by Mark Lawson
A trembling on his desk alerted him to a 901 recorded call. He ignored it. One of Tom’s distinctions among scholars of American history was his resistance to conspiracy theories. The explanation for the ballistic discrepancies in the Warren Commission’s conclusions on the Dallas shooting that most convinced him was that the President had accidentally been finished off by a bodyguard returning fire (the argument of a volume published on one of the decadal anniversaries), which the US government, from understandable embarrassment, had subsequently covered up.
Fifteen minutes later – exactly so, heightened awareness of time being a consequence of house arrest – the phone shook mutely with another Suicide Call. Tom watched it divert to the answer service and then repeatedly alert him to the message.
He scrolled to Chapter 9: Oh, Jackie!, in which the Albuquerque academic argued that LBJ had coerced the president’s brother into the murder scheme by threatening to expose his affair with Jacqueline Kennedy.
One disadvantage of electronic readers over traditional books was that, while throwing the former to the floor in exasperation might be just as therapeutic as jettisoning a hardback, it was more economically prohibitive.
While Tom had always been dismissive of the old theories about LBJ being a conspirator, at least that speculation had some evidential basis. The vice-president had been at risk of being dropped from the re-election bid and was without doubt the main American beneficiary of the death, which is a factor often considered by investigations of killings, even though such connections are not necessarily decisive: the fact that A is run down by a bus and B receives the insurance pay-off does not automatically mean that B fixed the brakes of the vehicle.
A further Suicide Call, followed by another 901 diversion.
This LBJ–RFK hypothesis, in contrast, seemed based on nothing except the desire to find a new route across over-trodden ground. The proposed co-conspirators would have had to overcome the obstacle of scarcely being on speaking terms. And, while a sexual relationship between Bobby and Jackie had been suggested by some, any such affair was assumed to have begun as desperate mutual comfort after the President’s death, which made psychological sense, rather than as a long-standing secret that had to be hidden by homicide.
After the third of the voicemail prompts, Tom, from curiosity rather than duty, went to the queue.
3:30: Hi, Tom. David Wellington. You’re probably on another call. Give me a bell or I’ll try you in a tick? Ciao for now.
3:45: Tom? David Wellington again. Didn’t get an answer from you just now. I’m sure it’s nothing. You’re probably just tied up somewhere.
Yeah, hanging from a beam in a barn, David.
4:00: Tom, it’s David. Look, I’m getting a bit concerned that you haven’t made our usual rendezvous. Listen, if I haven’t heard from you by 4.15, I’m going to have to enact protocols. Take care.
It is a common fantasy of the wronged to imagine the reaction of their persecutors on receiving news of the suicide and Tom was now given a glimpse of this satisfaction without the biggest drawback. He wondered if Special had been phoned or e-mailed to be told: He’s not answering his phone.
During the next fifteen minutes, he tried to focus on the tenth chapter – ‘The Wink: We Done It, Son’ – which argued that LBJ’s closing of one eye after being sworn in as President on the jet that carried his predecessor’s corpse was not, as previous intriguers had suggested, a shared moment of satisfaction with his wife and co-conspirator Lady Bird Johnson but a signal to Bobby back in the Attorney-General’s office, watching the footage on TV.
Why, the Texan historian argued, would Johnson have risked such a public gesture when he could have whispered quietly to his wife within moments in the presidential cabin that was now theirs? The only explanation was that he needed to get a message to someone who was not at the ceremony. As was common with bad history, a small truth spawned a hugely unsafe conclusion. The new commander-in-chief’s certainly inappropriate and therefore possibly mysterious eye movement might more likely have been directed at a distant observer but that didn’t mean the target was – as with B receiving the death payout from bus victim A – in any way inevitably Bobby.
Tom was also not sure where exactly RKF had been at the time of the assassination and, as the sport of historians is identifying inaccuracies in the work of their peers, got up to look for, on shelves that had once been alphabetically arranged, Manchester’s The Death of a President. Pausing between the M and the K sections, while trying to remember if his Kennedy library was arranged by author or overall subject, he began to wonder what the protocols mentioned by Wellington might mean. The arrival of a Workplace Harmony rapid response team at his door? A call or e-mail from Special?
He had just found the book he needed, under D for Dallas, when his phone tolled an entry in his in-box.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: U Okay?
Tom, just checking in again. You bearing up? Do let me know if you need to talk again or there’s anything at all I can do? C XX
His own laugh had been a rare sound recently and, with the village quiet because most people were at work, it startled him. So the protocol involved asking his kindest colleague to be a corporate equivalent of neighbours peering through the net curtains. Had Wellington asked around in panic that afternoon or was Ciara’s name stored as a precaution, like the next-of-kin box on a medical form? He resented the university for taking advantage of her nature but what she had done was merely an extension of the kindness she had already shown him. So he replied:
I’m surviving. A little writing, mainly reading: relieved to find that I can still tell good history from bad. T XX
After the experience of seeing years of his e-mails printed at the back of the Traill Report, Tom almost omitted the kisses but even Salem Academy could surely not claim that message signoffs had any significance. He got back a Good and another two virtual smooches, imagining the news being passed to Royal and then to Special and corporate relief all round that they would not yet be called to a coroner’s court.
In the Manchester book, he discovered that the Kennedy author, as well as being implausible in his broader claims, was also wrong about where Bobby had been when hearing of his brother’s death: the Attorney-General was eating a tuna sandwich in the swimming pool of his Virginia mansion.
The errant academic – as most now did in a culture where teachers were judged by public impact – printed his office contacts at the bottom of his Author’s Note. Tom had a tone for shame-mails (he might also post something on one of the K sites later) and it flowed easily: While you are entitled to your fantasies, however absurd, in interpreting the Kennedy assassination, certain basic facts are incontrovertible. At the time of his brother’s death, Robert F Kennedy (see Manchester, p 195) was …
He stopped. For the first time on one of these corrective missions, he pictured the recipient: hot, hurt, their work interrupted, cursing the nit-picking English prick. Tom deleted the message. Are you sure? his laptop queried. He was certain. His wounds had made him unwilling to spill the blood of others.
Pistory
Professor Ned Marriott may or may not be a sex criminal – he denies allegations that are currently under investigation by the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Millpond – but the under-acloud don and TV face now confronts another struggle to clear his name – over accusations of plagiarism.
The historiat may recall that the telly Prof already has form in this area. In 2000, the BBC and the production company Ogglebox apologized and paid damages to the publishers Pan Macmillan after admitting that multiple phrases from the educational set-text A Little History of Tudor England had been included without attribution in the scripts and tie-in BBC Books hardback for The Six Lives of Henry VIII, Marriott’s 1999 project charting the changes in King Harry’s reputation.
At the time, the wholesale theft of several sentences was blamed on a ‘misunderstanding at the
research and scripting stage.’ But, with the prof-on-the-box’s career already under threat from the allegations that he sexually assaulted two young women, TV bosses will be alarmed to hear that a detailed study by Pistory of the alleged rapist’s broadcast and published output has uncovered evidence that the under-a-shadow academic has continued to dip his fingers into the word-till when he hopes that no one is looking – which, with the declining ratings for his recent TV work, may have seemed a safe bet!
Until, that is, Pistory came along. We have uncovered multiple examples of suspicious overlaps with pre-existing texts.
In 2005, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Marriott wrote and presented a BBC2 documentary, made by Ogglebox, called Why Weren’t We In Vietnam?, which looked at how, in the mid-to-late 1960s, the then British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, resisted requests from the American President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, to give UK military support to the American war in Vietnam.
The script included these lines:
Marriott (VO): Campaigning for President in 1964, Johnson had opposed sending US combat troops to Vietnam and was said, in private conversation, to have called it ‘a raggedy-ass fourth-rate country’, over which no American blood should be spilled. But, by 1965, President Johnson was commander-in-chief of 184,000 American soldiers in Vietnam.
Although lightly paraphrasing in places, this script largely reproduces, in content and order of facts, a paragraph in America: A Narrative History by George Brown Tindall and David E Shi (Norton, 4th ed, 1996):
During the Presidential campaign of 1964 Johnson had opposed the use of American combat troops and had privately described Vietnam as a ‘raggedy-ass fourth-rate country’ not worthy of American blood and money. Nevertheless, by the end of 1965, there were 184,000 American troops in Vietnam. (p. 1425)
Note the word ‘nevertheless’, which is about the only thing the sticky-fingered professor hasn’t filched. Nevertheless, this isn’t a one-off. Marriott’s Channel 4 TV series and related book The Fabulous Fifties (1990) both contain these lines:
The Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was obsessed with bread: the economic significance of its price but also its taste. This was partly because he had hated the austerity ‘British Loaf’, introduced during rationing. He claimed it gave him flatulence!
And, in Professor Peter Hennessy’s Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (Penguin) we find this:
Bevin was obsessed with food, bread especially … he didn’t like the austerity ‘British Loaf’. It made him belch. (p. 375)
It’s not just Bevin who suffers from regurgitation, Prof Marriott! But, to be fair, the scandal-hit academic does also sometimes find his own words coming back on him. A passage describing the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II that featured in The Fabulous Fifties is partially reproduced, with minimal revision, in both Elizabeth I – Elizabeth II: Who Wins? and The British People. Marriott’s description of the politics of sixteenthcentury England in the Elizabethan book and series is also repeated more or less verbatim on page and screen in The English Witch Hunts (2005).
Whatever else the notorious historian may be guilty of, he certainly seems bang to rights on literary pillaging!
Nuance
‘Ned, it’s Claire. I’ve had a look at that blog you sent me.’
‘Good. And?’
‘I understand how galling this sort of stuff can be but I tend to advocate a sticks and stones approach.’
‘What? Throwing some at the smug, sanctimonious teaching assistant fucker?’
‘Er, no. More along the lines of blogs will never hurt you.’
‘But it’s clearly damaging.’
‘Potentially, yes. With those already determined to think the worst of you. Whether it’s actually defamatory, though … some of the passages he quotes are quite close.’
‘But the details of the Vietnam War or the Attlee administration remain the same. What historians do most of the time is put it in their own words. Tom Pimm calls us paraphrase-medics.’
‘I can see that. But it’s one of those things that a prosecutor can – I’m not saying it is – make sound lazy. Bevin’s belch is the sort of thing a decent QC …’
‘Okay, Claire. So, with that, you notice that the arsehole hasn’t put a date on Hennessey’s Never Again? That’s because his book came out in 1992, two years after mine.’
‘Wow! This is. You’re saying he stole it from you?’
‘No. No. It’s complicated.’
‘Oh, dear. Then, as a general rule, don’t take it near the law.’
‘The point is, I got it from an article Peter wrote – in the ’80s, I think.’
‘Oh, well, again, when said with an eyebrow raised under a wig …’
‘But it’s properly credited to him at the back of my book. The guy’s just done some quote-check without reading the footnotes. And the others – I mean, is self-plagiarism even plagiarism?’
‘Well, in strict legal terms, I’d think obviously not. Any more than self-abuse is abuse. But again – in an adversarial context – it can be made to seem – again, I’m not saying it is – dodgy …’
‘But he hasn’t really got anything on me. In every case, it’s a matter of nuance.’
‘Ah. So – to your average juror, Nuance is the name of some reality TV star’s latest baby.’
‘But how can he just get away with it? That phrase about being caught with my fingers in the word-till …’
‘Yes. I tend to advise being wary of suing over metaphors. Judges and juries allow quite a bit wriggle-room in interpretation.’
‘No, the point I’m making is that he’s nicked it from Martin Amis. The Moronic Inferno, I’m pretty sure. He’s plagiarized a phrase about plagiarism!’
‘That’s very funny. But it’s more a point for Twitter than the courts.’
‘I don’t twit.’
‘I know. But I can easily find someone here to get that up if you want it. Fight fire with fire; fight posts with posts.’
‘Claire, it’s like going to the doctor and being told to try a glass of water.’
‘Well, sometimes that might be the best thing for it.’
‘Okay. But, even you – the bit about literary pillaging!’
‘As I’ve said, metaphors … and what happened with the Tudor thing is on the record.’
‘Well, we know what happened there.’
‘Yes, we do. But it’s in cold print.’
‘Yeah, yeah. But pillage is a half of a well-known phrase. The Vikings, they pillaged and they …’
‘Oh, I see. Yes.’
‘So what this shabby hack is trying to say is he’s guilty of pillaging and so he’s nudge nudge guilty of … of …’
‘Well, he may be.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ, whose side are you on?’
‘Oh, Ned, you know better than that. All I’m ever doing is imagining how it will play. Legally, you are under a suspicion. We are in the process of demonstrating it to be false. But we can’t go after some blogger who’s probably only read by his mother for being suspicious of you. I can force him to specify what the allegations are and that you deny them. But my advice is that would make things worse.’
‘Yes. I … I’m sorry.’
‘Okay, Professor. From now on, I won’t tell you whether Churchill deliberately let Coventry be bombed and you won’t tell me who to sue.’
Shaving Luxury
Eager to economize – because of the loss of the fees from TV and the potentially bankrupting legal costs to come – Ned downloaded onto his cheapo phone an add-up app, which compared expenditure on a range of items (under the headings Groceries, Leisure, Fuel, Sundries) week to week, month by month, year on year.
Finding – pleasingly – that his writer’s mind still functioned through the fug of uplift pills, he was struck that the names given to the categories were not the words that most people would choose. Food, entertainment, petrol, miscellaneous were surely the more universal terms. Bu
t in Australian cricket, extras were referred to as ‘sundries’, and so perhaps Bank-Balancer had originated in Oz, although, ‘groceries’, he reckoned, must have been chosen because weekly shopping covered not just food but other stuff.
Which included, in this case, an escalating indulgence exposed by analysis of Ned’s cash flow. His purchases of shaving foam, it turned out, had risen by almost half a month in the period since his fall. At first, he wondered if the speedier beardgrowth was somehow a result of the antidepressants.
But then he understood. A reluctant and painfully inaccurate shaver, he had been, throughout his adult life, a weekend scruff, letting stubble grow unchallenged from Friday morning until he stumbled into the bathroom early on Monday. The roughness of his chin was a symbol of not being under pressure or on show.
His father and stepfather, born between the wars, had shaved every day, shaped by the Depression prejudice that a man whose face was neither clean nor officer-bearded was unemployed and careless of the figure he cut. And this prejudice may have been true because Ned’s weekend hairiness was designed to advertise that he was not, though through his own choice, working.
Now, with his profession threatened, he instinctively adopted the wisdom of his family ancients that to be unshaven was code for the dole. Since the humiliation, even with the trembling hands of the first few weeks, he had forced the SuperSmooth Fusion 4 across his jaw each Saturday and Sunday morning. Ned was determined that no observer – or, worse, photographer or reporter – would be able to say: ‘I saw him looking wild-eyed and unshaven in the street.’ He entrusted the eyes to the drugs and took care of the bristles himself.
As a result, he was shaving seven times a week instead of five, an increase of 40%. The further 8% of shaving foam purchased to make the alarm-triggering 48% was presumably explained by the fact that he was grooming himself more carefully than before, desperate to appear respectable.
