A Reply to Richard Jensen

Mark Lewis

I am, as Richard Jensen points out, a mere journalist and not a professional historian. But if his use of my Forbes.com articles is typical of the way he handles primary sources, I’m not sure Jensen is the best person to instruct me in the ways of scholarly attribution.

He condems an article I wrote about the charges Cornelius Ryan hurled at Stephen Ambrose in 1970, when Ambrose’s The Supreme Commander was published. Jensen labels this article “false” because Ambrose “did not use a single word of Ryan’s.” But I make no such assertion. I simply cite Ryan’s accusation that Ambrose quotes two British officers without attributing the quotations to their source, an earlier Ryan book. Ambrose, I write, “is not accused of presenting Ryan’s words as his own, but of denying Ryan proper attribution.” To support this, I post the text of Ryan’s letter to Ambrose’s publisher—and also Ambrose’s contrite reply, conceding the error and apologizing. All of which seems fairly straightforward to me, but then I am only a journalist.

In another story, I note that Ambrose in Crazy Horse and Custer appears to have copied several phrases from Jay Monaghan’s earlier Custer biography without using quotation marks. Jensen pounces, saying Ambrose did not borrow from Monaghan because “Ambrose and Monaghan used the same words taken from the same primary source.” This is a bizarre claim, given that Ambrose in his endnotes cites only Monaghan for the passage in question. Monaghan cites the original source, J.M. Wright, whose name appears nowhere in Ambrose’s bibliography. And Monaghan paraphrases Wright, for example by rewording “ungainly walk” into “gangly walk.” Ambrose does little paraphrasing; he scoops up Monaghan’s version, “gangly walk” and all. Moreover, Monaghan makes an apparent error by attributing the Custer description to Wright’s roommate rather than to Wright himself. Ambrose, following Monaghan, repeats the mistake. Jensen concludes that I “allege theft without tracing where the words actually came from,” but he seems not to have traced them himself.

Not that there is anything wrong with Ambrose relying on secondary sources. Jensen claims I challenge “the very act of retelling an old story.” Not so. Retelling old stories is the essence of narrative history. The problem is that Ambrose does not always retell the stories by recasting them in his own words. Sometimes, without using quotation marks, he just tells the stories pretty much as they already have been told by his sources. Ambrose always cites the source in his endnotes, but that is not good enough. Readers don’t check the notes to see who wrote which parts of a book. They assume all of it was written by the person whose name is on the cover. So when Ambrose copies other writers’ words without using quotation marks, his readers are indeed deceived.

How often does Ambrose do this? A spot check of randomly selected citations in seven Ambrose books and his Ph.D. thesis turned up a high percentage of problematic passages, suggesting a career-long pattern of, shall we say, inadequate paraphrasing. That hardly invalidates his body of work, but it does leave him open to legitimate criticism. Ambrose enjoys a reputation for turning dry historical material into sparkling prose. When some of that prose turns out to be copied from his supposedly dull sources, it tends to raise eyebrows.

Despite what Jensen implies, no one accuses Ambrose of plagiarizing massive chunks of text, or of stealing the fruits of another historian’s scholarship without giving credit. If those are felony offenses, then perhaps what Ambrose is accused of doing is more of a misdemeanor. But it is an ethical lapse nonetheless. It may not be plagiarism as defined by the American Historical Association, and it may not rise to the level of copyright infringement, but when the accused is a best-selling author celebrated for his ability to craft compelling narratives, it rises to the level of news.

Jensen surely is correct that it is up to the academy, not the media, to set professional standards for historians. But Ambrose is also a writer in the more general sense, whose books target a mass audience, so he may be held to other standards besides those of the academy. Journalists, for instance, are not allowed to copy other people’s prose, so we tend to apply the same ethical rule to nonfiction authors.

As Jensen notes, magazines such as Forbes do not use footnotes. But I do not write for Forbes; I write for Forbes.com, a web site where I can go beyond footnotes and post all the passages I mention in my stories. OAH members can visit the site, examine the evidence and make up their own minds as to whether “falsehoods,” “vast exaggerations” and “incompetent research” are labels best applied to my stories or to Jensen’s hyperbolic critique.

Mark Lewis is a journalist with Forbes.Com magazine.

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