Houston, We Have a Problem. A Jacob Heilbrunn Problem.

I see the New York Times is still assigning book reviews to Jacob Heilbrunn.  I guess they never read this 2008 piece I wrote in The Nation. Or this follow-up from John Palattella about the same issue: Heilbrunn’s problem with acknowledging his sources and with not producing prose that doesn’t track the prose of others. Here’s what I had to say about all this in The Nation (apologies for the long quote):

These are simple errors, and though one wishes that Heilbrunn didn’t make them so often or with such confidence, they don’t detract from his overall argument. The same cannot be said of the book’s two other problems. The first is that They Knew They Were Right leaves the reader with a weary sense of déjà vu, as if watching an old newsreel one too many times. It’s the 1930s, and there are the Trots in Alcove 1 of the City College cafeteria, the Stalinists in Alcove 2. Oh, and there’s Daniel Bell. One day he’ll call himself a liberal in politics, a socialist in economics and a conservative in culture. It’s the 1950s, and Time is proclaiming “reconciliation” between America and its intellectuals. There’s Partisan Review holding a symposium on “Our Country, Our Culture.” But where’s Irving Howe’s rebuke of this accommodation? Ah, there it is: “In a famous 1952 essay, ‘This Age of Conformity,’ Howe asserted that the intellectuals had sold out.” It’s 1993; the cold war is over. But Irving Kristol is still fighting it–this time, against the liberals he’s hated his whole life. In a controversial article, he writes, “My cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos.” Heilbrunn says, “Daniel Bell told me that he was stunned that Kristol would condemn liberalism outright rather than pointing to specific flaws.”

But Bell didn’t say that only to Heilbrunn. He said that to everyone, in Joseph Dorman’s 1998 documentary Arguing the World. Heilbrunn had the opportunity to interview Bell, Norman Podhoretz and many other conservatives and neoconservatives. But with one gem of an exception–after Heilbrunn informs Buckley at the New York Yacht Club that the only magazine Leo Strauss subscribed to was National Review, Buckley expresses delight but wonders if Strauss was “clubbable”–you’ve heard it all before.

Maybe you even wrote it before. Here’s Heilbrunn discussing how supporters of the war in Iraq began to criticize the Iraqis once the war effort faltered:

David Brooks blamed the Iraqis for succumbing to innate “demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise…even in the face of self-immolation.” Leon Wieseltier said much the same thing in The New Republic:

 The security situation is at bottom the social-cultural situation. It seems increasingly clear to me that the blame for the violence in Iraq, and for its frenzied recoil from what Fouad Ajami hopefully called “the foreigner’s gift,” belongs to the Iraqis. Gifts must not only be given, they must also be received…. For three and a half years, the Iraqis have been free people. What have they done with their freedom?…After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.

Here’s a passage I wrote in an article about Hannah Arendt published in the January 4, 2007, issue of The London Review of Books:

According to the New York Times columnist David Brooks, after the fall of Saddam the Iraqis succumbed to their native ‘demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise…even in the face of self-immolation’. Liberal hawks such as Leon Wieseltier believe much the same thing:

 The security situation is at bottom the social-cultural situation. It seems increasingly clear to me that the blame for the violence in Iraq, and for its frenzied recoil from what Fouad Ajami hopefully called ‘the foreigner’s gift’, belongs to the Iraqis. Gifts must not be only given, they must also be received…. For three and a half years, the Iraqis have been a free people. What have they done with their freedom?… After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.

The identical order and nearly identical setup of the same quotes, with the same ellipses, caught my attention, especially since Heilbrunn cites only Wieseltier in his footnote. But I dismissed it as a single instance of carelessness. Then I found another. Here’s Heilbrunn, in a chapter called “Redemption,” talking about Ronald Reagan’s human rights policy:

For example, on April 30, 1981, [Reagan] remarked, “Even at the negotiating table, never shall it be forgotten for a moment that wherever it is taking place in the world, the persecution of people for whatever reason…persecution of people for their religious belief…that is a matter to be on that negotiating table or the United States does not belong at that table.” But the New York Times reported on the same day that “after the speech, a White House spokesman said Mr. Reagan had not meant to alter his policy of playing down the rights issue in foreign relations.”

Here’s Patricia Derian, Jimmy Carter’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, in a November 7, 1981, article in The Nation:

On April 30, The New York Times quoted President Reagan as having said that “even at the negotiating table, never shall it be forgotten for a moment that wherever it is taking place in the world, the persecution of people for whatever reason…persecution of people for their religious belief…that is a matter to be on that negotiating table or the United States does not belong at that table.” In the same edition of the Times, a front-page story reported that “after the speech, a White House spokesman said Mr. Reagan had not meant to alter his policy of playing down the rights issue in foreign relations.”

Heilbrunn, it turns out, borrows more than the syntax, setup and sources of other people’s writings. Sometimes he reproduces, sentence by sentence, the arc and logic of their prose. Here he is again on Reagan’s human rights policy:

Reagan was initially rather disdainful of human rights, which he showed unmistakably by nominating Ernest Lefever, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger as well as the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center (which Abrams himself would head in the 1990s), to be assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. Lefever had declared that human rights were irrelevant to U.S. foreign policy and, furthermore, that any legislation making foreign aid conditional on a nation’s observance of human rights should be repealed. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had a Republican majority, rejected his nomination.

Here’s Derian again, in that same Nation article:

The President nominated Ernest Lefever to be Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Lefever’s publicly stated views on the subject were (a) that all legislation making foreign aid conditional on a nation’s observance of human rights should be repealed and (b) that human rights had no place in U.S. foreign policy. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with a Republican majority, handed the President his first important defeat by voting 13 to 4 to reject the nomination.

Each passage contains three sentences, plotting the same arc with essentially the same information: Reagan nominated Lefever; Lefever held two views on human rights; a Senate committee rejected Lefever. Heilbrunn even duplicates Derian’s prose–“that all legislation making foreign aid conditional on a nation’s observance of human rights should be repealed”–with a negligible change of “all” to “any.” While Heilbrunn does cite Derian for a comment on Reagan’s policy, he does not cite her or her article as the source of his information, quotations, argument and language.

Heilbrunn is a journalist, not a scholar; he is a former senior editor at The New Republic and a former member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board. Yet he or his publisher has packaged this book as a serious piece of original research. It comes with blurbs from esteemed academics and highly regarded journalists. It has extensive footnotes with primary sources, suggesting an author who has moled away in archives and microfiche reading rooms for months, if not years. Has he?

The mise-en-scène of Heilbrunn’s chapter “Wilderness” describes the raucous 1967 convention of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) in Chicago. Heilbrunn claims that his only source is a 1967 article in The New York Times Magazine by Walter Goodman. Yet several items in Heilbrunn’s account don’t appear in Goodman’s article. There is this statement from William F. Pepper, executive director of the NCNP, to the convention: “It may well be that what you begin here may ultimately result in a new social, economic and political system in the United States.” There is also a claim that some of the organization’s funding came from Martin Peretz, then a member of the New Left. There is even that middle initial “F” in Pepper’s name, which Goodman never uses. Each of these items does appear, however, in an April 2003 Journal of American Studies article by historian Simon Hall, who did find them by digging in archives (at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin) and poring over microfiche (“Political Activities of the Johnson White House, 1963-69”).

The second problem, then, with They Knew They Were Right has to do with its fast-and-loose use of sources. Heilbrunn harvests quotes, in the same order and with the same ellipses, from sources he neither acknowledges nor cites. His expository frames for these quotes closely resemble or repeat those of his sources. Passages in his text trace the arc of passages in other texts. On at least two occasions, he expropriates the research of others without attribution. And on at least one occasion, he passes off the prose of another writer as if it were his own. His sourcing is sloppy, his thinking borrowed, his writing derivative.

2 Comments

  1. eopton January 4, 2012 at 1:46 pm | #

    As has been said before (I forget the source), plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.

  2. Rosa Luxembourgeoise January 4, 2012 at 7:02 pm | #

    Heilbrunn’s NYT review of Derek Chollet and Samantha Power’s edited lauditorio of liberal hawk Richard Holbrooke may or may not be another example of sloppy sourcing and derivative writing, but it is certainly myopic and strange. “America” writes Heilbrunn, finding moral fault with Holbrooke for “getting” the Balkans but losing it where Iraq was concerned, “had responded to Serbian aggression. The Iraq conflict, by contrast, was a preventive war. Isn’t it sometimes a bit too easy to slide from liberal moralism about human rights violations to endorsing the use of American military force abroad?”

    There’s a silly rhetorical question for the ages. Why, yes, Jacob Heilbrunn, it does indeed seem to be dreadfully easy to slide from American military use of force abroad (invoking morality) to endorsing American military use of force abroad (invoking morality)! It would take the kind of political courage Heilbrunn doesn’t have to think of questioning Holbrooke’s motives in the Balkans (and Afghanistan) instead of assuming their purity there and displaying bafflement about his position on Iraq.

    I remember that 2008 review in the Nation, and in particular those passages where Robin demonstrates Heilbrunn’s misconduct, and recall thinking “this is how it is done.”

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