A Historian Who Lies About His Own Past

Insight on the News, July 23, 2001 by Stephen Goode

The esteemed professor, valued as a major scholar and a charismatic teacher, told the students in his popular course on the Vietnam War and American culture that he'd been a platoon leader with the Army's 101st Airborne, was a paratrooper in that war and witnessed combat firsthand. He said that he'd served with Gen. William C. Westmoreland and had been near the infamous massacre at My Lai when it happened.

All were lies, exposed by an investigative reporter this spring in the Boston Globe. The teacher actually had spent the Vietnam War years in an ROTC unit in cortege and men teaching history at West Point. He also claimed that he'd been the victim of redneck Southern cops when he was a civil-rights activist in Mississippi during the 1960s. He claimed they'd banged on the door of the place he was staying late at night and then followed him ominously to his car when he left.

That was a lie, too, as was his claim to the Globe reporter during an interview that he'd played football in high school and scored the winning touchdown during a difficult and important game. The only time he'd been on the football field, it seems, is to play the clarinet in the school band.

Tall tales, all of them, and the telling normally would relegate the tale-teller to the realm of habitual liar -- someone who might be trusted to deliver a good yarn but never to tell exactly what happened whenever he claimed to be telling the truth.

In this case, the man who lied was the historian Joseph Ellis, Ford Foundation Professor of History at prestigious Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He is a winner not only of the Pulitzer Prize but also of the National Book Award, an academic historian not only esteemed by his peers but widely read by the general public for his biographies of such American greats as Thomas Jefferson (American Sphinx) and John Adams (The Passionate Sage). Most recently, he published to wide approval, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.

What are we to think of this esteemed historian who plays easy with truth? Ellis has apologized for his behavior but stopped short of calling his misrepresentations lies. He says his failure was to "let stand" his claims without disavowing them. "Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made" he said with that unrelenting arrogance characteristic of so many American academics.

The Los Angeles Times has called editorially for Ellis' resignation or firing. Several fellow historians have censured him, though others have said no notice should be taken of Ellis' mendacity, calling his lies aberrations in an otherwise honest and deeply caring man. Mount Holyoke has announced that Ellis no longer will teach his Vietnam War course, which seemed like a punishment of sorts. But the president of the prestigious women's college, Joanne Creighton, denounced the Boston Globe for poking into the "private life" of Ellis and declared that the Globe's expose served no public purpose and should never have been published.

But she's wrong. Ellis presented himself as a participant in the history about which he lectured students --Vietnam and the 1960s protests -- and he wasn't. Surely his "firsthand" accounts of the war bestowed on his telling of them a legitimacy they did not have. It's not unreasonable to assume that more than one of the brilliant young women in his audience was swayed by the heroism Ellis claimed to have displayed during his bogus Vietnam and civil-rights experiences, but did not.

Given the genuine heroism of many Americans who served in Vietnam, Ellis should be profoundly ashamed. He should be ashamed, too, of claiming to have faced danger in Mississippi in the 1960s when he faced none (he was a graduate student at Yale and no political activist).

Do his lies as a man cast doubt on his veracity as a historian? Of course they do, and most directly on his role as a biographer of Jefferson. Ellis was coauthor of the 1998 story "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child" in which he, making full use of his prestige as a Jefferson biographer, affirmed that Jefferson indeed was the father of a child by his slave Sally Hemings.

That time Ellis lied by saying DNA tests showed "beyond any reasonable doubt that Jefferson had a long-term sexual relationship with his mulatto slave?" The tests showed nothing of the kind. What they did indicate was that the last child Hemings bore had Jefferson genes, likely from Jefferson's brother or his nephews (see "The Fable of Tom and Sally" May 21). Still, the very political Ellis did not hesitate to use his "proof" of Jefferson's guilt to mitigate former president Bill Clinton's responsibility in the Monica Lewinsky affair, which was very much in the news when Ellis' "report" was made public. If Jefferson had his way with a slave, Ellis averred, why couldn't Clinton have his with an intern?

If Ellis were an average Joe, his pathetic lies about himself and Jefferson wouldn't matter much, but because he's celebrated as an influential historian -- and a teacher of the young at a prestigious college -- they do matter, and they matter a great deal.