Plagiarism, Or a Case Of Something Less Duplicitous?

Could plagiarism be contagious?

In the latest allegation of what might be called "Stephen Ambrose flu," Montgomery County historian Robert M. Bryce has accused the director emeritus of the Boston Science Museum of lifting vast chunks of text, facts, syntax and even errors from Bryce's 1997 biography of polar explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook.

Bryce's attorneys have called on Seattle publisher the Mountaineers Books to halt distribution of "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" by Bradford Washburn and Peter Cherici, published last fall, until the issue can be resolved.

Bryce said the 192-page, unfootnoted volume not only appropriates research and writing from Bryce's 1997 book "Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved," but Washburn and Cherici never even mention Bryce's encyclopedic biography in the bibliography.

And as if to add to the insult, Bryce said, Washburn sent him a copy of "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" with a breezy thanks for his help.

"He knows I'm a little guy without many resources," said Bryce, a research librarian at Montgomery College. "And he's got plenty."

In fact, Henry Bradford Washburn Jr., 91, is one of the nation's most distinguished explorers, photographers, cartographers and mountaineers.

In a lifetime of scientific inquiry Washburn has published more than a dozen books on mountain climbing, as well as the Bright Angel Trail map for the Grand Canyon. A product of Groton School and Harvard with a blizzard of honorary degrees, he headed Boston's Museum of Science from 1939 to 1980, and has led expeditions to study cosmic rays and glaciers in Alaska, pioneered the ascent of numerous famous peaks and staked out a dizzying 59-line list of accomplishments in Who's Who. He's been a trustee of Smith College and a member of Harvard's board of overseers.

Could a member of the Academy of Distinguished Bostonians really have stolen someone's scholarly work? Particularly for a book titled "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook"?

According to Bryce, 55, the issue's not even close. His four-pound, 1,133-page "Cook & Peary," with its 2,040 footnotes, "is based almost exclusively on primary sources. . . . It is therefore a plagiarist's dream. It tends to be fact-heavy, and facts cannot be copyrighted."

But he said "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" "not only appropriates the facts I outline, but the sequences of them, chooses the same facts I do for discussion or example and quotes the same sources . . . in a manner that is virtually a condensation of my text."

Reached at his home in Lexington, Mass., Washburn said, "I don't know Bryce" and "to the best of my knowledge I've never laid eyes on his book. But you've got to remember you're dealing with a 91-year-old guy here."

If there was a "tiny" mistake made by failing to credit Bryce in the bibliography of "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook," Washburn said, it was the fault of his co-author and his publisher. "I don't see what all the fuss is about."

Helen Cherullo, publisher of Mountaineers Books, said the appropriation of Bryce's research in "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" without credit was an "inadvertent and unintentional error," which the publisher regrets. She said Mountaineers Books this week offered to insert errata slips crediting Bryce into the 2,600 published copies not yet in stores, and to correct the error properly in any subsequent editions. Such an action would be part of a settlement still under negotiation with Bryce and his lawyers, she said.

The most intriguing aspect of the similarities between the two books, however, was not even known to Bryce and his lawyers when they dispatched their complaint.

Recent questions about the work of historians such as Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin have involved passages with wording strikingly similar or identical to that in other, previously published books. While the passages in question have not been placed in quotation marks, as proper scholarship demands and their original authors might wish, those authors are at least credited by Ambrose and Goodwin in footnotes or a reference bibliography.

"The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" not only omits any scholarly credit to Bryce or his work, but does so, says co-author Peter Cherici, despite his best efforts and without his knowledge.

Reached at his home in Plainfield, Conn., Cherici acknowledged he drew freely from Bryce's text after being contracted by Washburn to do the actual writing of "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook." He said he credited Bryce's book fully in the bibliography he submitted to Washburn with his manuscript.

But the bibliography published in "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" is "entirely different than the one I submitted," Cherici said. It not only omits Bryce, it omits Cherici. The eight pages of annotated bibliography bear the credit line "by Bradford Washburn and Madeleine Gleason."

Why? And who is Madeleine Gleason?

"I can't answer that question," Cherici said. "I was completely out of the loop at that point . . . and being a professional writer I decided not to make waves. I needed to be paid."

"The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" sets out to discredit Frederick Cook's claim that he reached the summit of Alaska's Mount McKinley in 1903, thus becoming the first man to scale the tallest peak (20,320 feet) in North America.

Washburn, perhaps the foremost living authority on Mount McKinley, became convinced while surveying the mountain in 1953 for a climbing map that Cook never reached its peak and had falsified his claim. He has accumulated a mass of data in the years since to prove that point.

Bryce said he consulted Washburn repeatedly when writing the portion of "Cook & Peary" dealing with Mount McKinley, had maintained a cordial correspondence with the explorer and acknowledged Washburn's help in the list of sources for "Cook & Peary." When the biography was published, he said, he received a letter from Washburn complimenting him on the book.

During their talks, Bryce said, Washburn mentioned a desire to come out with his own book about the incident. Bryce said he offered to help the explorer place such a manuscript with his own publisher, Stackpole Books, but Washburn declined, saying he had hired a writer and found a publisher himself.

That writer was Cherici, who said he met Washburn in early 1999 through a mutual acquaintance in the Explorers Club. He completed writing "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" within that year. Cherici said his major source for the work was a mass of books, clippings and articles "about three feet tall," all collected and given to him by Washburn. But he said he "naturally" drew facts and sequences from Bryce's book, since it was both the most comprehensive and the most recent biography of Cook.

When "The Dishonorable Dr. Cook" came out, Cherici said, he was startled to see that the list of sources he had actually used, including Bryce's book, had been replaced with the bibliography credited to Washburn and the unknown Madeleine Gleason. He had sent the true bibliography to Washburn with his finished manuscript, he said. But Cherullo said when the manuscript reached her it contained only the Washburn-Gleason bibliography, so that was the one published.

In between Washburn and Cherullo on the manuscript trail was New York agent Lindley Kirksey, who represented Washburn and Cherici on the project. Kirksey said part of the apparent confusion stems from the fact that Cherici was actually augmenting and rewriting an earlier Washburn manuscript that Mountaineers Books had considered too long and technical for the average reader. The Washburn-Gleason bibliography was the bibliography for this manuscript, she said.

When Washburn sent her Cherici's final manuscript to send on to the publisher, Kirksey said, "there were then two bibliographies," only one of which found its way to the printers. None of the principals can say why.

And who, finally, is Madeleine Gleason? Kirksey and Cherullo couldn't say. But when Washburn was reached, he could:

"She's a professional typist who lives here with us at the Brookhaven retirement home in Lexington," he said. "She typed the bibliography. It was an enormous undertaking and she did a great job."