Scrapbook
Scrapbook 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...
...Robert W. Osborn accuse him of stealing public property had died of an apoplectic fit...
...Ambrose is a repeat offender...
...Not all of Ambrose's problems involve copying other authors' work...
...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...
...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...
...As is Eugene Scalia, now solicitor at the Department of Labor...
...Officials in Ankara say they will protest to the United Nations...
...Wahhabis believe that impressive buildings are like idols, and that treating them with respect constitutes a denial of monotheistic religion...
...Hardly...
...Scalia's nomination had made it out of committee before Tom Daschle single-handedly brought it to a screeching halt...
...Good horsemanship was taken for granted among the gentry" (Ambrose, p. 30...
...1: Jefferson the Virginian, p. 46...
...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...
...It will be replaced by eleven high rise residential towers, comprising 942 apartments, and a twin-tower five-star hotel including 1,200 rooms...
...One turns out to have been the subject of a review in the autumn 1997 issue of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography...
...Ambrose's 1991 Ruin and Recovery borrowed from Robert Sam Anson's 1984 Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon...
...Both men probably would have been approved by the Senate...
...His publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, agreed in 1979 to delete the passage in subsequent printings of the book...
...Wahhabis twice, in the 19th and 20th centuries, devastated the sacred mosques, tombs, and other buildings in the Two Holy Places, Mecca and Medina...
...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...
...Some of these instances were reported this week by Mark Lewis of Forbes.com and by the New York Times...
...President Bush recess-appointed both nominees late last week...
...Dodd attacked Reich in the media, but refused to give him a Senate hearing at which he could reply...
...Most of Ambrose's citations do point to more reputable scholarly sources, but not always precisely...
...That's unfortunate...
...This distasteful process notwithstanding, Reich is nonetheless assuming the position for which the president selected him...
...Both these books were edited by Simon & Schuster's Alice Mayhew...
...Are they sorry about that...
...In addition, as reported by Forbes: * Ambrose's 1975 Crazy Horse and Custer lifted passages from Jay Mon-aghan's 1959 Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer...
...Scrapbook 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'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...
...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...
...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...
...John Lillie "who upon hearing Lt...
...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...
...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...
...Wahhabism doesn't change, and the Saudis, proud of having destroyed the Islamic architectural heritage in the Arabian peninsula, are still at it...
...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...
...Wonder how they really feel about the Jewish state...
...But—as is almost always the case with sticky-fingered writers—this turns out not to have been an isolated incident...
...Too bad Bush had to get his men in in such a roundabout fashion...
...Americans found out about this attitude up close on September 11...
...Adding nothing substantially new, Ambrose uncritically skates across the preceding literature...
...Ambrose's 1997 Citizen Soldiers borrowed from Joseph Balkoski's 1989 Beyond the Beachhead...
...The castle was built more than two centuries ago on a hill overlooking Mecca, with the aim of protecting the holy site...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Ambrose grudgingly apologized in 1978...
...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...
...In his 1966 book Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, he wrote of a Capt...
...Still, his willingness to stand with "controversial" nominees is encouraging, especially with major fights ahead on judicial nominations...
...The destruction in March 2001 by the pro-Wah-habi Afghan Taliban of the ancient Buddhist statues of Bamiyan falls into the same category of sacred architecture criticism...
Vol. 7 • January 2002 • No. 18
