Ambrose, Stephen E., 1936-2002.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (from Mississippi)
STEPHEN AMBROSE, B. 1936
Branding Brotherhood
By ANTHONY GIARDINAIt's becoming more and more difficult to remember the mid-90's. Barely half a decade ago, it was still possible for a political convention, like the Democrats' gathering in 1996, to be centered not on terrorist threats but on proposals like flextime and family leave. Into that soft, family-centric world, the historian Stephen E. Ambrose lobbed a grenade. A series of them, actually. Beginning with ''Band of Brothers,'' in 1992, and continuing, at the spectacular clip of about a book a year, through last year's ''Wild Blue,'' he offered his male readership, their schedules full to bursting with P.T.A. meetings and obligatory attendance at soccer games, a powerful image of men as they used to be.
It was the battle-ready, action-oriented World War II vet whom Ambrose celebrated in book after book, as if he couldn't stop, as if the near-forgotten idea of who these guys had been and what they managed to achieve, once latched onto, had an insuperable momentum. As indeed it did. By the end of the decade, Steven Spielberg and Tom Brokaw had each followed Ambrose's lead by taking up the cause of the neglected fighting men of the Good War. ''Cause'' is precisely the right word; the rationale behind such books and movies, at least at first, was that we were making amends to a set of neglected heroes. It was that, sure, but it was also, and inevitably, something else. The ''citizen soldier'' was the perfect foil for a generation of baby boomers newly bent on self-examination, guys who had begun to wonder if, without having been in a war, they'd ever been truly tested.
''They wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not an M-1'' seems to be Ambrose's favorite sentence for describing the ploughboys and factory workers and young college men who defeated the Germans. (He used that sentence, almost verbatim, in three separate books.) His prose was boosterish, recruiting-poster bright -- clipped, energetic sentences perfectly matched to the single-minded exploits of the fighting men whose dignity of purpose is so clear it fairly sparkles on the page.
So much so, in fact, that at a certain point you have to wonder: how close does the burnished image come to the reality? Late in his life, Ambrose had to defend himself against the charge of plagiarism; in the end, that seems a less serious charge than another that might have been made against him: that of romanticizing the soldiers' experience. Ambrose, like Brokaw and Spielberg, never saw combat, and thus was free to write with a boy's awe. He loved to marshal quotes referring to the ''mystical'' attachment of a squad, the ''ecstasy'' of comradeship itself. The grunts who actually fought World War II and lived to tell about it didn't often use a word like ''ecstasy'' to describe their experiences. To read the firsthand accounts of veterans like E. B. Sledge, Paul Fussell and James Jones is to discover another kind of soldier, less war-dazzled and much grittier. But by the end of the century, we were ready to be told another story about war, and to be released into feelings of unity we hadn't had the chance to experience in 50 years.
History gets rewritten because our national mood changes; sometimes it's as simple as that. We get a new idea and it lets us reshape even the recent past in a kindlier light. Ambrose's significant contribution was to ask us to think about war not as the clash of large, sometimes inchoate forces but almost exclusively as the drama of the fighting man, of brothers helping brothers. In so doing, he helped reshape the war narrative in our time. Step into a movie theater and you can't miss it: suddenly, every war has become World War II. The Delta Force fighting in Somalia in ''Black Hawk Down'' is indistinguishable -- down to the haircuts, manliness and indomitable sense of purpose -- from the band of brothers in the recent HBO miniseries Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg fashioned out of Ambrose's book. Even the Seventh Cavalry that Mel Gibson marches into battle in Vietnam -- of all places -- in ''We Were Soldiers'' seems to be humming ''Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree'' instead of ''Purple Haze.'' Everything we thought we'd learned about war in the past 30 years has given way to a revisionist theory that seems to have sprung directly from Ambrose's books. ''It's about the man next to you'' are among the last words spoken in ''Black Hawk Down.'' ''That's all it is.''
''We fought for each other,'' Mel Gibson intones at the end of ''We Were Soldiers.'' And you thought wars were about politics.
It may well have troubled Stephen Ambrose -- who opposed the Vietnam War -- that the mood he helped entrench in us may have muted the discussion of a new war. No doubt, too, the prominent Hollywood liberals who have ridden to glory on the crest of the World War II narrative may be wondering whether they didn't ride it too hard. Inevitably, when war is reduced so entirely to the ecstatic spectacle of brother helping brother, it becomes that much harder to decide how, and why, men might refrain.
Anthony Giardina is the author of ''Recent History,'' a novel, and ''The Country of Marriage,'' a collection of short stories.
MAKING BOOKS; Writers Beware: History Is an Art, Not a Toaster (February 28, 2002)Many on Campuses Disdain Historian's Practice (January 15, 2002)
As Historian's Fame Grows, So Do Questions on Methods (January 11, 2002)
Author Admits He Lifted Lines From '95 Book (January 6, 2002)
MAKING BOOKS; Writers Beware: History Is an Art, Not a Toaster
By MARTIN ARNOLDThe mea culpas being offered lately by two popular historians caught plagiarizing are lame. They would have it essentially that, oops, mistakes were made because of the marketplace need for quantity and speed. An excuse? Not at all. An explanation? Well, barely.
Books are the products of artisans and artists, and this doesn't allow for them to be mass-produced at their creation like toasters that some assembly line puts together out of these and those parts gathered from here and there. If writers do want to try to run a factory, fine: just as long as they use their own raw materials.
Recently Stephen E. Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, both best-selling authors of some admirable books, have been caught lifting material from other people's books, kidnapping the work of others. So far they have gotten off easy, as nearly as can be determined. There has been some criticism in print but mostly not too harsh. Booksellers haven't stripped their shelves of these books, customers aren't demanding their money back, the authors' publisher seems more annoyed than angry, and no television producers or moviemakers are suggesting blackballing them. Both have brilliantly practiced the new art of crisis management: admit wrongdoing immediately, apologize and rectify.
The concept behind writing a history is not very complicated. It is original research and other carefully reviewed scholarship filtered through one person's mind. Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia, put it this way: ''Historians don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, but there's a difference between building on other people's scholarship and simply borrowing their writing.'' Perhaps his next book, ''Who Owns History?'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), scheduled for publication in April, will explain the difference to those who don't seem to know.
Maybe there's nothing to explain, and money and celebrity says it all. The public gorges on Mr. Ambrose's books. The more popular they become, the more they are bought and therefore the more books he writes, eight since 1997. No one says stop or hits the switch, and so the conveyor belts keep going. A commercial novelist can do one book a year. A historian, even a popular one, no way.
For Mr. Ambrose, with so much to do, naturally a careless slip occurs. People shrug. But they shouldn't: a writer of Mr. Ambrose's reputation should read every sentence before he ships a manuscript to his publisher, and he certainly should be able to recognize his own sentences when he sees them. His plagiarism was discovered with last year's publication of his best seller ''The Wild Blue'' (Simon & Schuster), an account of the men who bombed Germany late in World War II. Passages were lifted like clouds rising on thermals from Thomas Childers's ''Wings of the Morning'' (Addison-Wesley, 1995). The excuses were speedy compilations, editing oversights, the ability of computers to cut and paste. It was as if the modern techniques of composition were alive and had run amok, and the author had no control.
For Ms. Goodwin, there was borrowing, from perhaps as many as six other books, of scores of quotations or close paraphrases for her book ''The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys'' (Simon & Schuster, 1987). For her, somehow, it wasn't technology's fault but its near opposite: taking notes in longhand. She looked at them and couldn't always distinguish between her words and thoughts and those from others. Nor did her three full-time and one part-time research assistants help her. Indeed, they were part of the problem, the hidden workers on her assembly line, so many that one doesn't know whose history is being read. Everyone knows college history professors get research help from graduate students, but the students don't write or organize the works. (Sometimes the student doesn't get enough rightful credit, but that's the stuff of another column.)
David Nasaw, a history professor at the City University Graduate Center and the author of ''The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst'' (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), said, ''That's what drives us nuts, all those full-time assistants working for someone at one time.'' He added: ''Writing history is not an art but a craft. It requires interpretation and 50 sources and integrating and assembling this material into a story told by an individual voice.''
''I would never imagine in a zillion years having a research assistant take notes for me, and neither would any historian I know,'' Professor Nasaw said. ''They find material for me to check.'' Plagiarism as a mistake in transcription? Very careless. He said: ''If I have made a mistake in a transcription, by the time I've written the seventh paragraph I would have recognized it.''
Professor Foner said: ''I think there is a problem relying on other people to do your research and your writing, and some of these people have passed their own work on to researchers.'' Professor Foner sees no difference in method between the academic and the popular historian. ''It's abiding by standards that are easily available,'' he said. ''You can't publish a large book every year. Trying to do too much too fast and sloppiness is a lack of attention to your own methodology, and researchers and staff can't do it for you.''
''No one wants to string together quotations,'' he said. ''Writing is putting things into your own words. That's what we try to explain to college freshmen.''
Not a new idea. One can't know absolutely for sure about Macaulay or Gibbon, but they didn't have researchers. Parkman traveled the Oregon Trail and didn't just read about it or send somebody else to make the journey. As for today's popular historians, no one would waste a moment checking Robert A. Caro, who invests years in researching and writing each of his books.
Of course, for the very busy and popular writer, if they want, there is a way to do what they do without changing and without a hint of deception. They can imitate some of the great painting masters. If we can enjoy a work attributed to the School of Rubens, why can't we be comfortable with a book by the School of Ambrose or the School of Goodwin?
Many on Campuses Disdain Historian's Practice
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMOAfter accusations first surfaced that the author Stephen E. Ambrose had copied passages of Prof. Thomas Childers's book on World War II aviators, Professor Childers surprised colleagues and students at the University of Pennsylvania by saying he would continue to use Mr. Ambrose's books in his classes.
But as it became apparent that Mr. Ambrose had failed to attribute language from other people's work in his latest book, ''The Wild Blue,'' Professor Childers stood before his packed lecture class on World War II and announced he would cease using the popular historian's books.
The revelations about Mr. Ambrose's book are fueling a debate on several campuses over whether universities should continue to assign works by scholars who have been accused of appropriating someone else's work. The discussion is lively at Penn, where similarities between passages in Mr. Ambrose's best seller and Professor Childers's 1995 account of his uncle's aviation crew, ''Wings of Morning,'' tripped the first disclosures over Mr. Ambrose's prose. But it also extends to the University of Virginia, where some professors are pondering whether to use Mr. Ambrose's work amid an unfolding plagiarism scandal that has led to the expulsion of 17 students over the last year. While professors appear somewhat divided in their reactions, students at this urban Ivy League campus appeared to favor dropping Mr. Ambrose's work. They note that Penn, like most other universities, has strict rules against cheating and plagiarism, forbidding students from using published materials without thorough attribution. They said there should not be a double standard.
''They're telling us not to plagiarize,'' Sumit Walia, a sophomore majoring in economics, said on his way to class this morning. ''But what kind of message does it send if they accept it at the very highest levels?''
Ray Groller, a sophomore chemistry major, also opposed using Mr. Ambrose's books, a debate that has played out in the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian.
''Teachers are supposed to be role models in students lives,'' Mr. Groller said. ''They should try to lead by example.''
He said he had found himself tempted ''lots of times'' to appropriate quotations he had come across and pass them off as his own. ''But the thought of the consequences kept me from doing it,'' he said.
Still, there is a great deal of disagreement. At Virginia, Kenneth W. Thompson, a history professor, said he would continue to assign Mr. Ambrose's ''Rise to Globalism'' in his course on American foreign policy.
''If we discontinued books that I at least have used because of some evidence of human fallibility, I'd run out of books tomorrow,'' Professor Thompson said. ''This is an imperfect world with people who do make mistakes.''
While Mr. Ambrose's scholarly works, including biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, are mainstays of college reading lists, his more recent works appear on them less frequently.
Mr. Ambrose did not respond to a request for comment, but he has told The New York Times that he did not consider his mistake to be plagiarism. He said that if he came across passages from another author that fit the story he was telling, he would drop the passages into his text and credit the book in footnotes. Most scholars concur that such extended passages require the use of quotation marks. Mr. Ambrose has apologized for his technique.
Among academics, Mr. Ambrose's popularity had provoked soul searching and no small measure of envy. History professors on Internet chat groups wondered what the success of Mr. Ambrose and other popular historians said about their own failure to write readable books.
''The reason why historians tend to get envious -- and there's lots of Schadenfreude about Stephen Ambrose -- is that we don't tell good stories,'' said David Carlton, a history professor at Vanderbilt University who had participated in a chat session.
Also mentioned in the broader campus discussions about professional integrity is Joseph J. Ellis, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book ''Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.'' Professor Ellis was suspended from teaching at Mount Holyoke College after admitting that in classroom talks he had falsely claimed to have served in Vietnam. But his scholarship has not been questioned, and there has been no movement to drop his books in college courses.
Professor Carlton said historians had misgivings about the trade-offs they suspected Mr. Ambrose and other popular writers of making, and he noted that Mr. Ellis, for one, ''got in trouble for turning that storytelling technique to his own life.''
''What Ambrose did is something I could haul students before the honor council for,'' Professor Carlton said. ''And I actually have students who have trouble understanding why they should be hauled before the honor council for doing something like that.''
Professor Childers said that while he initially praised Mr. Ambrose's swift apology, his feelings changed when he read the author's description of his method. It was not just a matter of using quotation marks, the professor said, but of toiling to write a good passage rather than appropriating one.
''I just can't conceive of that,'' Professor Childers said in his office, after reading Mr. Ambrose's comments aloud. ''It doesn't take so much effort. Find the words. Write it yourself.''
As Historian's Fame Grows, So Do Questions on Methods
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKFor most of his career, the historian Stephen E. Ambrose was best known for his exhaustive multivolume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. He was respected in his field but seldom read by the general public until 1994, when he published ''D-Day,'' a sentimental tale about rank-and-file soldiers.
''D-Day'' became a best seller and changed Mr. Ambrose's life. To manage his soaring income, Mr. Ambrose incorporated into what is now called Ambrose & Ambrose Inc., based in Helena, Mont. He began to keep his five grown children busy as research assistants and published best sellers roughly every two years. With his family's help, he became the most prolific, the most commercially successful and the most academically accomplished of a new group of blockbuster historians.
Lately, however, some historians have begun to wonder about the toll of his prodigious pace. On Saturday, he acknowledged that his current best seller, ''The Wild Blue,'' inappropriately borrowed the words and phrases of three passages from a book by the historian Thomas Childers, ''The Wings of Morning.'' A closer examination of ''The Wild Blue'' by The New York Times indicates that in at least five other places Mr. Ambrose borrowed words, phrases and passages from other historians' books. Mr. Ambrose again acknowledged his errors and promised to correct them in later editions.
But even while conceding mistakes, Mr. Ambrose also defended his overall methods. He noted that in each case he included a footnote to the works he used, and he sometimes praised the books in his text.
''I tell stories,'' Mr. Ambrose said. ''I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation.''
''I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't,'' Mr. Ambrose said. ''I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I went to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.''
In general, professional historians consider it a failing to rely so closely on a single work by another historian for whole passages in any event, even when attributed. More important, Mr. Ambrose should have marked direct quotations in the text, or at the very least noted the closeness of his paraphrase in his footnotes, historians say. College students caught employing the same practices would be in trouble.
Mr. Ambrose initially defied his critics to find other borrowed sentences without quotation marks in his 30 books, before he was shown the passages from two readily available previous works that he used in ''The Wild Blue.'' He acknowledged using sentences verbatim and in at least five cases closely echoed the language and structure of longer passages from both the Army's official seven-volume study, ''The Army Air Forces in World War II'' by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate (University of Chicago, 1949), and ''The Rise of American Air Power'' by Michael S. Sherry (Yale University Press, 1987).
Although Mr. Ambrose, 66, said that his integrity had never wavered, he acknowledged that his methods changed over time, as he turned to more popular subjects and relied more on his children.
When Mr. Ambrose earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1960, he said, his ambition was to emulate traditional historians. His first book, ''Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff,'' was dense with footnotes and scholarly minutiae and read by almost no one. But one of its admirers was Eisenhower, who in 1964 tapped Ambrose, then 28, to write his biography.
Mr. Ambrose deliberately overcame his own admiration for Eisenhower to write a nuanced two-volume biography including Eisenhower's failures. His three-volume biography of Nixon underscored the former president's virtues.
''With Nixon and Eisenhower I was just wedded to the documents,'' Mr. Ambrose said. ''It was a total marriage.''
Mr. Ambrose's scholarship helped him win tenure at the University of New Orleans and in 1983 to secure funding for its Eisenhower Center, where he worked with a team of researchers to collect the recollections of more than 2,000 veterans.
Mr. Ambrose's interest had turned to stories of triumphant heroes with few moral or historical ambiguities, like those profiled in ''Band of Brothers,'' published in 1993.
After the success of ''D-Day'' a year later, his editors at Simon & Schuster began to look forward more eagerly to each next book.
''We welcome the fact that he is prolific,'' said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster, ''He works at a schedule that he sets, and we encourage the amount of his output because there is a readership that wants it.''
For his part, though, Mr. Ambrose said he never felt pushed. His editor, Alice Mayhew, had even advised him to slow down, telling him, ''I don't want people to think of you as somebody just pumping out cookies,'' as he recalled last week.
Mr. Ambrose said computers, and especially spell-checking programs, had helped him increase his pace. He said he relied on chronological storytelling to build readers' suspense, which helped him organize his books.
His advances for each new book swelled to more than $1 million apiece, and his income, including film rights, grew to over $3 million a year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
To keep up the pace, he also increasingly enlisted his son and agent, Hugh Ambrose, 35, as a collaborator, with additional research from his four other children.
''My son Hugh is my partner,'' Mr. Ambrose said last week. ''He is just a wonderful researcher. I don't know where he finds these guys'' -- veterans and sources -- ''then he gets on the phone with them for three or four hours, and that stuff is gold to me.'' Mr. Ambrose said his son's name would appear on the cover of his next book.
But Mr. Ambrose said he used no other research assistants, and took sole responsibility for any instances of copying. ''Hugh gave me the Childers's books and said, read this, and I did,'' he said.
In light of the recent revelation, Mr. Rosenthal defended Mr. Ambrose, saying his errors did not amount to plagiarism.
''There is no effort to deceive,'' he said. ''I think again that the material has been appropriately footnoted, and if there have been omissions it appears to be in the methods of citing as opposed to the citation itself. If there have been sins of omission, we will act to rectify them.''
Professional historians, however, said damage had already been done to Mr. Ambrose's reputation. Others have unearthed more limited but similar examples from his biography of Nixon and his book ''Crazy Horse and Custer.'' Dr. Sherry, a history professor at Northwestern University, was shocked to learn of Mr. Ambrose's use of his work.
''That is a lot of sloppiness, or plagiarism, or some combination of the two,'' Dr. Sherry said. ''Any of us professional historians can occasionally slip into uncomfortably close paraphrase, but very few of us do it as much as he seems to have been doing it in this book. This would be, for me as a teacher, unacceptable in a student, much less in a professional historian. It's sad because he is historian whose work I have often used and admired.''
Other historians said the errors were symptomatic of a style of writing popular history that prizes immediacy and fast-paced storytelling over critically interpreting the past. ''You can't get a more striking example of lack of critical distance from your sources than simply typing it into your own word processing program,'' said Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado.
Most, however, simply chalked the errors up to the ambitious pace of Mr. Ambrose's late career as a blockbuster author. Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University, said, ''Nobody can write as many books as he has -- many of them were well-written books -- without the sloppiness that comes with speed and the constant pressure to produce. It is the unfortunate downside of doing too much too fast.''
Undaunted, Mr. Ambrose said he and his son are hard at work on his next book. This time, ''I am sure going to put quotes around anything that comes out of a secondary work, always,'' he said.
Author Admits He Lifted Lines From '95 Book
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKThe historian Stephen E. Ambrose acknowledged over the weekend that he had copied sentences and phrases in his best-selling book ''The Wild Blue'' from another historian's earlier work. He apologized and said the repetition had been inadvertent.
In a column in this week's issue of The Weekly Standard, the executive editor, Fred Barnes, accuses Mr. Ambrose of borrowing passages from Thomas Childers's 1995 book, ''The Wings of Morning,'' without adequately acknowledging his debt. Mr. Childers, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said that he too had noticed the echoes of his own words. Both books tell the stories of airmen flying bombers in World War II, and Mr. Ambrose credits ''The Wings of Morning'' in a footnote as a source of information. But there are no quotations, and the footnote does not acknowledge taking words or phrases.
Mr. Ambrose declined to comment directly. On Saturday, his son and agent, Hugh Ambrose, explained that Stephen Ambrose had agreed to give a television program an exclusive interview on the subject. Instead, Stephen Ambrose issued a statement through Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for his publisher, the Simon & Schuster division of Viacom.
''Dr. Childers is correct,'' Mr. Ambrose said, ''I made a mistake for which I am sorry. It will be corrected in future editions of the book.''
Mr. Rothberg said the passages in question will appear in quotation marks in future editions.
The disclosure is likely to further a debate among historians about the kind of blockbuster history that Mr. Ambrose writes. Some said that such mistakes were inevitably more common when a historian tried to produce dramatic, detailed and highly accessible narratives about far-flung subjects as quickly as Mr. Ambrose did.
Told of Mr. Ambrose's apology yesterday, Mr. Childers said, ''I think it is a classy thing to do, and I appreciate it.'' He added that it was consistent with his impression of Mr. Ambrose, 65, as a fellow historian. After the publication of ''The Wings of Morning,'' Mr. Childers said, he received a letter from Mr. Ambrose praising the book. Mr. Childers had never met Mr. Ambrose and called the letter an unusually gracious gesture from a fellow scholar.
Publishing
The Ambrose Saga
Mark Lewis, 02.27.02, 6:00 PM ETNEW YORK - Judging from his book sales, Stephen Ambrose must be America's favorite historian. But Ambrose now finds himself enmeshed in controversy. First, The Weekly Standard revealed that The Wild Blue, his current bestseller, contains words and phrases borrowed from another author, without quote marks. Then Forbes.com identified four earlier Ambrose books that fit the same pattern.
Stephen Ambrose
Ambrose, a former history professor who has written more than 20 books, always cites his sources with footnotes. But authors are not supposed to borrow text verbatim without using quote marks. Ambrose on Jan. 6 released a statement apologizing for his use of certain phrases and passages in Wild Blue, saying that the omission of the quote marks was inadvertent. He has released no further public statement since the other four books were identified. But he is quoted in the Jan. 10 edition of the New Orleans Times-Picayune as saying he will soon address the issue by writing an essay about his work methods for a national publication.
Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis 05.10.02
Revising Wild Blue may not lay the issue to rest. Ambrose's doctoral thesis has the same problems.Did Ambrose Write Wild Blue, Or Just Edit It? 02.27.02
Goodwin confesses, but Ambrose remains in denial as evidence mounts about The Wild Blue.Doris Kearns Goodwin And The Credibility Gap 02.27.02
The historian withdraws a book from circulation and herself from the limelight to preserve her status. (SEE ALSO BELOW)Dueling D-Day Authors: Ryan Versus Ambrose 01.29.02
Stephen Ambrose faces yet another accusation, this time from the files of the late Cornelius Ryan. (SEE ALSO BELOW)Nothing Like It In The World? Hardly 01.17.02
Some passages in Ambrose's Nothing Like It in the World and Undaunted Courage have a familiar ring.Accusations Won't Hurt Ambrose Book Sales 01.11.02
Stephen Ambrose is likely to retain his bestseller status despite the current controversy.More Controversy For Stephen Ambrose 01.09.02
The historian's Citizen Soldiers and Nixon borrow from certain sources without using quotation marks.Ambrose Has Done It Before 01.07.02
Stephen Ambrose apologized for copying another author's words. But this wasn't his first offense.
Old Soldiers Never Lie 10.02.00
Stephen Ambrose writes that history actually happens, but you can't trust the ones who make it.
2 Say Stephen Ambrose, Popular Historian, Copied Passages
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKA columnist and a historian have accused the best-selling author Stephen E. Ambrose of copying passages in his recent book ''The Wild Blue.'' The two cite details and phrasing very similar to descriptions in ''The Wings of Morning,'' a book by the historian, Thomas Childers.
Both books tell the stories of World War II bomber pilots. Professor Ambrose included footnotes in his book acknowledging that Professor Childers's book was a source of information in the relevant pages. But Professor Ambrose does not acknowledge quoting from the book or borrowing phrases or wording.
In next week's issue of The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes, the columnist and the executive editor of the conservative magazine, argues that Professor Ambrose borrowed far more than what a footnote usually means. Mr. Barnes cites several sentences and paragraphs of ''The Wild Blue'' that closely echo words in ''The Wings of Morning.''
In an interview tonight, Professor Childers, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, said he, too, had concluded that Mr. Ambrose borrowed excessively. ''I felt sort of disappointed,'' he said.
Professor Ambrose, a respected historian who is an emeritus faculty member at the University of New Orleans, was unavailable for comment. Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for the book's publisher, the Simon & Schuster division of Viacom, said: ''Stephen Ambrose's 'The Wild Blue' is an original and important work of World War II history. All research garnered from previously published material is appropriately footnoted.''
But the similarity of some passages may provoke debates.
In one section, Professor Childers wrote, ''Up, up, up, groping through the clouds for what seemed like an eternity.'' He added later, ''No amount of practice could have prepared them for what they encountered. B-24's, glittering like mica, were popping up out of the clouds all over the sky.''
On a similar theme, Professor Ambrose wrote: ''Up, up, up he went, until he got above the clouds. No amount of practice could have prepared the pilot and crew for what they encountered -- B-24's, glittering like mica, were popping up out of the clouds over here, over there, everywhere.''
Elsewhere, Professor Childers wrote, ''Howard struggled to master the internal electronics of the radio, building generators, studying vacuum tubes and amplifiers, transformers and transmitters. He disassembled the sets, examined the intricate ganglia of tubes and wires, and reassembled them blindfolded.''
Also describing a radio operator, Professor Ambrose wrote, ''He mastered the internal electronics of the radio, built generators, studied vacuum tubes and amplifiers, transformers and transmitters. He learned to disassemble a set, then reassemble it blindfolded.''
Professor Ambrose appears to have relied on ''The Wings of Morning'' in particular for descriptions of the discomfort airmen faced aboard the B-24. In one passage, both books contain the following sentence verbatim, ''The bombardier, navigator and nose turret gunner were forced to squat down, almost on hands and knees, and sidle up to their stations through the nose wheel well of the ship.''
The ensuing descriptions follow a similar structure and share many other words in common. In describing the airmen who manned the twin machine guns in electronically operated positions on the bottom of the bomber, Professor Childers concludes: ''It was the most physically uncomfortable, isolated, and terrifying position on the ship. The gunner climbed into the ball, pulled the hatch closed, and was then lowered into position.''
In describing those same ball turret guns, Professor Ambrose, whose book centers on the experiences of Senator George McGovern as a B-24 pilot, ends his description, ''The ball turret was, as McGovern said, the most physically uncomfortable, isolated, and terrifying position on the plane. The gunner climbed into the ball, pulled the hatch closed and was then lowered into position.''
Last night, Professor Childers said he did not think Professor Ambrose had deliberately plagiarized his book.
''I don't attribute any malice to Stephen Ambrose. There is a term the Germans have, 'Mit dem linken Hand' -- he did it with the left hand, which means it is something that he is not focused on, he was focused on something else.''
Mr. Ambrose is not only among the best-selling American historians, he is also among the most prolific. He has written more than 25 books.
At least six books he has had published since 1994 have been best-sellers. In addition to World War II, he has written about the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase and the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Another book, ''Band of Brothers,'' was made into a television mini-series that was recently shown on HBO.
Mr. Ambrose is hardly the first popular historian or writer to face accusations of carelessness. Last year, for example, a history professor found that the writer David McCullough's best-selling biography of John Adams took a mistaken quotation from Thomas Jefferson as its subtitle, ''The Colossus of Liberty.''
Previously, scholars have accused the writer Susan Sontag of borrowing phrases in her novel published in 2000 ''In America'' from previous works, including a novel by Willa Cather. Ms. Sontag has said the echoes were intentional, for literary effect.
Plagiarism Controversy
Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis
(Page 1 of 2 from Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis)
Mark Lewis, 05.10.02, 3:00 PM ETNEW YORK - Embattled historian Stephen Ambrose has issued a revised edition of The Wild Blue that purports to give credit where credit is due. He admits to copying "some phrases" and "a few sentences" in some of his books, but he denies that this practice amounts to plagiarism, and rejects the notion that attribution problems are endemic to his entire body of work.
Ambrose's apologia is unlikely to end the debate. It now appears that the problems in Wild Blue reflect a pattern that can be traced all the way back to his University of Wisconsin doctoral thesis from 1963.
Titled Upton and the Army, it concerns the career of the 19th-century military tactician Emory Upton. The thesis was published in book form with the same title by the Louisiana University Press in 1964, and is still in print and featured on Ambrose's Web site. Forbes.com obtained a copy of the original thesis. A cursory check of four randomly selected sources listed in its bibliography turned up at least 11 examples of inadequate attribution--all of which are replicated in the book version.
In each instance, Ambrose copies a phrase or a sentence from his source, perhaps changes it a bit, and then footnotes the passage. The endnotes indicate the source, but do not indicate that the source's words are used without quotation marks. This is the method that got Ambrose in trouble after Wild Blue was published last fall, when a reader noticed a familiar-sounding phrase that turned out to come from one of Ambrose's sources.
Subsequently, further examples were unearthed in Wild Blue and in at least six of Ambrose's earlier books, going back to Crazy Horse and Custer from 1975. Now, the examples from his doctoral thesis establish that the pattern dates back to the beginning of Ambrose's career as a professional historian.
Among the well-known military historians whose words Ambrose recycles in his thesis are Bruce Catton and Russell Weigley. A previous Upton biography by Peter Michie, published in 1885, supplies a number of passages, slightly reworked and unadorned by quotation marks (see "Sources Echoed In Ambrose's Doctoral Thesis").
This week, Simon & Schuster, a unit of Viacom (nyse: VIAb - news - people ), published the paperback edition of Wild Blue, which was a bestseller in hardcover last fall. At least 20 pages of the new version (out of a total of 263) contain revisions resulting from the criticism of the hardcover edition. Ambrose has either added quotation marks and mentioned the source by name, or rewritten the material to make it entirely his own.
The only reference to the controversy in the new edition is an oblique one in the acknowledgements section: "Since the publication of the hardcover edition of The Wild Blue, more than a few folks have asked me how I could get it written so quickly. That made me realize that the one person I forgot to acknowledge was my son, Hugh. Hugh was there every step of the way on this book, from negotiating contracts to conducting most of the primary research, to editing the manuscript and suggesting great new material, to helping with the publicity."
Ambrose's critics (and some of his friends too) have suggested that Wild Blue's problems may be due to the fact that he has written so many books in recent years, churning out annual bestsellers for Simon & Schuster. But the problems in the Upton thesis suggest that Ambrose may have fallen into some questionable attribution habits early in his career.
This has been a rough year for the 66-year-old historian, who recently was diagnosed with cancer. He did not return a phone call seeking comment for this story. But the statement he posted recently on his Web site addresses the general issues raised by his critics since the Weekly Standard first broke the Wild Blue story in early January. (Similar questions later were raised about historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.)
"I always thought plagiarism meant using another peoples [sic] words and ideas, pretending they were your own and profiting from it," Ambrose writes. "I do not do that, have never done that and never will. I stand on the originality of my work. It is entirely my own, not taken from anyone else's work." (To read Ambrose's full statement, go to his Web site: www.stephenambrose.com.)
Ambrose points out that the number of problem citations unearthed thus far is relatively small when compared to the huge volume of his published material, "a total work of some 15,000 pages in print." True, but the examples that have come to light mostly have been discovered by randomly dipping into his body of work, a method that has yielded a very high percentage of "hits." That suggests a pattern that might well be confirmed by a more exhaustive examination of all his books.
With Wild Blue, for example, all nine source books that were readily available to be checked by the media have turned up instances of recycled prose. All the problems with those nine books have been corrected in the new paperback edition, but Ambrose has not said whether he went back and double-checked the citations from the other 18 books mentioned in his endnotes.
Ambrose in effect pleads guilty to the misdemeanor offense of "copying without adequate attribution," as distinguished from the felony offense of plagiarism. But that subtle distinction is rejected by the writer Thomas Mallon, who wrote about plagiarism in his book Stolen Words. Mallon says that he has not looked at the Ambrose situation closely but that, generally speaking, an author must not use another author's words without quotation marks.
"If this is a frequent occurrence, and really part of a writer's work habit, I would say no, this is not a misdemeanor," Mallon says. "This is a serious matter."
But Mallon also says that the public reaction to a charge of plagiarism can be problematic, because the tendency is either to reject the charge or reject the author: "There is no sliding scale of opprobrium." What is needed in situations such as Ambrose's and Goodwin's is a sense of proportion, which can allow for an appropriate degree of punishment without necessarily killing an author's career.
"Is it a transgression? Yes," Mallon says. "Do we need to read them out of polite society? No. Do we need to say that their books are now worthless? No. Do we need to say that they have nothing further to contribute? No."
Ambrose concludes his Web site statement by leaving his case to the court of public opinion: "The people will judge. The reading public will decide whether my books are fraudulent and react accordingly." Meanwhile, he plans to deal with his illness--and apparently to write more books, despite earlier comments that his next one would be his last.
"I have a lot left to say and to write about our nation's history, the American spirit and personal leadership," he writes. "I will take heart from the lessons I've learned over the years from these experiences as I deal with my own future."
Plagiarism Controversy
(Page 2 of 2 from Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis)
Mark Lewis, 05.10.02, 3:00 PM ETSources Echoed In Ambrose's Doctoral Thesis
Stephen Ambrose was awarded a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1963 after submitting a thesis entitled Upton and the Army, which was published as a book with the same title by the Louisiana University Press in 1964. The book remains in print.Below are comparisons between certain passages in Upton and the original source. The first Ambrose page number provided is from the thesis manuscript; the relevant page number from the book version follows the citation. If the book version is substantially different, it is quoted separately.
Towards an American Army, by Russell Weigley (Columbia University Press, 1962):
Weigley, pg. 218 "That is to say, the general staff agreed to call for a regular army of 281,000 men with veteran reserves to raise it to 500,000, plus a 'Continental Army' of part-time trainees roughly on the Swiss model. The Continental Army was to be a federal rather than a state force, but secured through volunteering."
Ambrose, pg. 233 "They asked for a regular Army of 281,000 men with enough reserves to raise it to 500,000 plus a 'Continental Army' of part-time trainees. The Continental Army was to be a federal rather than a state force, secured through volunteering." (Book version pg. 158.)
A Stillness at Appomattox, by Bruce Catton (Doubleday, 1953):
Catton, pg. 126 "The gunners sent double charges of canister plowing through the Confederate ranks, and at close range the effect was fantastic."
Ambrose, pg. 48 "The gunners sent a double charge of canister through the Confederate ranks." (Book version pg. 35.)
Catton, pp. 125-126 "He was riding his horse back and forth just behind the firing line, the only mounted man in sight, going unhurt by some miracle--every man on his staff was either killed or wounded."
Ambrose, pg. 47 "Most of the day Upton, encouraging his men, rode back and forth just behind the firing line. He remained unhurt even after every member of his staff was either killed or wounded and he was the only mounted man in sight." (Book version pg. 34.)
Under the Old Flag, by James Harrison Wilson (D. Appleton, 1912):
Wilson, Vol. 1, pg. 554 "Although badly wounded in the thigh by a fragment of shell, which laid bare the femoral artery..."
Ambrose, pg. 58 "It tore his thigh muscle open and laid bare the femoral artery..." (Book version pg. 41.)
The Life and Letters of Emory Upton, by Peter Michie (D. Appleton, 1885):
Michie, pg. 5 "However, he used to console himself by saying that a soldier did not need to be an orator, for that, if he ever had to speak, it would be to his men in the face of the enemy, and on such occasions an oration must be necessarily short, and he thought he would be able for that."
Ambrose, pp. 6-7 "He rationalized his shortcoming as not being essential to his goal, saying that soldiers did not need to be orators; if they ever had to make a speech, it would be in the face of the enemy, when orations necessarily are short, and he thought he could handle that." (Book version pg. 7.)
Michie, pg. 5 "He was thin and wiry, quite freckled, his hair standing nearly straight; always in a hurry...he often cut a person off in the middle of a remark with his own reply, which was always to the point."
Ambrose, pg. 7 "Classmates later remembered that Upton was always in a hurry and that he often cut a person off in the middle of a remark to make his own observation. Thin and wiry, he was heavily freckled, and his hair stood almost straight up."
Ambrose book version, pg. 7 "Classmates later remembered that Emory was thin and wiry, heavily freckled with hair that stood almost straight up, and that he was always in a hurry, often cutting a person off in the middle of a remark to make his own observation."
Michie, pg. 23 "He and his suite were mounted and preceded by a platoon of dragoons, as an escort."
Ambrose, pg. 11 "The Prince and his suite were mounted and, proceeded (sic) by a platoon of dragoons serving as an escort..." (Book version pg. 10.)
Michie, pg. 24 "Rigid though it was at times, yet the chastisement was always given in love rather than in anger."
Ambrose, pg. 13 "They were, he admitted, rigid, but their chastisement was given in love rather than anger..." (Book version pg. 12.)
Michie, pg. 33 "The ignorant people of Italy are now fighting for liberty; the chivalrous South is fighting for slavery."
Ambrose, pg. 15 "Even the ignorant people of Italy were fighting for liberty while the 'chivalrous' South fought for slavery." (Book version pg. 13.)
Michie, pg. 33 "He is energetic, and he is drawing all the talent he can from our army."
Ambrose, pg. 15 "Davis was drawing all the talent he could from the Army..." (Book version pg. 13.)
Michie, pg. 466 "He was punctilious in the discharge of his social obligations...Exacting the strictest discipline, he tempered it with kindness and consideration."
Ambrose, pg. 203 "His sister Sara kept house for him, and she insisted upon a punctilious discharge of his social obligations...He exacted the strictest discipline from his troops..." (Book version pg. 137.)
Plagiarism Controversy
Did Ambrose Write Wild Blue, Or Just Edit It?
Mark Lewis, 02.27.02, 2:45 PM ET
NEW YORK -Stephen Ambrose
Some historians learn from history, and some do not. Doris Kearns Goodwin, an expert on Lyndon Johnson, is addressing her own credibility gap by withdrawing a tainted book from circulation. But Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose is still going the limited hangout route, to recycle a phrase made infamous by the Watergate cover-up.
Having conceded some minor mistakes, Ambrose clearly is trying to move on without fully addressing the plagiarism accusations leveled at six of his books--especially his latest, The Wild Blue, which was published last fall and has been found to contain numerous passages he did not write. Like Goodwin, Ambrose is preparing a corrected version of his book. But unlike Goodwin, Ambrose has not reexamined the book himself to determine the full extent of its problems. His new edition of Wild Blue, now in the works, purports to deal with all the issues raised by the media--but a Forbes.com examination of this book's sources indicates that its problems are far more widespread than originally reported.
A new edition of The Wild Blue "is being prepared right now...all of these questions have been resolved."
"He's giving the reader that impression that the words on the page came out of his mind--but they came out of my mind."
"There are something like six or seven sentences in three or four of my books that are the sentences of other writers."
"I have reached a point in my life where, if I am not doing some writing every day, I am not happy."
Doris Kearns Goodwin
No one would care about this if Goodwin and Ambrose were obscure assistant professors laboring in some academic backwater. Both, however, are best-selling authors and TV pundits, which is why this literary scandal has generated so many headlines during the past two months. The controversy has touched off a national debate about what constitutes ethical behavior among writers and researchers, especially now that the Internet has made it so easy to copy passages electronically and insert them into a text. But Ambrose himself has thus far declined to join in the discussion.
Goodwin, who at first minimized her own transgressions, now has asked her publisher, Viacom's (nyse: VIA - news - people ) Simon & Schuster, to destroy all unsold copies of the current paperback edition of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Last month The Weekly Standard revealed that this 1987 book contains scores of passages lifted without proper attribution from some of Goodwin's source books. Last weekend, the New York Times reported that Goodwin intends to substitute a corrected version of the book, once she and her assistants finish their inventory of its many problem passages. Today, the Washington Post reported that Goodwin is taking indefinite leave from her commentary gig on PBS' NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. A PBS spokesman was quoted as saying the decision was mutual that Goodwin not appear on the show "until she gets her situation resolved." (See: "Doris Kearns Goodwin And The Credibility Gap.")
As for Ambrose, he told a Baton Rouge, La., audience on Feb. 22 that his next book would be his last. The 66-year-old historian, who has written, co-authored or edited some 35 books in the past 40 years, said at a Nature Conservancy event that henceforth he would devote his life to conservation causes. If he makes good on that pledge, it means the end of a storied career that in the last decade saw him ascend to the status of America's best-selling popular historian.
Ambrose's upcoming and presumably final book, which currently has no publication date, will be about World War II in the Pacific. Given his track record, it likely will be a bestseller--as was Wild Blue, the Simon & Schuster title that has gotten Ambrose into so much trouble. He was roundly criticized for recycling prose from three sources in this book without putting the borrowed words between quotation marks.
Ambrose's supporters deny that this amounts to plagiarism, since he footnotes all the passages in question and credits the source in his endnotes. A real plagiarist, they say, is one who steals another writer's words and gives no credit at all. Ambrose himself has asserted that the problems are minor and will be corrected in future editions of his books. He did not return a phone call seeking comment for this story, but his son and partner, Hugh Ambrose, responded on his behalf. The younger Ambrose said his father has not gone back and reexamined his books in light of the controversy. Instead, the Ambroses have been addressing the problems "on a case by case basis" as each one is brought to light by the media. Hugh Ambrose said a new edition of The Wild Blue "is being prepared right now," in which "we've dealt with the few instances that have come up," so that now "all of these questions have been resolved."
Stop the presses. Forbes.com has found that The Wild Blue contains passages lifted from at least six additional sources, bringing the total to nine, or roughly a third of the 28 books cited in the endnotes section. (Ambrose also uses other types of sources, such as interviews with veterans, which cannot so easily be checked.) These nine books are the only Wild Blue sources readily available at the New York Public Library, and all nine were plundered for prose that Ambrose uses without quotation marks, raising the possibility that the same pattern may be found in many or most of the other 19 books cited. That would leave Ambrose open to the charge that he did not write Wild Blue so much as edit it.
"To put it as politely as I can, I would say it's a highly disturbing pattern that cries for further investigation," says Joseph Balkoski, a World War II historian who complains about similar instances of improperly attributed prose in Ambrose's 1997 book Citizen Soldiers. "The pattern leads one to believe that his modus operandi is very suspect, shall we say."
The Wild Blue is subtitled "The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany." It focuses on the wartime experiences of former U.S. Senator George McGovern, whose autobiography, Grassroots, is one of the source books from which Ambrose borrowed passages without using quotation marks. Ambrose even borrows from himself--in Wild Blue he recycles an anecdote about General Dwight Eisenhower on Capri that originally appeared in Volume One of Ambrose's earlier Eisenhower biography. In the endnotes for that 1983 book, Ambrose cited Eisenhower Was My Boss, a 1948 book by Kay Summersby, as his source for the Capri story. In both the Eisenhower book and in Wild Blue, Ambrose's presentation of the anecdote closely resembles Summersby's. (See: Wild Blue Sources Questioned.)
At least Ambrose takes a bipartisan approach to his borrowing: Wild Blue lifts several sentences or passages from a McGovern biography by Robert Sam Anson, who is also the author of a Nixon book from which Ambrose borrows copiously in his Nixon: Ruin and Recovery. Again, Ambrose scrupulously footnotes all the passages and cites the source in his endnotes. But by failing to use quotation marks, he exposes himself to charges of plagiarism from critics such as Balkoski, whose World War II book Beyond The Beachhead was a source for Citizen Soldiers. (See: "More Controversy for Stephen Ambrose." )
Last month, Balkoski took public exception to Ambrose's use of lightly edited passages from Beyond The Beachhead without quotation marks. Now, Balkoski has found similar "borrowings" from another Citizen Soldiers source, The Men of Company K by Harold Leinbaugh and John Campbell. (See: Citizen Sources.) To Balkoski, it is "appalling" that an author would use another writer's words and think that a footnote is adequate compensation. Words that appear in a book without quotation marks generally are presumed to be the author's. Yet Ambrose in the six books under review has borrowed a number of vividly written passages and in effect presented them as his own. "The bottom line is, he's giving the reader that impression that the words on the page came out of his mind--but they came out of my mind," Balkoski says. "It's no understatement to say that I agonized over 90% of those sentences. Those words are my words."
Balkoski says he will not be mollified by changes made in future editions of Citizen Soldiers, which long ago completed its run as a bestseller. "It doesn't mean much to me when 99% of the sales have already occurred," he says. "Not many more copies of Citizen Soldiers are going to be sold."
That may also be true of Wild Blue, which tumbled down the bestseller lists fairly quickly after the plagiarism controversy erupted. First The Weekly Standard reported in early January that Ambrose had borrowed some passages from Thomas Childers' Wings of Morning. Ambrose apologized, but he also noted that the problem was limited to "three incidents," which he would correct in future editions. Then Forbes.com uncovered similar problems in several other Ambrose books. Then the New York Times revealed that Ambrose had borrowed passages from two additional Wild Blue sources, bringing the total for that book up to three. By this point, Ambrose was getting defensive. "I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't," he testily told the Times. "I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from."
Ambrose's critics respond that college students receive failing grades if they follow that practice when writing research papers. These critics note further that Ambrose, as a retired history professor, should be well aware that the ethics of his profession require the use of quotation marks in every instance in which another writer's words are used to any significant degree. Some critics also point to Ambrose's reliance on research assistants as a possible explanation for his problems, but Hugh Ambrose, who helps research the books, notes that he is himself a trained historian.
After Stephen Ambrose's comments to the Times were published on Jan. 11, he had little to say publicly until Jan. 31, when he defended himself briefly during a speech to a St. Louis audience. The Associated Press account of that event indicated Ambrose was somewhat dismissive of the criticisms leveled against him, insisting that while he should have used quotation marks, the footnotes amounted to adequate attribution. "There are something like six or seven sentences in three or four of my books that are the sentences of other writers," he told the audience, as reported by the A.P. "I know they are, and now reporters know they are, and now the whole world knows they are because I put footnotes behind those sentences and cited where I got this from. What I had failed to do--and this was my fault, my mistake--was to put quotation marks around those six or seven sentences."
Actually, dozens of passages in at least six Ambrose books have been called into question. True, they only add up to a tiny percentage of the many thousands of footnoted passages in all of Ambrose's books, as the author himself pointed out in a Feb. 6 letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, a high percentage of the footnoted passages examined by Forbes.com have turned out to be problematic for Ambrose. Given the obvious constraints of time and manpower, only a limited number of passages in six books have been vetted. Most of the remaining passages in those books, and all of the footnoted passages in Ambrose's other books, remain unchecked, at least by Forbes.com. Presumably an army of ambitious graduate students is now gnawing away at the rest of the Ambrose oeuvre, and any interesting findings will be made public in due course.
Earlier this month, Ambrose posted a brief note on his Web site, www.stephenambrose.com, labeled "Statement Regarding Recent Media Controversy." In it, Ambrose writes, "I have been criticized for improperly attributing other authors' writings in a few of my books. In each case, I have footnoted the passage in question, but failed to put some words and sentences into quotation marks. I am sorry for these omissions, and will make relevant changes in all future editions of my books." The Web site also posted a warm letter of support from McGovern.
Ambrose, in his limited public comments on the issue, seems to want it both ways: He is "sorry" that he did not use quotation marks, but insists that because he footnoted the passages, he didn't really do anything all that wrong. And he minimizes the number of incidents even as they continue to multiply, as more people pore over his books in search of clues.
Ambrose apparently does not plan to rebut his critics in greater detail; his son Hugh says that so far as he knows, his father is not at work on any sort of written apologia. Ambrose was expected to discuss the plagiarism issue on MSNBC's The News With Brian Williams several weeks ago, but in the end he did not appear on the show. He appears to be ignoring the issue, hoping it goes away. Of course, if he stops writing books, the plagiarism controversy would indeed become irrelevant. But it may be hard for Ambrose to give up his book-a-year habit.
One theory that the media has bandied about: Ambrose somehow was corrupted by the mass market. His recent books have earned millions for himself, for Simon & Schuster and for various Hollywood producers. Perhaps his head was turned by popular success, leading him to turn his back on rigorous academic standards in order to keep those annual bestsellers chugging through the pipeline. So the theory goes--but in fact, attribution problems have been uncovered in books Ambrose wrote long before 1994, when he had his first major bestseller with D-Day. As long ago as 1970, a young Ambrose got crossways with Cornelius Ryan, author of The Longest Day, over Ambrose's clumsy use of material from a Ryan book. (See: "Dueling D-Day Authors: Ryan Versus Ambrose.")
As an author, Ambrose has always been prolific, but around 1990 he really kicked into high gear. Since then he has been cranking out at least one book almost every year and sometimes two--including several on topics that have little to do with military history or presidential biography, his main academic specialties. Thus one year Ambrose might produce Undaunted Courage, a book about the Lewis & Clark expedition; another year he might come out with Nothing Like It in the World, about the building of the transcontinental railroad. (Both these bestsellers include at least a few passages lifted from their sources. (See: "Nothing Like It In The World? Hardly.")
For Ambrose, the pressure to produce seems to come from within. That much can be gleaned from something he wrote in the "Acknowledgments and Sources" section of Band of Brothers, his 1992 book that recently was turned into an award-winning miniseries for HBO, a unit of AOL Time Warner (nyse: AOL - news - people ). Ambrose wrote that he first got the idea for writing that book in early 1990, when he was finishing up the third volume of his Nixon biography. (As it happens, the later chapters of that third volume--Ruin and Recovery--include many borrowings from Anson's earlier Nixon book.)
"When I finished Nixon, I wanted to go back to military history," Ambrose wrote. "I intended to do a book on D-Day, but did not want to begin the writing until 1992, with the intention of publishing it on the 50th anniversary, June 6, 1994. I have reached a point in my life where, if I am not doing some writing every day, I am not happy, so I was looking for a short book subject on World War II that would have a connection with D-Day."
So Band of Brothers owes its original inspiration to Ambrose's unwillingness to spend more than two years writing D-Day. With barely a pause for breath, he segued from Nixon back to World War II, knocked off Band of Brothers fairly quickly while co-editing yet another Eisenhower book, then proceeded to D-Day right on schedule. Clearly this is an author who prefers not to linger over a book project any longer than necessary. But history is hard to write, and that is especially true for popular historians, who strive to create the exciting narratives that please large audiences. Perhaps the frantic pace he set for himself simply exceeded what is possible even for so hard-working an author as Stephen Ambrose.
That hardly sets an edifying example for young scholars, such as those involved in the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research, a group of students and educators whose annual meeting takes place this year in Ambrose's hometown of Whitewater, Wis. Ambrose originally was scheduled to address the group when it convenes in April, but at some point--it is not clear when--he backed out of the commitment. The group's Web site notes cryptically that he "regrettably is unable to attend the conference." Fortunately, the conference organizers were able to line up a suitable replacement: Doris Kearns Goodwin. No doubt she will have some interesting things to tell them.
Wild Blue Sources Questioned
Text comparisons between Wild Blue and six additional books cited as sources in Ambrose's endnotes section.Citizen Sources
Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers borrows phrases from The Men of Company K.
Doris Kearns Goodwin And The Credibility Gap 02.27.02
The historian withdraws a book from circulation and herself from the limelight, to preserve her pundit status.The Ambrose Saga 01.29.02
Evidence of copying problems continues to mount against America's favorite historian.
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Plagiarism Controversy
Page 2 of 3 from Did Ambrose Write Wild Blue, Or Just Edit It?
Mark Lewis, 02.27.02, 2:45 PM ETWild Blue Sources Questioned
Controversy over Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue began when The Weekly Standard accused Ambrose of copying some passages from Thomas Childers' Wings of Morning (Addison-Wesley, 1995) without proper attribution. Then, the New York Times unearthed passages Ambrose had borrowed from two other works: The Army Air Forces in World War II, a multi-volume work edited by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cates (University of Chicago Press, 1948-1958); and The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, by Michael Sherry (Yale University Press, 1987). Below are text comparisons between Wild Blue and six additional books cited as sources in Ambrose's endnotes section.50 Mission Crush, by Donald R. Currier (Burd Street Press, 1992):
Currier, pg. 69 "Just as we reached the bomb-release point, the high box of six ships drifted right over our box, and a bombardier from the 716th released his stick of 500-pound bombs. I was looking out my window at the time and saw the first bomb strike our wing man right at the top turret. There was a tremendous explosion, and the plane carrying Pickard's crew disintegrated into little flaming pieces. It happened in an instant, and it was hard to believe that these guys who trained with us and who lived in the next tent to us were gone."
Ambrose, pg. 182-183 "On another mission, Lt. Donald Currier reached the bomb release point when a B-24 drifted right over his squadron. Over Currier's head, the plane dropped its stick of 500-pound bombs. Currier was looking out his window at the time and saw the first bomb strike his wingman at the top turret. There was a tremendous explosion and the plane disintegrated into flaming pieces. It happened in an instant. Currier found it hard to believe that the guys who had trained with him and occupied the tent next to him were gone. Just gone."
Currier, pg. 70 "Pickard's plane was about 125 feet from us, and the concussion was stunning...The plane that dropped the bomb was not so fortunate. The bomb bay doors were open, and the whole blast came up into it. Isgrigg, the pilot, temporarily lost control; the plane slid out of formation, narrowly missing his wing men and heading for earth. Isgrigg punched the bailout button and some of the crew in the back bailed out. At that point, he began to get a measure of control over his airplane, but it was badly crippled and far below and behind the formation. Isgrigg ordered his co-pilot to go back and assess the damage. The co-pilot took one look at the broken, twisted hydraulic lines and bailed out himself. Isgrigg and his engineer somehow nursed that airplane back across the Adriatic to Grottaglie and crash-landed it on the field. For that feat of airmanship, he got the Distinguished Flying Cross."
Ambrose, pg. 183 "The concussion was stunning. The plane that dropped the bomb had its bomb bay doors open when the blast took place. The explosion came straight up and into the plane. The pilot, Lt. Vincent Isgrigg, lost control and slipped out of formation, narrowly missing the plane on his wing and plunging toward the earth. Isgrigg punched the bailout button and some of the crew got out. But Isgrigg regained control and sent his co-pilot back to assess the damage. The co-pilot took one look at the broken hydraulic lines and bailed out himself. Isgrigg and his one remaining crew member, the engineer, somehow managed to nurse the airplane back across the Adriatic to the AAF airfield at Grottaglie and crash-landed. For that feat, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross."
Goodbye, Liberty Belle: A Son's Search for His Father's War, by J.I. Merritt (Wright State University Press, 1993):
Merritt, pg. 33 "Merritt banked the plane steeply to the left and headed toward the rally point and home."
Ambrose, pg. 162 "After dropping the bombs, he banked steeply to the left and headed toward the rally point and home."
Merritt, pg. 33 "In the top turret, Carbo breathed easy and said to himself: 'We've made this one."
Ambrose, pg. 162 "The gunner in the top turret, Sgt. Nick Carbo, had just breathed easy and said to himself: 'We've made this one,' when the bursts came."
Merritt, pg. 33 "In the cockpit, a piece of shrapnel exploded through the flight deck and blew out one of the plexiglass panels overhead. Merritt fought the wheel as the plane heaved and slowed to the brink of stalling; then she began dropping..."
Ambrose, pg. 162 "One piece of shrapnel exploded through the flight deck...Merritt fought the wheel as the plane heaved and slowed to the brink of stalling. Then it began dropping."
Merritt, pg. 33-34 "Although stabilized, none of the three remaining engines were giving anywhere near full power, and their combined output could not have equaled much more than one good engine...They whined in a deafening caterwaul, their props wildly out of sync, while fuel streamed from the riddled wing tanks, filling the plane with the reek of gasoline."
Ambrose, pg. 162 "Gasoline streamed from the riddled wing tanks, filling the plane with the reek of fuel. Only one engine was still working, and that one hardly was."
Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern (Random House, 1977):
McGovern, pg. 10 "One day as we drove into his farmyard we saw Art sitting on the steps of his back porch, tears streaking down his dusty face. I had seldom seen an adult cry. Art Kendall explained to my dad that he had just received a check from the stockyards for a year's production of pigs. The check did not cover the cost of trucking the pigs to market."
Ambrose, pg. 30 "Once, while hunting with his father, he saw a farmer named Art Kendall sitting on the steps of his back porch, tears streaming down his face. Kendall explained to McGovern's father that he had just received a check from the stockyards for that year's production of pigs. The check did not cover the cost of trucking the pigs to market."
McGovern, pg. 24 "I met the pilot of one of these crews when Bill Rounds, traveling at high speed in a borrowed jeep, caught the corner rope of the lieutenant's tend and simply tore the structure in half. The stove, the hanging uniforms, the shelves of books, magazines and photographs--all of this and more literally flew into the olive grove."
Ambrose, pg. 134 "Rounds was driving, at high speed. He flew down the 'street' between the tents, turned a corner on two wheels, caught one of the ropes from the veterans' tent, and the ensuing rip tore the tent in half. The stove, uniforms on hangers, shelves of books, magazines and photographs, all flew into the olive grove."
McGovern, pg. 25 "The second mission of his substitute service, Sam's plane was blown out of the sky by Nazi anti-aircraft fire. There were unconfirmed reports of two of three parachutes being seen after the plane exploded, but we never heard another word of this quiet, hollow-cheeked navigator who dreamed of returning to Milwaukee and studying for the Presbyterian ministry. He was simply 'missing in action.' For the rest of the war, while we depended on substitute navigators, we lived with Sam's empty bunk, his treasured photographs and his neatly hung clothing, waiting for further word that never came."
Ambrose, pg. 200 "On his second substitute service, in the second week of January, Adams's plane was blown apart by German flak. There were reports, unconfirmed, that two or three parachutes had been seen after the plane exploded. McGovern and Rounds held on to the hope that Sam had made it out of the plane and came down by parachute. They depended on substitute navigators on their missions, but for a few weeks they lived with Sam's empty bunk, his photographs, and his neatly hung clothing, waiting for word that he had made it. The word never came."
McGovern, by Robert Sam Anson (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972):
Anson, pg. 40 "Rounds was a bouncy, wisecracking prankster from Kansas, the very image of a devil-may-care flyboy."
Ambrose, pg. 35 "He was a wisecracking prankster, the image of a devil-may-care flyboy."
Anson, pg. 47 "Halfway back in the airplane, Tex Ashlock was watching the scenery go by through the camera hatch. Suddenly, he couldn't believe his eyes. The bombs were away, and they were heading dead on a small farmhouse in front of them...The farmhouse Ashlock had been watching disappeared in a rolling cloud of brown smoke. In Ashlock's mind there could be no doubt about it; he had just witnessed cold-blooded murder."
Ambrose, pg. 208 "Sgt. Ted Ashlock was watching the ground through the camera hatch when the bombardier let the bombs drop. They fell on a farmhouse. It disappeared in a rolling cloud of smoke. In Ashlock's mind it was murder, pure and simple."
Evasion and Repatriation, by Edi Selhaus (Sunflower University Press, 1993):
Selhaus, pg. 187 "It was only then that he (McGovern) noticed that the mechanic had an English overall with RAF insignia on it and a cap with a red star. 'What are you doing here,' he asked him, still holding him by the shoulders. 'I'm a partisan squadron aircraft mechanic, Section B.' 'Good boy!' praised McGovern, shaking his hand once more."
Ambrose, pg. 195-196 "Then he noticed that Sever had on English overalls with RAF insignia on it, plus a cap with a red star. 'What are you doing here?' McGovern asked. 'I'm a partisan squadron aircraft mechanic, Section B,' Sever answered. 'Good boy,' McGovern replied, shaking his hand once again."
Eisenhower, Volume One: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, by Stephen Ambrose (Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Eisenhower Was My Boss by Kay Summersby (Prentice-Hall, 1948): (In Wild Blue, Ambrose recycles the below anecdote from his own earlier Eisenhower book, which in turn had borrowed it from Summersby.)
Summersby, pg. 114 "General Eisenhower, however, spotted a villa which wasn't exactly miniature. 'Whose is that?' he asked, pointing. 'Yours, sir,' was the reply. The general reddened, then nodded at another house, so fabulous it appeared on loan from Hollywood: 'And that?' 'That one belongs to General Spaatz,' our guide answered. Ike asked about several others, before erupting: 'Damn it, that's not my villa! And that's not General Spaatz's villa! None of those will belong to any general as long as I'm boss around here. This is supposed to be a rest center--for combat men--not a playground for the brass!' "
Ambrose, Eisenhower, pg. 267 "One a cruise around the Isle of Capri, Eisenhower spotted a large villa. 'Whose is that?' he asked. 'Yours, sir,' someone replied--Butcher had arranged it. Nodding at another, even larger villa, Eisenhower asked, 'And that?' 'That one belongs to General Spaatz.' Eisenhower exploded. 'Damn it, that's not my villa! And that's not General Spaatz's villa! None of those will belong to any general as long as I'm boss around here. This is supposed to be a rest center--for combat men--not a playground for the brass.' "
Ambrose, Wild Blue, pg. 202 "On a cruise around the Isle of Capri, he spotted a large villa. 'Whose is that?' he asked. 'Yours, sir,' was the reply. His aides had arranged it. 'And that?' Eisenhower asked, nodding at another large villa. 'That one belongs to General Spaatz.' 'Damn it, that's not my villa!' Eisenhower thundered. 'And that's not General Spaatz's villa! None of these will belong to any general as long as I'm boss around here. This is supposed to be a rest center--for combat men--not a playground for the brass!' "
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Plagiarism Controversy
Page 3 of 3 from Did Ambrose Write Wild Blue, Or Just Edit It?
Mark Lewis, 02.27.02, 2:45 PM ETCitizen Sources
Stephen Ambrose's World War II bestseller Citizen Soldiers (Simon & Schuster, 1997) earlier was found to have incorporated certain passages from one of its cited sources, Joseph Balkoski's Beyond The Beachhead (Stackpole, 1989), without putting the words within quotation marks. Now the same pattern has been found with at least one other Citizen Soldiers source, The Men of Company K by Harold Leinbaugh and John Campbell (William Morrow, 1985):
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 41 "From a low hill behind the line of departure, First Sergeant Dempsey Keller watched the company climb out of roadside ditches and foxholes and form up as skirmishers. These were men the first sergeant had helped train and had worried over for two years."
Ambrose, pg. 161 "From a low hill behind the line of departure, First Sgt. Dempsey Keller watched the men climb out of foxholes and form up. These were the men he had trained and worried over for many months."
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 45 "The British officer ran back to his tank and gave the building three quick rounds from his 75, one in each window. Thirty or forty Germans poured out waving white flags and yelling 'Don't shoot.' "
Ambrose, pg. 161 "The British officer ran back to his tank and gave the farmhouses three quick rounds from his 75, one in each window. Thirty to forty Germans poured out waving white flags."
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 133 "A bright fellow in headquarters finally figured out it would be simpler to ask transients their shirt size, on the assumption that Germans accustomed to the metric system would have trouble remembering a 14 ½-32 shirt wouldn't fit a hefty six-footer."
Ambrose, pg. 219 "One MP at headquarters, 84th Infantry Division, had a bright idea. He asked men he stopped at roadblocks their shirt size, on the assumption that Germans accustomed to the metric system would have trouble remembering a 14 ½-32 shirt wouldn't fit a big man."
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 159 "A limb was cut for Sabia to lean on, and he headed back to the rear hopping awkwardly in the snow on his good leg. He stopped after ten yards, turned around, waved his makeshift crutch in a gesture of defiance and exuberance. He bellowed, 'Hey, you bastards! Clean sheets! Clean sheets!' "
Ambrose, pg. 261 "Sabia took a limb to use as a crutch and began hopping awkwardly in the snow. After ten meters he stopped, turned around, waved his limb in a gesture of defiance and exuberance, and bellowed at his buddies in their holes, 'Hey, you bastards! Clean sheets! Clean sheets!' "
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 156 "Finally Leinbaugh and Campbell decided they had to make one more effort to find the 2nd Armored men. They headed diagonally downhill, feeling their way through the dark, forcing their way through the drifts, stopping frequently to listen for sounds of nearby troops. 'We paused,' Campbell says, 'and heard a rustling noise, very close. We dropped to a crouch alongside a narrow trail.' "
Ambrose, pg. 268 "Lts. Harold Leinbaugh and John Campbell of the 84th Division were out one night during the Bulge, feeling their way through the dark, forcing their way through the drifts, stopping frequently to listen for sounds of nearby troops. 'We paused,' Campbell remembered, 'and heard a rustling noise, very close. We dropped to a crouch alongside a narrow trail.' "
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 153 "He and his men were close-shaven, clear-eyed, and wearing clean uniforms. Bayonets were fixed to their M1s. They seemed totally out of place--an alien cast which had wandered onto the wrong stage...Instead of working their way through the woods and flanking their objective, they had advanced straight across a field of deep snow toward a fieldstone hut. The Germans let them get in close, just the right distance, and then methodically mowed them down. Every one of the men was dead."
Ambrose, pg. 287 "They were close-shaven, clear-eyed, and wearing clean uniforms. Their bayonets were fixed. To Leinbaugh, 'They seemed totally out of place--an alien cast which had wandered onto the wrong stage.' The new captain led his men out to a blocking position on the line. But rather than working through the wood and flanking the objective, he sent the men straight across a field of deep snow toward a fieldstone hut. The Germans let them get in close. When they opened fire, every one of the GI's was killed."
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 168 "During his brief visit the colonel was highly critical of the company's appearance. He said it looked as if nobody had shaved for a week. Leinbaugh said the lack of hot water was the real problem, not any lack of interest in our personal appearance. The colonel, who prided himself on being a product of the old National Guard, let us in on an old remedy. 'Now if you men would save some of your morning coffee it could be used for shaving.' Leinbaugh stepped over to a snowbank, picked up the five-gallon GI coffee can brought up that morning, and shook it in the colonel's face. The frozen coffee produced a satisfying thunk. He shook it again. 'That's enough,' the colonel said. 'Goddammit, I can hear.' "
Ambrose, pg. 382 "The colonel began to chew out the captains for their own and their men's appearance. He said it looked like no one had shaved for a week. Leinbaugh said there was no hot water. The colonel, who prided himself on being a product of the old National Guard, gave a tip: 'Now if you men would save some of your morning coffee it could be used for shaving.' Leinbaugh stepped over to a snowbank, picked up the five-gallon GI coffee can brought up that morning, and shook it in the colonel's face. The frozen coffee produced a thunk. Leinbaugh shook it again. 'That's enough,' said the colonel. 'Goddammit, I can hear.' "
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 220 "Navigating a narrow, swaying footbridge in the dark while lugging thirty or forty pounds of combat gear is no simple task. Half the duckboards were under swift-flowing water, and only a single strand of cable provided a handhold. The Germans had the range, and their shells exploding in the river doused the struggling line of GI's with water and mud."
Ambrose, pg. 409 "Company K crossed on a narrow, swaying footbridge that night. It beat swimming but it wasn't easy. The men had thirty or forty pounds of combat gear. Half the duckboards were underwater and there was only a single strand of cable for a handhold. The Germans had the range and were pumping in artillery."
Leinbaugh and Campbell, pg. 257 "We moved into an undamaged high-rise apartment, waved the owners into the streets, and discovered electricity, hot water, working toilets, and telephones with dial tones. We had time for hot baths--the first good soaking since our visit to the mine showers in Holland in November. We found a cache of black cigars and bottles of cognac. Bocarski lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and bullied his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect K Company within the week."
Ambrose, pg. 421-22 "By some miracle, the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment in which everything worked-- electricity, hot water, flush toilets, and telephones with dial tones. They had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles of cognac. Private Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect Company K within the week."
Plagiarism Controversy
Doris Kearns Goodwin And The Credibility Gap
Mark Lewis, 02.27.02, 2:45 PM ETNEW YORK - As a former Lyndon Johnson aide, Doris Kearns Goodwin knows all about credibility gaps. After becoming a historian, she wrote a book about LBJ that described his increasing isolation in the White House from anyone who might tell him an unpleasant truth: "Self-deceptions multiplied in this hall of distorting mirrors," she wrote, as quoted by U.S. News & World Report in its current cover story on "Fifteen Presidents Who Changed the World."
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Goodwin herself seemed trapped in a hall of mirrors last month after The Weekly Standard accused her of plagiarizing from several sources in her hugely popular The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, a 1987 bestseller that later was made into a successful TV miniseries. At first, Goodwin minimized the extent of the problem. Then, after more details surfaced, she wrote a somewhat self-serving essay for Time that conceded fault but insisted that her mistakes were inadvertent, the result of inadequate research procedures. Finally last weekend she told the New York Times that The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys has more flaws than even the Standard had alleged.
Today, the Washington Post reported that in the wake of that Times story, Goodwin has agreed to take an indefinite leave of absence from her pundit perch on PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Goodwin for years has been a frequent panelist on the show, but a McNeil/Lehrer Productions spokesman said she would remain on leave "until she gets her situation resolved."
Goodwin is withdrawing all unsold copies of the current edition of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and preparing a fully corrected version, so she now appears to be making a serious effort to address the plagiarism issue head on. That's more than can be said at this point for Stephen Ambrose.
Ambrose was the first popular historian cudgeled by the Standard for borrowing passages from sources but leaving off the quotation marks. Next it was Goodwin's turn. Unlike Ambrose, who has said relatively little about the controversy, Goodwin responded immediately. She gave interviews and wrote that essay in the Feb. 4 issue of Time, underscoring her eagerness to correct the problems. But her essay made no reference to the fact--already made public by the Standard--that her publisher Simon & Schuster had reached a financial settlement with one of her sources shortly after the book appeared in 1987. In return for that unspecified payment, the aggrieved author agreed to keep the matter confidential, sparing Goodwin any negative publicity at the time.
Nor did Goodwin's Time essay address the embarrassing fact that in 1993 she chastised Joe McGinniss, author of a book about Edward Kennedy, for allegedly lifting material from The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys without proper attribution. Goodwin went after McGinniss even though she knew full well she had been guilty of a similar offense with the same book and that the matter had been hushed up. (McGinniss, by the way, says his book gave Goodwin full credit for the borrowed material.)
Moreover, Goodwin, under the settlement, added footnotes to her book crediting the source, but she did not rewrite the passages in question. Which means this "corrected" version of her book--a steady seller off the backlist--had only been brought up to Ambrose code: footnotes, but no quotation marks around the borrowed passages.
To her credit, Goodwin did not leave the Time essay as her last word on the subject. Last weekend she told the Times that after the controversy erupted, she ordered her research assistants to stop work on her current book project to reexamine The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. They soon found many problematic passages, including some from authors not identified by the Standard. When her researchers finish vetting the book, Goodwin plans to substitute a fully corrected version; the unsold copies of the current paperback edition will be pulped. "I could not bear to have this book out there the way it was," she told the Times.
It was not clear whether Goodwin had told her assistants to apply similar scrutiny to No Ordinary Time, the 1994 bestseller about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, for which she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. She has not been accused of plagiarism in connection with that book--or indeed with any of her books other than The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.
Both Ambrose and Goodwin have numerous bestsellers to their credit, but Goodwin has produced far fewer books than Ambrose, so mass production apparently is not her problem. She confesses instead to sloppy research techniques--at least with her earlier books. "The mechanical process of checking things was not as sophisticated as it should have been," she told the Times. Or perhaps, given the multiple research assistants she apparently has at her disposal, it was simply a matter of too many cooks spoiling the broth.
Goodwin's abrupt departure from the PBS show is a setback, but she can take comfort from the fact that U.S. News treated her as a legitimate pundit this week by quoting her prominently about Lyndon Johnson. Whereas Stephen Ambrose is nowhere to be found in that U.S. News piece even though he is an expert on Richard Nixon, one of the presidents profiled. Not to worry: Once Ambrose stops sulking and comes up with a credible mea culpa, he too will be restored to good standing within the punditocracy, and once again will see his words appear frequently in national magazines--within quotation marks and attributed to him in the text. As a source, he would expect no less.
Ambrose Controversy
Dueling D-Day Authors: Ryan Versus Ambrose
Mark Lewis, 01.29.02, 4:45 PM ETNEW YORK - Embattled historian Stephen Ambrose is facing still more charges that he used material from a source without proper attribution--and this time the source in question is Cornelius Ryan, Ambrose's predecessor as America's favorite World War II chronicler.
Ryan, the best-selling author of A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day, died in 1974. Four years earlier, in September 1970, he had written a letter to Ambrose's then-publisher, Doubleday, accusing Ambrose of "a rather graceless falsification which concerns me and my book, The Last Battle." Ryan complained that Ambrose, in a 1970 book about Dwight Eisenhower, had copied two quotations from The Last Battle without attributing them to Ryan's earlier book--and had garbled the quotations to boot.
Ambrose, in a reply to Ryan written later that same month, apologized for the "careless error" and said he would fix it in future editions. But when the Ambrose book in question, The Supreme Commander, was republished in 1999, the garble had been fixed but the attribution still omitted any mention of Ryan or The Last Battle.
Click Here To Read The Ryan Letter
Click Here To Read Ambrose's Reply
Ambrose did not return a phone call today seeking comment. He has had relatively little to say since accusations surfaced earlier this month that he has borrowed phrases and passages from certain sources over the years without putting the words within quotation marks--a practice that many of Ambrose's critics consider a form of plagiarism.
Ambrose has pointed out in his own defense that he footnotes the passages in question and then cites the sources in his endnotes. Critics respond that footnoting "borrowed" passages isn't good enough, since the words still are being presented to the reader as having been written by Ambrose himself. The critics note that college students are forbidden to do what Ambrose does when they write research papers, so why should Ambrose--a former history professor--get away with it in his books?
Cornelius Ryan: another Ambrose critic
The Ryan situation is somewhat different, since Ambrose is not accused of presenting Ryan's words as his own, but of denying Ryan proper attribution. Ryan's complaint may seem relatively minor, but to Douglas McCabe, an archivist who oversees the Cornelius Ryan Collection at Ohio University, it demonstrates that Ambrose's attribution problems go back almost to the beginning of his scholarly career. "It brings into question all his professional work," McCabe says.
McCabe is curator of manuscripts for the Archives and Special Collections division at the university's Alden Library in Athens, Ohio, where the Cornelius Ryan Collection is housed. McCabe provided Forbes.com with copies of the Ryan letter and Ambrose's reply, both of which are part of the collection.
Ambrose published his first book in 1962 and has produced some 30 more since then, churning them out at such a steady clip that some critics wonder if he may have cut a few ethical corners along the way by borrowing too many improperly attributed passages from his sources. Since 1994, when his D-Day appeared, Ambrose has been a perennial star performer for his current publisher Simon & Schuster, a unit of Viacom (nyse: VIA - news - people ).
The current controversy was touched off when The Weekly Standard exposed attribution problems in Ambrose's current hardcover bestseller, The Wild Blue. Subsequently Forbes.com uncovered similar problems in at least four earlier Ambrose books, including his current paperback bestseller Nothing Like It in the World. (See: The Ambrose Saga)
Ambrose has his defenders, too. Among them is former Senator George McGovern, whose World War II experience as a bomber pilot is described in The Wild Blue. In a letter to the editor published yesterday in The New York Times, McGovern conceded that Ambrose should have used quotation marks for the disputed passages. But he also praised Ambrose as a "brilliant author" who has earned his current popularity. "He is not only a superb historian, but also a gifted writer whose books are devoured by the public, and a patriot who has donated millions of dollars to environmental and educational causes," McGovern wrote. "He is one of the few great men I have been privileged to know."
As for Cornelius Ryan, he was the Stephen Ambrose of his time, in the sense that he wrote massively popular books about the war against Hitler's Germany. Ryan's The Longest Day, a 1959 book about D-Day, sold millions of copies and was made into an epic film with an all-star cast. A Bridge Too Far from 1974 also was made into a popular film. Ryan, who was born in Ireland in 1920, covered World War II as a war correspondent before he turned to writing books. He died of cancer in 1974, shortly after his last book came out.
Ryan's 1966 book The Last Battle concerned the fight for Berlin that ended the war in Europe. Ambrose borrowed two quotations from this book for his 1967 book Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945, and in this instance, Ambrose properly attributed the quotes to Ryan's book. But when Ambrose used those two quotations yet again in The Supreme Commander in 1970, he ran them together so that they sounded as though they came from one man rather than from two different men. More annoying to Ryan was that, in The Supreme Commander, Ambrose no longer attributed the quotes to Ryan, but rather to himself.
"The crowning indignity, as far as I am concerned, is that in his notes on sources in the back on page 710 he gives credit to--guess who? None other than his own previous book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945, page 21," Ryan wrote to then Doubleday Editor-in-Chief Kenneth McCormack on Sept. 11, 1970.
"I don't know Ambrose but I do insist on this change being made," Ryan said. "For the moment, let's call this whole thing a mistake. I am sure that you will appreciate that this kind of inaccuracy breeds a wider distrust, in my particular league anyway."
Ambrose was contrite in his reply dated Sept. 26, 1970: "It was a careless error. I should not have run the Whiteley and Morgan quotes together, and I should not have cited my own work as a source. I offer no defense, and only hope that similar errors do not appear elsewhere."
Ambrose told Ryan that the quotes would be fixed and the attribution to Ryan restored "in the next printing." Whether that was done could not immediately be determined today; but in 1999, when the University Press of Mississippi put out a new edition of The Supreme Commander by arrangement with Doubleday, the quotes had indeed been fixed--but the attribution still cited Ambrose's own book rather than Ryan's.
Doubleday did not immediately return a call today seeking comment. As for the aggrieved party, Ryan, his publisher is unlikely to press any complaints on his behalf. The Last Battle was put out by none other than Simon & Schuster, which has also published all of Ambrose's recent bestsellers. Simon & Schuster has stood grimly by Ambrose throughout this trying month.
"We assert once again that Stephen Ambrose is one of America's most original and brilliant historians," Simon & Shuster spokeswoman Victoria Meyer said today. "We are saddened to see him become the subject of a witch-hunt."
