Combs Spouts Off

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Posts Tagged ‘lincoln’

Fiction passed off as history

Posted by Richard on November 15, 2012

NBC Nightly News had an interview tonight with Doris Kearns-Goodwin, author of the Lincoln biography on which the Spielberg film is based. Here’s all you need to know about Kearns-Goodwin: in the interview she drew parallels between a brave Lincoln, shortly after his re-election, fighting to get the 13th Amendment through Congress and Obama, shortly after his re-election, fighting to “save us from the fiscal cliff.”

Actually, Thomas DiLorenzo thinks that’s not all you need to know about Kearns-Goodwin. He has more, starting with a reminder that she’s an admitted plagiarist:

… Goodwin the court historian has devoted her life to writing hagiographies of the worst of the worst political bullies – FDR, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, and Lincoln. (It was her book on the Kennedys that got her in trouble and forced her to admit plagiarizing dozens of paragraphs, and paying a six-figure sum to the victim of her plagiarism. That got her kicked off the Pulitzer prize committee and PBS, but only for a very short while).

DiLorenzo thinks there’s also more you need to know about her book, Team of Rivals, the film Lincoln, and President Lincoln. I’ll give you a hint. He’s not a fan of any of them. Item one: the story that Lincoln fought to get the 13th Amendment passed (a centerpiece of Kearns-Goodwin’s book and the Spielberg film) is utterly false, according to David H. Donald, “a longtime Harvard University historian, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer, and the preeminent mainstream Lincoln scholar of our time.” RTWT.

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