The Vietnam war claimed another American casualty last week, but don’t look for this one ever to be chiseled into the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who apparently had let on for years to his students at Mount Holyoke College that he had served in the Army in Vietnam, was revealed to be merely a Vietnam veteran wannabe.
Far from slogging through rice paddies in pursuit of Vietcong or, as he allegedly told a Boston Globe reporter, serving on the staff of Gen. William C. Westmoreland in Saigon in 1965-66, Ellis spent that period at Yale University, working on a doctorate in history. He eventually did serve in the Army, teaching history at the United States Military Academy at West Point. But, according to a colleague at the academy, Ellis indicated he sought that assignment precisely to avoid the possibility of being assigned to Vietnam.
Service in Vietnam apparently was only one of several fabrications with which Ellis embroidered his biography, according to the Globe. He also was reported to have “exaggerated the extent” of his involvements in the civil-rights and anti-war movements. And he even went so far as to claim to have scored the winning touchdown for his high school football team in his senior year–a claim contradicted by the evidence.
Ellis has dropped out of public view since the Globe made its disclosures last week. It’s unclear whether his academic career will survive this crisis. Mount Holyoke was reported to be investigating the allegations against him and at least one other prominent historian, David J. Garrow of Emory University, who won a Pulitzer for a biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has said Ellis should be fired if he doesn’t resign first.
Certainly it is hard to imagine that a college would retain a student found to have engaged in such gross misrepresentations on his application for admission. It’s tough to see how it could justify retaining a faculty member guilty of such grievous violations of the truth–“veritas,” in the Latin of Harvard’s coat of arms.
But by this point, what will or ought to happen to Ellis is less interesting than the question why. Why would he have done what he did? As the Globe quoted one of his students as saying, “He has all the right credentials. There was no need for him to fabricate any of this.”
Yes and no. There are needs and there are needs.
Ellis had credentials–an Ivy League doctorate, highly praised publications, an apparently spellbinding classroom presence. But in teaching a course on Vietnam and American Culture he apparently felt he needed more–he needed the credibility that could come only from having actually been there. And so he appropriated it.
But there may have been a need even beyond that. It has become as fashionable today to have served in Vietnam as it once was to have avoided service there. No longer “baby-killers,” Vietnam vets are seen as kids–our brothers, sons, husbands–who were put into an impossible situation and made the best they could of it.
Recall the conversations sparked by the recent disclosures about the actions of former Nebraska Sen. Robert Kerrey in Vietnam.
And listen to another of Ellis’ students, talking to the Globe about the professor’s course on Vietnam: “I’m staring down the barrel of graduation, and I think back to that course and how the war was a test of his manhood. . . . It almost made me a tad jealous of people who had that choice to make–whether to go or not. He had gone, taken the test of manhood, and passed it.”
Not quite, as it turns out. But when it’s put into those terms–“the test of manhood”–you can see how Ellis, how many men, might have been tempted. The wonder is that the historian, who made his living excavating the truth of other men’s lives, thought his would go undiscovered.
