No one is claiming that there was any intent.”

She takes pains to avoid the very word, referring to the McTaggart business as “that mistake” or “this thing I have done” or simply “it.” In an interview, the only time she uttered the word “plagiarism” was to deny committing it in the Kennedy book: “You know, at the time the book was written, it absolutely required intent to deceive in order to be plagiarism.

In her own mind, Goodwin was not-is not-a plagiarist. Still others painted it as part of a larger trend in lost standards and accountability, casting Goodwin as a sort of Kenneth L. At the same time, there were academicians who took from the affair a lesson on the perils of assembly-line scholarship. Professional jealousy received frequent mention as a motive driving her detractors. Some came to see in her story one more instance of the machinery of American fame lifting up someone only to drop her down again. Hayes or Woodrow Wilson dealt in his White House days with whatever dilemma was confronting the current occupant. Whether her work was tainted would be debated in newspaper columns, on academic Web sites and on the very talking-head television shows where Goodwin so often played the role of quick-draw historian-always ready with a charmingly told anecdote about how Rutherford B. I’ll wait to see what you do with it.”Īnd with that it began, a literary dust-up that would engulf Goodwin, one of the nation’s most popular and publicly visible historians. Barnes, I am not sending this tip to any other press outlet for the time being. The tipster, identified in the letter as an “academic historian living in the Northeastern U.S.,” closed on a goading note: “Mr. McTaggart, it would develop, had accused Goodwin long ago of “slavishly” copying her work, a complaint that led to a secret legal settlement. Passages from the Goodwin book and other Kennedy histories were set down for comparison, beginning with a three-sentence snippet that appeared to be borrowed from a biography of Kathleen Kennedy by Lynne McTaggart, a London-based writer. The mystery correspondent opened with a salute, saying Barnes had been “quite right” to expose Ambrose, and then moved on to the main business of the missive-ratting out another celebrity historian: “I’ve long been concerned by several instances of plagiarism I noted long ago in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s ‘The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.’ I believe she ought to be called to account, just as Professor Ambrose has.” Ambrose’s book about World War II bombers contained some passages “barely distinguishable” from another author’s work. It was addressed to Executive Editor Fred Barnes, who had written a piece suggesting that historian Stephen E. In early January, an anonymous letter arrived at the Washington, D.C., office of the Weekly Standard.

Doris kearns goodwin baseball book