By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Sunday, March 10, 2002 - 07:08 pm:| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Sunday, March 10, 2002 - 07:08 pm: |
A Twice-Told Tale
An epidemic of plagiarism and the betrayal that goes beyond words.
By Jonathan Pitts
Baltimore Sun Staff
March 10, 2002
Joe Balkoski discovered his betrayal on the most ordinary day, in the most ordinary way. The slender, mild-mannered Baltimorean was on his way home from his part-time job at a military think tank in Washington - his twin interests, computers and military history, made him a valuable asset to battle simulators - and had 10 minutes to catch his MARC train. He used it to buy a new tome, Citizen Soldiers, at the station's bookstore.
Truth be told, he didn't expect to learn much. The 512-page hardcover was historian Stephen Ambrose's follow-up to his blockbuster hit, D-Day. Balkoski, a passionate expert on that subject - he had been to Normandy four times and published a D-Day book of his own - felt Ambrose generally failed to add to the public reservoir of knowledge. "He just tends to rehash what is already known," he says.
Still, he had to admit, Ambrose's potboiler narrative style had interested millions of Americans in their own history. And every Ambrose release was a publishing event in itself. Balkoski made his train, found a seat and settled in for a nice, relaxing read.
But when he cracked the book open, he saw it right away. "I remember it so distinctly" he recalls now, five years later. "I read that sentence and actually said, out loud, 'What in the world is this?' The woman next to me must have thought I was nuts."
Joe Balkoski wasn't ready for the asylum yet. But his life was about to take some crazy turns.
Joe Balkoski and Stephen Ambrose have one thing in common: a passion for World War II and the men who fought it. Both have done a lot to shift the focus of the war's history from the military brass to the common soldier. Otherwise, they couldn't differ more.
Balkoski, 47, who lives in Anneslie, is a self-effacing man, more interested in the stories he tells than in himself as bard. Since his days studying history at Vassar, he knew the ins and outs of research. His 1989 book, Beyond the Beachhead, sold 30,000 copies in three editions.
Unaffiliated with a university, he scrapes together his own funds to do research. He works for a computer-games company in Timonium.
Ambrose, on the other hand, has made himself a cultural titan. His skein of rip-roaring best sellers - Band of Brothers, D-Day, Undaunted Courage and Nothing Like It In The World among them - cover subjects from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the building of the intercontinental railroad. "He is not only a superb historian," writes former Sen. George McGovern, a central figure in Ambrose's newest book, The Wild Blue, "he is one of the few great men I have been privileged to know." Since his teaching career began at the University of New Orleans 30 years ago, he has churned out some 30 books. He is now a professor emeritus there.
That output would suffice for any writer. But Ambrose, 65, has done more. His passion and vigor helped him found the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, which has drawn more than half a million visitors since it opened in 2000. He founded the Eisenhower Center, a collection of manuscripts from Ike's days as supreme allied commander in WWII Europe. He's a ubiquitous TV commentator. He has been a consultant on Band of Brothers, the recent HBO miniseries based on his book, and on Steven Spielberg's epic Saving Private Ryan. According to the History News Network, a Web site popular with historians, he charges up to $40,000 per lecture, gives 20 talks a year and sometimes requires a Learjet to fly him to his engagements.
He is said to make $3 million a year, if not more. Small wonder The Wall Street Journal dubbed him "Ambrose Inc."
The debut of Citizen Soldiers in 1997 was, like all Ambrose releases, an event in itself. It was expected to be another best seller for the author and for Simon and Schuster, the publisher for whom he has been a franchise.
So when Balkoski settled in his seat on the MARC train and opened the book at its preface, one might have expected him to be pleased to see his name and the title of his own book. Wasn't it flattering to know that Ambrose even knew who he was? "Some of my friends said I should feel that way," he says with a shake of the head.
Instead, the sentence was alarming.
He has long since memorized the phrasing, but he still sounds incredulous when he speaks it: "I ... stole material, shamelessly if profitably, from ... Joseph Balkoski's 'Beyond the Beachhead.' "
" 'Stole'?" he says. " 'Shamelessly?' What was that supposed to mean? Was I supposed to be honored? I can tell you, I wasn't."
He went straight to the index and checked every sentence that mentioned his name. His words seemed properly credited in the body of the text. "But that word 'stole' made me nervous," he recalls.
He dug deeper. He turned to each passage that mentioned Normandy, the principal setting of his own book, and what he discovered left him gasping. He found himself reading stories, one after another, that were lifted straight out of his own book. And they were written in language that was "95 to to 99 percent my own."
Ambrose's had footnotes that referred to Balkoski in a general way in the back. But there were no quotation marks around the passages to attribute the language to him. The megastar left the impression that he had crafted the prose himself.
By the time Balkoski's train reached Penn Station in Baltimore, he had found six passages almost identical to his own.
He didn't know what to say or think. His mind was spinning. At home, he talked it over with his wife. Could they - should they - take legal action? The attorney for his publisher, tiny Stackpole Books in Mechanicsburg, Pa., agreed the copying was unethical and possibly illegal, but advised not to bring suit. It was a David-and-Goliath story with no slingshot in sight.
Balkoski took the advice. Surely, he thought, this was an isolated gaffe in an otherwise impeccable career.
Almost five years have passed since the release of Citizen Soldiers. In those five years, Ambrose has rolled out seven more books - comprising 2,034 pages - one of them with a co-author. The most recent, The Wild Blue, which details the experiences of McGovern's B-24 bombing squadron over Europe, came out last fall. As ever, his book took wing, soaring onto The New York Times' best-seller list and staying there 19 weeks.
But then it started spewing flames. Amid widespread disparagement - critics called the book sloppy, patched-together and slow - sales declined.
And when the story behind the story broke, it crashed and burned outright.
A sharp-eyed reader noted that Ambrose had lifted passages from a 1995 book, Wings of Morning, written by Thomas Childers, a widely respected professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. That still-unidentified reader contacted Fred Barnes, editor of the magazine The Weekly Standard. Barnes, himself an Ambrose fan, wrote a scathing piece that stopped just short of using the "p" word - the literary equivalent of the death penalty.
Ambrose, at first, lived up to his class-act persona. He made a public apology. On his Web site and elsewhere, he confessed his failure to use quotation marks around some stirring passages. He offered "no defense." He had erred in "methodology."
Childers, who has taught Ambrose books in his classes, accepted the apology. "I just wanted to move on," he says.
Some in the history field were slow to judge. Take Tom Schwartz, a professor of history at Vanderbilt. "My suspicion is that when you're that prolific, you get careless," says Schwartz, who has been working on an LBJ biography for six years. Ambrose was guilty not of plagiarism, he felt, but of "extreme sloppiness."
The nationwide response was less sparing. The History News Network buzzed with commentary, nearly all of it negative. "He should be sued by those whose works he has lifted and censured by the rest of us in the field," wrote John Zwicky, PhD, an archivist at the national Pediatric History Center. "Without [using] quotation marks to indicate precisely what a footnote refers to," writes Lief Carter, a Colorado College historian, "students of mine ... flunk the entire course."
Real-world condemnation was no less plentiful. "If you use someone else's distinctive language and don't put quotation marks around it, that's out of bounds," says University of Minnesota history professor Hy Berman. "When our students do it, they get a remedial education. Fast."
After the Childers episode hit, Mark Lewis, a writer at Forbes.com, recalled spotting similarities between Ambrose's Crazy Horse and Custer (Doubleday, 1975) and the late Jay Monaghan's Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer (Little, Brown & Co., 1959) Now there was clearly a pattern.
The story he wrote on the Custer affair triggered a blizzard of e-mails.
One was from a friend of Balkoski's who pointed to Beyond the Beachhead. A fifth, a sixth and a seventh pilfered author came to light - then, incredibly, six more. Seven of Ambrose's books were sullied by the charges.
His explanations fell somewhat short of soul-searching. "I am not out there stealing other people's writings," Ambrose told The New York Times. "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 in a footnote. I just want want [readers] to know where the hell it came from." Elsewhere he says: "I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. ... It almost gets to the point where, 'how much is the reader going to take?' "
"Well, dammit, I tell stories, too," says Balkoski, who, like Childers, has grown angrier with each surfacing case. "He's a professor emeritus. He's at the top of the ladder. He knows the rules. Saying he made a mistake of 'methodology' is like saying Cal Ripken ran the bases backward in an 'error of methodology.' He knew damn well what he was doing."
Childers, who now declines to accept the Ambrose apology, agrees. "Ambrose knows the rules," he says. "He just doesn't seem to care about them."
In the spreading fiasco, Beyond the Beachhead was the third book to come to light. Balkoski himself was thunderstruck by a National Public Radio report in which an actor and actress read equivalent passages, back and forth, between Beyond the Beachhead and Citizen Soldiers.
"Even I couldn't believe how similar they sounded," he says. "The effect was scathing."
Already working on his next book, about WWII in the Pacific - "my father has more energy than any three men I know," says son Hugh, who runs the author's Helena, Mont., office - Stephen Ambrose could not be reached for comment.
The wagons have been circled at the University of New Orleans, but a fellow professor issued a sly no-comment: "I've worked with the man," he says. "I think it would be in bad taste to comment on my colleague's serial plagiarism."
The Balkoski case illustrates how history is forged: by individual scholars of the present who work with primary sources. Those are either survivors who witnessed an event or the original writings of those who survived. Given that bedrock, the historian uses secondary sources to supplement. Not everyone, Balkoski found, is up to the daunting task.
Ambrose and Balkoski both report that on the morning of June 6, 1944, the 29th Infantry Division (comprising Marylanders and Virginians) and the 1st Infantry Division were the first to hit Omaha Beach. The 175th Infantry, mostly Baltimoreans, landed the next day.
The first couple of hours on the beach were a disaster. The troops were paralyzed by machine-gun fire. Many young soldiers lost their leaders. Some took initiative on their own; others just waited for senior officers to tell them what to do.
At this point, a key figure enters Beyond the Beachhead.
Brig. Gen. Norman Cota, a 1917 West Point graduate, was one of two generals on the beach. Cota, 50, landed about an hour after the first troops. "There are so many stories about him walking up and down the beach under fire," says Balkoski. "Guys were wondering what the hell he was doing, standing there in the open."
Later in the day, as the Americans inched their way inland, they came upon a village called St. Laurent, a typical French burg with lots of sturdy little farmhouses, all made of solid stone. The Germans were using them as strongholds; machine gunners and riflemen fired from within.
As Balkoski tells it, Cota approached his riflemen and an American captain to ask what was going on. "Well, sir," the captain replied, "the Germans are in a tough position, and we're exchanging rifle fire." Cota asked for six or seven of the captain's best men and told him to watch. He crept into a position where the Germans couldn't see him and, covered by the fire of his men, personally rushed the house.
He threw in grenades. He kicked the door in. The Germans who survived fled out the back, running for their lives.
Finally the firing stopped, and Cota returned to the young captain. "Did you see that?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," said the captain.
"You can't just stop when the Germans are shooting at you. You've got to take initiative and get them out of their holes. Do you understand?" Yes, the captain said. "Good," said Cota, "because I'm only one man, and I won't be able to do this for everybody." The captain saluted. Cota disappeared.
The Americans broke through. It was a turning point that day and, quite possibly, in the war.
Later that night at headquarters, according to Balkoski, John Purley Cooper, then a lieutenant colonel and one of the few to witness these events, approached Cota and said: "General, you just can't do that! You're a general officer. The men love and respect you. The longer you do that, the greater the chances you'll be killed."
"Cooper, I don't want to get killed in this war, and I don't expect to," Cota replied. "But I'm an older man, 30 years older than these other fellows. They look up to me and need me to lead."
How do we know this story, this single anecdote, from half a century ago? John Purley Cooper himself was in his 80s, a retired general living in Monkton, when Balkoski, in the course of his book research, contacted him. He was one of the hundreds of survivors Balkoski sought out, tape recorder in hand. The two became such good friends that for two years, Balkoski went to Cooper's house every Saturday morning to chat and spent another three years talking regularly to him on the phone. Cooper gave the writer pep talks when his enthusiasm flagged.
"You've got to tell the story of the 29th," Cooper would say. "We'll all be gone before long. And if you're going to tell the story of the 29th, you have to tell this story" about Cota. He said it epitomized the division.
"It wasn't long before I was the only person in the world who knew that story," says Balkoski. An enfeebled General Cooper, who had come to think of Balkoski as a son, died two months before the book came out.
In Stolen Words, his 1989 seminal book on plagiarism, scholar Thomas Mallon makes the point that "originality - not just innocence of plagiarism, but the making of something really and truly new - set itself down as a cardinal literary virtue ... in the middle of the 18th Century, and it has never gotten up."
Balkoski couldn't agree more. "When I was a college freshman," he says, "they taught us that if we were going to be historians, we had to base our findings on original sources." Secondary sources - secondhand accounts of the original writing, "borrowed" from contemporary authors - should be sparingly used.
As a case study, he places his Cota passage next to one that appeared in Citizen Soldiers eight years later.
Balkoski's reads as follows: " 'Well, I'll tell you what, captain,' said Cota, unbuckling two grenades from his jacket. 'You and your men start shooting at them. I'll take a squad of men, and you and your men watch carefully. I'll show you how to take a house with Germans in it.' Cota led his little group around the house to a nearby hedge. Suddenly, the general and his group raced forward, screaming like wild men, hurling grenades in the windows. Cota and another man kicked in the front door, tossed a few more grenades inside, waited for the explosions, then dashed into the house."
Then there was Ambrose's in 1997: " 'Well, I'll tell you what, captain,' said Cota, unbuckling two grenades from his jacket. 'You and your men start shooting at them. I'll show you how to take a house with Germans in it' ...
"Cota led his little group around a hedge to get as close as possible to the house. Suddenly, he gave a whoop and raced forward, the squad following him, yelling like wild men. As they tossed grenades into the windows, Cota and another man kicked in the front door, tossed a couple of grenades inside, waited for the explosions, then dashed into the house."
The theft of an anecdote alone is unethical, says Baldoski, but it's not letter-of-the-law plagiarism if cited properly. "If he had taken the time to reword my story, it wouldn't have bothered me." But the megastar copied the story and its "distinctive language," leaving the impression that the words were his.
"I agonized over every word in my book," Balkoski says. "It was a labor of love. He obviously had my book open at his computer and just typed in the words, changing a pronoun or a comma here and there. What took me 20 years took him 15 minutes. If that."
And if time is money, Balkoski got robbed. It took him a year and a half to write Beyond the Beachhead. He had endless local and European travel expenses, postal fees for corresponding with sources, and more. He had to quit his regular job. "I would have been better off on welfare," he says.
Balkoski sees irony in the fact that Ambrose is famed for being the veteran's friend when "he doesn't seem that interested in spending time with them."
Balkoski, not Ambrose, has attended every reunion of the 29th Division he could make - 16 in all - and cultivated relationships with scores of men twice his age.
Balkoski, not Ambrose, has been to nearly 30 funerals of 29th Division vets as his friends have passed away. World War II veterans are "dropping like flies," he says. "About 8,000 a day."
Ambrose didn't just steal words. He ransacked brotherhoods.
Last summer, Balkoski did more dirty work, traveling to France, mostly at his own expense, again for research purposes. He lived with his wife and two daughters in a village near St. Laurent. He was supposed to give five group tours of the beach, but two of them fell through, leaving him in financial hardship.
That was worrisome but, in a way, incidental: If it's the experience that counts, he completed his mission. "I know that when these guys are gone, I can look in the mirror. I can raise my head proudly and say, 'these guys are gone, but you know what? I know what they did.' "
He even made sure to find, from the late General Cooper's descriptions, the very house that Cota had raided. "It gave me chills just to stand there," he says, eyes glassed over. "Absolute chills."
To sell books by the million, you can't help attracting innumerable fans, friends and supporters, and Ambrose has a wide array. "While this is a slip-up, it's not characteristic of his style at all," says UNO chancellor Gregory O'Brien. Victoria Meyer, a spokesperson for Simon and Schuster, says these affairs have done nothing to diminish Ambrose's prominence, and that they will work with him to fix any irregularities they find.
Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center, implies the historian is envied: "It's always the tallest nail that gets hammered," he says. Nick Mueller, CEO and president of the D-Day Museum and Ambrose's close friend, calls it "a tempest in a teapot. We're talking about a man who has written 10,000 pages in his career. If you only make four or five mistakes in that much work, it's a miracle."
A common debate today cites the difficulty of balancing the narrative drive of "popular history" with the standards of "academic history."
"Publishers who want to sell a lot of books tell their authors not to use too many footnotes," says Balkoski. "It slows things down." Finally, Ambrose employs researchers (one of them son Hugh), a practice some say can cause losses in translation.
Even Mallon cuts him some slack.
"When you're writing a work of history," he told NPR, "you have a great deal of paraphernalia around you. You have printed sources, archival sources, handwritten notes. ... It takes a great deal of organizational skill. People get tired. People get sloppy."
For his part, Ambrose vows to correct all future editions of tainted books.
Balkoski buys none of it. "First of all, when we met at a conference in 1994, we got along fine," he says, "so you can't say that I'm envious."
Second, the issue over the use of researchers is a ruse. "It's your name on the cover, and every word is your responsibility," Balkoski says.
And if the omission of quotation marks were, as Ambrose insists, a "mistake," the language in the Ambrose passages would be exactly the same as Balkoski's. "Instead, in each case, he alters a word here, a phrasing there. That shows consciousness of wrongdoing." Finally, Balkoski says it is possible, if you work hard enough, to create a lively narrative and still give credit where it's due.
Childers, partly at the urging of his outraged students, has stricken Ambrose books from his curricula. Mallon says that, if nothing else, the Ambrose reputation has taken a major hit, and so might his future sales.
Rusty Monhollon, a history professor at Hood College in Frederick who has used Ambrose books, says all this copying sounds "downright pathological."
The nationwide debate on plagiarism heated up recently with the disclosure that Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a regular commentator on PBS' The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, had copied scores of passages from other authors for her 1987 bestseller, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and conceded there might even be more. She is on "indefinite leave" from her TV duties.
Worse still is the possibility that the whole imbroglio is just a sign of the times. A longtime colleague says Ambrose changed around 1990, when he found he could sell a lot of books.
"As a historian," says the colleague, who asked to remain anonymous, "the wildly popular Ambrose of the 1990s made a Faustian bargain. He traded his reputation as the master historian for the millions earned in writing boilerplate popular history. In the process, not only did his research methods become notably sloppier, but his craftsmanship disintegrated.
"Ultimately, Ambrositis, like Enronitis, is a sad tale of corporate greed."
What recourse does someone like Joe Balkoski have? Kearns simply conceded a settlement with the authors in question. Ambrose has chosen not to.
Balkoski, however, is halfway through the labyrinthine process of filing a complaint with the American History Association, a sort of "super-committee" that oversees historical affairs in this country.
"If they issue a finding of plagiarism," says Balkoski, "it's a whole new ballgame. If we get that ruling, and Simon and Schuster continues to make their statements of support, they'll be saying 'we defend plagiarism.' Then I'd want to go to every high school and college student in the country and say, 'one of the biggest publishing houses in the United States says it's OK to plagiarize.' "
What does Balkoski want from Ambrose? "An apology in a very public forum, an admission of wrongdoing, and an explanation of how it happened," he says. To this man for whom history is a labor of love, the issues of gaining a settlement or of filing copyright-infringement lawsuits are secondary.
He has met with a few lawyers, though, to explore options. "You do have to address the fact that that that little 'C' in the front of a book means something," he says.
Still, Balkoski is so upset on principle that he wrote a letter to the president of his alma mater, Frances Fergusson. He asked whether Vassar still teaches the same rigorous standards of scholarship they did when he was there.
"Her reply was eloquent," he says. "She reassured me that Vassar still insists on academic honesty, that plagiarism is punished severely there. It was a welcome reassurance."
One afternoon last month, Balkoski followed a hunch into his library. He went straight to Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers. He had a sneaking feeling Ambrose had pilfered the work of one of his closest friends, WWII veteran and author Harold P. Leinbaugh.
Leinbaugh, who died in the early '90s, was the principal author of The Men of Company K, a cutting-edge account of the Battle of the Bulge. "It was one of the first books to take a narrow focus from the soldier's point of view," Balkoski says. "He went into vivid, meticulous detail. He did a wonderful job of joining history and humanity."
If Balkoski was right, Leinbaugh would be victim No. 13.
As he flipped through Citizen Soldiers, the first passage his eyes fell on was one of his favorite stories of the war. A soldier at the front was wounded in the arm. He was in pain. He was elated. He was going home. And as he walked away from the company, he shouted, of all things, "Clean sheets! Clean sheets!"
Leinbaugh had told the story in his 1988 book - and in almost exactly the same words.
Within 15 minutes, Balkoski had found four or five plundered passages. "If I took an hour," he said, "I wonder how many more I'd find."
Balkoski has long been on a personal mission - to humanize World War II vets in perpetuity, to honor their sacrifices. "Leinbaugh would have taken great affront at this," he said, clapping Citizen Soldiers shut.
"I want to set the record straight. He was a true friend."
Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun