STEPHEN AMBROSE, COPYCAT (CONTINUED) As Fred Barnes reported in our cover story last week, bestselling historian Stephen Ambrose lifted the words of historian Thomas Childers and published them as his own. Ambrose subsequently apologized to Childers for the unacknowledged debt that “The Wild Blue” owes to “Wings of Morning” (both are histories of B-24 crews in World War II). But–as is almost always the case with sticky-fingered writers–this turns out not to have been an isolated incident. Ambrose is a repeat offender. The Weekly Standard has been besieged in the past week with e-mails, phone calls, and letters pointing to a number of books in which Ambrose recycles other authors’ prose without benefit of quotation marks. Some of these instances were reported this week by Mark Lewis of Forbes.com and by the New York Times. One turns out to have been the subject of a review in the autumn 1997 issue of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. There, reviewer Turk McCleskey of the Virginia Military Institute commented on Ambrose’s 1996 history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, “Undaunted Courage”: [Ambrose’s book] represents itself as a deeply researched and carefully documented narrative, but on closer scrutiny, “Undaunted Courage” only repackages other people’s work. Adding nothing substantially new, Ambrose uncritically skates across the preceding literature. . . . Most of Ambrose’s citations do point to more reputable scholarly sources, but not always precisely. Indeed, Ambrose’s debt to his predecessors leaves him open to charges of sloppy paraphrasing, as with this wanly cited echo of Dumas Malone: “In a country of vast estates, without cities or public transportation of any kind, with plantation seats far apart, riding was not a matter of sport or diversion but of necessity. . . . Good horsemanship was taken for granted among the gentry” (Ambrose, p. 30). Malone wrote: “In a country without large settlements and where plantation seats were far apart, riding was not a matter of occasional diversion but of daily necessity, and good horsemanship was taken for granted among the gentry” (Dumas Malone, “Jefferson and His Time,” vol. 1: “Jefferson the Virginian,” p. 46). In addition, as reported by Forbes: -Ambrose’s 1975 “Crazy Horse and Custer” lifted passages from Jay Monaghan’s 1959 “Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer.” -Ambrose’s 1997 “Citizen Soldiers” borrowed from Joseph Balkoski’s 1989 “Beyond the Beachhead.” -Ambrose’s 1991 “Ruin and Recovery” borrowed from Robert Sam Anson’s 1984 “Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon.” Both these books were edited by Simon & Schuster’s Alice Mayhew. Finally, according to the New York Times, in “The Wild Blue” Ambrose “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).” Not all of Ambrose’s problems involve copying other authors’ work. In his 1966 book “Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point,” he wrote of a Capt. John Lillie “who upon hearing Lt. Robert W. Osborn accuse him of stealing public property had died of an apoplectic fit.” Lillie’s descendants disputed the matter, first demanding Ambrose’s source, then, when neither he nor military record-keepers could come up with one, seeking a retraction. Ambrose grudgingly apologized in 1978. His publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, agreed in 1979 to delete the passage in subsequent printings of the book. Ambrose’s defenders, including his publisher, intimate that leaving out quotation marks might be a kind of streamlining of the production process, a side effect of high productivity. Are they sorry about that? Hardly. “We welcome the fact that he is prolific,” David Rosenthal, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, told the New York Times. “He works at a schedule that he sets, and we encourage the amount of his output because there is a readership that wants it.” URBAN RENEWAL IN MECCA Wahhabism–the quasi-fascist ideology that serves as a sort of genetic code for the Saudi Arabian state and the Islamic extremism it funds around the world–has always been committed to iconoclasm and vandalism. Wahhabis twice, in the 19th and 20th centuries, devastated the sacred mosques, tombs, and other buildings in the Two Holy Places, Mecca and Medina. Indeed, the Wahhabis would have leveled the Ka’bah, the temple in Mecca that is the object of pilgrimages by pious Muslims, had they thought they could get away with it. Wahhabis believe that impressive buildings are like idols, and that treating them with respect constitutes a denial of monotheistic religion. Americans found out about this attitude up close on September 11. The destruction in March 2001 by the pro-Wahhabi Afghan Taliban of the ancient Buddhist statues of Bamiyan falls into the same category of sacred architecture criticism. Wahhabism doesn’t change, and the Saudis, proud of having destroyed the Islamic architectural heritage in the Arabian peninsula, are still at it. Turkey has assailed the Saudis for a new “cultural massacre”–the demolition at the beginning of this year of the historic Ottoman castle of al-Ajyad, overlooking Mecca. Officials in Ankara say they will protest to the United Nations. Saudi minister of Islamic Affairs Saleh Al-Sheikh replied in the manner typical of the kingdom’s representatives: “No one has the right to interfere in what comes under the [Saudi] state’s authority.” The castle was built more than two centuries ago on a hill overlooking Mecca, with the aim of protecting the holy site. It will be replaced by eleven high rise residential towers, comprising 942 apartments, and a twin-tower five-star hotel including 1,200 rooms. RECESS TIME Otto Reich, President Bush’s nominee to be assistant secretary of state for western hemispheric affairs, will never get the chance to publicly defend himself from the vicious charges leveled against him in a public smear campaign by Senator Christopher Dodd. That’s unfortunate. Dodd attacked Reich in the media, but refused to give him a Senate hearing at which he could reply. This distasteful process notwithstanding, Reich is nonetheless assuming the position for which the president selected him. As is Eugene Scalia, now solicitor at the Department of Labor. President Bush recess-appointed both nominees late last week. Scalia’s nomination had made it out of committee before Tom Daschle single-handedly brought it to a screeching halt. Both men probably would have been approved by the Senate. Too bad Bush had to get his men in in such a roundabout fashion. Still, his willingness to stand with “controversial” nominees is encouraging, especially with major fights ahead on judicial nominations. FROM THE PEOPLE WHO WON’T SAY “TERRORIST” Reuters, the Brit news agency that thinks it would be unfair to label Osama bin Laden a terrorist, sent this remarkable phrase across the wires last Wednesday (emphasis added): “The United States, which gives Israel about $2 billion a year in weaponry used to kill Palestinians, objected to the $100 million [Iranian arms] shipment to the Palestinians.” Wonder how they really feel about the Jewish state.
