In Wake of the Scandal Over Joseph Ellis, Scholars Ask 'Why?' and 'What Now?'

His lies raise questions about his obligations, his college's, and the role of academic celebrity

By ANA MARIE COX

The line to get Joseph Ellis to sign copies of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers stretches out of the ornate lecture room at the National Archives and into its gray corridors. It is the Friday after the Monday on which The Boston Globe dropped a cluster bomb on the bucolic campus of Mount Holyoke College, where Mr. Ellis is a history professor, by reporting that he had for years been lying to colleagues, reporters, and students about his own role in history.

The Globe reported, and Mr. Ellis later confirmed, that he had fabricated a past in which he was present at some of the most crucial episodes in postwar America: He had said that he was a paratrooper for the 101st Airborne in Vietnam; that he was on General William C. Westmoreland's staff; that back in the United States, he was an antiwar protester and had participated in the civil-rights movement. He had also claimed to have scored the winning touchdown for his high-school football team in the last game of the season.

No one here at the archives seems bothered about what Mr. Ellis characterized as "having let stand and later confirming the assumption I went to Vietnam." After a short talk, which culminates in his speculating about how John Adams might have co-written the Declaration of Independence, fan after fan approaches Mr. Ellis's table with reverence, almost apologetically. No one asks about Vietnam.

Four reporters self-consciously hover nearby. Before his talk, Mr. Ellis had repeated the brief statement he had issued after the newspaper article appeared, adding, "After tonight, I must focus on my family and my own personal shortcomings." He has not spoken publicly about the matter since. Reporters had been warned that asking any questions about the controversy would result in "physical ejection" from the room, but they wait around anyway.

After the last book is signed, a phalanx of public-relations people swoop in around the historian as expertly as the security force one might expect for a rock star or a politician. And in a flash, he's gone.

But the discussions about Mr. Ellis and what he did linger on. News coverage and faculty-lounge gossip fixate on motivations: "Why did he do it?"

Others are asking, "What now?" That professors shouldn't lie to students is an article of truth that not even Mr. Ellis's supporters deny.

So what should Mount Holyoke do about it? Some critics say the college made a mockery of their supposed devotion to teaching by initially defending Mr. Ellis. But what if many of his students say he should be spared? And what if many historians point out that his work on the colonial era remains untainted?

What's more, in the past week, Founding Brothers moved from No. 10 to No. 8 on The New York Times's best-seller list. Academe may be searching for the right way to discipline Joseph Ellis, but the public is still rewarding him.

Many of Mr. Ellis's friends say that at first, they simply refused to believe what the Globe had reported. He had taught a popular course on Vietnam and American culture that he enlivened with details based, he said, on what he saw there. He had told colleagues that he considered writing a memoir about Vietnam, that magazines had wanted to interview him about his experiences. Asked one colleague, "If he was lying, why would he even consider doing that?"

Some friends said his stories were so compelling and realistic that if it hadn't been for his admission of guilt, they would have assumed that it was the government that was lying. Maybe, the theory went, Mr. Ellis's military records weren't found for a reason.

Mount Holyoke took a similarly defiant stance; the Globe reported last week that the college even attempted to dissuade the newspaper from publishing the original article, calling into question the legal basis of investigating statements made in the classroom.

When the newspaper went ahead, Mount Holyoke's president, Joanne V. Creighton, issued a statement: "We at the college wonder what public interest the Globe is trying to serve through a story of this nature."

Mr. Ellis at first refused to comment at all. But after the article appeared, in a statement whose passive voice recalls some of the vaguest official pronouncements about Vietnam, he admitted that the Globe's piece was essentially correct. "Even in the best of lives," he said "mistakes are made."

As scholars and journalists have jumped on the Ellis story, a consensus quickly emerged: His willingness to deceive is of a piece with the qualities he ascribed to his subject in Thomas Jefferson: An American Sphinx, which won a National Book Award.

That consensus is, perhaps, a little too neat. "When I read the first paragraph of the story, I lost interest," says Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of history at New York University. He says such deep readings of Mr. Ellis's books miss their most important feature: how well they have sold. Mr. Kelley places Mr. Ellis's statements at the far end of a continuum of misrepresentations, noting that professors and other authority figures create a whole range of half-truths to satisfy our culture's thirst for realism. That he lied about going to Vietnam isn't important, says Mr. Kelley. "What is important is that Joe Ellis felt the need to misrepresent his patriotism, to make himself into a metaphorical descendant of Jefferson."

At Mount Holyoke, officials say, Mr. Ellis will be held responsible for his retrofitted patriotism, though they are loath to be more specific than a promise "to arrive at a fair and judicious assessment." Ms. Creighton refused to be interviewed for this article.

Joseph Ellis, meanwhile, still has a C.V. to be proud of. In addition to the Pulitzer he won for Founding Brothers in April, and the award for An American Sphinx, his rich psychobiographical portraits of the men who shaped the early Republic have earned him long tours of duty on the best-seller lists. (Until David McCullough's new John Adams biography, a feat almost unheard of for histories of the period.)

He had been a sought-after pundit-in-the-making. He wrote in U.S. News & World Report about the near-simultaneous disclosures of DNA evidence of the adulterous liaisons involving Jefferson and, two centuries later, President Clinton. He testified before Congress on the need for a John Adams memorial. He was featured in a Ken Burns documentary on Jefferson.

That success sets Mr. Ellis apart not only from most academics, but also from most of the thousands of men who lie about being Vietnam veterans.

Patrick Hagopian, a historian at the University of Lancaster, in Britain, has studied the false Vietnam War stories of the men he calls "wannabes." For one thing, he says, referring to Mr. Ellis's Westmoreland tale, "a lot of people don't have credible access to those sorts of centers of power." And most wannabes use a Vietnam nightmare as a kind of get-out-of-expectations-free card: "'I haven't made much of my life, but here's this terrible thing that's happened to me in Vietnam.'" However, Mr. Hagopian notes, "This is not a plausible motive for a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian."

Glenna Whitley, co-author with B. G. Burkett of Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, says Mr. Ellis's stories are different from those of most faux veterans for another reason as well: He didn't stop at lying about going, but lied about protesting the war as well. "I guess he figured that wasn't enough -- that the real valor was to turn against the war," Ms. Whitley says. She gives such a turnabout some thought and suggests, "perhaps that's particular to academe."

Of course, one way that Mr. Ellis's statements were "particular to academe" is that they weren't mere boasting, but that he had told at least some of his lies in the course of lectures to students who felt lucky to be learning from the college's most famous professor.

"He lied in class," says David J. Garrow, a professor at the Emory University School of Law. "If he were telling stories in a local bar, who cares?"

The Mount Holyoke president's first, defensive response to the Globe article was roundly criticized, chiefly by Mr. Garrow in a blistering opinion piece that ran only a day after the story broke. "It appeared that she didn't particularly care about what he said in class," he says. Within a few days, the college had changed its posture. Alumnae wrote in, calling for Mr. Ellis's dismissal or just asking for a fuller inquiry into exactly what lies Mr. Ellis had told, and how often, and to whom. As of this writing, the professor remains "under investigation," though one may wonder what there is to look into. Didn't he acknowledge that he had lied?

The investigation may, however, be as much about what Mount Holyoke should do as about what Mr. Ellis has done. There is little question among the college's faculty, or in the larger world of academe, that what the professor did was wrong. But how wrong? Mount Holyoke has traditionally put a premium on teaching, which would seem to cast Mr. Ellis's fabrications in the harshest light imaginable, yet some alumnae have defended Mr. Ellis on the very grounds that he is a great teacher.

Karyn Coughlin, a 1995 graduate, had Mr. Ellis as an adviser for her senior thesis. It was on "ideas of truth, specifically postmodern ideas of how there is no truth, and how to incorporate that into history," she says, noting the retrospective irony.

She credits Mr. Ellis's dynamic lectures and obvious love of his subject for prompting her to major in history. She says she never heard him talk about Vietnam in class, only in private conversation, and even then not often. She repeats an argument made by other Holyoke alumnae in letters to the editors in The Washington Post and The New York Times: "I would hope that when Mount Holyoke investigates him, they take into account how good and popular a professor he is." Besides, she says, "I expect this isn't so unusual." Not that lying to students should be excused -- but among charismatic lecturers, spur-of-the-moment exaggerations must be pretty common, she argues. How can colleges expect to keep their best instructors perfectly in line all of the time?

Even the fiery Mr. Garrow takes a measured step back when pressed on how, exactly, one might hold professors' lectures to the same standards as scholarly writing. "It's a matter of scale and repetition -- that's the question for Holyoke," he says. "Right now, it looks like he did it not just occasionally for the last three semesters, but the last 10 years. And the lies came in weird and self-contradictory ways." In his opinion piece, Mr. Garrow said Mr. Ellis should be barred from the classroom and from "ever teaching history again." But at the same time, the law professor noted that the full story has not been told. He ventured no suggestions as to what further punishment Mr. Ellis may deserve.

That Mr. Ellis has been reported to have told so many different lies, and that different students tell different versions, will make Mount Holyoke's job especially hard, Mr. Garrow adds. "All they've got to work with are vague and potentially conflicting eyewitness accounts."

However deeply the Mount Holyoke committee may probe, it seems unlikely that it will discover the answer to the question the public barely had time to ask before the news media began to offer answers: "Why?"

At its highest level of abstraction, theorizing Joe Ellis has turned his colleagues into little Joe Ellises themselves. Scholars found themselves examining his every public utterance and written word for clues to the inner man -- much as Mr. Ellis has tried to tease out the neuroses and passions that made Jefferson a "sphinx" and Adams a sage.

"Clearly, if you look at the Jefferson book," says one historian, "he talks about Jefferson having different personae, and each doesn't know what the other is doing." In the book, Mr. Ellis comments on Jefferson's "highly developed network of interior defenses" that allowed him to be both an advocate for freedom and a slaveholder. He basically deluded himself, Mr. Ellis writes, calling Jefferson "the kind of man who would have been able to take an oath -- and if the technology for a lie detector test had been available, to have passed it" on such contradictions.

Yet for all the close scrutiny that scholars are now giving Mr. Ellis's books and interviews, no one -- not even his harshest critics -- has accused him of extending his fabrications back beyond the 20th century.

"It's not as if he plagiarized. Joe is a good historian. He is a fair-minded and generous man. It would be different if he made up something about Jefferson, but he's true to his material," says Andrew Burstein, a historian of the early Republic at the University of Tulsa. "Lying to students is a very serious error, but we should still separate it from the way he treats archival material."

One historian, who had commented on Mr. Ellis's work before the scandal broke and was contacted by many journalists afterward, has had enough of the matter: "I'm kind of sick of even talking about Joe Ellis. It's psychologists and not historians who should be looking into why he did this."

At the very least, say Mr. Ellis's colleagues, some of the rampant armchair psychologizing should turn in the direction of the colleagues themselves.

Mr. Ellis's friends say that professional jealousy -- as well as his prominence -- played a role in the speed with which word of his misstatements spread. And he wasn't helped by the way he had irritated some of his colleagues at the Massachusetts college over the years.

More to the point, gossip around South Hadley has it that "someone dropped a dime on Joe," says one faculty member.

Long before the newspaper article appeared, according to one colleague at the college, Mr. Ellis was "always saying things like, 'Right now, I know more about Thomas Jefferson than anyone else in the country.'"

"Joe did not wear his fame lightly," says another colleague.

Yet for all the best sellers and awards that he has accumulated, most historians say his work was itself not the kind of history that garnered much respect within the discipline. "There are maybe five or six people called 'presidential historians' -- Ellis was probably one of them," says one professor at a major research institution. "But that's a field that exists only on TV. None of them are people who, in the historical world, we would point to as major historians."

But Michael Kammen, a professor of history at Cornell University who won a Pulitzer in 1973 for a book about early American history, applauds Mr. Ellis's work precisely because it is popular. "I hadn't even heard of Founding Brothers until it won the Pulitzer," he says, "But when it did, I thought, well, I should read this. At historical-association meetings, we're always lamenting that we only write books for six other people." The book is "well written and shrewdly organized," he says. "I put Founding Brothers down with a sense of admiration."

Then again, says Mr. Kammen, one has to consider why Mr. Ellis's books are so popular. "At a time when Americans are deeply disappointed with American leadership -- look at the opinion polls on Bush; people even doubt that he's running the country -- here's Ellis saying, 'Once upon a time, there were gods who walked on the face of the earth.'"

Mr. Ellis's ability to dramatize the emotional lives of the founders is the aspect of his work that readers -- and award judges -- respond to. In his talk at the National Archives, in his books, and in his interviews, Mr. Ellis underscores the notion that the first leaders of the Republic were forged by fire and succeeded against great odds.

"The talent that is latent in this class is pulled out of it in a time of crisis," Mr. Ellis tells the crowd at the National Archives. "Fairly early in the game, most of these men recognized that if they succeeded, they would make history."

Seen against Mr. Ellis's depiction of colonial leaders as heroes, his lies don't look quite so much like evidence of ambition or malice. Rather, they seem like an attempt to make himself "present at the creation" of a new era -- much in the way that the subjects of his books were front and center at the dawning of theirs.

"Joe Ellis is the Vanilla Ice of the historical profession," says N.Y.U.'s Mr. Kelley. "I was watching the VH1 special on Vanilla Ice just after I read about Ellis. It's really the Joe Ellis story." Mr. Kelley then recounts the story of the white rap singer, a one-hit wonder who once claimed to have been a street thug, to have been from the ghetto, and to have been beaten up by black youths regularly as a kid. These were, at best, exaggerations -- fabricated, Vanilla Ice says, by his managers, in an effort to gain him credibility among people fascinated by gangs.

Joe Ellis, Mr. Kelley says, was trying to gain credibility with audiences -- both in the classroom and beyond -- fascinated by heroes. And today, says Mr. Kelley, people believe that personal experience is the ultimate form of credibility.

In today's classroom, he says, "students believe their source of knowledge is themselves. Professors have to trump that. Fifteen years ago you couldn't sit in a classroom and replace the text with your own experience."

"Scholars feel pressure to be authentic -- more than authentic," says Mr. Kelley. Personal history "carries more weight than having 20 years of research experience. If you write about music, you have to be a musician; if you write about the ghetto, you have to be from the 'hood."

Even if Mr. Ellis can no longer claim to be an authentic American hero, the fame that rests on his credibility as a historian of American heroes is unchallenged.

At the National Archives, the people in line to get their newly purchased books signed say it doesn't matter to them that Mr. Ellis fudged his military record. "He's a good novelist -- a good writer," says one woman of Mr. Ellis, who has never written a novel.

"People lie all the time," says a man with a Department of Defense ID card dangling from his neck.

And hey, Mr. Kelley points out, even Vanilla Ice is trying to make a comeback.