Like the best stories in a newspaper, it began as a tip. One person who knew the truth told a friend who mentioned it to an acquaintance who passed it on to Walter Robinson, a tenacious reporter, and that set in motion a sequence of events that would lead to the explosive revelation that Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Joseph Ellis was fabricating a Vietnam War record in lectures at Mount Holyoke College.
Here’s what happened.
Robinson was unable to act immediately. As head of the Globe Spotlight team, he was busy with a series on shoddy home construction. However, a cursory inquiry revealed that Ellis had claimed in a 1994 interview to have parachuted into Vietnam with the 101st Airborne. Robinson contacted a military historian who confirmed the unit never had parachuted into Vietnam. Further, Robinson filed a Freedom of Information inquiry that revealed Ellis had spent his military career on the East Coast of the United States.
”Now, military records can be wrong,” says Robinson, ”but there appeared to be grounds for additional reporting.”
After Ellis won a Pulitzer Prize in April, a decision was made to pursue the story sooner rather than later. ”Our concern was that if another newspaper did a profile, the probability was high the deception would be discovered because it was something any thorough reporter would find.”
At the end of May, Robinson sent 30 e-mails to students at Mount Holyoke to say he was researching a piece on Ellis. Several acknowledged that Ellis had talked in class about his experience in Vietnam.
”I contacted his alma mater, William & Mary, which sent me an interview in an alumni publication from 1975 in which Ellis said he had not wanted to go to Vietnam and instead went to Yale and arranged for a teaching position at West Point.
”I debriefed Mark Feeney, a Globe reporter who recalled Ellis saying last year that his Vietnam service included duty in Saigon on the staff of [General William C.] Westmoreland, the American commander. Feeney said Ellis had the bearing of the former football player he was. I asked what that was about, and Feeney said Ellis had described scoring the winning touchdown in the final game in high school.
”But when I contacted Gonzaga High School in Washington, they had no record of him having played football and, in fact, his team not only lost the final game but was shut out.
Robinson called Ellis. ”Look, I’m doing research for an article and I want to ask about apparent discrepancies in your backround, especially military service.”
Ellis was shaken. He stammered that he thought Robinson had been calling to interview him about a memorial to John Adams in Washington. Ellis agreed to an interview but later canceled.
”I couldn’t write the story without looking the guy in the eye,” says Robinson, ”and so on Friday I drove two and a half hours to his home in Amherst. He answered the door.
”Can I help you, sir?” Robinson recalls him saying.
”I told him who I was. He was surprised, polite, subdued and said he was sorry, but he wouldn’t talk to me. I said I drove all this way to meet him and persuade him otherwise.
”I’d left my notebook in the car so as not to intimidate him, but I figured whatever he said was fair game unless he explicitly said it was off the record. He said two pertinent things used in the story. He said, `Look, I’ll have to suffer the consequences.’ And `I believe I am an honorable man.’
The encounter had an impact beyond the two quotations.
”For me, meeting him humanized him, and when I wrote the article, as tough as the piece was, I think that having seen him face to face and seen how devastated he was at the prospect of what we were about to publish, it was an informing experience.
”I’m convinced – I’m sure PR types feel otherwise, but if he had acknowledged to me beforehand what he was forced to acknowledge later and if he had talked about it, the story would not have landed with the thump it did.”
Robinson wrote the story that weekend for Monday’s paper. On the night before publication, a spokesman for Mount Holyoke, Kevin McCaffrey, insisted to Robinson that a professor of constitutional law at the college judged Ellis a private individual and that it was wrong journalistically and legally to publish anything he said in a classroom about Vietnam. Editor Matthew V. Storin said the story would be published.
A veteran of Vietnam, Robinson says he feels no anger toward Ellis. ”I had e-mail from people who said they fought in Vietnam and they are angry. One said he’d give his Vietnam memories to Ellis in exchange for Ellis’s job.
”I’m not angry because it’s important for me to be dispassionate. I felt, in a perverse way, isn’t it wonderful that Vietnam service has come full circle so that people who didn’t go now claim they went.”
The story, Robinson says, left him tired, empty and sad.
”There’s no satisfaction at all in his plight. If there’s any satisfaction at all, it’s in the conviction we did the right thing, and even though initially there was a public sentiment against us, I think people now believe the story had to be written, that integrity in the classroom is important.
”Otherwise, there is no joy in this, no high fives. But if you ask who is responsible for the exposure of Joseph Ellis, it’s not me and it’s not the Globe. It’s Joseph Ellis. He did this to himself.”
