ABSTRACT
Until the summer of 2001, Joseph J.Ellis was one of America’s most celebrated academics. A Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College-one of the country’s top women’s collegeshis book, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy oƒ john Adams was published in 1993 to critical acclaim. Four years later Ellis rose to national prominence with a best-selling biography of Thomas Jefferson, which won the National Book Award; and then went on to win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History with yet another bestsellerFounding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation. In a promotional campaign for Founding Bothers in the summer of 2001, a long line of fans waited in the hallowed halls of the National Archives for Ellis to sign copies. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the American academic world, indeed the public at large, was deeply shaken when, on 18 June 2001, the Boston Globe revealed that Ellis had fabricated a past in which he claimed to have been a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam; to have been in the village of My Lai just before the notorious massacre; to have served on General William C.Westmoreland’s staff; and, once back in the United States, to have become an anti-war protester and a civil-rights activist. The truth, as the Globe found out, was that Ellis had never set foot in Vietnam during the war. Having received a reserve commission in 1965 upon graduating from college, he was allowed to defer active service for four years while working on his doctorate.
