Three death threats, one left hook to the jaw, 40 rejections from 40 publishers in 40 months, and a sold-out first edition. Such was the response to my 1994 book, The Martin Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story. Chronicles and I first became interested in this story in mid-1990, when we heard 1) that a university...
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National Love-Fest
Jackie, Tiger, and Ellen—not as catchy as Martin, Bartin, and Fish, or Abraham, Martin, and John, but good enough to mesmerize the press this spring. In one respect, the mainstream media were right: Jackie Robinson was a courageous man; Tiger Woods is an extraordinary golfer; and Ellen DeGenerate—well, two out of three ain’t bad. But...
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The Model and the Maid
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” Tolstoy’s remark shot to mind this summer, when supermodel Linda Evangelista won 80,000 French francs in damages from her lawsuit against Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front Party of France. The controversy stemmed from Le Pen’s campaign posters, which depicted a Joan...
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Playing Politics With Pericles
Somewhere toward the middle of The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Moral Stories, William Bennett has included “The Funeral Oration of Pericles” from Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. To Bennett (or to his ghostwriter), this “speech reminds participants of democracy two and a half millennia later that the character of the state is determined by...
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Christopher Hitchens & Vanity Fair
Christopher Hitchens and Vanity Fair get the Connie Chung Award for May. “Thanks for your help,” read the letter inserted in my complimentary copy of the May issue of Vanity Fair. It seemed like a polite gesture, a pat on the head for sharing my research (published and unpublished) on plagiarism. The irony—if you can...
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Denied Justice
Joe Occhipinti continues to be denied justice. As Greg Kaye reported in the October 1993 Chronicles, Occhipinti was the highly decorated undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service who was framed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for doing his job too well. Fluent in three languages, Occhipinti had distinguished himself as an expert...
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The New Sexual World Order
The New Sexual World Order is taking shape, thanks to the Peace Gorps, the United Nations, and the U.S. Congress. In late September, Dr. J. Ricker Polsdorfer, the Peace Corps’ director of medical services in Africa, was fired for promoting abstinence as a method of preventing AIDS. Dr. Polsdorfer’s crimes, according to the Peace Corps...
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Quintessentially American
ABC News recently broadcast contradictory stories about the Balkans War. The first story highlighted a press conference where NATO personnel denied that Americans were engaged in warfare and that any Serb civilians had been killed during the thousands of round-the-clock sorties conducted by NATO forces. Reporting this “news” without a hint of skepticism, Peter Jennings...
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The Edinburgh Brute
“The whole Sherlock Holmes saga is a triumphant illustration of art’s supremacy over life.” —Christopher Morley It was the spring of 1893, and Arthur Conan Doyle was plotting murder. “I am in the middle of the last Holmes story,” Doyle wrote to his mother, “after which the gentleman vanishes, never to return. I am weary...
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Our Blessed Plot
As if we needed more proof of the threat to national sovereignty, there comes John Gardner’s latest “James Bond novel,” SeaFire. Gone is Ian Fleming’s wonderful cast of characters. The drab but lovable Q has been replaced by a woman nicknamed Q’ute; the admiral M has been replaced by a committee of bureaucrats; a primping...
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Brief Mentions I
“She was ‘The Woman’ the press whispered about, with Dr. Martin Luther King on that last tragic trip to Memphis,” reads the back-cover blurb in oversize type. No, not Irene Adler, but the “first black woman senator from Kentucky.” Georgia Powers has finally come forward and described her many trysts with King, recounting how she...
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“Open the Files!”
“Open the files!” demands Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. And right fully so. The files in question involve the federal government’s attempt to entrap Qubilah Shabazz into a conspiracy to assassinate Farrakhan, who has long been accused of involvement in the 1965 murder of Shabazz’s father, Malcolm X. Federal prosecutors suddenly agreed in May...
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Brief Mentions
“Harry’s gone mad,” yelled Mrs. Barnes. “I just saw him running around the side of the house with a gun, muttering something about the plumbers.” Young Robert ran outside, and there found his dad, distinguished historian and man of letters, lying on his belly, blasting away with his old Army rifle at the foundation of...
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Peddlers of Virtue
The recent controversy involving Olympic diving star Greg Louganis highlights more than the moral degeneracy of the latest poster boy for AIDS. When Louganis hit his head on the diving board and bled into the pool at the 1988 Olympics, the only honorable and morally just thing for him to do was to notify all...
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Brief Mentions
[The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, by Lynn H. Nicholas (New York: Alfred A.Knopf) 498 pp., $27.50] Lynn Nicholas has written the most comprehensive account of the Nazis’ attempt to steal, sell, dismantle, and destroy Europe’s artistic heritage, but her stunning illustrations nearly...
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All Such Filthy Cheats
When Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman announced on January 18 his decision not to pursue confirmation as Secretary of Defense, he repeated Robert Massie’s old charge that William Safire is a plagiarist, saying this “does not, in my judgment, put [Safire] in a position to frame moral judgment on any of us, in or out...
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Where Have You Gone?
Joe DiMaggio, where have you gone? One could add Babe Ruth, Bobby Hull, and Dick Butkus. On good days American sports stars were treated more as gods than as mortal heroes, but on bad days they were booed mercilessly by fans. Booing is a grand old American tradition, but like nearly everything that’s traditional, it’s...
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In Praise of Tyranny
“I’m always sorry when any language is lost,” Samuel Johnson told Boswell during their tour of the Hebrides in September 1773, “because languages are the pedigree of nations.” Linguistic pride is not a dead artifact of Romantic nationalism. It is alive and well today, among the Quebecois and among the supporters of a constitutional amendment...
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Truth or Consequences: Redefining Plagiarism
A Trojan horse has passed through the gates of the academy, virtually unnoticed. The Sinon is Keith Miller, an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University and author of Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (1992), and the subversive offering is his essay in the January 20...
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The Last Battleground
The breakfast table is the latest battleground in the war against the family. School-based breakfast programs have been tried at the local level for years, and the idea goes back at least as far as the Black Panthers in the 1960’s. The big push now is for a national program. Last year, a federally subsidized...
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A Houdini of Time
“I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal my words every one from his neighbour.” —Jeremiah 23:30 After seven years on public and private payrolls as senior editor of the King Papers Project, Clayborne Carson has finally produced the first volume of MLK’s papers. The project began in 1984, and since 1986 has...
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A Number of Requests
Our “Letters From Prison“ (Correspondence, May 1992) elicited a number of requests for an update. The letter ended with “Frank,” a 26-year-old black man imprisoned in Illinois, in solitary confinement at a medium-security prison. He had been placed in isolation for his own protection, because the gang he had once belonged to, the Black Gangster...
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Both Symbol and Symptom
Batman Returns–as much as Easy Rider, Saturday Night Fever, and Wall Street-is both symbol and symptom of its cultural time. Fans looking for anything like Jack Nicholson’s psychotic comedy will be disappointed, for this sequel is all too serious and somber. The entire movie is cast in an eerie purple blue, and this time the...
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ACT-UP of the Newspaper Industry
USA Today is the ACT-UP of the newspaper industry. Last April 8 the paper outed Arthur Ashe, forcing him to reveal the fact that a 1983 blood transfusion left him HIV positive. USA Today also recently outed former television newscaster Linda Ellerbee, bullying her into a public discussion of her double mastectomy. As Ellerbee revealed...
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America: Ostrich or Eagle?
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips As a gorgeous American call girl lies murdered on the 46th floor of Los Angeles’ Nakamoto Tower—a Japanese conglomerate’s newly erected American headquarters—a grand opening celebration with Washington and Hollywood notables is in full-swing on the floor below. Security cameras have recorded the murder, but...
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Vigilante Justice: A Case Study
When mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths who attempted to rob him in a New York subway in 1984, news reporters inevitably called him the “subway vigilante.” But Goetz was not a vigilante; he was not a member of a vigilant group of concerned citizens patrolling the subways as keepers of the peace. On...
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Signed Into Law
National Education Day was signed into law by President Bush and Congress last March 20. At first sight this new holiday looks like the President’s bid to be taken seriously as the “education President.” In fact, educators nationwide celebrated it as a tribute to their profession. But a closer look at the bill indicates that...
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Cultural Coma
When Magic Johnson announced that he was retiring from basketball because he had tested positive for the HIV virus, the nation fell into the kind of cultural coma that is all too common in recent history. The national television networks interrupted regularly scheduled programs for live coverage of Magic’s news conference and ran nightly retrospectives...
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Truth or Consequences
“I don’t know where democracy will end, but it can’t end in a quiet old age.” —Klemens von Metternich Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were among the first political commentators to designate the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan a watershed date in American political history. From their perspective in 1981, “What was so quickly started...
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A Man for No Season
“It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four Harry...
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Subject of a Task Force
Homelessness was the subject of a task force recently established by the mayor and county board of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its purpose was “to develop mechanisms and a philosophy of care that will break down the barriers to becoming ‘un-homeless,’ so that these people are given the opportunity to pursue stable and productive lives in this...
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Under Siege
Forks, Washington, known as the “Logging Capital of the World,” has reportedly taken on the signs of a community under siege. In this small timber town there are rows upon rows of idle logging trucks, yellow “solidarity” ribbons tied to telephone poles and trees, with signs posted everywhere that read, “This Family is Supported by...
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The New World Order
Last September, in a speech about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President Bush used for the first time a phrase that has come to signify his foreign policy objectives and his vision of the post-Cold War age: “New World Order.” Here and in subsequent speeches the President would hint that, with the liberation of Eastern Europe,...
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Making Its Way Into Our Education
Political correctness has finally made its way from our universities to our junior high schools. Last March, in the northern Illinois town of DeKalb (population 32,000), 75 students of Huntley Middle School walked out of class, held a press conference, demanded the resignation of their principal, and called for the punishment of two classmates who...
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A Replay of the Spanish-American War
The Persian Gulf was recently the scene for a replay of the Spanish-American War. This time our “Manifest Destiny” was the “New World Order.” Our Teddy “Rough Rider” Roosevelt was “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf Our “Butcher” Weyler was “Hitler” Hussein. Our Frederic Remington was Peter Arnett. Our “Cuban sugar” was Kuwaiti oil. Both wars were crusades...
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Fevered Dreams
Collected here are 159 of E.B. White’s short pieces written for the New Yorker. They show White at his best: as critic, essayist, humorist, and satirist. Though he will perhaps best be remembered for Charlotte’s Web and the Elements of Style, these slices of life on everything from lipstick to atomic weaponry remind us of...
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After-Shocks
Martin Luther King’s plagiarism continues to send after-shocks. Ralph Luker has been dropped as the associate editor of the King Papers Project; his contract was not renewed last January. Clayborne Carson’s staff has reportedly been in disarray for quite some time, and sources associated with the Project called Luker “expendable,” the “fall guy,” the “sacrificial...
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Eliciting Responses
The story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s plagiarism has elicited a number of responses, most of them disingenuous. Walter Muelder, the former dean of Boston University’s School of Theology, would like to exculpate Boston University’s Jon Westling (see page 4) but only succeeds in making matters worse. Mr. Muelder casually reveals what should have been...
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Tally and Record
The Immigration and Naturalization Service announced last June that to “regain control of the border” the INS will now begin to deport and possibly jail aliens and smugglers entering our country illegally. If you’re wondering whether this hasn’t been INS policy all along, think again. In the Southwest, repeat offenders have traditionally been released just...
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A Doctor in Spite of Himself
On December 3, 1989, the London Telegraph included a piece of academic news from the United States: “Researchers in his native Georgia must soon decide whether to reveal that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, murdered in 1968, was—in addition to his other human failings—a plagiarist. There is now much doubt as to whether his...
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The Theft of an American Classic
Country music has never been shirked in the pages of Chronicles, as any faithful reader knows. John Reed’s June column concerning the Far East’s fascination with country music, however, left out one pertinent mention: the story of Torn Mitsui. Mr. Mitsui is a fifty-year-old professor of English at Kanazawa University; he is also Japan’s foremost...
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National Service
“I call, therefore, a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” —John Milton On February 25, 1906, to a full assembly at Stanford University, William James gave his most famous speech, “The Moral Equivalent of War.”...
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A Niagara of Print
“It used to be one of our proudest boasts that we welcomed the downtrodden, the oppressed, the poverty-stricken, the fit and the unfit to a land of freedom, of plenty, of boundless opportunity. Our hindsight tells us that this boast was fatuous.” —George Horace Believe it or not, Chronicles was not the first magazine in...
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Exposing Paradoxes
Children are dying in an increasing number of ingenious ways, and the only thing more disturbing than this trend is the even more ingenious way in which society is rationalizing and legally justifying their deaths. Two-year-old Robyn Twitchell died at his parents’ home in Massachusetts on April 8, 1986, after suffering for five days with...
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C-H-A-R-I-S-M-A
Mikhail Gorbachev has it, so do Jesse Jackson, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Violetta Chamorro. John Kennedy personified it, Ronald Reagan scripted it, and Michael Dukakis experienced what life can be like for a politician without it. It’s how success and failure in national politics is so often now spelled: it’s c-h-a-r-i-s-m-a. Like so many...
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Setting the Stage
Marion Barry’s arrest in January for cocaine possession set the stage for what has become a familiar American scene. At a press conference held after his release from jail, it didn’t take Barry long to perform the public ritual of secular penitence: he announced that he would be entering a drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation center because of...
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Wimin’s Work
The women’s movement is in considerable disarray. While most self-described feminists are concerned mainly with job prospects, equal pay, and abortion rights, the radical wing of the movement is busy advocating everything from witchcraft to lesbianism. This was never more apparent than at NOW’s recent convention. While most delegates were content with denouncing the Supreme...