Turns out I owe Jack Cashill an apology.

Because I was wrong, wrong, wrong about the identity of the author of Dreams From My Father. Independent confirmation of Cashill's claim that William Ayers penned the President's memoir comes in the form of a book by celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen. Cashill is right to be excited—it's not every day you blunder to the plate, close your eyes, swing for the fences and have your prayers answered. That's what the arrival of corroborating evidence in Andersen's book amounts to, and no researcher who's found corroboration of the sort in independently researched materials will begrudge Cashill the tone of unreserved glee and grammatical abandon evident in his latest post:

In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.

Who cares that book titles are traditionally underlined or italicized, capital letters belong at the beginning of sentences, or that he uses, commas, like an undergraduate when independent research has provided a factual basis for his speculative argument:

Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published—just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."

Only a killjoy would complain that Michelle Obama couldn't be a source, "quite possibly" or otherwise, because Andersen wrote an unauthorized biography—which, by definition, is a biography whose subject or subjects did not participate in its composition. That those "inside sources" who knew of Michelle's purported recommendation are not named, i.e. sourced, is the sort of thing that, despite being true, only someone who hated joy would point out.

Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant—so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."

Even though Cashill jettisons the very pretense of formatting book titles here, and even though Andersen's claim is couched in a conditional clause ("would be significant") of the sort favored by authors who learned their libel law from the wrong end of many lawsuits, we should not let such quibbles diminish the importance of this independent, corroborating evidence—especially when, even though Cashill doesn't identify him in his post, these claims come from a named source:

In the end, Ayers's contribution of Barack's Dreams from My Father would be significant—so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similiarity to Ayers's own writings . . .

"There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Hyde Park," said writer Jack Cashill, who noted that a mutual friend of Barack and Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, thanked Ayers for helping him with his book Resurrecting Empire. Ayers, explained Cashill, "provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood."

Your eyes do not deceive you. Against odds of astronomical grandeur, Cashill's independent, corroborating evidence for his theory that William Ayers wrote the President's memoir is also named Jack Cashill. But, as Cashill—the one who first made the claim, not the independent researcher who verified it—might say, sometimes the world can be as small as the city of the Chicago.

Comments

[happyfeet]

It still looks more and more like Ayers had some role, as yet undefined. Andersen says "a Hyde Park neighbor" told him so and I believe him. I just don't get the sense from the little president man that he could write a book. If he *could* write a book, his career would have been very different early on. He wouldn't have chosen to scrounge around the slums of Chicago with that hateful marxist preacher if he had actual literary talent or even general literary proclivities I don't think. I doubt his woman would have married him neither, if he were a writer for real. She doesn't seem very enthusiastic about thinking and stuff.

[happyfeet]

Also I don't think you're really sorry.

[Gary Farber]

As I just wrote on Facebook: "Only a killjoy would complain that Michelle Obama couldn't be a source, 'quite possibly' or otherwise, because Anderson wrote an unauthorized biography—which, by definition, is a biography whose subject or subjects did participate in its composition."

This is just a nitpick, Scott, but that's not actually so.

An "unauthorized" biography simply means that the subject hasn't given their legal stamp of approval to the book; it doesn't mean that a subject, or related couldn't be a source "by definition."

As I said, this is a nitpick, but "by definition" is wrong. (Taking into account that, of course, "not" also fell out of your sentence between "did" and "participate.")

"Authorized" and "unauthorized" concepts that are applicable legally, but don't speak to specific details of who may have said what to which author.

It's unlikely beyond all reasonable doubt that Michelle Obama was a source here, but it's not impossible "by definition."

Helpful link.

I don't mean to encourage your trolls; as I've said, it's just a tiny nitpick.

[Gary Farber]

Also, I, for one, trust the "sense" of Some Person On The Internet who goes by the handle of "Happyfeet."

Now, there's a source you can't go wrong with!

You can't beat a citation like "I just don't get the sense."

All doubt about the Ayers-wrote-Obama assertion must now be laid aside in the face of such documentation and logic.

[happyfeet]

Thank you for your support. You're why I do what I do.

[SEK]

Also I don't think you're really sorry.

You got me there, happy.

He wouldn't have chosen to scrounge around the slums of Chicago with that hateful marxist preacher if he had actual literary talent or even general literary proclivities I don't think.

As to the literary proclivities---or, as they're more accurately known, "pretensions"---we have irrefutable evidence that Obama had them in the form of the poems he published as an undergraduate. As to the literary talent, well, that depends on what you mean. If you mean, "the ability to write non-embarrassing poetry," then I think we can agree on "not so much," but if you mean, "has an ear for a finely-turned phrase and steals from the right people," then I've got to say you're in the wrong. It's one thing to give good speech (oratorical talent); another to write good speech (rhetorical talent); and another to recognize and employ speechwriters whose rhetorical talents complement your oratorical ones, and that is, I think, a literary-type talent.

An "unauthorized" biography simply means that the subject hasn't given their legal stamp of approval to the book; it doesn't mean that a subject, or related couldn't be a source "by definition."

I know you've worked in publishing, but it was my understanding that the subjects of unauthorized biographies avoid all contact with the authors writing them because even, as it was explained to me, an email telling an author to "GO FUCK YOURSELF!" could be legal grounds for a claim that the biography is authorized. Obviously, the person who told me was exaggerating, but as she represents some biographers and this was in the course of a conversation about the complex legal relationships my little literary journalists entered into with their subjects, I'm inclined to think there's something there.

You're right, though, that I don't quite know what that is: it could be conventional wisdom of the "There There Be Dragons" variety, intended to chop the infinitesimal odds of a lawsuit into ever finer bits, but now I'm interested, damn it. Let me consult my friend and see what's what here.

[happyfeet]

I think you're conflating marketing savvy and literary talent. He's the Tyler Perry of politics. And that is not a literary-type talent.

[happyfeet]

If Tyler Perry were a marxist what was beholden to Daddy Soros and et cetera.

[SEK]

This, for the record, is why I like happy. He's agreeably disagreeable, but like me---say, with the Beauchamp stuff---he honestly appraises material he wishes weren't true. (Not that he's not still wrong 99 percent of the time, but he's wrong in the right way, as it were.)

[Gary Farber]

IANAL, but I've editorially worked on more than one biography that was not, in any contractual way, authorized, but in which, nonetheless, the surviving spouse of the subject gave lengthy interviews and provided much information and material to the biographer. For what it's worth.

In other words, a legal heir to a subject of a biography can easily not sign a contract that renders a biography "authorized," and yet cooperate as much as the heir desires to.

Doing so enables the heir to avoid putting their implied personal seal of approval on every detail and phrase of a biographer, while still being cooperative.

"Authorized" tends to lead to unjustified assumptions by many that the subject/heir has established a legal veto right over the content of such a biography, and this will indeed be the case with many "authorized" biographies, but it doesn't need to be the case, and often it isn't.

See, for example, Edmund Morris' authorized biography of Ronald Reagan; it was fully legally "authorized" by Reagan, but no veto power was exercised over what Morris said or included.

But since this sort of thing is often unclear to many readers/reviewers/people, not signing a legal contract that says the publisher can label the book as "authorized" is one way a survivor or subject can both provide some distance and also be helpful, if they choose.

Thus, "unauthorized" in no way establishes "by definition," or at all, that a subject or heir hasn't cooperated.

Though I think I'd bet a nickel or two in this case that, in fact, Michelle Obama was not a source. I spell my name "Danger."

[JPRS]

Associated Press style demands double quotation marks for all titles. It's a holdover from the days of teletype machines, but it's still on the books.

[Karl Steel]

SEK, thanks for posting this, and thanks Farber for your professional suggestions. It's a wonder to me that Cashill, so far as I know, doesn't make any reference to what must be the vast literature on literary influence and stylistic change in any number of major author studies (Joyce or Eliot, for example). Surely this would complicate his silly argument. And doesn't someone somewhere consider Obama's book and its style in relation to his undergraduate style? All I find off hand is a NY Times article on Obama's long history of opposition to nuclear weapons.

You know it was quite common in the 19th-century to claim that ex-Slave narratives could not have been written by the slaves. I also think of Christine de Pizan's works being ascribed to men in her 15th-century translations into English. Plus ça change...

As for the intellectual acumen of a Princeton and Harvard grad who is not, unlike so many of those folks, a legacy admit...where'd you get your terminal degree, HF?

I think you're conflating marketing savvy and literary talent.
Oh wise one, how do you isolate the literariness of any particular piece of writing? Pick up your formalist silverware and commence slicing! Or maybe I should direct you to Richard Ohmann.

[Karl Steel]

Oops: "in the 19th century"

[The Spooked Moose]

The larger question of intrigue is whether Bernardine Rae Dohrn is actually Jeff Goldstein in weekend drag.

[JeffG]

Cashill denies he was the source. I know, because I wrote him and asked directly. Which means you have just accused Christopher Andersen of being a plagiarist and a fabulist. Either that, or you are accusing Cashill of being a liar. Choose.

Oh. Conditional and past imperfect are not the same thing. You can make an argument that what's being used here is an implied conditional, but dicentra has a different take.

Farber already dealt with your "unauthorized" gotcha in his own preciously pedantic way, so I'll only add that Michelle Obama could have been the source the anonymous source was attributing the information to. Which would make her the source without making her the source, if in fact Andersen trusts the source of the source.

The rest is you attacking the grammar and punctuation of a blog post.

Congrats on that.

[SEK]

As Jeff can't seem to figure out who's saying what where, I'm going to reprint my comment from the other thread, then address his latest in another comment.

Cashill's the only named source. If, as he claims before an audience ideologically predisposed to believing him, he never spoke to Andersen, that means that Andersen's a lying about having spoken to Cashill. You do not read something on the internet and write about it as if it is the product of a dedicated interview. You do not, as M.G. Lord wrote a few weeks back, "try to pawn off someone else's research as your own," but that's exactly what Andersen seems to do. The back material for chapters five through eight is almost exclusively a list of previously published articles. Here's the kicker, though:

Cashill claims Andersen didn't talk to him, that he must've have read something he'd written online---but the words Andersen reports Cashill having "said" don't appear online. See for yourself. Now, I can't definitively say where those words came from, only that Cashill's claim that Andersen must have read that online is demonstrably untrue . . . which, when coupled with his deleriously sloppy bibliographic skills, makes Andersen the most dubious of sources.

Unless you're Jeff, in which case, Andersen's sloppiness, reliance on previously published material, as well as his propensity for lying enhances his credibility. Which is fine as far as standards go, but it does make it abundantly obvious that you're not motivated by a deep-seated commitment to the truth.

Back to the original point, here's what Andersen says of the information contained in chapters five through eight:

For these chapters, the author drew on conversations with, among others, Senator John Kerry, Senator Tom Harkin, Newton Minow, Jeremiah Posedel, Abner Mikva, Senator Mike Jacobs, Larry Walsh, Zarif, Joyce Feuer, Janet Allison, Letitia Baldrige, Wellington Wilson, Coralee Jacobs, Edward Koch, Rick Lazio, the Reverend Alvin Love, Betsy Vandercook, Mary Ann Campbell, and Lowell Jacobs. (309)

He then proceeds to list two pages of previously published sources. Significantly, none of Cashill's work is listed there, which when combined with the fact that wha Andersen reports Cashill as having "said," convinces me that either one or both of them is lying . . . because either one or both of them is lying, but given how irresponsible Andersen is, it's impossible to tell who. Given the available evidence---which is suspect, since Andersen even muffs his own index, claiming Cashill appears on 166 instead of 164---Cashill would fall into the incredibly dubious category of "among others," in which case, Andersen's intellectual irresponsibility has made it impossible to verify his claims . . .

. . . which, if you're Jeff, is a good thing because you can't disprove what's been deliberately obfuscated.

[Ahistoricality]

Significantly, none of Cashill's work is listed there...

I went looking for that as well. I'd also like to know who, in that list of sources, could possibly be close enough to Michelle Obama to qualify as a credible rumor-monger (as opposed to the non-credible ones, which journalists are supposed to ignore): I don't recognize most of the names, and don't know (or care, generally) enough about the Obama's private life to even know where to look.

[The Spooked Moose]

Michelle Obama's arse could be the source of Spring rainbows. As they say in the school of visceral realists, "a reverse cowgirl could be a queer cowboy playing a rusty trombone, but so what."

[SEK]

I'd also like to know who, in that list of sources, could possibly be close enough to Michelle Obama to qualify as a credible rumor-monger

It's gotta be Ed Koch, no? Wasn't she tight with John Kerry back in the day? No, sorry, I'm misremembering: Tom Harkin was her confidante, or was it Zarif? No, I'm sure it was Mike Jacobs, because he and Michelle were like this back when they didn't live anywhere near each other and neither were in politics . . . but who am I kidding?

We both know that the confidante was "among others." How could it not be? By which I mean, I dare you to prove it isn't. Because neither you nor anyone else can . . . which is exactly as Andersen wants it. Honestly, it's hilarious that Jeff points to a claim in a poorly researched, aggressively irresponsible book by a celebrity biographer and thinks the burden of proof is on us. (And by "hilarious," I mean "pathetic," because he used to be better than that.)

[Dave in SoCal]

The rest is you [SEK] attacking the grammar and punctuation of a blog post.

While committing spelling errors of his own. Or is "undgraduate" in the third paragraph the new way that the cool kids are referring to undergraduates?

Why yes, you DO look like a bit of a douche.