I’ll wait to see what you do with it.”Īnd with that it began, a literary dust-up that would engulf Goodwin, one of the nation’s most popular and publicly visible historians. Barnes, I am not sending this tip to any other press outlet for the time being. The tipster, identified in the letter as an “academic historian living in the Northeastern U.S.,” closed on a goading note: “Mr. McTaggart, it would develop, had accused Goodwin long ago of “slavishly” copying her work, a complaint that led to a secret legal settlement. Passages from the Goodwin book and other Kennedy histories were set down for comparison, beginning with a three-sentence snippet that appeared to be borrowed from a biography of Kathleen Kennedy by Lynne McTaggart, a London-based writer. The mystery correspondent opened with a salute, saying Barnes had been “quite right” to expose Ambrose, and then moved on to the main business of the missive-ratting out another celebrity historian: “I’ve long been concerned by several instances of plagiarism I noted long ago in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s ‘The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.’ I believe she ought to be called to account, just as Professor Ambrose has.” Ambrose’s book about World War II bombers contained some passages “barely distinguishable” from another author’s work. It was addressed to Executive Editor Fred Barnes, who had written a piece suggesting that historian Stephen E. In early January, an anonymous letter arrived at the Washington, D.C., office of the Weekly Standard.
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