IT’S THE best spring ever, green and lush, and baby robins are chittering in their nest in the maple tree and the smell of blossoms is in the air – and yet we dour Scots cannot forget April 27th was the anniversary of our ignominious defeat at the Battle of Dunbar, our good King John stripped of his regalia and the Stone of Scone hauled off to London.
Yes, I know 1296 seems a long time ago, but we Scots nurse our resentments carefully. I know I do.
Plenty of people have said nice things to me over the years that I vaguely remember, but I remember with stunning clarity where I was sitting when my classmate Cliff Nordstrom put his thumb and forefinger around my wrist and told me I had skinny arms “like a girl’s”. The moment burns in my memory 52 years later. I still feel self-conscious wearing short-sleeved shirts.
Ditto, a dozen other small slights. To you they’d seem minuscule. A review of a book of mine, mostly favourable, but one sentence was like a shiv between the ribs, and that is the sentence I remember.
It’s resentment, I think, that lights a fire of ambition in our tails and drives us to beat our wings on the porch screen, hoping to reach the incandescent glow of fame and fortune.
And now I wonder what deep resentment motivated the late Stephen Ambrose to lie about his closeness to his biographee Dwight D Eisenhower and claim to have spent hundreds of hours with Ike when, according to the general’s diary, he probably spent no more than four or five.
When the story came out in The New Yorkermagazine last week, I felt ill. I admired the man. I loved Citizen Soldiersabout the Battle of the Bulge. He was a deservedly bestselling historian ( D-Day, Band of Brothers), the prolific author of books on Lewis and Clark, George A Custer, the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War, biographer of Eisenhower and Nixon: why did he need to stoop to such a pitiful petty lie? And why did he lift passages from other writers and use them without quotation marks? Did someone make fun of his lack of erudition, growing up in Wisconsin? Did he feel inferior to his doctor dad? A long-time smoker (who died of lung cancer in 2002), maybe Mr Ambrose was given to tempting fate.
Plagiarism is suicide. It’s a stain peroxide won’t lift out. All your hard work over a lifetime, blighted by the word “plagiarism”. It’s in the third or fourth graph of your obituary, a splotch on your escutcheon.
Here, dear reader, I must disclose that I have repeatedly lied about my closeness to General Eisenhower and have claimed more than once to have been his aide aboard the cruiser Memphis, where he observed the D-Day landing from the porthole of his cabin, in which he was ensconced with Marlene Dietrich, sipping champagne, as I sat outside the door strumming Lili Marleneon a HarmonyTone F-4 mandolin.
Years later, an eagle-eyed reader blew the whistle, pointing out HarmonyTone’s F-4 mandolin was not manufactured until 1947. Also, that I was two years old. Also, that Marlene Dietrich was in Hawaii at the time, canoodling with John F Kennedy.
Luckily the exposé came out on the very day Richard Nixon resigned as president and so it got buried in the back pages, along with the embarrassing fact my book, Sailing with the General, contained large swatches (unattributed) of Tolstoy's War and Peace.
Thankfully, these disclosures never got in the way of my friendship with Mr Eisenhower, and he and I golfed many, many rounds together with George S Patton and Walter (Old Iron Pants) Cronkite, the memory of which the smell of plum blossoms brings back with startling clarity. – (Tribune Media Services)