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Goodwin's folly
How a popular historian committed plagiarism, tried to cover it up, and got caught in the culture of the celebrity media scandal
BY DAN KENNEDY

[] There is a certain predictability in the way a media scandal such as the one engulfing historian Doris Kearns Goodwin plays out. It begins with the initial accusation -- in this case, of plagiarism -- followed by the accused party's response. It then escalates, with more allegations, more responses, and the arrival of ax-grinding outsiders who sign up for the prosecution or the defense depending on their ideological and personal inclinations. Finally, the accused slips out of sight -- usually without anyone's really understanding what happened in the first place -- only to be resurrected somewhere down the line. The sins of the past are entirely forgotten and mostly forgiven, save for that nagging suspicion that, well, she must have done something wrong. Otherwise, why would she have gotten into trouble in the first place?

Goodwin, who has admitted to lifting other writers' material without proper credit in her 1987 bestseller The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (Simon & Schuster), is right at that just-about-to-slip-out-of-sight stage. She's been relieved of duty in judging this year's Pulitzer Prize nominations, and she's been dropped -- maybe temporarily, maybe not -- from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, on PBS. She's lost out on a few college speaking gigs. The Harvard Crimson has called on her to resign from the university's Board of Overseers, arguing that she committed literary crimes that would cost a mere undergraduate his or her academic career.

These are, of course, serious, real-world problems for a scholar. But at the same time that Goodwin has thrived as a historian, she has also become a media celebrity, a reliable television talking head whose unpretentious erudition and sensible moderation have made her welcome in millions of living rooms. And within that artificial reality, different rules apply.

In media terms, she now occupies familiar ground. There's Mike Barnicle, a man whose own record of professional misdeeds -- serial plagiarizing and fabricating, and falsely claiming years ago to have written speeches for Robert Kennedy and to have helped write the screenplay for The Candidate -- far exceed Goodwin's. (Ironically, Goodwin and her husband, former presidential aide Richard Goodwin, have publicly defended Barnicle.) There's Paula Poundstone, who pled guilty to child endangerment for driving drunk, and who was hit with murky charges of child abuse as well. And, of course, there's Gary Condit and his reprehensible behavior following the disappearance of Chandra Levy. On the surface, these cases have nothing to do with one another. But they do share this: as with Barnicle, Poundstone, and Condit, the actual case against Goodwin will, over time, fade in importance in comparison to how people feel about her: whether they like her, whether they think she's good on TV, and whether they enjoy her books, assuming they've ever read any of them.

Barnicle's back, writing columns for the New York Daily News, hosting a talk show on WTKK Radio (96.9 FM), and popping up on WCVB-TV/Channel 5's Chronicle and MSNBC. Poundstone is trying to come back, and is performing in Boston this week. Condit is gone, but rest assured he'll find some way of reinventing himself -- perhaps as a professional media victim on the cable talk shows, followed by a lucrative second career as a Washington lobbyist.

[] And if you think I'm off base in comparing Barnicle's and Goodwin's literary transgressions with the far more serious matters involving Poundstone and Condit, well, that's the point. In mass-media culture, everything is flattened out. Plagiarism and child endangerment are just two interchangeable aspects of the vague, generic charge of "wrongdoing," a convenient shorthand term that can be repeated endlessly in the speeded-up, dumbed-down news cycle. The charge sticks even when it can be disproved -- and yet, when true, it rarely inflicts more than passing damage.

Before this past week, I had read only one of Goodwin's books -- her first, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Harper & Row, 1976). But you needn't read 900-page books in their entirety to evaluate charges of plagiarism. You need only compare Goodwin's passages with her sources. For this piece, I sought neither her comments nor those of anyone else. As is generally the case in such a media scandal, everyone is on the record, in some cases repeatedly. What's missing is an attempt to make sense of that record.

It's not likely that many people are taking pleasure in Goodwin's ordeal. She is, by most accounts, a nice person who works hard on her books. A Concord, Massachusetts resident, she is also a local celebrity, someone in whom Bostonians have justifiably taken some pride. She has essentially admitted to plagiarism in the case of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. But though her Pulitzer-winning 1994 opus on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time (Simon & Schuster), has come under question, it seems solid enough to me to withstand sustained assault. Doris Kearns Goodwin is not a fraud. She is, rather, an earnest, well-intentioned historian who made some serious mistakes.

But before she slips out of sight, before the nascent stirrings of her inevitable comeback can even begin, it's worthwhile to consider what it is she actually did.

TRYING TO make sense of the Goodwin scandal is humbling. Yes, she made serious mistakes. Yet it's easy to see why she strayed -- and how any writer could fall into the same trap. The best way to understand what happened is to pull together the various threads of the story -- something that is rarely done in day-to-day coverage, which is why it is all too often played as a matter of indeterminate accusation and response. (In laying out the sequence of events, I am relying to some extent on a piece that appeared in the online History News Network, which I, in turn, learned about in an Alex Beam column in the Boston Globe. See how complicated this gets?)

First blood. The story broke in mid January in the Weekly Standard -- the same magazine that, several weeks earlier, had reported similar charges against historian Stephen Ambrose. In Goodwin's case, the particulars reported by Bo Crader were overwhelming. Crader showed that Goodwin -- in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys -- had lifted sentences and paragraphs, word-for-word or close to it, from Hank Searls's The Lost Prince: Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy (1969); from Rose Kennedy's 1974 autobiography, Times to Remember; and, especially, from Lynne McTaggart's Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times (1983).

In addition to reproducing three striking examples of Goodwin's lifting from McTaggart, Crader reported that there were "dozens more such parallels," and that, in later editions of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Goodwin had added 40 footnotes crediting McTaggart. Goodwin also added language to the preface effusively praising McTaggart's book -- yet slipped it in so that it appeared to be part of her original November 1986 preface.

Modified limited hangout. Goodwin immediately went into damage-control mode, starting with the Standard piece. She blamed her borrowing on her practice at the time of taking extensive notes in longhand. "When I wrote the passages in question, I did not have the McTaggart book in front of me," Goodwin told the Standard. "Drawing on my notes, I did not realize that in some cases they constituted a close paraphrase of the original work." She acknowledged that the extra footnotes and the acknowledgment of McTaggart's work were added after McTaggart contacted her.

Unfortunately for Goodwin, she almost immediately had to begin expanding on her carefully constructed answer. On January 22, the Globe's Tom Palmer reported that Goodwin had reached a "private settlement" with McTaggart -- including money -- after McTaggart complained about Goodwin's uncredited reliance on her book. "The whole understanding was supposed to be confidential just because of the nature of it," Goodwin told Palmer. "All that really happened was she sent me a letter saying not all the passages that relied on her work had been as fully footnoted as she would have liked. I agreed with her."

Goodwin followed that up with an essay in Time in which she acknowledged that "mistakes can happen," but added, "I take great pride in the depth of my research and the extensiveness of my citations."

The wronged woman. Goodwin may have believed she had no choice but to defend herself. But by speaking about her "confidential" arrangement with McTaggart, she freed McTaggart to speak as well. And what McTaggart has had to say is devastating.

In an interview published on the Weekly Standard's Web site on January 23, McTaggart said Goodwin's account that she accidentally lifted a few lines was "not correct." In fact, McTaggart said, "there were dozens and dozens of individual phrases and unusual turns of phrase taken virtually verbatim, or paragraphs where a few words had been changed." She added that Goodwin reached a settlement with her only after McTaggart had threatened to sue her for "serious copyright infringement." And though McTaggart, like Goodwin, declined to say how much money had changed hands, she characterized the settlement as "substantial . . . many times more than what is usually the case for this kind of thing, according to my lawyer."

Last Saturday McTaggart was back, this time on the New York Times op-ed page, flatly accusing Goodwin (and Stephen Ambrose) of "plagiarism." McTaggart wrote: "In my case, whether Ms. Goodwin had used footnotes or even quotation marks around the passages taken from my book would not have mattered. . . . It was the sheer volume of the appropriation -- thousands of my exact or nearly exact words -- that supported my copyright infringement claim."

Defining the offense. On March 3, the Globe ran a column by Tom Oliphant that, at first blush, looked important. He observed that another Goodwin accuser, media gadfly Philip Nobile (about whom more below), had neglected to note that passages Goodwin supposedly lifted from William Shirer's magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959) had actually been footnoted -- that is, Goodwin had given Shirer full credit -- and it was thus ridiculous to accuse her of plagiarism.

"Enough already," Oliphant wrote. "Off the facts, Doris Kearns Goodwin plagiarized nothing 15 years ago in her massive and definitive work, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. With context and perspective thrown in, as they should be, you could go back and underline the preceding sentence a hundred times." (Yes, he really does write like that.)

Oliphant's defense turned out to be a case of premature exoneration, akin to this classic bit from February 3, 1998, when he wrote: "There was no phone sex; no heavy phone conversation of any kind; no dress with semen stains on it; no dress at all, in fact."

Incredibly, Oliphant's defense of Goodwin came a week after the New York Times had reported that she herself had admitted that "she failed to acknowledge scores of close paraphrases from other authors," and that she had asked her researchers to stop working on her current project -- a biography of Abraham Lincoln -- so they could completely vet The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Goodwin also told the Times that she had asked her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to destroy what copies it had of that book and to publish a new, corrected version this spring.

What Oliphant really missed, though, was the tough, rigorous standard by which academia judges plagiarism. Maybe if Oliphant cited a book in one of his columns but then paraphrased it a little too closely, it wouldn't be a big deal. Not so in Goodwin's world. By neglecting to put exact quotes inside quotation marks, Goodwin committed plagiarism, even though her footnotes clearly credited her sources.

Timothy Noah, of the online publication Slate, has been dogged in pursuing this aspect of the Goodwin story, even going so far as to track down Harvard University's policy on plagiarism and to put up a link. Here is a highly relevant excerpt: "If your own sentences follow the source so closely in idea and sentence structure that the result is really closer to quotation than to paraphrase, . . . you are plagiarizing, even if you have cited the source [my emphasis]."

By these lights, Goodwin -- a former Harvard professor -- committed plagiarism. Period. Oliphant, who is himself a Harvard graduate, should be able to understand that.

Behind the fortress walls. Goodwin has made it clear that the book she will defend to the last -- the book for which she will pour hot oil on marauding invaders -- is No Ordinary Time, her magnum opus, the work for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. If it ever were to be shown that she was as sloppy with that as she was with her earlier book, then it's possible she could be forced to relinquish her Pulitzer -- and her reputation would be in ruins.

Enter Philip Nobile, a former media critic for New York magazine with a passion for gloves-off intellectual combat. In the past, Nobile has gone after the late Alex Haley for his use of lifted material in Roots, and he's been crusading for several years against radio host Don Imus for his occasional forays into racist humor. (Indeed, I've got a folder full of angry e- mails from Nobile, ripping me for failing to see Imus in as negative a light as he does.)

On February 23, Nobile wrote a piece for the History News Network charging that The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys also includes passages plagiarized from three other books: Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers's Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (1972); Peter Collier and David Horowitz's The Kennedys: An American Drama (1974); and Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Shirer examples did not strike me as particularly strong, but I found the passages cited from the other two books to be troubling. In any case, they fit with Goodwin's acknowledgment that there are numerous problems with The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

Far more controversial, though, is Nobile's campaign against No Ordinary Time, first reported in an Alex Beam column in the Globe. According to Nobile, Goodwin lifted from David McCullough's Truman (1992); but he has been unable to persuade anyone to publish his findings, including the History News Network.

Nobile declined to provide me with his examples, so I plowed through the footnotes to No Ordinary Time myself and found six citations to Truman. Three were straightforward attributions of direct quotes by historical figures. No problem there. The other three paralleled Truman in small fragments, but, at least in my estimation, qualified as paraphrase rather than plagiarism. The closest call came in a passage about FDR's funeral. Goodwin: "Never, Truman later wrote, would he forget the sight of so many people in grief." McCullough: "Never would he forget, Truman wrote, the sight of so many people in grief." But that's just one rather pedestrian sentence, and the surrounding material in each of the two books is quite different.

Barring any further disclosures, I'm prepared to accept Goodwin's assertion that No Ordinary Time is free of the sort of problems that have been found in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. No one -- not me, not Beam, probably not even Nobile -- would be talking about her close paraphrasing of McCullough were it not for the problems with her earlier book.

PERHAPS THE MOST crucial thing to keep in mind is that the standard Goodwin violated in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is very tough, but it's a standard she chose to impose upon herself both by affiliating with Harvard and by presenting herself as a serious historian. As Tim Noah and others have pointed out, if one of her students at Harvard had done the same thing she did, that student could be kicked out, with no guarantee of being allowed to return, and with a permanent blot on his or her academic record.

History-writing is a solitary job, but it takes place within a community. And it's the standards of that community that Goodwin violated. Because she failed to pay sufficient respect to those who preceded her, she has created the risk that those who come after will give her credit that she isn't due -- that someone will footnote a small but telling literary flourish and attribute it to Goodwin rather than Lynne McTaggart or Peter Collier and David Horowitz or Hank Searls.

One fascinating little sideshow: Goodwin has found herself in far more trouble than Stephen Ambrose, whose plagiarizing is, if anything, far more pervasive than hers. The difference is how they see themselves, and how they wish to be seen by others. Ambrose is frankly and openly a popularizer who does not much care about what the academy thinks of him. In a piece for Slate, Columbia University historian David Greenberg recounted what Ambrose told the New York Times: "I tell stories. . . . I am not writing a PhD dissertation. . . . I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't." Etc.

By contrast, Greenberg noted, Goodwin wants to be seen as a popular historian who is also respected by the academy. "Because the reputation she wants to protect lies with elites, not just with an undiscerning mass, she couldn't shrug off her plagiarism and still preserve her reputation, even if she wanted to," wrote Greenberg, who is an admirer of Goodwin's. "She's in an impossible bind: The more she tries to fix her mistakes, the more attention she draws to them."

Last week, David Gates wrote an essay in Newsweek about the Goodwin scandal in which he recounted trying to analyze similar passages in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. His conclusion is fair warning for anyone who tries to make definitive statements about this: "I went at this stuff with a yellow highlight pen. My conclusion? A hell of a mess. And my head hurt."

So does mine.

Goodwin committed plagiarism, but I don't think she is, at heart, a plagiarist. She'll be back. What she'll have to live with is the legacy of the celebrity media scandal. She may regain her popularity and dazzle readers with her Lincoln biography, but it won't quite be the same. She may even be described as a "controversial" historian, that slippery phrase used by lazy commentators who can't remember and don't care what was behind the "controversy" they're alluding to.

Thus, even if she comes back and thrives -- and it's a good bet that she will -- she'll be permanently diminished as a public figure.

And nobody will be able to say exactly why.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net..

Issue Date: March 22 - 28, 2002