Heroic Lies: A Pulitzer Prize-winner Is Caught Doing a Larry Lawrence

Dear, oh dear. A Pulitzer Prize-winner has been caught doing a Larry Lawrence.

If any of you can't quite place Larry, he was the very rich scumbag friend of the scumbag who lived in the White House until Jan. 20 of this year. Clinton made Lawrence an ambassador, and after Larry croaked, had him interred at Arlington, to rest forever among America's heroes.

By all accounts, Larry Lawrence was a particularly nasty piece of work. He bullied and screamed at people unable to answer back, bribed his way through life and finally got a degree of respectability when he met the greedy Clintons. Crooks and liars usually go together, as did the Clintons and the Lawrences. Larry the louse got to be buried at Arlington because of a cock-and-bull story he invented. According to Lawrence, he was a volunteer able seaman in one of those almost suicidal convoys to Murmansk, when his ship was torpedoed and he was blown overboard. Reports as to how long one can survive in freezing waters in the North Atlantic vary from one minute to maybe 10 or 20 max. Our hero spent the night and was finally rescued by a passing destroyer.

Actually he was at a junior college in Chicago. He never put on a military uniform, never got on a ship and the closest he got to battling the Nazis was while watching a film called Battleground, starring Van Johnson. (He also got to fight against the Nips in Back to Bataan, starring John Wayne.) He was nevertheless buried with honors, an act so very typical of Bill Clinton's carelessness with the facts and with the nation's traditions. When the truth emerged they had to dig him out and ship him to California, a place much more suited to tall tales and bullshit.

Now we have Joseph J. Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose latest opus, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, has been on the bestseller list for 26 weeks. According to the historian, he was an airborne soldier in Nam, a platoon leader and paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division.

The trouble is that the closest Ellis got to Vietnam was when he saw Platoon.

Unlike Larry the Liar, Ellis did spend three years in the Army?teaching history at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Which in a way makes it worse. West Point operates under the honor system, and one would think spending three years among the brave and honorable men there would teach one not to lie. Ellis obviously was not influenced by his surroundings. The more famous he got, the bigger the tales he told. According to The Boston Globe, which broke the story, Ellis at first recounted his heroics only to his students at Mount Holyoke, where he teaches a course on Vietnam and American culture.

Once found out, Ellis wrote a statement expressing deep regrets over embellishing his record, and after apologizing to family, friends, colleagues and students, stated that "Beyond that circle, however, I shall have no further comment." Well, yes, I see why, but that doesn't mean others cannot. Have further comment, that is.

Ellis' hypocrisy is mind-boggling. He even exaggerated his antiwar record, wanting to have it both ways: the soldier hero who first serves his country and then turns against an evil war. What crap. Almost as bad as that of Joanne V. Creighton, the president of Mount Holyoke, who described the self-proclaimed hero as "One of the most respected scholars, writers and teachers in the nation?he has earned a reputation for great integrity, honesty and honor." In the words of Winston Churchill, some honesty and honor.

I am not advocating throwing the book at Ellis. He has hurt no one except himself, and we are all apt to embellish here and there when it suits us. But let's not go on about honesty and integrity as if the guy had done something heroic. According to David Oshinsky, an historian at Rutgers talking to The New York Times, "There was something so intensely moralistic and divisive about the 60's. You marked your identity by whether you took a stand." Ellis obviously had his cake and also ate it. At least in his head.

Inventing war heroics is a no-no to my generation. I saw my father and uncles go off to war, witnessed a bloody civil war rage in my front yard and lived through heavy Allied bombing for four years. I learned to respect physical courage above all other attributes, something Ellis and Lawrence obviously did not. One night in the spring of 1972, in Firebase Birmingham, near Phu Bai, I was dining with Colonel Mao, the highest decorated South Vietnamese soldier. We were both drunk and high on hemp when all hell broke loose. The base was under attack, the 105 howitzers firing blindly against an enemy that had come right up the wire. Mao pulled himself together and started screaming orders. The next day I found myself describing the attack for the wire service I was writing for at the time, in purple prose, but also including myself in the hand-to-hand fighting. Thank God I caught myself in time, or I might have done a Lawrence or an Ellis. It is an easy thing to do, when under fire, but it takes a special kind of liar to invent things. Both Lawrence and Ellis were safely back home while brave men fought on their behalf. Let's honor the brave, not the bullshitters.