June 01, 2003|By Ariel Sabar | Ariel Sabar,SUN STAFF
The Naval Academy said yesterday that it will investigate allegations that a highly regarded professor plagiarized portions of his new book on the history of the atomic bomb.
Authors who had been asked to review Brian VanDeMark's book, Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb, for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times said in interviews yesterday that they were startled to find phrases nearly identical to those in other books. The authors assembled a list of more than 50 passages they say should have been clearly attributed.
VanDeMark, a rising star in the academy's history department and co-author of the best-selling In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam with former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, issued a statement through the school yesterday: "I stand by the book in total. But I accept responsibility for rectifying my mistakes."
Reached at his home in Annapolis, VanDeMark, a tenured associate professor, declined to elaborate. In an interview Friday with The New York Times, which first reported the controversy, he defended most of the disputed passages as "reasonable paraphrases" but promised to reword or add footnotes to others in future editions.
Academy officials said yesterday that VanDeMark would remain at the school in good standing during a preliminary inquiry by faculty members.
The allegations whipsawed VanDeMark's colleagues in the history department, who described him as a careful, principled scholar who had no trouble winning book contracts with top-drawer publishers or invitations to lecture at Oxford.
Hired in 1990 after receiving his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, VanDeMark, 42, made a mark as an engaging teacher and prolific scholar, his colleagues said. VanDeMark, who teaches American diplomatic history, had taken a sabbatical this past year to finish the book.
"I just don't know what to say except that I'm shocked," said Larry V. Thompson, a recently retired academy professor who chaired the search committee that hired VanDeMark. "Brian does not strike me as the kind of individual who would do this. He doesn't need to do this. He was on the fast track."
Craig Symonds, a Civil War specialist at the academy who read several versions of the manuscript, said he found his colleague to be a "dedicated researcher and conscientious scholar."
Allegations of plagiarism are nothing new among historians. Last year, authors Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen E. Ambrose admitted that they had borrowed passages from other authors without proper acknowledgment.
But the charges take on a different hue at the Naval Academy, where character education is a linchpin of the curriculum and midshipmen are held to high standards of conduct.
"We're at an institution that is dependent on professionalism and integrity," said Mary A. DeCredico, the chairman of the history department.
VanDeMark's book follows the lives of the nine scientists who invented the bomb and examines the ethical quandaries they grappled with afterward. In a May 1 article, Kirkus Reviews called it a "welcome addition to the literature of the atomic age."
Problems with the book were spotted by Gregg Herken, an atomic historian and curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum who had been asked to review it for the Los Angeles Times.
He was struck by a description of scientist Vannevar Bush as resembling a "beardless Uncle Sam," a phrase he remembered from Richard Rhodes' 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Herken began to recognize what seemed to be unattributed phrases from his own books, Brotherhood of the Bomb (2002) and The Winning Weapon (1981).
In The Winning Weapon, for instance, Herken wrote: "Total destruction stretched out in a half-mile radius from the point of the explosion, leaving the rubble of one building indistinguishable from that of the next."
VanDeMark wrote: "Total devastation stretched out half a mile from the point of the explosion, leaving the rubble of one building indistinguishable from that of the next."
In Brotherhood of the Bomb, Herken wrote: "Once again, force of personality and sheer power of intellect had made Oppenheimer the dominant figure in a group."
VanDeMark: "Once again, through the force of his personality and the power of his intellect, Oppenheimer emerged as the dominant figure of the group."
"It was almost disbelief - an out-of-body experience," Herken said yesterday in a telephone interview. "You can't believe that somebody would do this, especially someone from the Naval Academy."
After spotting the similarities, Herken said he called a colleague, Robert S. Norris, the author of Racing for the Bomb, who had been asked to review VanDeMark's book for The New York Times.
"Within a half hour or so, I had found numerous examples taken from my book," Norris said by phone yesterday. "I got ahold of the Times book editor and I said, `You've got a big problem here.'"
Other phrases bear a close resemblance to those in Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb, by William Lanouette.
Lanouette: "One minute he was silly and winsome, the next, sullen and withdrawn."
VanDeMark: "One minute he could be silly and winsome, the next, sullen and withdrawn."
VanDeMark lists these books in his bibliography, but neither footnotes nor places quotation marks around the passages.
The Naval Academy's history department enacted a strongly worded anti-plagiarism policy in 1998 after a reviewer accused another academy history professor, Michael T. Isenberg, of borrowing liberally from other authors without attribution, said DeCredico, the department chairman. DeCredico described the case, which received no publicity, as "egregious." Isenberg, who has since died, denied doing anything wrong.
The policy, posted on the school's Web site, requires authors to "provide proper citation for everything taken from others."
