It’s come to my attention that some people have confused our work here at the Harding Institute with that of Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Michael’s a terrific guy and a distinguished expert in the field of Middle Eastern security affairs. So out of respect for him, and to alleviate any lingering confusion, I’ve decided to start to publicly use the name that most of my friends call me anyway, Marty.
It has come to my attention that a golf blogger who moonlights as a shill for identity politics has been calling us names and challenging our right to speak freely. My assistant Jimmy thought I would be upset upon hearing this news. But I explained to him that flying under the radar in these turbulent times is not a bad thing, especially considering the sensitive national security work in which we sometimes engage. Unlike the Bill Wolfrums, Marnie Vander Helsings and Arianna Huffingtons of the world (or even my esteemed colleague Debbie Schlussel), my ego is not so out of whack that I feel compelled to plaster my face next to each and every blog entry, potentially compromising the safety of my dedicated staff and trusted contacts in the field.
To paraphrase the late Dartmouth professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.” Here at the Harding Institute we take pride in being good citizens, and part of being a good citizen is accepting that the “other”, even if you don’t completely understand him/her, is just as real and true and worthy as yourself.
I was one of Dennis’ first friends here in Washington. One of the few who could talk in detail with him about high school wrestling over the occasional mid-morning drink (I grappled JV back in high school). From what I hear, he was one of the most hands-on and effective wrestling coaches of his day. And I recognize that retirement can be expensive and a man needs to make a buck.
But going to work for transgender-friendly Dickstein and Shapiro? Well, I know I said I’d let bygones be bygones and focus on the present but my friend Stanley Rubin has told me stories about that operation that would make your blood curdle. And even though I fully endorse John McCain, I remember (like I remember Amalek) the dirty tricks campaign waged against my candidate at the time, Rudy.
Dennis, come on, buddy. I know you can do better. I defended you in the Mark Foley scandal, and now you’re just perpetuating stereotypes of the GOP. We’re going to have enough trouble this fall defeating Obama and heading off another Democrat landslide.
If there’s one thing I learned growing up in Washington is never look a tulip in the eye and call it cross. I met Senator Kennedy for the first time when I was a boy. Always the mentsch unless he was drunk and that was only for a period of years, his angry drunk years. But for most of his life, he showed class and caring. So even though he sits on the opposite side of the aisle, I extend my respect to a friend, to a mentor. Speedy recovery, Mister Senator.
My old pal and Harding Institute cohort Stanley Rubin just bent my ear over a midday Dewars at McCormick & Schmick’s about how we should really be reconsidering our relationship with so-called rogue states like Sudan and Myanmar. In what is fast becoming a return to the polarized Cold War-like era of satellite states and surrogate wars, America needs to compete against China (and yes, Russia) not for resources per se, but for INFLUENCE.
Stanley just got back from a well-heeled fact finding mission as a guest of the Sudanese goverment, and he says that there’s a real willingness for the Sudanese to open avenues to the White House. Frankly, they’re not so crazy about their new found benefactors, the Chinese. Whether it’s a racial thing, or they just can’t figure out how to use chopsticks, they’d rather be bought off by the West than the East. If it weren’t for that pesky Darfur thing and the UN’s mishandling of it all, Stanley assures, we’d have Sudan in our pocket in a heartbeat.
As many of you know, I’ve long put my trust into my associate fellow at the Institute, Eli Perle. He takes care of the web, books my interviews, and has truly been my aid-de-camp. So it was with great sorrow that when I returned from my last Mid-East trip, Eli greeted me with the sad news that he’s decided to seek greener pastures. He feels - and I think correctly - that he’s gotten all he can get out of his tenure at the Institute. I’m sure there was more we could have gotten out of him, but I don’t want to be accused of holding back a promising young politico. Eli’s still deciding where he’ll end up, but we’re sure he’ll be fine.
In the meantime, the Institute is happy to bring aboard two new staffers: Jimmy Havermayer and also recently, Poppy Cartwright. (see, it takes two to fill Eli’s well-trod shoes) Jimmy drove me around the Florida panhandle as a volunteer for the Giuliani campaign, and I sensed in him then that he had a keen grip on life but knew when to ask for directions. It’s Jimmy’s first time in the District, and I’m sure he’ll do fine. Poppy, some of you may remember, first interned at the Institute last summer, and now has joined us on a fulltime basis.
For those of you who didn’t see it in the comments buried below, we feel we owe it to Thomas Callahan to showcase his explanatory note in full:
Tom Callahan ‘84 here with a clarification:
My old man (who died in 2006 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s) used to refer to his former professor by name with an aphorism something like, “You know what Rosenstock-Huessy used to say…” and then would say something about fate and being aware that you don’t know how your life will unfold. My six living brothers and sisters can all attest to Dad’s references to R-H, but none of us can remember the exact words that had stuck in my father’s mind. I never knew how Rosentock-Huessy’s name was spelled, and I always thought his first name was Rosenstock and his surname was Huessy. I even googled various misspellings of his name one time but to no avail. Then I came across Hart’s article. Now I had the guy’s name (I thought - didn’t know that Hart misspelled it too), and I was able to find a philosophy web site and a few samples of his writing (still didn’t pick up on the misspelling). For the alumni profile, I used the citizen-education quote rather than my poorly remembered paraphrase of my Dad’s paraphrases of what R-E used to say. So–Hart definitely did not lift his quote from me; it is thanks to Hart’s article that I could track down more information about my father’s favorite philosophy professor. No plagiarism intended by me - just wanted to quote Prof. R-H accurately while capturing the spirit of my father’s aphorisms. I don’t think my late father or the late professor would mind. Indeed, the late professor would probably be more concerned if I misquoted him with a memory shrouded paraphrase. Finally, any mistakes are entirely mine, not Ms. Birzen’s. I provided that passage to her.
Regarding Phi Delt, Gig Faux was VP when I was President of the house. He was if anything even more instrumental than I in bringing Phi Delt back into the good graces of the College at the time.
Best regards,
Tom Callahan ‘84
So there you have it; mystery solved. Kudos to Callahan for responding so forthrightly. As we’d heard, he’s an honorable, patriotic man. As you can see, this also clears Birzin and Jeffrey Hart (as far as the quote goes, yes, but his attitudes on Jews vis a vis his support for Obama is still troubling - especially given Obama’s speech today about the Rev. Wright and Barack’s own crazy white Grandma. I guess that makes Hart the nutty Judeo-fetishist uncle in New Hampshire)
In my ironic ramblings about plagiarism, it’s possible that I buried the lead. The Goeglein case was open and shut about as fast as you can get. But the question that lingers is what’s the story with this Jeffrey Hart character? I was just reading The Dartmouth Review’s wrap-up story by A.S. Erickson and something odd hit me:
When contacted by CNN, Professor Hart said, “I told him I was flattered he’d used it. It doesn’t damage him in my estimation at all. I’m glad he spread the word.” ….”A bit of plagiarism should not trouble this White House at all. The Dartmouth Review publishes a lot of very good material, and should take a bow.”
To his credit, this is exactly the point I was making in my last blog (though I meant it ironically). But honestly, why would an avowed Obama supporter like Hart be so forgiving of a Bush apparatchik like Goeglein? On a purely human level, it doesn’t make sense. He should be going ballistic. (for example, our friend Debbie Schlussel rightly takes considerable umbrage when Sean Hannity plagiarizes her)
The only explanation is that something was funny with his original story in the first place and he didn’t want to draw attention to it. He probably figured it was one part of one article - the whole thing would blow over. He had no idea at the time that Goeglein had also plagiarized everyone from The Washington Post to the Pope, and it would become a huge story. As I pointed out in my last blog, it could be that Hart had plagiarized the quote from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy from fellow Dartmouther Asst. Deputy Sec. of State Thomas Callahan.
On the other hand… One astute reader has pointed out that the Callahan piece was written by “Lisa Birzen, ‘03″. Giving her the benefit of the doubt that she wrote it as a freshman (apparently she was a math major who with “a passion for Japanese culture”), that would still be a year after Hart wrote his story (assuming the date on his story really was from 1998).
Did Birzen also plagiarize from Hart? Maybe, but her use of the Rosenstock-Huessy line (complete with the same misspelling that tripped up Hart and Goeglein) is in a first-person quote from Callahan that involves the memories of his father, who apparently had Rosenstock-Huessy as a professor sometime in the mid ’40’s.
“My father was class of 1947 at Dartmouth and used to quote to us one of his favorite professors, a philosophy professor named Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey: ‘The goal of education is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can refound his civilization.’”
That might imply that Callahan was sitting at his computer Googling old Dartmouth Reviews when he got called by Birzen and just completely made up a story about his own father. But why would a reputable member of Sec. of State Colin Powell’s team do that?
More likely is that Callahan - or his father - had written that quote somewhere else (maybe nowhere Googlable - maybe in some Dartmouth paper) and Hart had copped it. But let’s give Hart the benefit of the doubt, too. I just had my associate Eli send a note to the Dartmouth Review. They’re on the ground at Dartmouth and can dig through the records better than anyone to sort this out. (unless of course, they’re covering for Hart - who founded the Dartmouth Review in his living room - but again, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Odd, though, that Hart, whose tenure at Dartmouth may have overlapped Rosenstock-Huessy would have misspelled his name in two different places. I suppose that’s why he was an English professor, and not a spelling professor.)
Who knew there’d be so much intrigue at Dartmouth?
Meanwhile, other links to the Goeglein story:
The Opinion Mill
The Buzz Bin
Ivy Gate
Shakesville
Common Sense
In light of the recent news about a White House staffer caught copying the Dartmouth Review and other news sources for columns he wrote for his hometown paper in Indiana, I think it’s time to reconsider… what’s so bad about plagiarizing? And I’ve just discovered, is the initial article that was discovered to be “plagiarized” really one that was plargiarized itself?
Here was Tim Goeglein - this minor figure in the Bush Administration who was clearly still trying to impress his parents’ friends, his high school bullies and quite likely the girl who dumped him at senior prom. Once a month, he got his name in the second-rate newspaper in a two-paper small town with his one-line bio stating that he was a success in life: “Fort Wayne native Timothy S. Goeglein is a special assistant to President Bush in the White House.” But with a last name that homophonically cries out for someone to search his musings on Google, sure enough, former Fort Wayne News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall took 60 seconds to figure out that Goeglein had copped a decade-old piece in the Dartmouth Review for one of his columns.
So? How many people in Fort Wayne read the Dartmouth Review? This is the well-respected conservative student paper of Dartmouth College - a minor Ivy League school at best, but to be sure, one that even Tim did not attend. No, true to his conservative Christian roots, Tim attended the salt-of-the-earth Indiana University. He went on to work for Gary Bauer during the 2000 election, before becoming an acolyte of Karl Rove in the Bush White House.
I don’t know Tim well - our paths have crossed during a few campaigns and conferences over the years - but he always struck me as a genuine, earnest guy. A true believer, for whom it didn’t seem out of place that he wound up as President Bush’s liaison to Christian conservatives.
The real question is not why Tim cribbed a little on his columns. He’s a busy guy. Between Bush trying to burnish his legacy by giving away birth control to Africans, and with John McCain winning the Republican nomination largely out of spite, the White House liaison to the religious right has a LOT on his plate. No, the question is why the pointy-headed cynical Dartmouth crowd is heaving such a hue and cry over this homage from Tim? If they were genuine in their conservative ideals - like Tim is - they would care about promulgating the ideology, not preserving their egos.
Because really, that’s all plagiarizing is: Helping disseminate the ideas of another. Goeglein is accused of lifting a line from Dartmouth’s Jeffrey Hart, when he wrote in 1998: “A notable Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey often expressed the matter succinctly, ‘The goal of education,’ he would say, ‘is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.’”
Wait a minute, Tim still attributes the quote to Rosenstock-Huessy. (of course, Nancy Nall points out in Slate, both Goeglein and Hart completely misspell his name: it’s really Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy). It’s Hart who’s the one who’s egotistically cribbing the intellectual property of a hundred-year old professor. And what’s the lesson of this aged scholar? That a person should “re-found his civilization.” And, that is exactly what Goeglein did: He found an old Dartmouth Review story and then “re-found” it for a new audience in Indiana. I, for one, think that’s exactly what the old professor would have wanted.
Here’s the bombshell: A further Google search would imply that Hart plagiarized HIS quote from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Callahan - complete with the exact misspelling of Rosenstock-Huessy’s name. Callahan’s father is the original Dartmouth student who quoted his then post-World War II professor, Rosenstock-Huessy, a German intellectual who emigrated to US in 1933. Callahan, the younger, is a true Republican patriot - who’s served his country on the frontlines in Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan. Compare that to Dartmouth English teacher Hart, a founder of the Dartmouth Review who was a Nixon and Reagan speechwriter (he was likely fired by Nixon, or at best couldn’t hack it), and is now… get this… supporting Barack Obama.
Indeed, this whole controversy is indicative of the very faultline that is trembling the base of the Reagan Revolution. The cynical East Coast conservatives, who’ve cast their lot with McCain and give lip-service to the “conservative” ideology, versus the true-red Huckabeeans who would rather lose in November, than win with anything less than ten Antonin Scalia’s on the Surpreme Court.
In this context, I don’t see Tim as a plagiarist, but rather as a holdover from the Rovian days of the White House who is being purged for the final cleansing year of George W. If Karl Rove was still in the White House, Tim Goeglein would have been promoted, not fired.
Whining about Goolge from the left
Left’s view of McCain all wrong
Going after my pal Peter Rubin
The Clintonites begin the circular firing squad
McCain’s “so-called” lobbying ties - and you think Obama has none? Start digging.
