A Historian and Her Sources
CRADER, BO
A Historian and Her Sources Doris Kearns Goodwin's borrowed material. BY BO CRADER IN 1993 HISTORIAN Doris Kearns Goodwin complained that Joe McGinniss had borrowed extensively for his The Last...
...Back then, Doris kept notes on long legal pads and some papers got shuffled...
...Joe Senior rushed down and escorted the priests into a small room off the living room...
...Those mistakes were corrected...
...105) Here's Goodwin: [He] turned helplessly to Tommy Campbell, then fought his way through the hysterical fans to provide solace to his son...
...I stood for a few moments with my mind half paralyzed...
...She asked that more footnotes be added and a paragraph crediting her book...
...130) Goodwin: Mrs...
...McTaggart, for example, writes that her [Kathleen's] closest friends assumed that she and Billy were "semiengaged...
...It was corrected as soon as she became aware of the error...
...The treatment of McTaggart's work as a source changed after the first edition of Goodwin's book...
...Doris acknowledged the mistake to McTaggart, and they reached an understanding on how those mistakes should be corrected...
...There's "a certain amount of license," he says...
...Drawing on my notes, I did not realize that in some cases they constituted a close paraphrase of the original work...
...The truth was that the young couple had reached no such agreement...
...Gibson gave a tea in her hon- ^ or to introduce her to some of the other girls—hardly a routine practice for new recruits...
...She changed a few words, which seems to me to be within bounds of journalistic ethics, although I myself always tried to give credit to authors I used...
...one source for Goodwin was Hank Searls's 1969 The Lost Prince: Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy...
...David Rosenthal, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, publisher of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, says that an "understanding" was reached between Goodwin and McTaggart...
...We sat with the priests in a smaller room off the living room, and from what they told us we realized that there could be no hope, and that our son was dead...
...Now, it's Goodwin's use of source material that requires explication...
...Then she managed to blurt out what the two priests had said...
...Subsequently, The Weekly Standard received a letter pointing out that Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys borrowed with insufficient attribution from three earlier works by other authors...
...The truth was that the young couple had reached no such agreement...
...On the day of the party reports of a secret engagement were published in the Boston papers...
...Yet the dateline of the preface in both editions reads "November 1986," as if nothing had been added...
...Their eldest son was dead...
...I acknowledged immediately that she was right, that she should have been footnoted more fully...
...Searls describes Joe Kennedy's disappointing last game on the Harvard football squad: Joe had shivered on benches from West Point on the Hudson to Dartmouth in the mountains of New Hampshire...
...65) The corresponding passage in Goodwin's book differs by just a few words: her [Kathleen's] closest friends assumed she and Billy were semi-engaged...
...He leaped from the bed and hurried downstairs, I following him...
...689) But the most striking borrowing is from Lynne McTaggart's 1983 Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times...
...The changes were not accompanied by any acknowledgment of defects in the earlier edition...
...523) McTaggart: Mrs...
...As Goodwin put it in her 1993 complaint against McGinnis: "There's nothing wrong with an author building on material from a previous book...
...Point on the Hudson to Dartmouth in the mountains of New Hampshire...
...She confirms that McTag-gart contacted her shortly after the book appeared in 1987...
...This was done in the paperback edition...
...Why weren't the passages ever put in quotation marks...
...Waking him, she stood for a few moments, her mind half paralyzed, trying to speak but stumbling over her words...
...666) There are dozens more such parallels in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys...
...622) In an interview, Searls acknowledges the similarities...
...Had she asked for more quotations in the text," says Goodwin, "I would have done it...
...586) McTaggart: Hardly a day passed without a photograph in the papers of little Teddy, taking a snapshot with his Brownie held upside down, or the five Kennedy children lined up on a train or bus...
...507) Searls describes the scene after the 1937 Harvard victory over Yale: He turned helplessly to his old classmate Campbell, then fought his way blindly through hysterical fans to the field to comfort his son...
...101) Eighteen years later, Goodwin writes that Joe Kennedy was shivering on benches from West Bo Crader is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...That's the way history is built, as long as you credit the source...
...25) Goodwin: Hardly a day passed without a newspaper photograph of little Teddy taking a snapshot with his camera held upside down, or the five Kennedy children lined up on a train or bus...
...When I wrote the passages in question, I did not have the McTaggart book in front of me...
...The error was inadvertent...
...There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things...
...I tried to speak but stumbled over the words...
...And learning from this, I have made it a constant practice to use quotations in the text itself and to have the original source directly in front of me when I am writing...
...McTaggart, in a phone interview, says that she is unable to comment on or discuss the matter...
...He just uses it flat out, without saying that it came from my work," Goodwin told the Boston Globe...
...Then I managed to blurt out that priests were here with that message...
...178) Goodwin changes a few words: Naval pilot training held coldly to the premise that it was best to remove those who couldn't conquer the tensions of flying early, before too much time and money had been wasted on them...
...An examination of the works in question confirmed the correspondent's allegation...
...And the preface to the latest edition of Goodwin's book includes the following paragraph: "In the preparation of this work, I was grateful for Lynne McTaggart's biography, Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times, which is the definitive biography of Kathleen Kennedy and which I used as a primary source for information on Kathleen Kennedy, both in my research and in my writing...
...In response to my questions, Goodwin explains, "I wrote everything in longhand in those days, including the notes I took on secondary sources...
...The 2001 edition of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys contains 40 endnotes citing McTaggart that were not in the first edition...
...McTaggart was not mentioned in the preface to the first edition...
...Goodwin continues, "This was brought to a satisfactory conclusion 15 years ago...
...In the original book there were some mistakes made," he says...
...301) The corresponding passage in Goodwin's book differs mainly in changing perspective from the first to third person: Rose ran upstairs and burst into her husband's room...
...You expect that another writer would acknowledge that," Goodwin continued...
...There he and Rose heard the story which made it clear that there could be no hope...
...Kennedy writes: I ran upstairs and awakened Joe...
...Harvey Gibson gave a tea in her honor to introduce her to some of the other girls—hardly a routine practice for new recruits...
...And to this day, the borrowed passages are not placed in quotation marks, though they are now footnoted...
...In another instance, Goodwin's prose mirrors that of Rose Kennedy's 1974 autobiography, Times to Remember...
...I just don't understand why that wasn't done...
...BY BO CRADER IN 1993 HISTORIAN Doris Kearns Goodwin complained that Joe McGinniss had borrowed extensively for his The Last Brother from her 1987 book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys...
...508) Searls writes that Naval pilot training held coldly to the premise that it was better to remove the accident-prone early, before too much time and money had been wasted on him...
...Two weeks ago in this magazine, Fred Barnes reported on the striking similarities between Stephen E. Ambrose's The Wild Blue and Thomas Childers's Wings of Morning...
...It's inexplicable why it wasn't done...
...Professional norms in the crediting of source material are not, however, matters of lawyer-like negotiation between authors and their sources...
...On the day of the party, reports of a secret engagement were published in the Boston papers...
Vol. 7 • January 2002 • No. 19
