Dear Ms. Berger,
Wow, you play rough ["The 'borking' of Doris Kearns Goodwin," 3.7.02]. Thomas Oliphant's silly diatribe in the Boston Globe (3/3) was trumped by David Gates in the current Newsweek. He read the same parallels on historynewsnetwork.org and devoted a two-page story to my case. He came to a different conclusion.
Yes, I've written online recently for tompaine.com and the history Web site above. My editor at both places was and is the respected historian, Rick Shenkman. But otherwise I've written for the Times in New York and London, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, Spy, Esquire, New York, The Village Voice, Newsday. I've written or edited eleven books including Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and the New York Review of Books. Need I go on? A few years ago the BBC turned my Village Voice story on Alex Haley into an hour-long documentary seen all over the world. So give me a break.
I neither belong to, nor cultivate any BLOG, though Jim Romenesko links up a lot of my work.
In your ardor to excoriate me, you neglected to say that Goodwin blocked publication of my Truman parallels through legal intimidation. What is she afraid of? If my case is weak, she'll look good. But she won't fight in the open, preferring off the record legal intimidation.
As for your soft-headed absolution of Goodwin's plagiarism as merely accidental, you recklessly failed to mention that she deliberately covered up her copying in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys via a secret payoff to Lynne McTaggart in 1988. Thus her plagiarism was deliberate the second time around. When she had a chance to correct her accident, she refused and left scores of passages kidnapped from McTaggart remain UNQUOTED for the next fourteen years!
Naturally, as an ethical journalist yourself, you will make the necessary retraction and corrections of your character attack.
Yours etc.,
Philip Nobile
Natasha Berger Responds:
I was quite hard on Philip Nobile in my recent article on Doris Kearns Goodwin, so in the interest of fairness, I want to address the issues he brings up in his letter to me.
First, the David Gates article in Newsweek that Nobile claims refuted Thomas Oliphant's recent Boston Globe column. Oliphant, as I wrote in my piece, argues that Nobile is unfairly pursuing Goodwin for plagiarizing parts of her book, No Ordinary Time. I cited Oliphant's point that the accusations have not been published in the mainstream media, because they are without merit. Gates does not mention Oliphant or No Ordinary Time. Instead, he quotes from side by side comparisons of various books and the one for which Goodwin is already in hot water, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Here's what he says about the controversial passages:
I went at this stuff with a yellow highlight pen. My conclusion? A hell of a mess. . . As Goodwin herself admitted, her paraphrases were too close, and she'd repeated some phrases verbatim. How bad they looked depended on how much other text you put around them. Nobile's had a little; Goodwin's had a lot. But the words at issue looked the same. Further conclusion: Some spinning was going on, and it wasn't just my head.
This is hardly an endorsement of Nobile. Further on, Gates concludes:
If you're a historian and you didn't actually witness this or that event, you reconstruct and retell it based on your own interviews, somebody else's printed account or both. In other words, you combine quotation with paraphrase, and it's not surprising when the two get mixed up -- whether (in ascending order of heinousness) out of honest confusion, carelessness, laziness or dishonesty. What Goodwin did is small potatoes compared with my hapless student's trying to pass off [another author's] essay as his own.
This actually supports the arguments I made in my piece. Goodwin was certainly wrong, but her sin is made more forgivable by her voluminous scholarship on this and other books. As for the payoff to Lynne McTaggart, I'll let Goodwin speak for herself. Here's what she told The Weekly Standard:
I acknowledged immediately that she was right, that she should have been footnoted more fully. She asked that more footnotes be added and a paragraph crediting her book. This was done in the paperback edition Had she asked for more quotations in the text, I would have done it.
For whatever reason, fourteen years ago McTaggart chose to take Goodwin's money and put the matter to rest.
Nobile also defends himself against an accusation I never made -- that he is a blogger. What I did say was that he made "regular" appearances on blogs. Nobile attests to this himself: "Romenesko links up a lot of my work."
That said, calling Nobile an "online" journalist was not entirely accurate -- he is an accomplished print journalist as well. It was his online work that concerned me here though, as I believed and still do, it fanned the flames of the Goodwin controversy. I came to this conclusion by analyzing his words about the case, not through any personal or professional malice, and I stand by it.
