media and the AHA (American Historical Association) for not being more consistent,balanced and inquiring when it comes to investigating stories of historical inappropriateness. Why are some historians punished and others given government honors? This is a great read that will make you think.

Wiener's book does not attempt to settle the scholarly controversies which it describes. It was written to inform us of actions taken against historians who incur the wrath of the political Right. He concedes the work of these historians was flawed: but the point is that the tactics used against them, so as to discredit their work, or even drive them from the profession, smack of totalitarianism. For contrast, he shows us rightist historians who violated fundamental rules of careful scholarship and got a slap on the wrist, followed by a reward from the White House.

A very disturbing book. Prospective historians will read it and perhaps chose a less hazardous discipline---to everyone's loss.

Political double standards abound in American academia, argues Jon Wiener in his fascinating book on scholarly scandals. Abrogation of professional responsibility is forgiven the likes of Bush Republican favourite, Professor Allen Weinstein, whose failure to make his sources available to all researchers to check the accuracy and interpretation of his 1978 book which claimed to prove that Alger Hiss, a State Department official, really was a Russian spy.

David Abraham, however, is a Marxist historian whose scholarly transgressions in his 1983 book on German business support of Hitler's rise to power, although publicly corrected despite being marginal to his work, earnt him a vicious vendetta of charges of forgery, lying and fabrication of archival records, successfully sabotaging his university appointments.

Charges of academic fraud also did in Michael Bellesiles, whose 2000 book, Arming America, had shown that Americans' love affair with the gun was an "invented tradition" dating well after the US Constitution had supposedly enshrined the right to bear arms as inherently American. The gun lobby turned an evidentiary molehill into a mountain of denigration which was scaled by journalists, historians and his university employers who set up an investigatory panel, ending Bellesiles' career.

When, however, the economist, John Lott, argued in his 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime, that States with laws allowing people to carry concealed weapons have lower crime rates, Lott fraudulently invented a survey which claimed that merely brandishing a gun without firing it will, 98% of the time, be effective. Lott, his message being one the gun lobby wanted to hear, went about his fraudulent work unhindered.

A hostile media burnt Mike Davis, the Marxist author of Ecology of Fear, who was denounced as a fraud in 1998 for a few trivial footnote errors that cropped up in a 484 page book with 831 footnotes. The posse was led by a Malibu realtor whose billion dollar real estate company stood to lose business from Davis' exposure of the irresponsibility of Los Angeles developers in promoting reckless high-rise development in a city historically subject to earthquakes.

Unlike Davis, the conservative anti-feminist, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, was treated with kid gloves by institutional and media power despite serious academic misdemeanours involving student complaints that she was engaging in sexual harassment, discrimination and emotional bullying, none of which stirred stir university administrators to action or the media to critical scrutiny.

If Fox-Genovese was the lecturer from hell, then Dino Cinel was the lecherer from heaven. This `porn professor', a former priest, defrocked for sexual abuse of teenage boys and possession of child pornography, did not disclose his past to the appointment committee of CUNY University, despite the cause of his dismissal being relevant to his new position involving authority over young people.

Weiner's other case studies include two celebrity historians and plagiarists (Doris Goodwin, historian of the Kennedys, and Stephen Ambrose, patriotic war historian) whose "literary larceny" went unpunished because of their orthodox politics.

For leftwing historians, punishment is no more than a careless footnote away. Focusing on minor discrepancies in the documentation and concealing their political disagreements behind vociferous charges of `fraud', powerful conservative movements and institutions can undo careers whilst their right wing peers are rewarded despite massive fraud and deception.

"Accuracy is a duty not a virtue" says Weiner, quoting the historian, E.H. Carr. For the left historian, accuracy (to the nth degree), it would seem, is also needed as insurance against the frenzied footnote fetishists of the academic and political right.