When the Times informed Montana Senator John Walsh last week that one of his graduate-school papers contained unattributed passages by other writers, Walsh tried out three responses. First, he told the Times that he did not do “anything intentional.” The next day, Walsh, a Democrat who spent thirty-three years in the military, suggested that his plagiarism was connected to post-traumatic stress disorder from service in Iraq. The public was unmoved by that explanation, and, on Friday, Walsh said that P.T.S.D. did not have “any impact” on the case. Instead, he urged voters to look ahead. “I made a mistake here and I’m going to move on,” he told the local CBS station.
In his aversion to attribution, Walsh has earned a footnote in the history of those whom the Roman poet Martial, in the first century, called the “plagiarii”—those who “kidnap slaves,” or, in Martial’s experience, his words. “If you allow them to be called mine, I will send you my verses gratis; if you wish them to be called yours, pray buy them, that they may be mine no longer,” he wrote. Walsh is in good company: Wordsworth, Swift, Coleridge, Wilde. In describing Cleopatra on her barge, Shakespeare digested a description from Sir Thomas North, though after comparing the two, Richard Posner, the judge and author of “A Little Book on Plagiarism,” concluded, “If this is plagiarism, we need more plagiarism.”
As he confronts the consequences, Senator Walsh might feel fortunate that he is a senator, not an academic or a college freshman or a blogger. Last year, an assistant professor of English at Brown University lost her tenure-track job after she was found to have included unattributed passages in her book; undergraduates could flunk a course, or worse. Last Friday, as Walsh declared his intention to move on, BuzzFeed was firing one of its writers, Benny Johnson, after the site found forty-one “instances of sentences or phrases copied word for word from other sites.”
If one is going to plagiarize, it pays to be in politics, where the expectation for remorse, and the likelihood of punishment, are minimal. In 1950, Joseph McCarthy thundered about Communists using the unattributed words of Richard Nixon—but when he was asked, in a hearing, “Have you no sense of decency?" it wasn’t because of that. In 2008, Barack Obama took the words of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, but fended off criticism by explaining later that Patrick “gave me the line and suggested I use it.” Vladimir Putin was awarded an advanced degree by the St. Petersburg Mining Institute with the help of a dissertation that, as two Brookings researchers discovered, included sixteen stolen pages—and, remarkably, not a single set of quotation marks. Putin has simply avoided answering questions about it.
One of the rare politicians who paid a price for purloining was Joe Biden, whom I profiled in the magazine last week. In 1987, Biden was on the Presidential campaign trail when he spoke lovingly of his coal-mining ancestors—except he did so with the language that the British politician Neil Kinnock used to describe his ancestors. When it was discovered, Biden said, “I do not understand what the big deal is.” But that case and others (Biden had lifted five pages of a paper in law school) eventually forced him to withdraw from the Presidential race. He thought that being bumped from that particular tenure track was a bit unfair. “Although it’s awfully clear to me what choice I have to make, I have to tell you honestly, I do it with incredible reluctance,” he told the press when he withdrew and returned to the Senate.
In the seventeen years since then, the apparent costs for plagiarism in politics have dwindled further. In October, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul was found to have ripped off Wikipedia for his description of the film “Gattaca” during a speech at Liberty University. That led to the discovery—now lavishly documented on Wikipedia—that he had pickpocketed language on a number of occasions: For his Tea Party rebuttal to the State of the Union; for three pages of his book, “Government Bullies”; for an op-ed; and testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Paul announced new safeguards for his office to prevent it from happening again, but still said that he was being held to an “unfair standard.” He blamed the fuss on “haters.”
There are other reasons, other than the lack of consequences, why holders of high public office tend to bound over the line between their own words and those of others. One is habit: they routinely deliver impassioned speeches written by staff, and ardent talking points e-mailed by party committees. Brian Martin, an Australian scholar who has studied intellectual theft of one kind or another, suggests that these routine forms of ghostwriting might be better understood as “institutionalized plagiarism.” Another explanation, offered by Thomas Mallon, David Callahan, and other authors, is that political speech, unlike regular communication, is rewarded for staying within prescribed boundaries rather than venturing creatively, for intoning the same thing over and over again, for staying on message, and for offering familiar mantras and faithful recitations of the conventional wisdom.
For Senator Walsh of Montana, none of those rationales suffice. He wasn’t yet in the Senate when he submitted a paper on American policy in the Middle East, at least a quarter of which appears to have been borrowed from academic articles and other sources available online. He seems to have simply succumbed to a political tendency less common in America than in Germany, where a string of politicians lost their jobs after they were found to have buttressed their political resumes with PhDs. (A minister of defense, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, borrowed so much from the Web that he was nicknamed “Baron zu Googleberg.”)
The only real mystery in the stories of political plagiarism is its durability in an age of Turnitin and other scanning software that can protect an author from his own mistakes, intentional or otherwise. Judge Posner, in his book, published seven years ago, took stock of the emerging technology and concluded: “We may be entering the twilight of plagiarism.” That verdict, for the moment, remains premature.
