When Leftists Fall Out
Amazingly, the
LA Times provides a detailed slapdown of Doris Kearns Goodwin and her plagiarism addiction. Her whine:
In her own mind, Goodwin was not--is not--a plagiarist. 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. And no one is claiming that. No one is claiming that there was any intent."
Her defense has been that she was guilty only of a "mechanical breakdown," a misdemeanor of sloppy footnoting and subpar paraphrasing in what was her first attempt at a major history. She also maintains that after the Kennedy book, her methodology was cleaned up, so that when it came to "No Ordinary Time," her Pulitzer-winning history of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt in wartime, "things got checked. We knew. We'd been through this."
Nonetheless, an examination of that book against a handful of the hundreds of texts listed in the bibliography did turn up instances of what appear to be parallel language usage and similarly constructed sentences.
She's a legend in her own mind. There's also an interesting profile of plagiarists as a group:
Cases where plagiarism is alleged--whether they eventually prove out or not--tend to unfold along uncannily similar lines. Accused plagiarists, for example, as Thomas Mallon and others have noted, often are writers who have not been shy about accusing others of the offense. And when caught, they almost always fall back first on a defense of sloppy notetaking.
"Plagiarists," Mallon observed in his 1989 book, "take refuge in their notebooks with roughly the same frequency that scoundrels wrap themselves in the flag."
Should the notebook gambit fail, the accused will duck behind his or her footnotes, protesting that it would be ludicrous to credit a book and then crib from it; that would be giving the game away.
"As it develops," the late Peter Shaw, an English professor at Stony Brook University, wrote in a 1982 paper for the academic journal American Scholar, "giving the game away proves to be the rule rather than the exception among plagiarists. Both in the commission of the original act and in the fantastic excuses that follow it, plagiarism is often calculated above all to result in detection."
Shaw found similarities between plagiarists and kleptomaniacs. The pattern, he wrote, "begins with the plagiarist's act of stealing material of the sort that his talent and intelligence would appear to make unnecessary for him. There follows his strewing of clues to bring about detection. After detection, the plagiarist offers excuses that testify to the unconscious motivation of his original act, though ordinarily without acknowledging either its breach of ethics or its obvious self-destructiveness."
Recidivism also appears to be part of the package. Plagiarism, Mallon found, "is something people may do for a variety of reasons but almost always something they do more than once."
Doris fits the profile perfectly. Bzzzzt, game over.
