PressEthic

As a history major at college, I really looked up to Doris Kearns Goodwin. I was a big Roosevelt buff, and fell in love with her book, No Ordinary Time. That was until my mother let is slip one day that she had heard Goodwin was a cheater. That she had been caught plagiarizing another historian. While I did quite enjoy her writing, her historical fiction reads almost like a narrative, and makes for a far easier and enjoyable read than others who write about the Depression, I just couldn’t bear to pick up her book anymore. She had lost my respect. She had lost my interest.

Last week’s Boston Globe featured a column announcing Goodwin’s comeback. But it wasn’t like she was sick or had a sudden career change, then decided to return back to historical writing. She cheated. The entire Kearns Goodwin cheating affair is actually logged on the site for the History News Network. The site provides a list of historians, appropriately titled, "Historians on the Hot Seat" and details those who have been caught fabricating or lifting other people’s work. The list is longer than I thought it would be, and as a history major I am a little troubled. But apparently, Kearns-Goodwin has never officially admitted to full-out plagiarism. While she paid off the woman who claimed she had taken her words to write, The Fitzgerald’s and the Kennedy’s -she admits to merely getting her notes mixed up, "inadvertently copying" as some in her defense claim. But that the Los Angeles Time found similar problems in her Roosevelt novel, “No Ordinary Time”, It makes one think, once a cheater, always a cheater...

What columnist Alex Beam has a problem with is the ease at which Kearns is being allowed back into society-back into the ranks of literary greatness. Beam cites her “charming personality”, “powerful friends”, and her eloquent writing style as keys to her easy rehabilitation. Her book, entitled, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln will not be released for another week and half, but already the woman has interviews scheduled for The Today Show and NPR and will even appear as a guest on Meet the Press. She is being featured in November in Atlantic Monthly. Is this how we treat those who have violated the code of ethics? Kearns promised to release a correct more accurate version of The Fitzgerald’s and the Kennedy‘s(aka one she wrote entirely on her own) soon after the scandal hit in 2002. She had all the books pulled from the shelves, but Beam found a copy at a just a few weeks ago at a bookstore, with the incriminating passages still included. As for the re-written book, the publishing house says its in the works. I guess trying to erase the evidence that you are a big fat cheater, is last on Goodwin's list.

How should cheaters be dealt with in society? While Goodwin in no way went through the same investigation as say Jayson Blair, and as far as we know did not plagiarize in that magnitude that he did, should she be accepted into society with such open-arms? You can bet that in her interviews, questions about her inadvertent copying will be first on the interviewers list, and I am sure she will just smile, and say she mixed up her notes with those of her secondary source notes. Though anyone who is writing directly from their notes, can usually tell, unless they are in some incredible stupor that the writing just doesn’t sound anything like their own. While I love a good read about Abraham Lincoln, I do not think I will be buying Goodwin’s book. If I can write a 150 page senior thesis on Eleanor Roosevelt without copying from another writer and correctly citing my sources, then this woman,(who is an overseer at Harvard) should have had no problem.