HAVING WORDS
Don't Indict 'Popular History'
Hollywood didn't make Stephen Ambrose commit plagiarism.
Now that the sins of Stephen Ambrose have been laid out, and with Doris Kearns Goodwin possibly about to join him in the pillory, the latest plagiarism scandal seems to be evolving into a morality tale about serious historians seduced into error by the lure of popular success. But this conclusion is demonstrably false, and now is the time to say so, lest publishers begin to shrink from putting out history books that people actually enjoy reading.
Since I am dissenting from an emerging Ambrose consensus, I should make clear my membership in the "gotcha" mob that has hounded America's favorite historian since early January, when The Weekly Standard brought his transgressions to light. Fred Barnes revealed that Mr. Ambrose's current bestseller, "The Wild Blue," incorporates several phrases and passages from a source without using quotation marks. Subsequently, I unearthed similar problems in four other books--"Citizen Soldiers," "Crazy Horse and Custer," "Nixon: Ruin and Recovery" and "Nothing Like It in the World."
Mr. Ambrose's plagiarism is not limited to a few sentences. He borrows copiously from some sources, then footnotes the passages and cites the source in his books' endnotes. But that's not good enough, as generations of college freshmen have learned. Foot- or endnotes tell readers where the information came from, but the writing is assumed to be the author's own work. Even if Mr. Ambrose acted without malice, he presented others' words as his own. That is plagiarism.
That point is lost on the Ambrose diehards who e-mailed me angrily after my findings appeared on Forbes.com. These fans, patriots all, tend to cherish the cheerfully triumphalist tone of his recent books. As chronicler of the Greatest Generation's greatest victory--World War II--an attack on Mr. Ambrose is seen as an attack on the soldiers he writes about, and their legacy.
But I also received messages from disillusioned people who now view Mr. Ambrose as something of a Clintonesque villain, whose ethical lapses echo America's moral decay. Presumably, these affronted moralists were further depressed to learn that the Standard has identified similar plagiarism in the original edition of Ms. Goodwin's 1987 bestseller "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys." Ms. Goodwin said that her borrowings were inadvertent, and that she corrected the problem in later editions.
Plagiarism is serious. Journalists and academics who are caught at it sometimes lose their jobs and reputations. Mr. Ambrose is no longer a full-time professor, so he faces only the discipline of the market. "Wild Blue" has tumbled from its high perch on at least one bestseller list; but I predict that his fans will turn his next book into yet another blockbuster. Few of his readers care about missing quotation marks. Certainly, they are not about to abandon popular histories for academic tomes that eschew dramatic narrative for dry-as-dust analysis.
Which brings us back to the theory that Mr. Ambrose was tempted from the righteous path by the pressures of the marketplace. The author himself has had little to say, apart from apologizing for the "Wild Blue" passages and making a few defensive remarks about his methodology. Perhaps at some point he will explain himself fully. Until then, the reigning theory is likely to be that "Hollywood made him do it"--to wit, that once he achieved bestseller status in 1994 with "D-Day," he began churning out potboiler histories at breakneck pace to earn those ever-larger advances and movie deals. Inevitably, corners were cut.
It was inevitable, too, that many reporters would derive this moral from his fall. Certainly, there are supporting quotes available from aggrieved academic historians. And journalists--like Mr. Ambrose himself--are slaves to the narrative imperative: They must impose a structure on what they write, connecting the dots to present a compelling story.
Thus a commentator in the Toronto Globe and Mail observed that Mr. Ambrose earns million-dollar advances and hobnobs with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, who turned "Band of Brothers" into an acclaimed TV series. "But there seems to have been a price to pay for all that celebrity and money," the writer noted, observing that the scandal "begs the question of how far--and how fast--an academic should go when turning a dry history into a book ready for the mass market and perhaps Hollywood producers."
Adding Ms. Goodwin to the mix would muddy this storyline, since she does not mass-produce books, and only one of them has a taint. Also, she won a Pulitzer Prize for "No Ordinary Time," so presumably she stands in better repute with her peers than does Mr. Ambrose. But otherwise she fits the pattern: a best-selling historian who appears on TV, and whose "Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys" was turned into a miniseries. If more books by other popular historians are implicated in the days to come, then the Ambrose story will be subsumed by a widening scandal. Until then, however, corruption-by-Hollywood is likely to remain the media motif.
But the problem with this theory is obvious: Mr. Ambrose was recycling prose from his sources at least as early as "Crazy Horse and Custer" in 1975, two decades before he hit the big time. Further, the theorists generally cite his "Nixon" trilogy approvingly as an example of his earlier, scholarly work, before fame and fortune spoiled him. Yet the third volume borrows chunks of prose from a book by Robert Sam Anson. So the problem is not new, and cannot be blamed on Hollywood.
Whatever led Mr. Ambrose to decide he could appropriate others' words, it was not the demands of a mass audience that made him do it. Nobody goes into history to get rich. Mr. Ambrose has cranked out some 30 books since his first one in 1962, driven apparently by a love for his subject and an urge to share it widely. That's to his credit. That he sped up the writing process by lifting passages from others is to his discredit. It is not, however, an indictment of popular history.
People want a story well told. Such stories are readily available; they comprise our history. There is no shortage of writers willing to render them into lively narratives. What they do is very hard work, and it takes time to get it right--time that Mr. Ambrose has apparently been unwilling to devote to each separate project.
But the narrative approach remains valid, for only by this means will most Americans encounter their own history in compelling format. This, after all, is a nation that gazes at Britney Spears's navel, yet has also devoured David McCullough's biography of John Adams--at 751 pages. Academic historians may take issue with aspects of this book, but they can only be thankful that Mr. McCullough has enabled a dowdy historical figure such as Adams to compete with Ms. Spears for attention. So please, publishers, keep those popular histories coming. Just make sure that all the words in them are written by the person whose name is on the cover.
Mr. Lewis is a staff writer for Forbes.com.
