We’re used to seeing plagiarism in public life—Joe Biden’s the most famous culprit, but there are also various German politicians, as well as Harvard law professor and almost-Supreme-Court-judge Laurence Tribe. Some Yale law professors too, I think. And lots of academics, from Weggy on down to various more obscure characters.
Plagiarism is taking someone else’s writing and passing it off as your own. The opposite—taking your own writing and attributing it to someone else—is called ghostwriting.
The most common use of ghostwriting by political figures is when someone is hired to write something that will be published under the politician’s name. Maybe the most famous example here is the book Profiles in Courage, attributed to John Kennedy. A few years later, Barry Goldwater had a couple of ghostwritten books attributed to him. Perhaps the best way of thinking about these examples is that these guys are politicians, not writers, but they’re taking political responsibility for the words that are placed under their names. It’s not really important whether they wrote the particular words; what’s relevant is that they’re standing by these words.
Recently I learned about a different sort of example of political ghostwriting. In this case it was the politician who was the ghostwriter: he did the writing and then attributed it to others.
Paul Campos has the story. It’s about controversial abortion judge Matthew Kacsmaryk:
As a lawyer for a conservative legal group, Matthew Kacsmaryk in early 2017 submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions.
The Obama administration, the draft article argued, had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.”
But a few months after the piece arrived, an editor at the law journal who had been working with Kacsmaryk received an unusual email: Citing “reasons I may discuss at a later date,” Kacsmaryk, who had originally been listed as the article’s sole author, said he would be removing his name and replacing it with those of two colleagues at his legal group . . .
What Kacsmaryk did not say in the email was that he had already been interviewed for a judgeship by his state’s two senators and was awaiting an interview at the White House.
As part of that process, he was required to list all of his published work on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, including “books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces, or other published material you have written or edited.”
The article, titled “The Jurisprudence of the Body,” was published in September 2017 by the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a right-leaning journal that Kacsmaryk had led as a law student at the University of Texas. But Kacsmaryk’s role in the article was not disclosed . . .
I guess that it was no secret that Kacsmaryk was an anti-abortion activist, and in general there’s no principle by which political activists should not become judges, so I’m guessing it was a bit of overkill for him to break the rules and not list this article he wrote. Seems like an example of someone trying so hard to be careful that he gets himself in trouble. Too clever by half.
But all this made me think of my own writing. Have I ever been a ghostwriter? I don’t think so. Several years ago my work was plagiarized—that is, some of my ideas were published under somebody else’s name—but he didn’t ask me for permission to do this, so it was plagiarism by him, not ghostwriting by me. Other times I’ve written a draft article or book and then approached others to join me as coauthors, but that’s not ghostwriting either, first because I kept my name on the projects and second because the coauthors helped on these projects too, which indeed is why I invited them to join the projects in the first place. There have have also been some projects where I’ve helped out but said I’d rather not be included as an author, not out of embarrassment but rather because I didn’t think my contributions to these projects were so large, and I was concerned that if I were included as a coauthor, people would inappropriately give me credit for the work. Finally, there have been some projects where I’ve helped out but I was dissatisfied with the final version of the paper and I didn’t feel like putting in the effort to make it better, so I just asked to be removed from the author list so I would not be taking responsibility for the product.
No actual ghostwriting, though. If someone paid me enough, I’d do it. I’d even prove a theorem for Stephen Wolfram for enough $ . . . unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I’m not a good enough mathematician to prove any of the theorems he’d like to see proven. And I have no plans to interview for any appointive federal positions, so I doubt I’d have any motivation to do a Kacsmaryk and try to erase the tracks on any work I’m legally required to disclose.
P.S. There’s one thing I do sometimes that’s kind of ghostwriter-like, which is to take some phrase that I’ve used (here are some examples) and attribute it to someone else, or to say something like, “As the saying goes . . .” I do this sometimes for amusement and sometimes because I feel that, even though I have no direct quote for the saying, that it’s something I’ve heard before, or similar to something I’ve heard before, so I don’t really feel I deserve credit for it.
1 For all journals I’m aware of (in the sciences), the judge’s actions would have clearly been unethical because the listed authors of the paper had nothing to do with the work.
2 Given that the journal approved this ridiculous request, wouldn’t they have also approved the ethical option of publishing anonymously? (Or maybe a pseudonym?)
3 I’ve never really thought about whether ghostwriting is ethically better than plagiarism. I suppose the key point is that the ghostwriter is a willing (and presumably remunerated) participant, while someone who is plagiarized is not. And I suppose no one wants a book cover clogged with lists of the actual writers of Hardy Boys or Warrior Cats books. Still…
Isn’t the point here that Kacsmaryk didn’t want to get asked about this article at his hearing before the Judiciary Committee?
Both ghostwriting and plagiarism, where ethically dubious, are subspecies of *fraud.* And where not dubious, they are not.
Thius, political autobiographies which are ghostwritten are fine because people don’t *expect* the politician to have written them (and many, like the autobiographies of Malcolm X or most sports autobiographies, make the name of the ghostwriter manifest.)
Legal briefs can freely plagiarize, because the contents are regarded as the sole relevant thing and their authorship is deemed entirely inessential.
The normal way to publish something without having it attributed to you is to use a pseudonym, but this is strongly disfavored for academic publishing. The solution Kasmaryk hits upon, willing adoptive authors (“straw authors”?), is, as you point out, not really deceptive since his views are fairly well known, but does allow him to defelct questions about direct authorial responsibility… much as Charles Barkley did when he argued that he was misquoted in his autobiography.
Jonathan (the other one) said, “The solution Kasmaryk hits upon, willing adoptive authors (“straw authors”?), is, as you point out, not really deceptive since his views are fairly well known, but does allow him to defelct questions about direct authorial responsibility… ”
Apologies for being in a jolly mood at the moment, but I’d be interested in a definition of “defelct”. (I hope auto-correct doesn’t try to change it again to “deflect.”)
Nothing the Obama administration proposed would have forced religious physicians to do transgender operations or prescribe abortifacients. The legal reasoning the article seems to suggest is execrable. Indeed, it was better to deny authorship than to stand by it, in order to maximize personal gain, but it was a conspiracy to deceive the Senate. (In my opinion.)
When I have made some relatively small contribution to an article and do not wish to take responsibility for it as a whole, I ask the other authors to include an acknowledgment and leave me off the author list. And although acknowledgments do not get considered in academic promotion, the nice thing about them is that, unlike authorship, they usually state what you actually did.
As for political figures having others write books for them, I think this falls into a category where it is common knowledge that this is done and nobody is actually deceived by it. In fact, I think in the commercial publishing sector generally, it is understood that works are not infrequently ghost-written.
The academic sector, though, lives by different standards. And judges, unlike politicians, are expected to exhibit at least a veneer of integrity.
Clyde said, “When I have made some relatively small contribution to an article and do not wish to take responsibility for it as a whole, I ask the other authors to include an acknowledgment and leave me off the author list.”
This reminds me of once when I wrote an article and sent it to a colleague (whom I knew quite well) with her name as co-author. She sent me a reply along the lines of, “This part of the paper is something that I never would have thought of, and this part is something that you never would have thought of, and the rest is things we both could do easily, so why don’t you just leave my name off of it.”
The judge’s move reminds me a little of the excuse you sometimes hear from plagiarists when they are caught: the passage in question was really ghost-written by a friend or research assistant. Until it was identified as problematic, the author was willing to take credit, but once it is criticized, the text is renounced.
It’s bad form, to my mind. The ghostwriter is asked (and often paid) not to take credit. I suppose part of the contract could be that they will take blame for any errors should the need arise. But now we get into an even weirder possible market: authors contracting with stand-by “ghost-authors”, not to actually write the book, but to take the fall in case errors are identified. People with no reputations to lose (non academics, say) might make a good income selling these — what shall we call them — “authorial credit swaps” — a kind of insurance policy.
Of course, this is the reason not to accept the excuse that someone other than the named author really wrote a text. And not to allow the judge’s little trick.
I think that the most famous example of ghostwriting by a political figure may be Churchill’s six volume work “The Second World War”. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in large part for it. But that’s not the funniest thing about it, that’s the Freudian slip in the first edition of the first volume calling the French Army the “poop of the life of France,” when it should have said, as it does in later editions, the “prop of the life of France.”