The Original George W.

It has been a hard time for those of us who enjoy popularized histories and historical biographies. Doris Kearns Goodwin, perhaps best known for Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream and No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Stephen Ambrose author of, among many other volumes, Undaunted Courage and Citizen Soldiers were both caught in plagiarizing material. Most likely these errors were the consequence of haste and sloppiness, rather than malice. Much worst was the apparently deliberate historical fraud perpetrated by Michael Bellesiles who ended up resigning from Emory University for his misdeeds. Bellesiles wrote Arming America which won Columbia University's Bancroft's Prize for History. Columbia University's Trustees later voted to rescind the prize after Bellesiles's scholarly crime became clear. On the basis of irreproducible evidence, Bellesiles argued that in colonial America ownership was far less ubiquitous as previously supposed. It was not lost on the cultural elites that such a result could effect our perceptions of the original understanding of the Second Amendment's guarantee of the "right of the people to keep and bear arms." The original credulity of the Bancroft Committee and academia as a whole towards Bellesiles's book is a testament to its rhetorical convenience to those for whom the Second Amendment is an inconvenient nuisance.

In between the careless errors of Kearns and Ambrose and the malicious ones of Bellesiles falls the deceitfulness of Joseph Ellis. Ellis was caught by the Boston Globe in a series of self-aggrandizing lies told to his friends, colleagues, and students. Ellis really spent his military career lecturing at West Point, but he told others not only that he was in Vietnam, but that he was a platoon leader in the storied 101st Airborne Division. Ellis also claimed that he served on the staff of General William Westmoreland, the American Commander in Vietnam, giving him extraordinary credibility when teaching a course on that era at Mount Holyoke College. Again, people were credulous about Ellis's Vietnam claims because Ellis was anti-war in outlook. The anti-war sentiments of a Vietnam War hero had greater claim to moral authority. For his sins, Ellis was suspended without pay for one year from his endowed chair at Mount Holyoke

And yet, Ellis is a wonderfully gifted writer, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his book the Founding Brothers: The American Revolutionary Generation. There is a legitimate argument that Ellis is one of the most knowledgeable historians of the Revolutionary War Era. Despite these credentials and gifts, it is difficult to read Ellis's new book, His Excellency, about George Washington, without nagging doubts caused by Ellis's personal mendacity. Fortunately, Ellis used the opportunity of this new book to return to historical scholarship.

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