The Ghosts

Once upon a time, when statesmen wrote their own speeches and authored their own autobiographies (or at least left that impression), a historian felt pretty sure that he could take a man at his word. Nowadays, complains Historian Ernest R. May in the American Scholar, things are tougher. The modern biographer can no longer be sure just what part ghost and what part flesh his subject was.

"The choice and order of words in Jefferson's writings enabled [biographers] to rebuild and portray his pattern of thinking, but for contemporary public figures, similar analysis is practically impossible. If, on the basis of letters and speeches, a scholar should try to analyze Franklin

Roosevelt's mind, he would emerge with a figure made up of Roosevelt and the fragments of Roosevelt's ghosts--Rosenman, Sherwood, Michelson, Grace Tully, Missy Le Hand, even the sprightly apparition of Harold Ickes . . .

"Examples could be taken from any era to show how ghost-written sources have built an impenetrable thicket around the truth. Two generations of scholars have quarreled about the meaning of Washington's Farewell Address, simply because no one knows whether Washington himself or Alexander Hamilton was its author." The same can be said of Woodrow Wilson's "neutrality in thought" proclamation of Aug. 18, 1914. Recent investigations have "turned up the original draft of this proclamation in the handwriting of Robert Lansing, with changes and notations by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan . . . Therefore, if any character is revealed ... it is that of Lansing or perhaps that of Bryan. Certainly it is doubtful that Wilson's innermost thoughts appeared . . .''

Today, says May, the situation is far worse. "All of Stimson's On Active Service in Peace and War, except direct quotations, was written by McGeorge Bundy; and part of Hull's lengthy Memoirs was written by Andrew Berding and various State Department experts . . . Walter Muir Whitehall's Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record . . . is a fusion of two firsthand accounts . . . and in the book's World War II narrative, it is sometime? difficult to tell what was actually seen by the commander in chief of the fleet and what was merely glimpsed by Whitehill from the Admiral's outer office . . ."

Indeed, says May, "the practice of using ghostwriters and collaborators is so common as to raise doubts concerning even the books in which collaborators are not named. That a publisher should see fit to blazon advertisements of Crusade in Europe with the statement 'Written by Eisenhower himself!' carries alarming implications and the historian's fears were hardly allayed last year when he saw the amazement with which newspapers reported that Governor Stevenson wrote hi? own speeches."*

The implications. May believes, "may be enough ... to drive American historians back into the colonial period or else into writing busty fiction."

*During the campaign, both candidates made use of ghosts. Some of Stevenson's: Herbert Agar, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Archibald Mac-Leish, Bernard DeVoto. Samuel Rosenman. James Wechsler. Some of Eisenhower's: Stanley High, Gabriel Hauge, C. D. Jackson, Emmet Hughes.

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