Today, Rick Perlstein’s new book, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980, hits bookstores. It’s useful to remember, as Perlstein continues exploring the Republican Party’s right turn between 1960 and 1980, the manufactured controversy surrounding his last volume, The Invisible Bridge, in 2014. Namely, a claim of plagiarism as specious as it was partisan.
Lest you’ve forgotten or haven’t read it, The Invisible Bridge focuses on America in the years 1973-1976, with occasional flashes backwards to sketch biographical details of Ronald Reagan. The book focuses on the high drama of the Watergate scandal and its fallout, the resultant cultural turmoil as people ceased to trust government institutions, and how Ronald Reagan expertly exploited these tensions, not to call for reforms but a more aggressive, nostalgic conservatism. At the end of Bridge, Reagan has nearly unseated sitting President Gerald Ford at the 1976 Republican convention; Reaganland continues the story through the 1980, with Reagan and Jimmy Carter as protagonists dueling for the soul of America.
Whereas Perlstein’s previous books, Before the Storm (a chronicle of Barry Goldwater’s doomed campaign in 1964) and Nixonland (placing Richard Nixon’s rise within the ’60s culture wars), received near-universal acclaim from reviewers, Invisible Bridge received its share of flak. Some reviewers seemed offended that Perlstein decided to place his footnotes online; Steve Donoghue of Open Letters Monthly attacked Perlstein’s footnoting as “Soviet cryptography,” while Sam Tanenhaus savaged him in The Atlantic as “intellectually lazy” and a “web aggregator,” as if his book merely compiled a list of Google hits. One can debate the merits of this approach, but it’s neither original nor unique to Perlstein.
The most vociferous critic, though, was Craig Shirley. A conservative writer and activist, Shirley has written four laudatory biographies of Ronald Reagan. Perlstein extensively cites Shirley’s 2004 book, Reagan’s Revolution, in his footnotes and thanks the author in his acknowledgements. Not extensively enough for Shirley, who complained that “I see my own writing in his book, not cited or credited to me.” Shirley didn’t bother, apparently, to check online for the footnotes, where his book is cited 125 times. But Shirley, whose insistence that Reagan was a divinely anointed being differs strongly from Perlstein’s progressive criticism, initiated a lawsuit against Perlstein and his publisher, Simon & Schuster.
In his formal complaint, Shirley’s attorney claims that Perlstein “lifts without attribution entire passages attempting to conceal his theft by altering words or re-ordering sentences, but in other instances not even bothering to do so.” He further demanded that Simon & Schuster pulp all copies of the book and pay Shirley $25 million in damages. Shirley’s complaints were amplified by the press, particularly The New York Times, granting them a wider audience than such squabbles generally receive. Ultimately, the claim was thrown out before reaching court.
Those who’ve studied Shirley’s claims have, indeed, found them laughably thin. “Rick Perlstein would have to be the worst plagiarist in history,” David Dayden observes, “by citing his victim 125 times in source notes and thanking him in the acknowledgments.” Most claims of “plagiarism” are, indeed, paraphrases of Shirley’s own writing, but augmented by online citations acknowledging Perlstein’s sources. Many are patently absurd, as when Shirley claims a CBS News broadcast of the 1976 convention as his own property. The most Shirley demonstrates is that Perlstein’s online footnoting led to a handful of mismatched quotes, perhaps vindicating those who criticized this practice but doing little to advance “plagiarism.”
Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, examines Shirley’s examples at length. He puts particular focus on a pair of passages on Kansas City in the 1976, at the time it hosted the Republican Convention. From Shirley’s Reagan’s Revolution (p. 297):
Even its “red light” district was festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, as dancing elephants were placed the windows of several smut peddlers.
And Perlstein’s equivalent passage (Invisible Bridge, p. 771):
The city’s anemic red-light district was festooned with red, white, and blue bunting; several of the smut peddlers featured dancers in elephant costume in their windows.
Which would be a damning connection…except that Perlstein, indeed, cites this very passage of Shirley’s book in his end notes. “Shirley’s other complaints, at least the ones detailed in the cited lawyer’s letter,” Liberman comments, “seem less serious — they involve brief paraphrases, possible borrowing of evocative details, or re-expressions of similar content that might have been drawn from any number of sources.”
At worst, Liberman concludes, Perlstein is guilty of patchwriting. This is a common practice in nonfiction writing, defined as “restating a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the language or syntax of the source.” Some writers disapprove of the practice, but it’s only “plagiarism” if such paraphrasing is done without citation: Liberman comments that Perlstein’s patchwriting is “within the normal boundaries of research methods for narrative histories, as indicated by the fact that Shirley did quite similar things with his own sources.”
Of course, it seems unlikely that Shirley’s meretricious claims originated from intellectual honesty. For Shirley manages a public relations firm who counts among its clients Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Citizens United and the National Rifle Association. Indeed, one of his aides, Dianna Banister, sent an action email to conservative groups about Invisible Bridge, instruct them that “anything you can do to jump into the fight would be helpful,” along with “suggested tweets” and links to negative reviews. No wonder one writer labels it “a dressed-up attack on scholarship that’s really a calculated political broadside.”
It’s unsurprising that conservative outlets picked up Shirley’s criticisms, running headlines like “Rick Perlstein: Probable Plagiarist, Definite Jerk.” Reagan (or the sanitized, saintly portrait of Reagan) is like a God to conservatives like Shirley, any criticism (particularly from a self-identified progressive) a form of heresy. Why the New York Times followed suit is harder to understand, or the critiques from writers like Tanenhaus who should know better, except that their centrism is now equally invested in the Myth of Reagan. Perlstein, in an interview with Salon, suggests further that his straying from the standard analysis of politics is the problem:
“These people who identify themselves as non-ideological, or post-partisan, or centrist, position themselves as not interested in ideology, but they’re perfectly obsessed with ideology, they’re just drenched in ideology, because they’re always weighing every utterance of themselves or others for bias,” Perlstein observed. “If you believe that there must be some abstract idea of left or right… you’re always going to be taking an ideological temperature, instead of just seeing the text, clearly, and evaluating it on an invention evidentiary basis.”
Perlstein’s work, of course, is not above criticism. His hyperactive prose style can become grating, along with his overemphasis on cultural ephemera (a reader of The Invisible Bridge might wonder whether The Bad News Bears really deserves as much coverage as the Saturday Night Massacre). He’s often sloppy or careless with details: in Nixonland, for instance, he attributes Douglas MacArthur’s “Old soldiers never die” quote to George Patton, and claims that the National Guard brought tanks to Kent State. His interpretation of Nixon, Reagan and the myriad other figures sketched in his work is certainly debatable, even from those sympathetic to him. But calling him “intellectually lazy” is absurd; a plagiarist, a lie.
Plagiarism is a serious issue, in history as in any academic field; no one wants to see their work stolen without attribution. Such claims, when they exist, are worth assessing and, where valid, worthy of scorn. But it behooves those who aren’t Ann Coulter’s publicist not to throw such accusations around lightly…or mainstream media and fellow scholars from repeating them.